The rain is gone, but the scars of Hurricane Katrina remain in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Three years after the storm, the number of permanent Katrina refugees in the city numbers in the tens of thousands, and those new arrivals have strained the infrastructure and the schools here.

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And while Baton Rouge has seen one of the larger population swells from the storm, it isn’t alone among the Minority Central communities of Patchwork Nation. Katrina refugees wound up relocating all over the United States, but the densest re-population, as one might expect, took place in the Deep South, home of the majority of the Minority Central locales. These are places where FEMA — and larger post-disaster work by the federal government — will likely be an issue in November. You can bet that residents will be scrutinizing the government’s responses to Gustav and any other tropical storms that reach land this fall.

Beyond storm watching though, people in these places have a lot of issues on their mind, including race and education equality.

These are, for the most part, places with large African-American populations, and tension between blacks and whites is the subtle undercurrent of almost everything that people care about in these communities.

On the whole, the 408 counties of Minority Central have median household incomes that, at about $31,400, are far below the national average. Due in large part to those income numbers, the schools often struggle.

In Baton Rouge for instance, there is a two-tiered education system. The city is about 50 percent African-American, but blacks make up 80 percent of the public school student body. Many of the white would-be public school kids attend the nearly 50 private K-12 schools in the city.

The region leans Democratic, but voter turnout determines winners — and it tends to be notoriously low here. President Bush, the Republican, received 53 percent of the vote here in 2004. But that could change following the rise of Barack Obama, the first black major-party presidential nominee. Reports of large numbers of new voter registrations since January could make the biggest difference here.

— Dante Chinni

Read more about the Patchwork Nation communities at The Takeaway’s election Web site, vote2008.thetakeaway.org »