Kathey Boisseau had one son in the Army distributing books to grateful children in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, she had a teenage son without textbooks in the rebuilt, balkanized (some say apartheid) school system in New Orleans.
Which one is the “Third World?”
Boisseau saw the irony up close. “I just want something that works,” she said in an October interview about the New Orleans schools.
New Orleans parents must work at it to place their children in New Orleans public schools. Or, you could say, New Orleans “public” schools. In the aftermath of the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina that knocked the Crescent City off its foundation, authorities restarted the school system in a way that tried to destroy the United Teachers of New Orleans and cranked the floodgates wide open for charter schools and lower school staff salaries. Their moves split the public school system into a chaotic number of segments that confuse parents.
The Ninth Ward
Nikkisha Breaux lived in the Lower Ninth Ward for all 31 years of her life until the Big One blew in off the Gulf of Mexico. An aunt, uncle and two cousins perished in the storm and flooding. Nikkisha and her three children fled to Dallas while her husband Lawrence, a bus driver, remained in New Orleans continuing to work as a bus driver until he was laid off nine months after the hurricane. Nikkisha was uneasy about the schools in Texas, where one teacher commented on her son’s accent by saying, ‘That’s New Orleans ignorant.’”
After several months, Breaux and the children returned to New Orleans. Their home was gone. They have lived in two different trailers arranged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with the prospect of another move in November from the trailer in New Orleans East, not far from scrublands along the Industrial Canal where post-Katrina debris, including stacks of crushed autos, have been dumped legally and illegally.
Breaux felt it was important for the “peace of mind” of her sons—11-year-old Drasean and 9-year-old Lawrence—to return to the school they had been in pre-Katrina, Martin Luther King Junior High. Drasean returned with a heavy heart because of a classmate friend who died in the storm. Breaux is concerned that there is only one counselor for 800 students at MLK, and wonders about help for kids who are suicidal in the aftermath of Katrina. (The president of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Brenda Mitchell, took note of the kind volunteers of counselors and psychologists from the United Federation of Teachers, who talked to New Orleans school children in volunteer visits earlier this year. These professionals, led by June Feder, had the experience of dealing with the stress of New York City school children in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001.)
Seandre Breaux, 12, landed in a charter school affiliated with the University of New Orleans after her mother spent weeks trying to understand the landscape of New Orleans schools. She is concerned about the atmosphere at that school. Seandre must wait in long lines to go through metal detectors.
“It’s a big, big chaos,” said Breaux, citing hundreds of students in 2005-06 wanting to go to school but told by authorities there were no public schools available for them. Dozens of pre-Katrina schools remain condemned. They are in neighborhoods marked by abandoned homes that still feature the spooky spray-paint markings from emergency workers in the weeks after the hurricane that communicate what group inspected the home at what date, and how many bodies were found inside.
Today, the schools are split into three (separate, unequal) groups (with a lot of splinters within those groups):
● five schools (only five) remain part of the New Orleans public school system;
● dozens of charter schools started with a variety of affiliations and federal seed money;
● dozens of recovery district schools run by the state.
Parents returning to post-Katrina New Orleans, trying to put their lives together and find a home, must also learn how to game the school system. They have to determine for themselves the degree of truth, myth and ideological motivation in the following truisms:
● Charter schools are the best; some of them have unions and others have administrators paranoid about any union talk.
● Recovery district schools hire predominantly inexperienced, uncertified teachers, some from the federal Teach for America program. These are the more dangerous schools, with authorities rushing in the flood aftermath to hand security contracts to private firms.
“I’m fighting for my kids to have a better education,” said Breaux. At this point, she added, it’s worse than what she herself had going to school in the Lower Ninth Ward in the 1980s. Breaux herself would like to become a teacher—she is taking courses in English and history at Southern University in New Orleans.
Fleeing the storm
It broke Kathey Boisseau’s heart, with a Category 5 hurricane bearing down, to leave her ailing mother while she packed up a car with her three children and a grandchild to head north. It took 17 hours to get to northern Mississippi. Her mother, suffering from colon cancer at a hospital with an IV line administering antibiotics, couldn’t have survived that trip.
Kathey told herself she had to be a rock. Her son Kevin, at the time in the Army Reserve, helped clean up New Orleans. Wearing a respirator, Kevin moved around in an environment where soldiers were finding corpses, Kathey Boisseau recounted tearfully. He reported to the family in northern Mississippi that their house was gone.
In the immediate aftermath, there was sketchy information in the media about the fate of hospital patients. Boisseau was sure her mother had perished in the storm until a friend called, two weeks later, to tell her to turn on the television, where former President Bill Clinton was kissing her mother on the forehead in Little Rock.
“We’re here crying and crying and she’s flirting with the president,” Boisseau chuckled.
For a time, Boisseau’s youngest son, Benjamin, went to school in Memphis, where Boisseau was impressed—the red tape was minimal and tutoring was available. Then her mother died. Boisseau decided to return to New Orleans, dedicating herself to rebuilding the city and “helping elderly people return to their homes.” Formerly she was a chef. She received training to be a carpenter, and now helps in the reconstruction.
But getting Benjamin back in school—that was another thing. One official told her Benjamin might have to sit out a semester, which is when Boisseau thought, “This is the United States of America, not a Third World country ... if you take away the school, you take away their hope. Otherwise, they sit in (FEMA) trailers all day. If we don’t put a priority on a school system, then there’s something wrong with our system. I was disgusted and I didn’t give it up.”
The charter schools were filled. You could sign up for a waiting list.
She found a school, John McDonogh, a recovery district school, where Benjamin went in September 2006, but, Boisseau said, “It was like he wasn’t in school.” There was no homework. Many days there were no teachers with students spending the day in the library or the gymnasium. This was at a time when many experienced teachers were thinking about returning to New Orleans and being told by school authorities there were no jobs for them. Teachers had been laid off by the “public” school districts in the weeks after Katrina.
The school has improved in the last year. But, when Boisseau stops to reflect on the message that students are receiving in the way the school system has been reconstructed, “I lay down at night and I have tears. My son is a black male in a society waiting for him to fail.”
