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Background Hamline University, a medium sized college in St. Paul Minnesota, dedicated resources and time to New Orleans, Louisiana in its efforts to rebuild and reclaim the city. Days after Hurricane Katrina hit, Hamline sent students, faculty and staff to help with recovery efforts. The Education Club adopted Martin Luther King Science and Technology school (MLK) soon after to help in cleaning and rebuilding the school and sent over $20,000.00 in books, supplies, merchandise gift cards, food and water to help with this effort. Still fueled by the great need in New Orleans for assistance, the group's leader Dr. Jean Strait worked with Traveler's Insurance Company and received a grant of $30,000 to start an online tutoring and mentoring program that would be staffed by Hamline University and Avalon High School students in St. Paul. Students traveled to New Orleans in March of 2008 to meet their MLK student mentees, help with self-esteem programming, and create relationships of trust and respect with the mentees. The first phase of the project ended in June of 2008. Hamline Students who were part of the initial trip accompanied Dr. Strait and Dr. Rob Shumer (University of Minnesota) to New Orleans in July of 2008, continuing to volunteer their services in the clean-up and remodeling of the Depot House, a historic landmark in the warehouse district on O'Keefe Avenue. According to a report compiled by the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives in 2008, a post-Katrina school system is vastly different from the previous public system. Changes include:

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A Title III grant made possible a three year experimental program to determine if children with the specific reading disability, dyslexia, could be remediated by the use of a structural-linguistic procedure taught through a multi-sensory approach. This remedial procedure was taught on a one-to-one basis of instruction through the use of para-educational personnel under close supervision in a regular public school setting. During the two years of the program seventy-eight students attended the full day Perceptual Development Center Program and 545 students participated in an hour-a-day reading program. Test-retest data revealed that students receiving this specialized training improved in reading skills and retained this gain or further improved after dismissal from the program.