NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) – For public schools in New Orleans, recovery started years before Hurricane Katrina’s first wind, when the Recovery School District was created in 2003, to help struggling schools.
The storm put more obstacles in the way of building a stronger educational landscape, but today’s Orleans Parish School Board has an optimistic eye on the future.
Brand new campuses are emerging and modern technology fills state of the art classrooms.
Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. says it’s all falling into place for the OPSB.
“We have equipped schools that are prepared for the 21st century, vs. what we had pre-Katrina,” says Lewis.
An even bigger sign of progress is that more City of New Orleans students are headed for higher education—and that’s not all: “We have more students now than we had even pre-Katrina qualifying for our TOPS program which means they can go to college for free,” says Lewis.
But unity is his greatest long-term goal.
“After Katrina we have two fragmented systems, the RSD and the OPSB. One of my main goals is to make sure that we can reunite the school system and have schools to return back to the Orleans Parish School Board,” he says.
To that end, there are 54 schools that could potentially transition back to OPSB from RSD.
“There are many assumptions that are made but when those charter schools return, we’re not going to take their autonomy away from them,” says Lewis.
The very first one to make the move is the Martin Luther King K-12 Charter School in the Lower 9th.
“Their governing board made that declaration and decided to come back and so that was our first school that returned back on July 1 of this year,” says Lewis, smiling broadly.
Unity on answering the question “When’s the first day of school?” is another goal.
“Because it’s very hard to say we need all students in school on the first day, but the first day is different for many families,” says Lewis, who acknowledges that the issue creates childcare issues for many families.
When it comes to safety in the classroom, Lewis says security counselors are a built-in part of the system. They are teachers and principals, there to protect and to mentor, and they’ll be getting additional training this year.
