Larry says he loves to read, and hopes that one of his new classmates might be able to lend him the latest Harry Potter book. He is one of about 50,000 hurricane evacuees being absorbed by the north Texas school system, a small but important first step towards restoring some kind of order to young lives shattered by the storm.
"There's no time to waste," said Larry's mother, Dorothy, 48, who fled to Texas from her New Orleans home with her 15-year-old daughter Lanara and husband Larry Sr, who is now looking for work in hotels.
"There's no use him sitting out of school for weeks on end and falling behind while we get settled here, and he needs that routine for stability while everything else is going on."
The West Dallas community school caters for children from low-income backgrounds in small groups of about 10 to each teacher. Its headteacher went to the shelter at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, where displaced people were staying, and offered a handful of scholarships to those most in need.
Well-wishers donated the money for Larry's new bag and uniform. He says he misses his friends from his old school in the flooded Gentilly neighbourhood of New Orleans, but gets on well with his new classmates, who are keen to hear his stories about escaping the hurricane and living in a shelter.
"Once he was through that first day, he was fine," said Mrs Moses. "I think it's easier for the younger children to adjust to something like this. They just bounce back and get on with it."
Larry's sister Lanara is more subdued. She is aware of the horrors unfolding in her hometown, fears for the friends who stayed behind and might have drowned, and realises that she will probably never return.
Mrs Moses, who was a children's speech therapist in New Orleans, says it will be a while before her daughter will be completely comfortable in her new school, Lake Highlands High, even though they have made her very welcome.
It is pupils such as Lanara, and others who might have lost relatives, who are in need of expert attention, school officials said.
"We have counsellors, psychological services, community people, all coming into the school," said Marian Willard, the principal of the James Madison high school in Dallas city centre that has already enrolled more than 80 evacuees aged between 14 and 19.
"The hardest thing is not knowing where some of their relatives are. They've been separated from family members and it's hard for them to look too far ahead until they've found them."
Ms Willard made it a priority to meet as many of the evacuees' parents as possible, encouraging them to accompany their children to school for the first couple of days.
"We want to reassure them that they don't have to worry about their kids and that it's a safe environment here," she said. "We want the children to do everything they did in New Orleans - and they're already getting involved."
Donald Claxton, the spokesman for the Dallas independent school district which has found places for more than 2,000 pupils so far, said the schools had "rolled out the red carpet".
"These people have gone through so much, and it just made sense to be as open and helpful as we could," he said.
