"Music Brings Hope"

The Bogalusa High School choir was gifted with a trip to Arizona, thanks to the generosity of high schools in Arizona:

With the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina, a high school choir from Bogalusa, La., had no hope of making a spring music trip.

So the choirs from three southeast Valley high schools gave them one.

The visitors will sing tonight in Mesa at their own benefit concert, the culmination of a project conceived months ago by Cristine Evans, choir director at Hamilton High in Chandler.[...]"You are our heroes," Milton Gholar, Bogalusa High's music director, told Evans and her choir. "You have done something for me and my students that we will remember for the rest of our lives."

Bogalusa is a town of about 14,000 roughly 60 miles northeast of New Orleans. The high school's gym was destroyed by the storm. About 70 members of a senior class of 190 have not returned; some are finishing school in Texas.

Also reported in The Daily News.
Photo from the online Daily News by Danny Hanemann. Not yet archived and linkable.