Community Meeting to Unveil New L9 Schools

Friends -

The Lower Nine School Advisory Group will be holding a Community Meeting on Tuesday, February 2 at Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School at 1617 Caffin Avenue from 6pm to 8pm to unveil the drawings for a new K-8 and High School to be built on the former Lawless School sites in the Lower Ninth Ward.

The schools, designed by New Orleans architect John Williams, are designed as state of the art "Living Schools".

We hope you can join us as we move one step closer to realizing the dream of a fully revitalized Lower Ninth Ward Community.

Thom Pepper
Secretary
Lower Nine School Advisory Group

What is L9SDG?

What is L9SDG?

The Lower 9 School Development Group (L9SDG) is a collective of grassroots organizations committed to envisioning, advocating for, and building schools in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. L9SDG is guided by the conviction that open-access, neighborhood-based public schools are the bedrock of community restoration and development.

In the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, fundamental concerns have arisen regarding the lack of inclusive and substantive community-based participation in educational decision-making. More specifically, the School Facility Master Plan for Orleans Parish, which the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) issued in August 2008, specifies which schools will remain open, which schools will be closed, and which will receive funding for (re)development.

Thus far, this process has been problematic and exclusionary. Four of the five schools that existed in the Lower 9th Ward prior to Katrina have either been demolished or are slated for demolition. Only one has been rebuilt, and, in this case, only because of the sustained efforts and civil disobedience of its dedicated principal, veteran teachers, and community members. Most important, this school has a waiting list and cannot accommodate an increasing demand for elementary and high school education in the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the RSD has received millions from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for damage to these schools—$46,775,923 million to be precise. Not a single dollar of this money has been allocated for building schools in the Lower 9th Ward.

This is our struggle—one rooted in concerns over the educational advancement of our children and the very survival of our historic and culturally rich community.

We invite the development of a wider alliance around these issues and demand that the RSD be held accountable for providing support for public schools in all communities throughout the city.

Historical Context:

The Struggle for Educational Justice in the Lower 9th Ward

The 9th Ward of New Orleans has a long history of struggle for racial and educational justice (Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club, 2006). Despite historic state failure to invest in adequate public infrastructure throughout this part of the city, the 9th Ward as a whole had one of the highest rates a black working-class homeownership in the nation before Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005 (Common Ground, 2006). Nonetheless, residents of this area, particularly the Lower 9th Ward, were obstructed by the military from returning home in the months following Katrina (Buras & Vukelich, 2005). For some, the breaking of the levee along the Industrial Canal, which resulted in 20 feet of water surging into the Lower 9th Ward, represented an apparent opportunity to "cleanse" the city of particular residents (Buras, 2007; Saltman, 2007).

We are not strangers to such struggles. Two of the major legal challenges advanced by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) against school desegregation in the 1940s and 1950s were lodged by residents of the Lower 9th Ward, who protested the historically poor and unequal educational facilities designated solely for African American children.

The first case (Rosana Aubert v. Orleans Parish School Board) was filed in 1948 on behalf of Wilfred Aubert, a dock worker and community activist who had school-aged children and sought to equalize public school facilities (DeVore & Logsdon, 1991). It is exceedingly relevant that the school which inspired Aubert to seek legal counsel was Macarty Elementary School—the school attended by his own children and the one that stood where the only post-Katrina school in the Lower 9th Ward—Dr. Martin Luther King School for Science and Technology—currently stands.

The second case (Earl Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board) was filed in 1952 on behalf of Earl Benjamin Bush to force the desegregation of the city’s public schools (DeVore & Logsdon, 1991).

With massive resistance to integration at every level after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954—protestations of White Citizens’ Councils, foot dragging and evasion by the Orleans Parish School Board, and the passage of countless segregationist bills by the Louisiana State Legislature—Federal Court Judge Skelly Wright crafted a school desegregation plan in 1960 that would encompass elementary schools, beginning with the first grade.

Both of the schools chosen by the school board for desegregation were in the Ninth Ward—William Frantz Elementary School in the Upper Ninth Ward and McDonogh 19 Elementary School in the Lower Ninth Ward. At the all-white Frantz School, six-year-old Ruby Bridges was escorted by federal marshals as she confronted the violence of the “cheerleaders,” a group of white mothers who daily hurled racial insults, physical threats, and rotten eggs at Ruby; some threatened to poison or throw acid on her.

The first graders who entered McDonogh 19 had similar educational aspirations and similarly harrowing experiences, along with their parents and families, yet they persisted for the collective good of the African American community (Baker, 1996).

The traces of this history are indisputably present in the concerns and actions of current community members, who have struggled and continue to struggle for the right to open access public schools in the neighborhood in which they live and have roots (see Buras, Randels, Salaam, and Students at the Center, 2010).

