Where The Schools Went Episode 1: What Washed Away

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Hello, everybody.

This is Ravi Gupta, the co-host of Majority 54, which is on the Midas network.

And I've been working with these guys for years.

And we've been working on a very special project.

It's called Where the Schools Went.

It is a five-part podcast series all about the New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina school reforms, the past 20 years of what happened after Hurricane Katrina when basically an entire school system disappeared and people had to work together to build something new.

And it's a really inspiring and challenging story that really gets the heart of, you know, politics, policy, government service.

And I think you're going to learn a lot.

It's going to captivate you, and you're going to meet a lot of people.

We spoke to over 50 people as part of this story.

Meet a lot of people who are really heroes out there doing the work of trying to educate the most vulnerable people in our country.

And so I'm really happy to partner with the guys, the brothers at Midas and everybody else on the team for this and we're going to be dropping one episode every week on this feed so check out our very first episode here we go

august 29th 2005 the heat pressed down over 100 degrees in a city built below sea level new orleans The levees were still holding, but just barely.

The storm had doubled in size overnight.

There's been a levee breach that occurred along Industrial Canal at Tennessee Street, three to eight feet of water expected from this breach.

The superdome was already filling with families and local TV reporters were switching from forecasters to beggars pleading with people to leave.

Roughly 100,000 people, many without cars, credit cards, or places to go, were left behind.

We also report of a leak too in the superdome that part of the roof has peeled back.

Of course, this is a shelter.

There are about 10,000 people located here.

When the storm finally hit, it wasn't just a storm, it was a flood, a collapse, a national trauma.

So, an incredible, incredible amount of water coming in with this.

Winds have been gusting 100-100 to 20 miles an hour in some cases.

Makes your ears pop a little bit.

New Orleans is getting hit very hard.

A lot of objects flying through the air here, including things like siding.

Unfortunate for some of the people that decided not to evacuate and are trying to just hold on during the storm.

Oh no!

There were four houses over there.

Now they're gone, all four of them.

Oh man.

Four houses gone.

Over a thousand lives lost.

80% of the cities submerged.

In some neighborhoods, the water rose 15 feet.

70% of homes gone or gutted.

The numbers are staggering, but they don't tell you what it's like to watch your city vanish.

They don't tell you what it's like to see the water rise past your porch, then your windows, then your roof.

They don't tell you what it's like to wait.

Not for just a rescue, but for proof that anyone even knows you're there.

To wake up the next morning and hear that your city is just gone, it was a shock it was just like everything was just gone all the memories pictures just wiped away in one day like that i lost everything

everybody and my family lost everything we literally had to rebuild from the ground up on every house there was these exes which is what the government put on the house to signify that someone had searched that house for survivors That was on our house with like the number on top.

There was military helicopters overhead.

All the streetlights were still out.

It was eerie.

It just was kind of this like odd, post-apocalyptic kind of feel.

Almost every child lost their school, their routine, in many cases, their home.

And some kids lost even more.

I was seven years old.

It was crazy.

Like, water was to my neck, like people floating on mattresses.

Even like dead bodies, same shoulders.

It took that particular student a month and a half to find his mom.

Within days, Hurricane Katrina became one of the deadliest storms in American history.

Many are calling August 23rd, 2025, the 20th anniversary of Katrina, which strikes me as strange.

Anniversaries are for weddings, for the Gold Watch Day, after years on the job.

for the milestones you celebrate, not the moments you wish you could forget.

But anniversaries are often how we talk about loss in this country.

We mark the calendar, we light the candles, we try to make meaning.

And in New Orleans, a city that lives on ritual, that treats history like an inheritance, even the smallest routines become acts of meaning-making.

The kind built from moldy photo albums and FEMA trailers.

From prayers whispered beneath blue tarps, from hot plates and extension cords.

from neighbors gathered around folding tables, sharing what little they had.

Of course, there's often no one story.

What emerges instead are threads of memories, rituals, and patterns stitched together to help us make sense of what's been taken and inform the daily work of moving forward.

In this podcast, we'll pull on the threads surrounding the city's kids, parents, and educators.

And what happened when the hurricane washed away not just the physical structures of the school system, but the history, rituals, traditions, even its its teachers.

