On August 30, Hurricane Ida lashed Louisiana with winds that measured over 150 miles per hour. Leaving a trail of destruction that knocked out power for the entire city (a situation that may last for weeks), the damage to infrastructure is compiling New Orleans’ already embattled struggle to fend off the pandemic.
Schools are closed, hospitals are full, and, much like sixteen years ago when Hurricane Katrina struck and eventually led to our public schools getting replaced by charters, residents are faced with yet another turning point that could drastically impact their city, for better or for worse.
Before Hurricane Ida hit, more than 1,000 parents, teachers, and community members signed a petition asking for a choice that they currently do not have: to allow children and families to have a virtual option for attending school.
Louisiana has the nation’s highest COVID-19 death rate, and the fastest growing rate of new cases among children.
Recently, I joined with other New Orleans school parents gathering in front of the KIPP New Orleans Schools headquarters, the largest charter school network in the district, to demand the choice of a virtual school option this fall. Our call for a virtual option does not come from a place of privilege but out of the need to keep children safe.
Louisiana has the nation’s highest COVID-19 death rate, and the fastest growing rate of new cases among children, with one in four testing positive. Children’s Hospital New Orleans has been inundated with children between the ages of five and sixteen and no longer has hospital beds available. Local news outlets recently report that hundreds of New Orleans students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19, and thousands have been quarantined.
The new Lambda variant, which scientists warn might be more resistant to vaccines, has been detected in Louisiana. So parents are legitimately concerned about keeping their children safe. Because the district consists entirely of charter schools, parents have less control over whether their school follows Centers for Disease Control protocols for COVID-19.
Because of a lack of central control and accountability, neither city hall nor the district has oversight of the safety on our school buses. Consequently, when a local news outlet examined the licenses of each of the school district’s independently operated school buses, it found “only 16 percent of the almost 700 independently operated school buses have cleared City Hall’s safety inspection and licensing requirements.”
In what one former official called the “wild, wild West of buses,” a shortage of bus drivers left parents with no choice but to drive their kids to school. And parents I’ve spoken to wonder why there are no bus monitors, especially on school buses with children sitting three to a seat along with small children who often take off their masks.
“Why are they allowing our children to get on school buses that are unsafe and not regulated?” a parent, who wants to remain anonymous, tells me. “Some of those buses don’t have air-conditioning, heating, or working windows. How can you filter the air when children are on a bus with COVID-19 if you can’t open a window or turn on the air-conditioning?”
Parents and students in New Orleans also tell me that school bathrooms are in the same condition that they were in before the pandemic: barely usable, lacking soap, and smelling up school hallways.
Some schools don’t employ janitors and split the janitorial duties between other staff members. Most do not follow the protocol to clean the bathrooms every hour, and there are no guarantees that desks, chairs, floors, and carpets are cleaned every day. In response, parent groups are forming all over the city seeking more options, including access to virtual learning. One group of parents is even filing a lawsuit.
It seems like [school leaders] are just waiting for something bad to happen
But private boards that run charter schools and our elected school board often don’t bother listening to parents and neglect open meetings laws, using the coronavirus as an excuse.
When they bother to issue their rationale for reopening schools, their statements are easily refuted, as in this email that parent Daniel Zimmerman sent to me:
“The school board posted a Facebook article about the yellow fever epidemic, saying how resilient people were and that, despite 200 student deaths, we bounced back. That message tells every parent that there is an acceptable number of deaths that you’re willing to accept to justify ‘bouncing back.’ So I'm asking each of you, what is your acceptable number of deaths? And what if your kid was in that number?”
Zimmerman, who has an immunocompromised wife, points out that the only virtual option available to parents is only if a child has, or lives with someone who has, a medical condition that makes them more at risk of becoming severely ill or dying from the virus.
But in a system of all charter schools, there is no uniform policy for how to handle the requests, and there is not even a consistent policy across all thirty-nine separate charter entities. Hynes Elementary School, for example, has a virtual option for all parents, but the school is also a selective admissions school with at least one-third of the student population being middle income—a stark contrast from the city’s student population, where 82 percent are economically disadvantaged.
“My daughter is asthmatic, and that worries me,” Parent Donna Dugue tells me in an email. “It seems like [school leaders] are just waiting for something bad to happen that would force them to open a virtual option, and that’s not fair.”
Since the pandemic began, COVID-19 claimed the lives of eleven children younger than eighteen as of late August. The most recent death was an infant less than one year old. For New Orleans charter school leaders and our elected officials, who are acting as if the virus isn’t being spread in schools, this is willful negligence, at best.
And without an option for more safety measures, school choice in New Orleans is looking more and more like only the schools have choices, and they’ve chosen to ignore the health and well-being of the city’s children, as well as parent voices that are crying out for better standards and protocols.