The Struggle for Dr. Martin Luther King Elementary School for Science and Technology

 After Katrina, the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) had little intention of supporting the return of any of the five schools originally in the Lower 9th Ward, including: (1) Louis Armstrong Elementary School, (2) Thomas A. Edison Elementary School, (3) Joseph A. Hardin Elementary School, (4) Martin Luther King Elementary School, and (5) Alfred Lawless Senior High School.

Thus the first challenge confronted by teachers and community members in the Lower 9th Ward was to rebuild a school. With this commitment, the principal and a number of the veteran teachers affiliated with King Elementary School proceeded with writing a charter school proposal—the only means for possibly reopening the school in a newly reformed, charter school-driven policy environment.

Ultimately, King was the only charter submitted solely by a grassroots group that the state approved; other charters were granted to schools collaborating with educational management organizations. Building upon its preexisting history, King aimed to reinstate as an open access, community-run school.

Despite all of the work required to get the charter, the approval was only the beginning. King still needed a building for 2006-2007, while the original site in the Lower 9th Ward was being renovated. This, too, proved to be a battle. The RSD offered the dilapidated Charles Colton Middle School to King, which the district promised to appropriately renovate. However, problems with asbestos, termites, and other hazards were not remediated and deadlines for building repairs were repeatedly missed by the district.

Members of the King School demanded access to a safe, alternative school building—an uptown site in much better condition—but the RSD said it had other plans for that building

By September 6th, King decided to hold school on the steps in front of Colton to let the world know that teachers were ready to teach, while the district had provided no adequate place for teaching to occur. In consultation with leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), it was decided that the school would peacefully march to the offices of the RSD about two miles away. The superintendent of the RSD at the time, Robin Jarvis (the current superintendent is Paul Vallas), was not there, so the students took a seat and the teachers continued to teach. Members of the SCLC also talked with the children about Dr. King and his struggle to bring equality during the 1960s. Jarvis finally arrived and agreed to a closed-door meeting with five or six key members.

As a result of this mobilization, the well-maintained building uptown became available and that is where King's students were taught for the remainder of 2006-2007.

On August 13, 2007, King returned to its original location in the Lower 9th Ward, where renovations had occurred throughout the previous year. On that momentous day, the school principal declared before an exhilarated community: "Dr. King said, 'They dared to dream.' And after the disaster that devastated this area and our school, we dared to dream. . . . We are glad to be home and indeed this is a homecoming" (Mos Chukma Institute, 2008).

The Present Struggle—Where is the Funding for a High School in the Lower 9th Ward?

At present, the King School is at capacity, with over 700 students and a waiting list of over 350 children. While granted permission to operate a high school beginning in 2008-2009, no additional funding for facilities has been provided. Thus, King's 9th and 10th grade students occupy the last remaining space in the school, with 11th and 12th grades to be added in 2010-2011 and 2011-2012, respectively. Despite the very solid, culturally relevant curriculum that King is providing to its current high school students, capacity remains a pressing but unresolved issue due to systemic failure of the RSD to invest in school development for the Lower 9th Ward.

In August 2008, a School Facility Master Plan (SFMP) was released by the RSD. This plan was presented as the product of community input solicited during the previous months. In reality, however, many communities had little voice in determining which schools would remain open, which would be closed, and which would receive funding for renovation and constuction. Moreover, the window for additional public comment in September 2008 was interrupted by Hurricane Gustav, and once again, little effort was made to obtain substantive feedback from the communities most affected by Katrina.

The master plan indefinitely closes or "landbanks" approximately 60 schools, with buildings subject to sale for alternative public and, most alarmingly, private use. Yet such selective shuttering of schools—most of these schools are in working-class and middle-class communities of color on the downtown and eastern side of the city—is only one troubling aspect of the master plan. The plan also specifies six phases for school rebuilding, but only Phase I is funded.

Currently, there are no monies allocated in Phase 1 to build a high school in the Lower 9th Ward. While the original master plan indicated that a new high school would be built in the Lower 9th Ward, it was the only school in "Phase 1–High School Renovations and New Construction" that had no specifically designated site within the neighborhood. What is more, an "addition" to King, which would enable the accommodation of some 500 high school students, was delegated to "Phase 5–Pre-K-8 Renovations and New Construction" (Kilbert & Vallas, School Facility Master Plan for Orleans Parish, August 2008).

The fact is, a majority of schools that have reopened or are slated for funding are not downtown, but are concentrated uptown in largely white, upper-income neighborhoods that suffered the least damage from Katrina due to historic access to high ground and disproportionate funding for levees.

The superintendents' amendments to the master plan were issued in November 2008. At this juncture, a high school for the Lower 9th Ward was no longer designated for Phase 1, but instead a 9th Ward High School at the former site of George Washington Carver High School in the Upper 9th Ward was planned. The high school addition to King remained in Phase 5, while among the other four schools that existed in the Lower 9th Ward prior to Katrina, one was landbanked (Armstrong) and the other three either demolished or slated for demolition (Edison, Hardin, and Lawless) (Superintendents' Amendmends, November 2008).