Because what's followed Hurricane Katrina over the past 20 years is, by many accounts, the most dramatic reinvention of a school system in American history.

Is it the story of a heroic turnaround of one of the worst school systems in America?

Let's face it, the schools weren't working for the children in New Orleans before the storm.

This community has actually used the crisis as an opportunity to start rebuilding and try to experiment with new ways of learning.

Or is it about something else entirely?

A group of education colonizers who swept in and stole jobs from the city's black middle class.

It was all connected to a narrative of blackness as disposable, marginalized, disenfranchised, etc.

Others argue it's more pragmatic than that.

That a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy was torn down and replaced with a more elegant and responsive series of nimble organizations and entities.

To get public schools up and running much quicker and without all the bureaucracy, I think this made a lot of pragmatic sense.

And then there's another version of the story, one where outside profiteers strip mind a once-proud system, siphoning wealth and influence away from a community already struggling to survive.

If your goal was to break up the black community, break up the black power structure, take wealth from an already poor community, then yes, it was a beautiful success.

Now, it's cliché to say there's truth in all these perspectives, to on the one hand, on the other hand, the story to death.

So we won't do that.

Over the course of this series, we'll wade through these competing narratives.

We'll test them, compare them, and hold them up against the actual record of schools in New Orleans over the past 20 years.

And just so you know who's guiding you, I'm Ravi Gupta.

I've spent a significant part of my life working in public education in the South.

I was a charter school principal in Nashville and later a superintendent of a school network that launched Mississippi's first charter school.

During that time, I often visited New Orleans.

I was even offered a large federal grant there to start a school.

So I come to the story as both an insider and an outsider.

Not an insider to New Orleans.

I wasn't born there.

But I've been close enough to its post-Katrina education experiment to understand how influential and how complicated it really is.

I spoke to over 50 critics and champions of New Orleans reforms for this project.

And now I'm going to let them speak for themselves.

This is where the schools went.

Hurricane Katrina left 65,000 students without a school.

The buses were underwater, the central office was gone, along with payroll records, student files, building plans.

30 schools were damaged beyond repair.

A billion dollars in school infrastructure wiped out.

And no one, not the district, not the state, not even the federal government had a plan for what to do next.

Because to understand what could come next, they had to reckon with what had existed before.

And the topic of the pre-Katrina schools was, to put it mildly, fraught.

For some, there was a sense of pride in the old system.

Everybody could imagine New Orleans as very segregated, but you had these pockets of black excellence, of a black civil society or civic society where you had working class and upper working class and kind of underclass folks going to certain public schools together.

Education advocate Chris Stewart spent much of his formative years in New Orleans.

The very first school I went to in New Orleans was Valencia C.

Jones and that was a school that had been really good for my dad's generation.

They had very fond memories of it being a strong school.

Orleans Parish public schools can claim trailblazers like Joan Bernard Armstrong, the first black chief judge of the Fourth Circuit, Grammy warner John Batiste, singer-songwriter Frank Ocean, and civil rights activist Ruby Bridges.

In 2000, Edna Carr High School was honored with the National Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence Award.

Benjamin Franklin High School would receive the same honor in 2003.

Yes, there were bright spots.

Dedicated educators, mission-driven administrators, people who believed in the power of equality education.

But this was largely the exception, not the rule when it came to New Orleans education.

No one likes to be told the institutions they love are failing, but it would be dishonest to ignore the reality that existed before the storm.

Here's former New Orleans school principal Barbara McPhee in an interview she did for a documentary speaking about New Orleans schools before Katrina.

I once said that if the New Orleans public schools had been a living organism, the health department would have come and said, whoa, this is dead.

We need to bury it now.

It's not good for the atmosphere.

The New Orleans school system was the subject of many headlines in the early 2000s.

The Times-Picune called it a system in crisis.

The Washington Post called it a train wreck.

The Gettysburg Times called it a national horror.

And just one year before the storm, New Orleans Paris School District was one of the lowest performing districts in Louisiana, a state that, at the time, ranked near the bottom of the country on most education measures.

Only 56% of students graduated high school, 10 points below the state average.

One in 10 students had been picked up for skipping school.

