Ted Poe: “when the howling winds and incessant rains of Hurricane Katrina came barreling ashore on the southeast Texas coast, the…”

“when the howling winds and incessant rains of Hurricane Katrina came barreling ashore on the southeast Texas coast, the small coastal town of Sabine Pass was almost completely destroyed by destruction and devastation. School Superintendent Walt Fenn immediately worried about the 300 students who attended K-12 school, Sabine Pass School. Thousands of miles away, however, elementary school kids at Sam Bundy School in Farmville, North Carolina, heard about the devastation in Texas. They too experienced a similar destruction in Hurricane Floyd in 1999. These kids wanted the students in Sabine Pass to know everything will be okay. The children at Sam Bundy School raised over $2,500 for the school kids in Texas, school kids they had never met in a place they had never seen. There was no red tape, no Federal bureaucracy, just a bunch of kids in a small town in North Carolina that wanted to help some other kids in Texas. The students at Sam Bundy School are wonderful examples of Americanism and volunteerism. Now they have a whole crew of new pen- pals in southeast Texas that will forever be grateful. These Sam Bundy students remind me of the song ``Thank God for Kids,'' another example of children being our greatest natural resource. That's just the way it is. ____________________”