Hurricane Lessons: A New Orleans School Activist’s Message to New Survivors

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As a public school parent who weathered Hurricane Katrina, I've been asked by parents who have endured the more recent storms in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico to impart whatever wisdom I can about the recovery process, and what happened to local schools in New Orleans in the months and years after the storm.

My first suggestion is to remember to hold on to what is important—your sanity, your family, your community, and the institutions that make them whole. Start the healing process today. People have a tendency to battle emotions, especially painful ones than can happen after a trauma. But they’ll show up later on and hurt us and make us complacent when we need to fight.

Because you need to be prepared to take on outsiders and their plans. Everybody coming to help is not coming to help you. Some of them come to help themselves, even if they may not even be aware of it. Be wary of those who aren't willing to fix what's broken and instead are just eager to replace your community institutions with substitutes that are more to their liking.

For any recovery process related to the rebuilding of neighborhoods and schools it is crucial that local communities are involved. Don't ask—demand that any organizations donating money and services , especially philanthropic ones, have local people leading the process. Demand to know if the money is going into the hands of the people who need it the most, that the programming coming into your community is programming that you actually need, not what other people want for you.

You need to be prepared to take on outsiders and their plans. Everybody coming to help is not coming to help you.

Keep your eye on the money. Make sure that any new programs are at least co-led by people in your community. If there is an outside director making $55,000 a year, there should be a co-director from your community making the same amount of money. Do not let this be an opportunity for developers to displace people and gentrify your communities. When the developers come in, tell them get out. You can redevelop your own communities, and they will build homes you cannot afford to buy.

Define for yourselves how organizations can be of use to your community. If Teach for America [TFA] wants to come, let them be teaching assistants. But if you can, keep them out. TFA teachers are most likely not familiar with your culture, community, or city, and they probably do not understand trauma or how to teach a trauma-informed curriculum. Most importantly, they often don't even know how to teach.

Michael, who is now in college, remembers of his TFA teachers in New Orleans’ schools after Katrina, "They just didn't know what they were doing. They got frustrated and cried easy, I kept thinking, ‘I thought we were the ones [who] went through the storm.’ We didn't have a math teacher for most of year and then we got one she said her major was journalism and she was horrible at math but she would give it a try. That was my senior year."

Megan, a student I worked with in 2014, told me: "I am a hard-working straight-A student, I just want to be treated with respect and dignity. Why is this so much to ask? Why do people think because we've been hurt it's OK to hurt us? Is it they just don't know any better?"

After ten years of fighting for local control, the New Orleans schools are finally going back under the school board. But we haven’t really won; we were infiltrated. If anybody asks why all this demanding and fighting is necessary, use New Orleans as an example. We have a system of almost sixty different districts in a small city. High schools in 2018 will go back under Orleans Parish school Board. But they have no power. This is spelled out in Act 91, which states:

"Unless mutually agreed to by both the charter school's governing authority and the local school board pursuant to a duly authorized resolution adopted by each governing entity, the local school board shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction in the areas of [I’ve put this in a numbered list for clarity]:

  1. school programming,
  2. instruction,
  3. curriculum,
  4. materials and texts,
  5. yearly school calendars and daily schedules,
  6. hiring and firing of personnel,
  7. employee performance management and evaluation,
  8. terms and conditions of employment,
  9. teacher or administrator certification,
  10. salaries and benefits, retirement,
  11. collective bargaining,
  12. budgeting,
  13. purchasing,
  14. procurement,
  15. contracting for services other than capital repairs and facilities construction.”

This reduces our school board to nothing more than a monitoring service and destroys our democratic process. Our elected body has no voice in the fifteen areas listed above, which means the people have no voice in them.

New Orleans’ new school system shuts down schools that are struggling. That's their “accountability” mechanism. Imagine yourself going to the pediatrician and saying, ‘My baby cries all the time, and the doctor says throw that one away and get a new one that doesn't cry as much!’ But that’s our system of school accountability; that's our system of fixing low income housing. That is disaster capitalism. The best defense is a good offense .

Once people can make decisions about what's best for you without your input, they're going to make opportunity for themselves, sometimes at your detriment. After Katrina, $76 billion came pouring into New Orleans, but the black native population here is substantially less well off since the storm. The city has one the top five largest income gaps between rich and poor people in the nation. That is New Orleans’ Katrina legacy.

Don't let it be yours.

Ashana Bigard is a life-long resident of New Orleans, mother of three, social justice organizer, and advocate for children and families in Louisiana with the Education Justice Project of New Orleans and the United Students of New Orleans.