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Brothers help a school heal

Recalling their scary experience with a hurricane, teens start a book drive to help a school hit by Katrina.

By CHUIN-WEI YAP
Published August 6, 2006

TAMPA PALMS - As the brothers watched the images of despair unfold on television, with thousands of people huddled at New Orleans' beleaguered Superdome, a memory haunted Trevor and Taylor Lloyd.

It was of themselves barely a year earlier, in their mother's Temple Terrace house, deprived of electricity by the fury of Hurricane Ivan and eventually left homeless for three weeks.

"We had to stay at friends' houses," said Taylor, 13, a freshman at Freedom High School.

"We had to leave our dog behind in a house without electricity for three weeks."

As they later sat with their mother watching the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, the boys knew they had to do something.

"We wanted to find a way we could help," said Trevor, 15, a sophomore at Freedom. "We figured the schools must be out of stuff."

So began the Land O'Lakes boys' Katrina book drive.

Searching on the Internet, the brothers came up with a short list of 10 schools and began calling them, one by one. Most could not be reached.

But when they got to Peta LeBlanc, principal of New Orleans' Dwight D. Eisenhower Elementary School, they heard a plaintive plea that stopped them in their tracks.

"Please stop calling (the others)," she begged. "We need your help."

Shut down after Katrina, the school is struggling to get back its students, supplies and books. Celeste Ancar, the school librarian, sent the Lloyd brothers a wish list of books:

The Planets in Our Solar System. The Cat in the Hat. Rookie Read-Aloud Science Grades K-2.

The school's most pressing need was for Webster's third grade dictionaries.

Trevor and Taylor enlisted aid from their father, Derek, a Land O'Lakes automotive businessman.

In turn, he got the Rotary Club of Land O'Lakes involved. Word spread. Links were added to Web sites. Fellow Rotarians slapped fliers advertising the book drive on their storefronts.

Four dropoff locations were set up in Pasco County as the boys worked in tandem.

Trevor, the one who wants to be a sports agent, the one who's a member of his school's Future Business Leaders of America club, became the frontman who would give a flawless five-minute presentation at a Rotary Club meeting to update members on the project.

Taylor, the one whose voice softens when he speaks of their dog that died, the one with dreams of becoming a veterinarian, became the backstop who would write out their goals and cold-call the schools.

Then the bags came in.

"Bags and bags," Taylor said. "Thirty, 40 books at a time. Two bags sometimes. Five bags sometimes."

"We thought, 'This is the starting point,' " Trevor said.

The brothers gave up some favorite reads of their own, including all their Harry Potters and Animorphs.

They set a goal of 2,500 books. They had about 500 piled in their dad's home at midweek, with hundreds more coming in.

With $1,000 raised from Rotary International and the local Rotary Club, the Lloyds would buy the rest of what the Eisenhower school needs. This weekend they planned to load up a truck and make the 10-hour drive to New Orleans, followed by a caravan of Rotarians.

"I lost my house, car and principalship all in one day," LeBlanc wrote in an e-mail to the boys' father in January. "Our children were scattered across the country, and our schools were all closed. ... I cannot express what support like yours means to those of us trying to get our city back and running."

She probably hasn't seen the last of the Lloyds.

"We'll do more," Trevor said.

[Last modified August 5, 2006, 19:14:23]