It rained for three days in New Orleans in mid-March, which is not a big deal unless you've traveled there to paint a house in a week.

That's the situation a group of Museum School students found themselves in during the school's second "alternative spring-break" trip to help with post-Katrina rebuilding projects in the city. "We originally planned to work 9 to 5, and use time at the end of each day to talk about what we were seeing and experiencing," says Dean of Students Ernest Plowman, who joined the students on the trip. "But we decided as a group that it was more important to actually get the job done."

The house-painting project came courtesy of the Ash Cultural Arts Center, a longtime community organization in New Orleans that is sprucing up a building it calls the Douglas Redd House—named for its late founder—for an artist-residency program. The students worked from 7 in the morning to 7 or 8 at night. "I found out I'm not very good at housepainting," says Kimberly Fox (BFA '09), one of the student organizers of the trip. Fox, along with Sabri Reed (BFA '10) and Amanda Cassingham (BFA '09), dug drainage ditches and cleaned up piles of salvaged bricks on last year's New Orleans trip. When they returned to Boston, they "really wanted to keep having a conversation about it," Fox says. "It makes sense to think about using art and creativity in dealing with social issues."

That's exactly why Museum School conceived the first New Orleans trip. Christy Cornett, the assistant director of student life, established a partnership with the New Orleans Women Artists Collective (NOWAC), a Boston-based organization that helps support Louisiana artists who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina. In 2009 Fox, Cassingham, and Reed worked with the Museum School's Institute for Art and Civic Engagement and with NOWAC to plan not only the trip but other collaborations as well. When NOWAC acquired a donation of kitchen furnishings, Museum School students helped load them onto a truck bound for New Orleans. "The question we have tried to ask is, 'How can a group of artists contribute to the structural and cultural rebuilding?'" Reed says.

For the spring-break trip, NOWAC steered the Museum School to the Ash Center, as well as to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School, where Museum School students worked with art teachers and children both in the classroom and on a mural project. "What's behind this trip is the belief in artists helping to support other artists," Cassingham says. "While we as artists from Boston were giving to artists in New Orleans, this was also an exchange where we received gifts of insight, inspiration, and hospitality."

Fox, who plans to become a teacher, agrees. "It was hard to come back to Boston" after working with the children at the King elementary school, she says. "The kids have seen so much more than they should have, but they were so wonderful and so open to us. They reinforced my ideas about why teaching is important."

As for the Douglas Redd house, it got painted. "We were determined," Plowman says. "It took on a lot of meaning for us to finish that job."