66% of students were enrolled in schools that had been dealt a failing grade by the state.

And 65% didn't meet basic standards in English and math.

And then there were the buildings.

Many lacked working air conditioners.

Parents sent their kids to school with toilet paper because bathrooms weren't stocked.

At one school, students even walked a Taco Bell between classes to use the bathroom because the stalls in their school had no doors.

Many of the system's challenges trace back to one place, the central office, home to key system administrators.

Not everyone in the central office was part of the problem.

The district's own superintendent was at war with his own staff and the board over corruption.

He was eventually pushed out months before Katrina because he wanted to hire an outside auditor to look into spending practices.

We'll dive deep into that story in episode four.

Here's Chris Stewart again.

Right before Katrina, the FBI set up an office in the school district to save them travel time.

Just to save us time, why don't we just set up an office in the district as the FBI?

There were so many cases, so many allegations of fraud, waste, and outright theft that the Bureau needed its own desk.

It wasn't a sting.

It was a residency.

Ken Ducote was the district's director of facility planning and development at the time, and he began to notice some suspicious activity from some of his colleagues.

There were things like six-figure cash payoffs made in the parking lot.

Ken was in a bind.

He didn't want to look the other way, but he also didn't want to invite the attention from his higher-ups.

We were under order not to talk to the FBI.

Now, of course, that alone was illegal because

If you know a federal crime is being committed and you don't report it, then you are guilty of misprisoning of a felony.

Misprison is the deliberate concealment of a treasonable act or a felony.

So that's a crime itself.

So Ken decided to take matters into his own hands.

He knew a retired FBI agent who used to work for the district.

The man was an enthusiast of classic carps.

And it just so happened that Ken's daughter was getting ready to sell her Red Mustang convertible.

Since we weren't under orders not to talk to retired agents, I met with the retired FBI agent and told him some stuff was coming down and I would get him information to pass on to the FBI as appropriate.

It was a risky move.

Ken had learned that his phone messages and emails were being monitored by someone in the superintendent's office.

I had some boxes of files I had made copies of to give to the state auditors.

So he set up a code with the retired agent.

I called him up and I told him that my daughter was ready to show the Red Mustang convertible to anybody who wanted to buy it.

So he says, well, I think I know somebody who wants to buy it.

Ken and the agent both figured if anyone was listening in, they would think they were only talking about his daughter's car.

He called me back and said that this guy he knows from out of town is interested in buying that Red Mustang convertible and he'd like to see it Tuesday morning.

Six months later, a story about the corruption was picked up by the Sunday paper.

What Ken's story reveals isn't just the scale of corruption.

It's the extent to which criminality had become so entrenched, so deep that it took code words, classic cards, and secret handoffs to get the truth out.

The headlines brought a new level of scrutiny and attention to the city schools just as the FBI was gearing up to deliver their verdict.

Here is Louis Rigel, FBI special agent, speaking at a press conference unveiling a series of charges.

Some of the things have been

I just can't believe it was crowded.

More than 20 staff members were indicted.

One employee had been on paid leave for 35 years.

Audits uncovered tens of millions in undocumented spending, some of it on ghost employees and overtime fraud so brazen that employees were claiming they worked Christmas Day.

Failing academics, crumbling buildings, and a disgraced central office.

This wasn't just dysfunction.

It was institutional rot.

And for years, the city kept sending kids into it.

That decay was decades in the making.

Even in elementary school back in the 70s, Chris Stewart says he could tell something was wrong.

It was dark for me.

It was dark.

It was grim.

It was in a building that seemed like it had seen better days.

And my instant opinion was, these guys do not care about us.

They do not care about me.

It felt more kind of like warehousing us.

So part of it was just the shock of being in a place that looked so segregated and dark halls.

And it felt like the needs of the kids had gone by the wayside by the time I got there.

Now, what was really hard about that was that the older generation remembered this as being a great school.

And I didn't know it then, but now I know to say, yeah, for you.

Yeah, it was for you.

Yeah, in your generation, I'm sure it was amazing.

But when you put me in it, I think you hadn't been there for a while.

He said he deserved better.

New Orleans deserved better.

There's ways in which a school system like that can remind you of just how poor you are.

It reminds you every day how poor you are.

