Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > June > 01 > Entry
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.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Urban School Issues
Comments
By edie
June 7, 2006 12:34 PM | Link to this
I went on the higher ed bus tour at EWA, and posted my photos on flickr. Check them out for graphic representation of some of what Sam described: http://flickr.com/photos/shmeedie/sets/72157594153728468/By Oldprof
June 3, 2006 9:07 AM | Link to this
Somebody (probably everybody) needs to get a video of the first episode of James Burke’s old “Connections” PBS series, titled “The Trigger Effect”. Burke had the uncomfortable answers to these big questions.By Scott Elliott
June 2, 2006 9:52 AM | Link to this
Mary, those are good questions. I don’t know if they have any numbers on deaths of students and teachers. They told us yesterday that workers continue to find bodies and so the death count is still changing. The state is largely operating the school district right now and they are not paying very many people since they have so few schools open. The state official who is in charge of New Orleans schools told us the loss of the city was incredibly damaging to the state budget. About a month after the storm she said there was a huge drop in tax revenue causing all sorts of havoc for the government. She had to lay of 20 people in her office alone, she said. The vast majority of teachers and students — and for that matter, just about everybody else — are living elsewhere right now. And one of the big unknown is how many of them will come back and when.By Mary
June 2, 2006 7:42 AM | Link to this
Just curious - how have the payroll and school funding issues been handled? Have teachers gone on to other areas? Does anyone know how many teachers and students have perished?