By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer
Freshman who escaped Katrina is back home, attending Bates College.

LEWISTON – Sarah Chandonnet planned all summer for her freshman year at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Instead, she ended up at Bates College.

The 18-year-old had fallen in love with New Orleans while on vacation a couple of years ago. She liked the Tulane campus, set in the heart of the Garden District. The 13,000-student school would introduce her to diversity she’d never known in Lewiston. And she could go as a pre-med student, her first step to a career in pediatrics.

So she was ecstatic when she arrived there a few weeks ago. While her mother and grandmother helped move in her belongings Saturday, Chandonnet met her roommate and got the key to her dorm.

Then officials told her to go home.

“Someone stood on a table and said a hurricane was coming,” she said.

Chandonnet, with her mother and grandmother, retreated to a New Orleans hotel room for the night. A self-described worrier, Chandonnet wanted to book their plane tickets then and there. Her mother persuaded her to wait.

On TV, newscasters tracked the storm.

“We watched it go from a Category 3 to a 4 to a 5,” she said.

The next morning, a Sunday, they secured some of the last seats on the last airline flying out of the city. They got home Monday, after stops in Houston, Ohio and Washington, D.C.

They were safe, but Chandonnet’s college plans were shattered. The school closed for the fall semester. Officials said it might open for spring, but in the ravaged city nothing was certain.

Then Bates College in Lewiston agreed to take students affected by the hurricane. Tuition-free.

Chandonnet signed up for microbiology, chemistry, Latin and sociology, every course she had scheduled at Tulane. And because Bates started later than Tulane, she didn’t miss a class.

When Tulane reopens, she’s obligated to go back for at least a semester. But Chandonnet, who considered both Bates and Tulane when she looked at colleges, may return to Bates after that.