Because I have to put up with this shit.

That's how I know I'm poor.

Because I have to go to schools where everybody's getting arrested.

Nobody cares.

You have teachers constantly telling your kids things like, I get paid whether you learn or not.

You knew you were poor or near poor by the school system, not just by your neighborhood.

In 2003, one of the city's high school valedictorians scored an 11 on the ACT, placing her in the bottom 1% nationally.

After failing to pass the math portion of the exit exam for the fifth time, she was barred from graduation.

You heard that right.

The valedictorian couldn't even walk at graduation.

That was the breaking point for Leslie Jacobs.

At the time, she was a member of the Orleans Paris School Board and one of the most high-profile advocates for change.

As Jacobs put it, When she failed and couldn't walk across that stage and get her diploma, there was no civil rights protest, no religious protest, no business protest.

There was a deafening silence.

That was, in my mind, the emblem of a city that had given up all hope in its schools.

The Recovery School District was born of that silence.

In 2003, the Louisiana state legislature created the district, or the RSD.

to do what local systems around the state no longer seemed capable of doing, take over and turn around chronically failing schools.

For the first time, the state had the authority to strip control from a local school board in the name of accountability.

Not everyone was happy with the decision, even if they were running low on patience with the status quo.

Dana Peterson was an organizer with a local union at the time.

Before Hurricane Katrina, this community was saying very loudly it was dissatisfied with the state of public schools in the city.

But that doesn't mean that people wanted the state to sweep in and take them over.

Tensions boiled over during a 2005 Orleans Parish School Board meeting.

And I don't believe the state can solve it better than we can solve it.

We have intelligent people, black people there who can do it the job also.

And so I completely disagree.

And I think it's outrageous that you assert such a thing in this environment.

My job is to do the very best I can for this district.

Not for me, not for the contractors, not for the vendors.

And if I think that the state can do it better, I want them to try to do it.

I have been on this board now for over four years, fighting to try to make this thing better.

That's where I've been.

And you had not attended one board meeting that I know of in those four years.

Until, until the people,

until the people, well, wasn't very many of them, until the people decided that they wanted to get rid of other people on the board,

you didn't have an interest in it.

But the Orleans Parish School Board had little power to stop the state, which planned to move ahead despite any resistance from local leaders.

And while more than half of New Orleans schools had been labeled academically unacceptable, the state's recovery school district started small, targeting just five schools in the city to take over in its first year.

The five schools the state had selected for takeover were set to open as charter schools in August 2005.

You're going to be hearing a lot about charter schools during this series, so I figure I should just give you a quick explainer.

Charter schools are, for the most part, public schools, but unlike traditional public schools, they operate independently of school districts.

Most are run by non-profit organizations and governed by independent boards.

Charters are exempt from many of the rules and regulations that govern traditional schools, and they're often non-unionized.

In return, They face the risk of being shut down if they failed to deliver results.

So when the Recovery School District decided to go the charter route, they were making a basic bargain.

More autonomy, more accountability.

In hindsight, the name Recovery School District feels oddly prophetic.

A mechanism built to recover failing schools would soon be tasked with something much bigger.

Recovering an entire city's education system from disaster.

In the aftermath of the storm, New Orleans wasn't just damaged.

It was dispersed.

Tens of thousands of students, teachers, and families found themselves scattered across the country, trying to rebuild their lives from church basements, hotel rooms, and borrowed couches.

Roughly 250,000 evacuees relocated to Houston.

Another 40,000 landed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Some 35,000 made it to Atlanta.

Others stayed close to home, crashing with relatives in Baton Rouge or Lafayette, finding shelter in community centers, schools, and churches.

We'll follow one of those threats to Houston, Texas, because that's where a group of educators found themselves partnering with a group of displaced New Orleans families.

Together, they were about to launch something that, at the time, felt improvised, temporary, maybe even impossible.

But it ended up being something more.

Remember those five New Orleans schools the Recovery School District had selected for takeover in 2003?

KIPP, short for Knowledge is Power Program, had been approved to lead one of them.

At the time, KIPP was the most prominent charter school network in the country.

It began in Houston in 1994 and expanded nationally through a franchise-like model, eventually growing to dozens of cities across the U.S.

