his State of the Union address, President Bush called for reauthorization
the No Child Left Behind but did not mention that children in New Orleans whose lives were devastated by Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita are being left further behind because his administration and state and local officials have bungled the recovery
effort.
Just last week, 300 New Orleans school children were shut out of schools and denied an education they
badly need because the city says it doesn’t have enough space or teachers. So, instead of studying in classrooms, 300
students are sitting at home waiting for space to open up in schools. All the while, more students are coming into the city
daily as families who left after Katrina are beginning to return home.
What makes the lockout of school children even
more outrageous is that the city’s school enrollment is less than half of pre-Katrina levels and there are thousands
of unemployed school teachers in the city who lost their jobs or were forced to retire when local officials closed schools
to gut the teachers’ union. Shortly after Katrina, some 4,900 public school teachers, mostly members of the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO)/AFT, and 1,900 support staff were forced to retire or just lost
their jobs.
A broad coalition of unions, civil rights, religious and community groups is demanding the city, state and
federal governments bring the city’s teachers and school professional staff to the table so they can help create a quality
school system.
Brenda Mitchell, president of UTNO, says 17 months is more than enough time for officials to get their
act together and provide a decent education for children:
It is a public outrage and criminal that the student
victims of Hurricane Katrina are not only being left behind, they are also being shut out and denied the educational foundation
that they so urgently need to start to rebuild their lives after Katrina.
It’s un-American for children to come
into a place and not be able to get an education.
The policymakers need the voice of the teachers and the school employees
at the table. We could tell them what’s really happening in the schools.
You can take action to help
change the situation for New Orleans school children contact Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and David Vitter (R-La.) and tell
them the situation in New Orleans is unacceptable. Tell them that it is time to work with parents, teachers and community
leaders to ensure that all the city’s children receive a decent education.
Mitchell says state
and local officials seized the opportunity after Katrina to eliminate the union.
They thought that with
the economy of the region declining teachers would take less and they wanted to be able to hire and fire teachers at will.
They cannot silence our voice. We need to be involved as we craft our new school system.
Maria Alexander,
who returned home to help rebuild her native city after living in New York for 20 years, says New Orleans parents demand quality
schools for their children.
They have a right to a good education. They went to different places (during
the evacuation of New Orleans) and saw good public schools with resources and good teachers. It’s crazy that teachers
lost their jobs when they are so needed.
Alexander, education director for the advocacy group ACORN, says
more than 300 students are not in school. She says the process for enrolling in school is so cumbersome and time consuming
that it scares off many parents who also have to work. The city is ready to open another 1,200 public housing units, bringing
even more children into the city.
It’s all about the kids. We have to fight for the kids.
To
make matters worse, proponents of school vouchers are seizing on the collapse of the public schools to try and create a voucher
program that would further erode the ability of public schools to educate New Orleans’ children.
The
Archdiocese of New Orleans again is pushing a measure in the state legislature to pull money away from public schools
and put it into vouchers so children can attend private schools. The measure has failed several times in the legislature and
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) is known to oppose vouchers.
It’s not surprising that proponents of vouchers
are using the school crisis as the staging point for something they long have pursued, Louisiana Federation of Teachers President
Steve Monaghan told the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
It’s not the solution any more than the
solution to the Orleans problem was the dissolution of everything that was there before.
Before Katrina,
New Orleans had 128 public schools. Now, only 55 have reopened. Thirty-one are autonomous charter schools, the largest group
of charter schools in the nation. The local Orleans Parish school district operates five schools. The state-controlled Recovery
School District (RSD), which took over schools with performance scores below the state average, even if they were meeting
yearly progress goals, operates the rest. Employees in RSD schools have no union representation. Those schools are the ones
that have placed children on the wait list.
The problems in the schools are just symptomatic of a larger, more widespread
neglect of New Orleans by federal and state officials, city’s leaders say. During a field hearing yesterday in Louisiana
by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said:
There
is not a sense of urgency in this administration to get this done. You get a sense that will has been lacking in the last
several months.
The Center for American Progress reports New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (D) said the federal government was “abandoning
its legal obligation to help his city recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.”
Much of the growing
tension between state and local officials in Louisiana stems from delays in a federal program that reimburses local officials
for a host of infrastructure projects, including road repairs, public building construction and debris removal. Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) “has paid Louisiana roughly $5.1 billion to reimburse local officials for infrastructure projects
following Katrina, but only about $2 billion of that money has reached communities 16 months after the storm” due to
cumbersome audit procedures, Nagin says.
Yesterday at the field hearing, Nagin said:
The reality is
that it has been 17 months since Katrina, Rita and the flooding that followed and citizens are tired, frustrated and angry.
Worst of all, they are losing hope. We need systemic, meaningful change now.
