Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Thursday, June 1, 2006
Getting schooled in New Orleans
To get to New Orleans’ ninth ward, you drive along that infamous canal that breached last September, spilling a torrent of terror, up onto a tall bridge. As you crest over to the other side, the crumbled matchstick scene of hundreds of destroyed homes lumps your throat and raises goosepimples.
What does it look like? Hiroshima? Too much, maybe. But not that far off.
Andy Mollison, the retired education reporter who worked for Cox Newspapers for 40 years, leaned over to me and said, “Xenia tornado.”
Yes, the wake of Hurricane Katrina bore some resemblance to the deadly 1974 Xenia tornado just outside Dayton in the way it disfigured a community. But the scale of Katrina is so huge, it’s as if the Xenia tornado continued on and wiped out Columbus, too.
How in the world does a school district recover from this?
That was the question local officials here tried to answer Thursday for a group of education reporters.
Here’s just a few highlights of what they told us:
- Before Katrina, the district was already in crisis with 70 of 128 schools labeled “failing” by the state and $71 million in federal Title One funds unaccounted for.
- The damage to New Orleans schools is estimated between $850 million and $1 billion. The district was woefully underinsured against flood. Instead of the state-required $500,000 minimum flood insurance on each school, New Orleans had about $165,000 per school. FEMA won’t cover the difference, driving up the local cost for rebuilding.
- The state now controls 107 of the district’s schools and has opened 25 schools since November. They are preparing for 24,000 kids to start school in August and another 3,000 by Jan. 1. These estimates are purely an educated guess based on data on home ownership, insurance and patterns of population growth.
- Things are still so bad that many neighborhoods remain uninhabitable. Some families are sharing temporary trailer homes, sleeping in shifts. At least one school building houses two schools — one that meets in the morning and one in the evening.
- The state has had no contact with 200 private and parochial schools. That is, those schools are empty and the state cannot locate anyone associated with the schools to say what happened to them.
- Many of the fleet of flooded school buses we saw on TV after the storm are still sitting idle in the same lot. Nearly all of the city’s school buses were ruined.
- New Orleans may soon eclipse Dayton as the biggest U.S. charter school experiment. Nineteen of the schools that are open now are charter schools and the state and city want more schools to have charter-like independence and local control as they reopen.
The bottom line message from school officials we spoke to was that the flood is not over here. Not by a long shot. The crisis remains an every-minute-of-every-day obstacle for schools. And until there are decent schools up and running, it will be hard to entice city residents to return home, even when housing availability improves.
I’ll be posting more on New Orleans schools and the EWA conference over the next couple of days.
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The Big (Not So) Easy
I’m in New Orleans today for the Education Writers Association national conference. On Saturday, I’m on a panel with Patti Ghezzi, Get Schooled blogger for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Alexander Russo, who writes a blog called This Week in Education. We’re going to be talking about education blogging and its role in education reporting.
This afternoon, I get to tour New Orleans schools, which were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Only 16 of 126 schools in the city remain useable and thousands of kids here are relocated to other cities and states (even some in the Dayton area).
But on the other hand, New Orleans was long known as one of the nation’s most dysfunctional and worst performing school districts. So now months after the storm, as the school district seeks to rise from the ashes, some view it as a one-time opportunity to remake the district into something better. (Read more about this issue at PBS’ Merrow Report by education journalist John Merrow, who is here for the conference.
My early impressions of New Orleans four years after I was last here and nine months after the storm? Well …
the airport — an epicenter of death, despair and destruction after Katrina — is surprisingly clean and functional. But there is a constant hint of cleaning fluid in the air and the floors appear buffed from heavy-duty scrubbing but streaks of old grime are faintly evident.
An incredible number of houses still sport blue tarps where roofs were torn away, and the closer you are to the city’s core the more piles of debris appear on streetcorners. The Superdome carries a huge banner proclaiming “Opens in September — Go Saints!” even as worker hammer away at its gaping scars.
Even my hotel, on the edge of the relatively undamaged French Quarter, is still undergoing flood-induced renovation.
But the people who are here seem as lively as ever. About two minutes after I dropped my bags in my room, a parade passed under my third-story window at 10 a.m. — bright colors and waving feathers bobbed down the sunny street.
More on the schools later.
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