They were known for a school model called No Excuses, which stressed academic focus, strict behavior codes, school uniforms, and swift punishment for infractions.

The intention was to create orderly environments that would raise student performance.

And the very same elements that supporters of these schools loved are also what critics found objectionable, citing high suspensions, teaching to the test, and stifling student independence.

In future episodes, we'll get more into the debate over that model.

But one thing to know, those types of schools, they tended to attract a certain profile of educator, young and idealistic.

Our school was taking over a school called Phillips Middle School, which I believe had received a failing grade for I think four years in a row.

That's Jonathan Birch, the school's second hire and its business operations manager.

If you've never worked in a school, that title might sound secondary, but it's not.

It's the person who handles everything outside the classroom.

buses, meals, custodial services, payroll, purchasing, scheduling, compliance, safety, supplies.

You're the fixer, the quiet fighter, the one who holds everything outside of the classroom together while the educators teach.

It's also one of the hardest jobs in a school.

At my first school, the business operations manager quit on the third day due to stress on the job.

KIPPS school was set to open with one grade in September.

To help students catch up before classes started, Jonathan and his team decided to run a summer school in August.

We were having our first Saturday school, so students were coming in for extra enrichment.

But as the students came to the school, we had to tell them, here's some extra work to do over the next week.

There's a storm coming.

You actually need to go home and prepare with your family.

Katrina hit that Monday.

A few days after the storm, Jonathan started hearing from his colleagues.

Some of them had started getting phone calls from our students because one thing we always did was give students phone numbers.

They could give us a call.

And so there was a core group we found of students who had evacuated to Houston.

Many were in the Astrodome, which is one of the biggest shelters.

We realized there's nothing we can do in New Orleans right now.

So why don't we go to Houston and look for our kids?

Jonathan set off from Baton Rouge.

The only hotel room that we could find was the executive suite at the Astrodome Holiday Inn up on the top floor.

It was the only one that somebody from New Orleans hadn't rented.

And so there were four of us, teachers and the principal and myself from the school, who stayed there.

And we spent two or three days just walking through all the shelters looking for kids.

And we had signs that said, do you know anyone that went to Kip Phillips Academy in New Orleans?

At the time, 27,000 evacuees were housed in Houston's Astrodome.

For weeks, the facility operated as a temporary shelter.

It's really just one big open space where they had hundreds and hundreds of cots on the floor of the arena and all throughout.

There wasn't much privacy.

There really wasn't much organized.

It was after this huge traumatic event.

And so, as you can imagine, people wanted to get out of there and have something else to do.

Jonathan and his colleagues quickly found 15 of their 120 students.

Initially, they worked with Kip Heuston to enroll their students in a Kip Heuston school.

They rented a passenger van and transported them back and forth from the Astrodome for about a week.

They never really turned the lights off in the Astrodome at night.

Regulating your sleep is probably pretty tough.

There's no privacy, there's no enclosed spaces.

So one thing we had to do is we had to go buy our students' alarm clocks to make sure that they would get up on time.

So you can imagine what it's like.

You're an eighth grader, you are, you know, 13-14 years old, you have an alarm clock that's going off at 6.15 a.m.

There's hundreds of people trying to sleep, trying to, you know, reclaim their lives.

It just wasn't sustainable.

The New Orleans team realized they needed to start a new school for any student who'd been evacuated.

They found a building that the Houston Independent School District wasn't using and worked to set up an all call for teachers.

Tawana Pierre Floyd answered that call.

I'm from New Orleans, which I'm really proud of.

I actually grew up in the 9th ward, Upper Nine, to be more precise.

Tawana had just graduated from Howard University in the spring of 2005.

She joined Teach for America and received a 10th grade English teaching placement at the same same school her siblings had graduated from the previous year.

I'm a baby teacher, 21 years old, but as far as the kids know, I'm 40.

I think that's what I actually literally told them.

She was on a home visit to a student who had skipped detention.

The student's mother asked Tawana if she was planning to leave the city ahead of the storm.

But Tawana hadn't even heard the storm was coming, so she rushed home to tune in.

I turn on my little 13-inch black and white TV, and I actually remember this really clearly.

