Hurricane victim stays to take kindergarten teaching job

J. Craig Anderson

Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005 | 8:51 a.m.

Barbara Mason had expected a few days' rest in Las Vegas before heading back to New Orleans to grapple with the tragedy of losing her home and job to Hurricane Katrina.

Instead, within a week Mason has found the very things she thought she had left behind.

Mason and her family -- husband and New Orleans paramedic Ronald Mason, and their 18-year-old daughter, Renee Mason -- have appeared in print and TV news reports since arriving in the valley last week as part of a city-organized furlough program for rescue workers.

Ronald and Renee Mason returned to Louisiana on Saturday, he to resume his part of the recovery effort and she to continue school at Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux.

But Barbara Mason is going to stay for a while. The educator has accepted a job teaching kindergarten at Kit Carson Elementary School in Las Vegas, effective Sept. 30.

"If I fly back home, I'm just stuck with no place to stay," she said Monday.

Mason said she also planned to move out of Boulder Station today and into a more permanent home, courtesy of a Las Vegas firefighter's family that offered her a vacant apartment.

Mason said another firefighter supplied her with a new wardrobe to go with her job.

"People have been so generous from the fire department," she said.

Kit Carson Principal Linda Gipson is from Louisiana and feels a special affinity for its residents, but she said hiring Mason was simply a smart decision.

Gipson said Mason is an experienced teacher who holds all of the necessary credentials to work at the school.

"It helped her, but it also helps me, because now I have a qualified teacher," Gipson said.

Mason wasn't thinking about looking for a job in Las Vegas until some people she met started telling her about the need for schoolteachers in the area. She was reluctant at first, mainly because she would be separated from her family.

During the hurricane and for the week that followed, Mason was separated from her husband and daughter because she was stranded at Orleans Parish Prison, where she had been teaching classes to inmates.

Mason also had a scare when the prisoners, fearing lack of food and rising water, staged an uprising.

Despite her recent ordeal, Mason said it didn't make sense to return to Louisiana with her family because Ronald would be working for days on end with the hurricane relief effort, and Renee is a full-time college student living on campus.

Both husband and daughter said they would rather she live and work in a safe environment, even if it's in a different city.

Both told her, "We support you 150 percent," Barbara Mason said.

Mason said she plans to stay in Las Vegas until New Orleans is rebuilt and she can find a new job there. In the meantime, family members will visit her when they can.