Parenting & Family Quote by Laura Bush

A First Lady’s sentence can sound like a public-service announcement, but it also functions as a small act of political triage. Laura Bush’s appeal after “Hurricane Corina” (almost certainly a mangled public reference to Hurricane Katrina) aims to reassert normalcy through the most American of stabilizers: school. In a disaster zone, “make sure their children are in school” isn’t just about attendance; it’s a proxy for safety, structure, and the restoration of civic order.

The intent is clean and managerial: get families back into routines, give displaced kids access to meals, counseling, and supervision, and signal that government institutions are functioning. But the subtext is more complicated. Urging parents to “make sure” carries an implicit transfer of responsibility onto individuals at the exact moment when infrastructure, housing, transportation, and documentation may be shattered. It frames recovery as something families can accomplish through compliance, a gentle moral nudge that can read as tone-deaf if you’re living in a shelter, your school is underwater, or your child is traumatized.

Context matters: as First Lady, Bush’s lane was education and literacy, and her public voice was designed to soothe rather than litigate blame. That soothing is the rhetorical move here: school as a symbol, not a policy. The line works politically because it sidesteps the messy argument about preparedness and response, and instead offers a simple, legible action item. Its weakness is the same simplicity: it compresses chaos into a checklist, asking devastated people to perform normalcy before normalcy is actually available.