I heard Bob Brick

say something to the effect that, like, if people don't leave, there won't be enough body bags.

Tawana's son, Coltrane, was not even a year old.

Her husband, not from New Orleans, had family in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The whole family quickly packed up and drove north.

And after some pleading, her mother, siblings, and extended family joined too.

They were assigned to a church that had opened its doors to Katrina evacuees.

The entire family was placed in a single room.

We are all in this big room.

They're providing food, like three squares, and not even beds, like pallets.

In some cases, I remember a few people like making a chair bed.

So it's like one chair facing this way, the other chair facing the other way, so your feet can rest.

Tawana had been in Vicksburg for about two weeks when Teach for America called.

The organization was offering its Louisiana Corps members three options.

stay in New Orleans and work with FEMA, leave the teaching corps altogether, or go to Houston Houston and support displaced students there.

Tawana chose Houston.

It felt emotional.

And I think for me personally, I understood where kids and families were coming from.

And once she got there, Tawana joined Jonathan and the growing KIPP team helping to recruit students.

I asked her what she told those students.

Do you remember the messages that you were spreading back then?

Like what were you saying to families?

You're basically like, hey, here's a school.

Yeah, the big message was like, we get you.

We too are displaced by this storm and we're trying to create a safe space for all of us.

KIPP New Orleans West College Prep, now College Prep, opened on October 3rd, 2005, a mere 35 days after the storm.

Live from the CNN Broadcast Center in New York, this is News Night with Aaron Brown and Anderson Cooper.

The skyline of Houston, Texas, as viewed through the school bus window.

Another day for students in exile.

Do you guys miss New Orleans?

The name of the school is New Orleans West, a place specifically for Louisiana children evacuated from Hurricane Katrina.

Because of a federal law passed in 1987, New Orleans evacuees were considered homeless, and the act established that homeless children could immediately enroll in the school district they resided in without proof of birth certificates, school records, immunization records, proof of guardianship, or even proof of residence.

It also made homeless students automatically eligible for free school meals without needing to prove income eligibility.

Jonathan and the KIPP team hustled to keep up with the demand.

Within four weeks, we had 400 students, K through eight, all from New Orleans.

And word spread by word of mouth.

We didn't know if it was going to work, but we kind of stuck with it.

And students showed up, families believed in us, and we made it happen.

In that first year, the school would welcome an estimated 500 students through its doors, the majority of whom were displaced from New Orleans.

Donnell Bailey was one of them, 10 years old and in the fifth grade.

His family had left for Houston the day before the storm.

They had chosen the city because they had relatives there, and they thought it would be a quick stay.

When his family realized they'd be in Houston for a while, Donnell's uncle and his grandmother prioritized getting him back in school.

It was a lot to process, especially for a 10-year-old.

Overwhelming majority of kids were from New Orleans and

a lot of new teachers, a lot of new faces.

My

school that I went to prior to Katrina, most of my teachers

were black teachers.

Having new teachers who were young, who were white, it was just a shift, right, in what I was used to.

The teachers were going through a shift too.

Many of the KipNow team had only taught a week or two of summer school.

Most were displaced themselves.

And now they were not just teaching.

They were building a school from scratch.

And they had to lean on each other.

We spent a lot of time figuring out what teaching looks like.

Like, how do you teach reading effectively to anybody?

And a lot of time in each other's room so we could say, like, what are you doing well?

So that I can get better.

And so I think the drive in that building was honestly unparalleled.

The team had more than instruction to worry about.

They had to learn how to support students carrying invisible weight.

In the first days when it rained hard in Houston, like the littlest kids would hide under the desk.

The older kids, they were too cool to do things like hide under the desk, but they would flinch.

There was a lot of emotion connected with weather that we had to navigate.

Many families weren't settled.

They were cycling through shelters, hotels, church basements, temporary apartments.

Some move weekly, others daily.

Here's Jonathan again.

So as the operations guy, one of my jobs was to figure out how do we get kids to our school.

So we had 12 bus routes plus two 15 passenger vans.

And this was pre-Google Sheets or shared internet documents.

We were constantly updating addresses because our kids were constantly moving from a shelter to a hotel to maybe a church and then maybe to an apartment.

