Remembering Katrina.

Some Memories - 10 years later. 

Ten years ago I was in New Orleans with a team of colleagues working to turn around the Orleans Parish School District, which at the time was the very definition of dysfunctional. Federal funds couldn’t be accounted for, paychecks bounced and no one could say for sure how many people the district employed or how much property it owned.  And the ones who were paying the price were the children.

Schools were in terrible condition, with inoperable drinking fountains, unsafe playgrounds and had nothing in terms of lighting, architecture or design that would inspire learning.  Supplies weren’t getting to the schools and, in an extreme example, teachers and some students were bringing their own toilet paper from home.

Two days before Hurricane Katrina hit, our team, which was from all over the country, left New Orleans and headed home for the weekend.  We watched along with the rest of the country the worst natural disaster ever to hit American soil. 

Three days later, along with two other colleagues, I flew into Baton Rouge (New Orleans had shut down its airport save for military aircraft) and went to the military’s command center in the capital city.  Our client, the Louisiana Department of Elementary and Secondary Education arranged for special passes for us to drive from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and be allowed past the city’s then makeshift military check points along on our way to the school district’s headquarters.  PBS’ The News Hour took note of our efforts at the time.

Although the building was badly damaged, we made it up to the 4th floor IT data room to retrieve the back-up tapes to the mainframe so that we could begin to restore a school district that only existed on paper.  

During those early days, there was no place to stay or work in New Orleans and hotels in Baton Rouge were filled to capacity with people who had fled the hurricane and who had no place to live.  We stayed for several weeks at a School for the Deaf dormitory in Baton Rouge. Our rooms had a large red light bulb that served as the room’s “doorbell” by sight. 

Over the next two years, our team played a major role in the recovery of the school system.  The State used its Recovery School District or RSD to take control of most of New Orleans’ schools and the turnaround firm I was with at the time worked with both the school board and the state on the recovery effort.

It is hard to comprehend just how apocalyptic the scene in New Orleans was those first days after the levees broke and the storm submerged the city.  Cell towers were down, and so upon entering the city, there was no way to communicate with anyone other than in person.  Hard to imagine. 

There were police on the backs of trucks, patrolling neighborhoods by sight and communicating via radio walkie-talkies.  Abandoned houses, boarded up businesses and vacant buildings all patrolled by roaming police officers wearing fatigues, carrying significant and visible weaponry.

Here and there, you could find a brave small local restaurant or diner that managed to open and serve a few dishes.  We would drive miles to find somewhere where we could grab something, anything to eat. 

In those early weeks I recall driving around entire neighborhoods, checking out the damage done to school buildings to figure out which ones we could quickly bring back up to useable status.   These buildings were not in good shape before Katrina – afterwards they reeked of mildew and mold.  Many had taken on several feet of water and when it receded, it left furniture strewn everywhere.

Over a period of months, folks slowly started to come back.  You’d meet people on the street or in a random bar or restaurant and hear incredible stories of what they’d be through, why they came back and what they found when they got there.

We worked incredibly long days and nights.  There was no blueprint for bringing back a school system from annihilation.  We were constantly white boarding plans and contingency plans regarding construction schedules for our schools, hiring and staffing plans, funding levels, enrollment, busing, food, etc.  Imagine planning to open a school from scratch but instead of a normal 12 to 24 month planning cycle we had a 6-week cycle.  Imagine doing it when many neighborhoods had no electricity, no healthcare system and no housing.

New Orleans looks vastly different today.  In the school system, enrollment is below its pre-Katrina levels.  Charter schools serve a majority of the students. This fact has raised recent criticism, but critics fail to comprehend just how bad the schools were pre-Katrina – and how, after the storm, we were dealing with conditions seen nowhere else in America.

Similarly, it is easy to discredit the reform efforts for its failure to completely educate all of its students at levels we aspire to, but do not achieve in many other cities. Failure to reach a goal should not discredit progress towards it.

Today, if parental choice within an accountable framework of school options is appealing to you, New Orleans is the place to be.  It is easy to credit Katrina as being a unique, once-in-a-lifetime set of circumstances that led to its recovered or recovering school system.  However, that would discredit the political will of Louisiana public officials and the innovation of its entrepreneurial education community to design and implement a new kind of portfolio of schools. 

Ten years later, what do I remember most about Hurricane Katrina?  Perhaps it is the momentum that storm created.  Pre-Katrina, public education was in decline.  Post-Katrina, the city clearly has positive momentum.  There’s a proverbial saying the “calm before the storm” but in New Orleans’s case I think the calm came after the storm.