Reuniting Children With Parents

In the chaos following Hurricane Katrina, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children were separated from their parents. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has registered more than 700 such cases. It has reunited more than 100 evacuee children with their families so far.

Brook Schaub, a retired police investigator volunteering for the Center at Houston's Astrodome, tells The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen the main tool being used is "some of the databases just being formulated by the different agencies here, and trying to get some matches.

"The Red Cross has done a good job of creating some databases, allowing people to enter names of who they're looking for.

"We're trying to get all the databases we can find. There's no central database where everyone's name is in it. So, as an example, (Thursday), we tapped into the Houston school district, got a list of the newly registered kids, and we expect to recover about a dozen kids and reunite them (Friday) just on that database.

"Primarily right now, we're talking to people, trying to track down relatives, extended families, neighbors who may be here, and trying to locate the children so we can reunite them."

Chen asked if there are too many databases.

"The more databases there are," Schaub responded, "the more resources we have to look at. I don't know that that's hurt us too much, because we'll search them all. If we have the name of a child or parent, it takes it a little longer to go through a dozen, two dozen databases than if we had one central one. But I think a lot of that will be taken care of as the days go on, as we start seeing a melding between these databases. …The fact that the debit cards were given out will create another database we can tap into. So I think it's gonna get better as we go on."

Schaub adds that the kids got separated from their parents in several ways: "What we're seeing here is, a lot of times, the children may not have been with their parents at the time of evacuation, may have gotten separated on the buses, the parents got put on one bus and the child perhaps put on with a neighbor or extended family member on another bus and the buses took off in different directions."

And what will become of the kids who aren't reunited with their parents?

"We've been working really closely with the Houston police and Child Protection Services here, and they've been extremely excellent helping us. Right now, the ones we can't find the parents (of) are going into foster shelters and being taken care of, and we're gonna continue to look to see what comes out of New Orleans."