Let us be crystal clear: The Lower 9th Ward School Development Group fully supports the building of a high school in the Upper 9th Ward.

However, this does not resolve the need for a high school in the Lower 9th Ward, where there exists a documented need by parents with school-aged children for another elementary and high school in the neighborhood. Despite claims by the RSD that the master plan utilized demographic information to create neighborhood "recovery profiles," which were then used to determine where schools should be restored, a demographic profile prepared by ESRI, at the behest of L9SDG, revealed the following in 2008:

• Within a two-minute drive of the King School, there are 493 school-aged children, meaning children ranging from age 0 to 19.
• Within a five-minute drive of the King School, there are 4,752 school-aged children.

Theses families, who have struggled to return to the Lower 9th Ward, believe that schools should be the center of community restoration. Indeed, L9SDG continues to collect signed petitions from families for a proposed elementary-high school in the neighborhood—one that could build upon the important work that King has been doing amid increasing demand.

The question is: Why doesn't the RSD believe that schools should be the center of community restoration in the Lower 9th Ward?

The Demand for a Lower 9th Ward High School

Even more important, why has the RSD failed to allocate federal monies disbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for the restoration of Lower 9th Ward schools to the Lower 9th Ward?

Clearly there has been a lack of transparency and community input into the process governing the (re)development of local public schools. This reveals a lack of participatory democracy at the most basic level and we demand that these circumstances be addressed by the RSD in an open forum that values and honors the voices of economically and racially marginalized communities.

Let us be crystal clear: The Lower 9th Ward School Development Group does not believe it is the only community that has suffered from either a lack of representation in the educational decision-making process or a lack of allocated resources for rebuilding open access, neighborhood-based public schools.

Indeed, similar struggles have unfolded around the impending closure of Frederick Douglass High School, where the Douglass Community Coalition urged the RSD to invest in the historic, public school—one of the only open access high schools remaining in the area. Yet even before the release of the master plan and the so-called window for public comment, the RSD had determined that the school would be closed (Buras, 2009).

Similarly, in the Hollygrove neighborhood, the parent-organizing group SOSNOLA has joined with the Paul L. Dunbar Collaborative, including local ministers and grassroots organizations such as Trinity Christian Church and Hollygrove Neighbors, in advocating the reopening of Dunbar Elementary School (SOSNOLA, 2009). Here again, the RSD has been unresponsive to the community's educational concerns.

L9SDG welcomes an alliance with aggrieved community groups who are committed to the restoration of public schools that are:

• neighborhood-based, supporting the return of residents and restoration of affected communities
• open access, without either formal or informal barriers to student entry and enrollment
• respectful of the contributions, rights, and benefits of veteran teachers, who were summarily fired in January 2006 and who have been subjected to the loss of benefits accrued through years of pre-Katrina service to New Orleans Public Schools
• prepared to recognize the teachers union, United Teachers of New Orleans (American Federation of Teachers Local 527), in collectively representing the rights of veteran teachers
• welcoming of substantive and democratic inclusion of grassroots communities in educational decision-making, including plans for building schools throughout the city
• borne from governmental transparency and accountability in the allocation and use of public monies based on legitimate, sustained, and widespread community input

Due to a lack of transparency and accountability by the RSD, the L9SDG has crafted, through its own efforts and expenses, architectural plans for a Lower 9th Ward Elementary-High School where Lawless Elementary-High School formerly stood. The proposed buildings would accommodate approx. 1,400 elementary and high school students and would consist of approximately 200,00 square feet of programmatic space, including classrooms, library-media center, technology wing, cafeteria, art facilities, band facilities, choir room, auditorium, gymnasiums, football and baseball fields, weight room, administrative offices, and parking. The anticipated cost of the schools are $62,000,000 million.

Most important, the school curriculum will revolve around environmental sustainability and will prepare students to contribute to the community through the health sciences, technology, and the arts. In this regard, the school will build upon the legacy of the King School, for example, extending the work it has done through the "Wetland Warriors" Program. All students will be exposed to a college preparatory curriculum, while the school also will respect an array of vocations.

The guiding vision behind the curriculum is the development of student creativity and intellect based upon the critical investigation and resolution of pressing community problems, such as race- and class-based health disparities and access to healthcare; the relationship between communal health and the destruction of the environment, including strategic disinvestment in local neighborhoods and public infrastructure, dysfunctional patterns of consumption and production fostered by a tourist-oriented economy and low-wage service industry, and the loss of wetlands due to petrochemical industry; and finally, the role of the musical, visual, and performing arts—including New Orleans indigenous cultural traditions—in sustaining and advancing the cultural and environmental health of the community.

We demand immediate attention of the RSD and the funding of a school for our children. Justice requires it and we stand ready to struggle for it in solidarity with oppressed communities in New Orleans and throughout the global south.