Katrina Anniversary renews fight by John McDonogh parents, alum

8th September 2014   ·   0 Comments

By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer

Holding a candlelight vigil on Aug. 29, more than 50 people spent the evening of the 9th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on the steps of John McDonogh High School. In addition to remembrance and prayers, the vigil gave voice to the continuing fight to get the beleaguered school out of the Recovery School District’s (RSD) jurisdiction.

“I was in this building for many years,” said Shawon Bernard, a former assistant principal and member of the John McDonogh Steering Committee.

“I was here and I know what they did to it,” she said. “They tell you it was not doing well before Katrina – It’s not doing well now. They made it worse than it was.” It’s not about helping children, Bernard said. “It’s about money and contracts and other things.”

In recent months, the effort to wrest John Mac from the RSD’s stubborn grasp saw a victory from the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), which passed a resolution to bring the school back to local control.

The victory was followed by double defeats, first at the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (BESE) July meeting in New Orleans, when vice-president James Garvey questioned whether BESE had the legal authority to move the school from the RSD to the OPSB.

Then, at BESE’s last meeting in Baton Rouge on August 13, the motion to return John Mac to the OPSB failed in a 6-4 vote. BESE members Carolyn Hill, Lottie Beebe, Walter Lee, and Jane Smith voted to return the school. Members Garvey, Kira Orange Jones, Holly Boffy, Connie Bradford, Chas Roemer, and Judy Miranti voted against.

Jay Guillot was not present.

According to an analysis from the Louisiana Department of Education’s (LDOE) legal staff, while BESE does have oversight over the RSD, many decisions are delegated to the superintendent, including, “planning and oversight for the construction of new and renovated school buildings, assigning school programs to school facilities, and exchanging buildings between RSD and OPSB.”

In other words, Garvey is suggesting that even if the RSD makes a low-performing school worse – given free rein and nearly unlimited funding for close to an entire decade – there is no governing body or written policy that can effectively say to the RSD “You’ve had your chance and failed, so you lose this school.”

Nor is there any mechanism giving power to the vote of the citizens served by the school about in which district they want to be.

Attorney Willie Zanders argued that BESE does have the authority to move the school. Zanders wrote an open letter to Garvey on Aug. 4 in which he described RSD Superintendent Patrick Dobard’s plan to wait six months as a “delay tactic.”

Dobard’s spokesman said he was not available for an interview for this story.

Why not move a school from one of the state’s worst-performing districts to one of the best, Zanders asks in the letter.

Zanders also highlighted segments of the state constitution that he says makes it clear that BESE can give John Mac to the OPSB, including the following excerpt:

“. . . the board shall have the power to supervise, manage, and operate or provide for the supervision, management, and operation of a public elementary or secondary school which has been determined to be failing . . .”

The John Mac situation is unprecedented in New Orleans’ new fragmented education landscape that has seen nearly every public school privatized by the state, and privatized while still using public money but without any democratic mechanisms in place to give citizens a voice in what happens to their schools.

The RSD’s dogged determination to keep John Mac – despite having for nine years failed miserably to bring any sort of improvement to the school – has some speculating that State Superin­tendent John White and the RSD are more attached to the dollar amounts tied to John Mac than they are to genuinely doing anything that advances education.

In those nine years, John Mac has seen four different state superintendents, four different RSD superintendents, and six different principals.

Community outrage reached a boiling point in 2013 when the charter operator Future is Now Schools (FINS) abhorrently exploited the students on a television documentary series on the Oprah Winfrey Network – a project apparently supported by White, who hand-picked FINS and its CEO Steve Barr (paid an annual salary of $250,000) to be the school’s “savior.”

“It must be about the money,” Zanders said at the vigil. “With a 9.3 out of 150, it’s not about educating anyone,” he said, referring to the School Performance Score under FINS. “It must be about the money.”

White’s promise in 2012 to turn it into a world-class culinary arts school – an idea he said came from a survey of the community – is just one in a long list of broken promises.

In order to get the $35 million designated for the dilapidated building’s renovation, White “told us we had to go charter,” “Coach” Frank Buckley said at the vigil. “He turned around and picked the operator,” Buckley said, referring to the California-based and scandal-ridden FINS.

“They ran it into the ground,” Buckley said. “They failed. They made a lot of money, and they left town.”

Distrust runs deep between White and the RSD and the John Mac community. While community members acknowledge that the OPSB isn’t perfect, most have lost all confidence in the ability or integrity of the RSD.

“As educators, parents, and community members, we know what is best for the children,” said Shawon Bernard, a former assistant principal. “We don’t have to bring in an outside corporation.”

Alumnus and former parent Angelina Elder talked about the pain she felt as she took “thousands of pictures” of mold, termite damage, asbestos, and other deplorable conditions. With the windows boarded up or sealed shut, “They didn’t allow the children to got outside,” Elder said.

On July 30, White’s office said that renovations were going to start “immediately,” however the vigil took place in front of the cracked and crumbling building that continues to fall further into disrepair. Elder’s photographs from 2010 show mold inside of the walls, but the RSD said there was never any mold remediation.

LDOE spokesman Barry Landry gave the following answer to an emailed question regarding the timeline for the renovation: “The design phase for the demolition of the John McDonogh building interior has begun, as such the renovation process is currently underway. The renovation of the John McDonogh school building will require gutting the building down to the studs. This design phase is always the first formal phase of such a process. The bid for the demolition is expected to open in October 2014. Con­struction will begin during the 2014-2015 school year. Once construction starts, the RSD expects to complete the renovation in approximately two years. The RSD is still fully committed to renovating and building the John McDonogh facility.”

At the vigil former principal Walter Goodman talked about the RSD’s direct run effort at John Mac in the years immediately following Katrina. He described the choice to employ security guards over social workers, and suspending kids instead of treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“I have great expectations for our children, and jail is not one of them,” Goodman said.

Also passed at the Aug. 13 meeting was a resolution to have the OPSB lead the decision-making process going forward, which includes holding meetings with community members. The motion passed 7-3.

But the community is not convinced, and the words “community engagement” have become laughable – a lie they say they won’t fall for again.

“We were lied to. We were bamboozled,” Clarence Robinson said at the vigil. Robinson served both on the FINS executive board and is part of the steering committee.

“The state BESE board wants John Mac to enter into another faith community engagement process,” said education advocate Karran Harper Royal. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

In terms of selecting a new operator for the school, Landry issued the following statement:

“The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has directed the Recovery School District to decide the future of John McDonogh in collaboration with the Orleans Parish School Board and to engage local community members. The group will report back to BESE during their October meeting on a timeline for this process to include public meetings over the next several months.”

Harper Royal also said she doesn’t buy the argument that BESE doesn’t have the power to move the school. “BESE holds the key,” she said. “They’re playing games with us. We say no more. We want to return to democratically elected control, and we want that to happen today.

John Mac has been called a linchpin – amid speculation that the state is concerned that if one school goes back, it will open the door for more schools to return to democratic oversight.

When the RSD took nearly all of the city’s schools, the intent to privatize was masked as an intent to “turnaround.” But the RSD continues to stagnate at the very bottom of state district rankings.

The language used at the time of the takeover also led the community to believe that the RSD would, after five years, return schools to local control. Nine years later, not a single school has returned out of the nation’s first 100 percent-privatized urban district.

“John Mac is important,” Zanders said. “It will be the first school taken back out of 107. But it won’t be the last.”

This article originally published in the September 8, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.