“Dismantling a Community,” Center for Community Change Reports from New Orleans

More than one year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast, communities in the region are still struggling to rebuild their homes and their lives, and part of this struggle is the effort to rebuild their schools. “Dismantling a Community,” a new publication from the Center for Community Change, describes the fragmented, decentralized, and under-funded state of New Orleans schools and highlights the problems facing public education in the city. While New Orleans faces massive challenges, school districts outside the city are facing problems of their own, including overcrowding resulting from thousands of displaced students. In many areas affected by the storm, however, people are working together to rebuild their schools, and with them their communities.

Decentralized Charter Experiment

Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become “the nation’s pre-eminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools,” according to the New York Times. Of the 53 schools – less than half of the pre-Katrina number – that opened in New Orleans for the 2006-2007 school year, 31 are charter schools, chartered by a range of federal, state, and local agencies. In all, 21 different entities are operating New Orleans schools.

Many educators and community members are critical of this new, almost entirely decentralized system. “Dismantling a Community” describes the hardships that the new system creates for families trying to find schools for their children while still struggling to rebuild their homes and their lives. Only the 17 schools run by the “Recovery School District” (RSD) – a state-run body that after the hurricane took over 107 of the city’s 128 public schools – are obligated to create space for students and have a uniform start date. The other schools have various admission requirements and enrollment caps as well as widely varying start dates. The children who are already the most at risk are the ones most likely to be left behind in such a system. In addition to creating these hardships, the report claims, the new system has done a great deal of harm to communities by having schools operated without local support and by forcing parents to compete with each other in order to educate their children.

The decentralization of public education and predominance of charter schools have also raised accountability concerns. Brenda Mitchell, the president of the United Teachers of New Orleans, wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that New Orleans has no “system” of schools; it instead has a “hodgepodge…without common standards, goals and public accountability.” Lance Hill, director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, told the New York Times, “We’ve created the most balkanized school system in North America. The average parent is mystified.”

Advocates of charter schools and school choice, however, see the current situation in New Orleans as a chance to strengthen the city’s school system, which has long been criticized for its low performance. The U.S. Department of Education is highly optimistic about the effectiveness of charter schools and since the hurricane has appropriated $45 million in federal aid to Louisiana for the development of charter schools. Only weeks after the storm hit, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings waived federal restrictions on charter schools for New Orleans, saying that charter schools were “uniquely equipped” to serve displaced students. Secretary Spellings has praised charter schools in the city for their “ability to cut through red tape and be responsive to families where and when they need them.” As Leslie Jacobs, vice president of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education told the Wall Street Journal, “This is truly an opportunity to hit a restart button. We’re taking advantage of that opportunity to design for the long term a very different model based on public-school choice.”

Understaffed and Under-funded

In addition to the other problems they face in the recovery, school officials are stymied by a lack of resources. As of late October, the RSD had more than 80 staff vacancies, was still having difficulty transporting all of its students to and from schools, and lacked enough textbooks for all its students. As Leigh Dingerson of the Center for Community Change explained, schools are hiring teachers at lower salaries and with fewer benefits than before the hurricane; many teachers have opted for early retirement in order to keep their benefits. Furthermore, Dingerson also explained that many special education students have been turned away from full charter schools and have been forced to attend the already-understaffed RSD schools. That the RSD schools have insufficient staffing and insufficient resources raises concerns that these students are not receiving the services they need.

Finding Room for Displaced Students

New Orleans and surrounding parishes have seen a significant drop in enrollment. Orleans Parish, for example, has only 25,000 students enrolled this year, compared to 65,000 before Katrina. Many of the displaced students have moved to other parishes to attend school, leading to overcrowding problems in the receiving parishes.

In Ascension Parish, for example, primary schools designed for 500 students are facing enrollments of over 1,000 this year, forcing the School Board to hire additional staff and create additional classroom space. Other parishes near New Orleans are still serving hundreds of displaced students, though the numbers are starting to decline as students begin to move back to their communities.

Rebuilding Communities

That families and children are starting to move back to their home communities and schools is one ray of hope in the region. An article in the Times-Picayune last April described the efforts of educators in Jefferson Parish to rebuild schools and the effect that the recovery has had on the community. Diane Roussel, the parish’s superintendent of schools, explained that teachers and administrators took an active role in repairing schools, in an effort to ensure that enough schools would open on time. Jefferson Parish’s enrollment is already more than 85 percent of its pre-Katrina level, and officials anticipate the numbers to keep rising. Ronnie Slone, chairwoman of the Jefferson Chamber’s Education Committee, told the Times-Picayune, “It was the schools that were the catalyst for bringing Jefferson Parish back.”

St. Bernard Parish, which had over 20 schools before the storm, educates 3,600 students in the two schools that it has opened so far. School officials have worked hard to expand classroom space and provide supplies for all the students, and they believe the effort to rebuild the schools has been a positive force for restoring the community. School Board President Diana Dysart told the Times-Picayune that functioning schools have given people “hope for the future,” and that more and more displaced residents are moving back to the parish. Enrollment in the parish continues to increase, and district officials plan to reopen several more schools next fall.

The efforts of communities to rebuild and reopen their local public schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is testament to the power and importance of community that the Center for Community Change describes in “Dismantling a Community.” Whether the decentralized, “market-based” system in New Orleans serves to boost student achievement, and whether it does so at the expense of the strength of the city’s communities, remains to be seen.

Prepared by Matthew Samberg, November 3, 2006