Education disparities in N.O. start with brick and mortar say activists

5th October 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Kendall Lawson
Staff Writer

As the charter bus circled the city of New Orleans, education activists pointed at abandoned and deteriorated schools with the hope that the education reform bus tour of the city, and town hall forum would spark a conversation about disparities in public education facilities. Roughly 50 people participated in the tour of the city’s public schools and later attended the town hall titled The Future of New Orleans Public Education at Christian Unity Baptist Church on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015. The bus tour and forum was put on by The Schott Foundation, the United Parents Standing for Education Together, the New Orleans Equity Roundtable Coalition for Community Schools, the Pyramid Community Parent Resource Center, and the New Orleans Imperative.

Activists told riders that not only did the Hurricane Katrina take over 1,400 lives. The category 5 storm also took away educational opportunities for many students by ruining the city’s schools and learning institutions. Ten years later, New Orleans’s public schools are physically run down with the state-run Recovery School District either closing them or converting them into charter schools. “It’s smoke and mirrors,” said Karran Harper, a founding member of Parents Across America, who directed the bus tour. “They didn’t transform the schools to make them better, they closed them,” Harper said.

The activists pointed out that strengthening these neighborhoods post-Katrina required investing in public schools. “Rebuild has a new connotation,” said Roslyn Smith, a private educational consultant. “These neighborhoods are struggling to come back with the lack of schools,” Smith said. The city’s schools that serve primarily African-American students have become neglected under the current, charter school system. Funding has been directed towards repairing schools in more affluent areas, advocates said. The charter system does not provide the amount of financial help compared to the prior public school system which allowed for better oversight and accountability.

Since the storm, nearly three-thirds of the city’s public schools have become independent charter schools. While the Recovery School District put in place these charters as its solution, activists said that the charters operate out of inadequate learning facilities, and students are placed in schools far from their homes.

Using the Desire neighborhood, known as The Estates, built with federal funds that is home to “over 300 hundred children,” Harper told the riders that there was still no elementary school close by for the area’s children to attend.

And as the tour reached The Estates neighborhood, Harper directed the riders to look at the swards of high grass that students must pass through in order to reach the bus stop.

Activists say school choice needs to be addressed. The education system’s OneApp application allows parents to select up to eight schools, but families and activists say the selection process is not as transparent as it ought to be.

“Schools have concerns about it because they feel that certain types of students are being funneled to them,” Harper said. “Parents have concerns about it because they don’t really get the choices they wanted. The OneApp will say 83 percent of parents got one of their top three choice, but what about the rest of the percentage that didn’t get their choice? That’s still a problem.”

The organizers are hoping that the tour and the town hall would encourage the community to become active stakeholders in the future of the city’s public education.

“We are paying taxes and have no input about what’s going on,” said Dr. Raynard Sanders, the host of The New Orleans Imperative on WBOK radio, and the moderator of the town hall. “It’s so important because schools close and people have no clue about what’s going on,” Sanders said.

In Aug. 2010, New Orleans public schools received a $1.8 billion grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to repair and build around 85 schools. The federal dollars were primarily directed at rebuilding schools in affluent areas of the city, activists argued. Meanwhile, schools like G.W. Carver Preparatory Academy were neglected, with students forced to hold classes in trailers after the storm. Other schools like John McDonogh High School and McDonogh City Park Academy continue to remain neglected by the public school system, activists said. Both schools have only now begun to undergo gutting renovations.

Visiting these educational landmarks evoked nostalgic memories for many of the attendees of the bus tour. Pastor Brenda Square of Beecher Memorial United Church of Christ said she felt very emotional passing her childhood elementary school, Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School. “We built the first library, we started one in a house and we built a history, so the library at King’s school is the first one for this area,” Square said. “It shows you how community does inspire children. Every time I come here it’s very emotional,” she said.

Square and others who attended said the tour showed how the government had neglected the community and its schools.

Those who attended Thursday’s town hall at the church said both events are the first steps in taking action to reform the city’s school system.

The event’s organizers said they hope to inspire residents to become engaged in order to bring about policy change.

“These children need a thriving community,” Harper said. “This is blight at the hands of the federal government.”

This article originally published in the October 5, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.