Reviving Hope

week after she started teaching high school in New Orleans through Teach For America, Katharine Schweighardt (BSBA ’05) fled New Orleans steps ahead of Hurricane Katrina. She found refuge in Houston, where she rejoined Teach For America to teach evacuees. When the corps offered her a position in the FEMA disaster recovery center in Baton Rouge instead, she jumped at the chance. “We would be given 25 families as our responsibility,” she recalled being told. “We’d help them get housing and FEMA assistance. I thought it was an awesome opportunity.”

She headed out of Houston on the day Hurricane Rita forced an evacuation there. What should have been a four-hour drive took 14 hours, much of it spent low on gas in standstill traffic in the hot Texas sun. Once in Baton Rouge, Schweighardt found an air mattress in a shared house and plunged into working for FEMA 12 hours a day, six days a week.

“It was my first brush with the inefficiencies of the federal government,” she said. Often, though, she was able to help those whose requests for assistance had bogged down. A few months later, Teach For America gave her the opportunity to teach math in an inner-city Baton Rouge high school. “I wanted to go back to New Orleans, but I joined this organization to be teaching and I wanted to get back in the classroom,” she said.

Even in her undergraduate days, Schweighardt felt a sense of urgency about meeting students’ needs. While at UNC Kenan-Flagler, she interned at the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service in Carrboro. Seeing adults whose lives would have been different if they had graduated high school affected her deeply.

It was tough taking over a class midyear, but by March, Schweighardt recalled, things started to go right. Her students did well on a compulsory test. Many opened up after she told them they could go to college. “Really?” they’d respond. “No one’s ever said that to me.”

When her two-year teaching commitment ends, Schweighardt hopes to work for a financial consulting firm or on the organizational side of Teach For America. Meanwhile, she sometimes passes along to her students concepts she worked with in business school — one day recently, she explained to them what “breaking even” meant. And she utilizes in the classroom the problem-solving skills she learned at UNC Kenan-Flagler. “It’s a smaller scale than a business, but you want your classroom to work efficiently. Being able to think on your feet and come up with a good solution — that’s pretty much what I do all day every day.”