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PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. -- President Bush, focusing on progress since Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast, hugged wiggling children at their newly reopened school and hammered nails into a home for a storm victim. Still, everywhere he went, there were signs of the rebuilding's slow pace.

In this hard-hit coastal Mississippi town, Bush celebrated the return to school of 1,100 elementary students. He encouraged the presidential dreams of one boy standing among dozens of classmates in a grassy courtyard. "Someday you may be," Bush said.

The president told a classroom of kindergartners to be proud of a school system that is "vibrant and alive" and committed to maintaining its former excellence.

With many students' friends missing, the reopening was bittersweet. The classes being held at DeLisle Elementary School combine students from two schools, which before the storm hit six weeks ago together educated 2,000.

Earlier, in the pitch-dark hour before dawn, Bush spent nearly two hours at a bustling Habitat for Humanity construction site in Covington, La. Aiming to support the effort to find housing for those displaced by Katrina, Bush -- donning a hard hat, work gloves and a giant wraparound leather tool belt -- briefly joined Habitat volunteer builders, then chatted, signed autographs and posed for pictures.

The project had been on the schedule for the community, which appeared mostly unscathed, before the hurricane hit. And the construction of two homes -- coming just four days before Bush's deadline for getting the more than 32,000 people still in shelters into sturdier accommodations -- paled before the larger task at hand.

The president's last stop of the day was in Jefferson Parish, La., where he met with local officials and the commander of the military's hurricane-relief effort in Louisiana, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore.

Bush's helicopter flight path into the parish revealed the work ahead to get communities back to normal. Over a large area, more homes than not were draped with government-issue blue tarp that temporarily covers storm damage.

Closing out a two-day trip to the storm zone -- his eighth since Katrina struck on Aug. 29 -- that began and ended in New Orleans, Bush proclaimed a "renewal of this important part of the world."

"We got a lot of work to do," he said from the bed of a black pickup truck, addressing hundreds of soldiers and airmen at the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station near New Orleans. "Out of this rubble is going to come some good."

He rejected criticism from Democrats that his visits to the region were more photo-op to repair his hurricane-battered image than substance.

"We want to encourage other Americans to help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food, or to continue to express the incredible compassion that the country saw," Bush said in an interview with NBC's "Today" show from the Habitat site.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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