By Toni Garrard Clay/AISD Communications Specialist
It was the end of summer in 2005, and 8-year-old Rashaan Miller was getting ready to start a new school year. He doesn’t remember much from that time. He certainly didn’t know Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest storms in the history of the United States, was bearing down on his city and his family’s Ocean Avenue home.
“The night before we left, I remember my mom was watching the news,” recalled Miller, now a 17-year-old senior at Athens High School. “She told us to pack our bags and get ready to leave. We left the next morning … two days before the hurricane hit. I was clueless.”
Miller’s mother gathered up her two boys, her mother and other friends and family and fled with thousands of other evacuees toward Texas. They drove until they arrived in Athens. It looked like a good place to rest.
“We just stopped when we wanted to get some sleep,” recalled Miller. The exhausted and displaced group took a room at what was then the Spanish Trace Inn and received some assistance from First Baptist Church of Athens. “I asked my mom a few weeks into staying at the hotel if we were going to go back home, and she said no. Everything is wiped clean.” Continue reading “Rashaan Miller: From Hurricane Katrina to AHS Student of the Month”