I could remember being on the phone with a family looking at an early version of MapQuest or Yahoo Maps or whatever, and saying, okay, I see where you live.

I see where this bus stop is.

I'm going to try and tell you where to walk, where to go.

And I was just a voice on the phone trying to get these families to the school.

I have to say, founding the school is the hardest thing I've ever done.

It took everything I had and then some.

And this team had to do it on the fly for a temporary school for displaced students, staffed by mostly first-year and early career educators who were displaced themselves.

My life at that time was get to school at 6 a.m.

Maybe go home

at 8.30 or 9.

I mean, I think I had an air mattress that I slept on and no furniture in this little apartment a couple miles away.

You know, you feel like you're being shot out of a cannon every morning when you wake up.

A quote from Eleanor Roosevelt hung behind the school principal's desk.

Quote, you gain strength, courage, and confidence by every great experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

You're able to say, I lived through this horror.

I can take the next thing that comes along.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Because that's what Kip now was trying to do.

What every adult in the building was asking of themselves and of their students.

They couldn't just be a school.

They needed to be a place of refuge.

They honored New Orleans in small, meaningful ways.

The school colors were Mardi Gras purple, green, and gold.

Its logo was the Fleur-de-Lis, nestled inside the Texas Lone Star.

They even held a Mardi Gras parade, hundreds of miles from the French corridor, but still rooted in its spirit.

Kip now wasn't just a school.

It was a place of refuge, patch of stability.

But it was also still a school.

And schools are ultimately judged by what they teach and what students learn.

By year's end, two-thirds of displaced students across Houston, not just KIPP, had failed the state's math assessment.

The Houston Independent School District had received roughly $16 million in federal funding to educate evacuees, but that didn't cover the costs of summer school.

One in four students didn't move on to the next grade.

KIPP now wasn't rated separately by the state.

It was classified as a special program, so we don't have external data on how those particular students in KIPP did.

By the middle of spring, something resembling normal had taken hold: a routine for staff, for families, for students.

It wasn't home, that would always be New Orleans.

But the New Orleans they left was not the city they'd returned to, especially when it came to schools.

While students had been scattered across shelters and school districts, The city's public education system was undergoing the most radical overhaul in American history.

Let's recap for a moment.

By the time Katrina made landfall, the New Orleans public school system was already in crisis.

Academically, it was one of the worst performing school systems in the country.

Dana Peterson, who at the time was a local labor organizer, recalled a chilling report delivered by an independent auditor just weeks before the storm.

That said, if in fact there were an emergency in the system, the system had less than, I think, six weeks of reserve cash on hand.

The system was more than 70 million in debt and knee-deep in federal investigations.

And then came Katrina.

An estimated $1 billion in damages.

30 buildings considered beyond repair.

The city's tax base collapsed.

Its infrastructure was wrecked.

The storm comes and wipes out a lot of the physical infrastructure of the building, but also the system didn't have any reserve cash to ensure that the people who were working in it could be taken care of for some period of time.

It had no money to do that, had no cash to do that.

In November 2005, only about 5,000 students said they planned to return to a New Orleans public school by the end of the year.

That's just over 7% of the entire pre-Katrina student population.

State funding was adjusted accordingly.

New Orleans's allocation dropped in half.

On September 15th, the Orleans Parish School Board placed all 7,500 staff on unpaid leave before eventually letting them all go for good.

Shortly after, the board announced that schools were unlikely to reopen for that year.

It left a vacuum.

The city needed its schools to open.

Here's Ken DeCote again: the reopening of the schools was critical.

We knew that the adults were not going to be able to come rebuild and so on if their children did not have schools to attend.

The Archdiocese was the first to step in.

The St.

Louis Cathedral Academy reopened on October 17th, and by January, almost all of the city's Catholic schools were back in operation, serving around 15,000 students.

But the Catholic schools didn't have enough infrastructure to take on every student, so families and educators had to figure out what to do next.

Enter the Recovery School District.

The little-known, lightly resourced entity that had been created just two years earlier, the state legislature decided it was ready for a promotion and voted to turn over an additional 102 public schools in the city to the RSD, effectively dismantling the local school district in one sweeping move.

We'll get to that part of the story in just a moment, But first, I want to introduce you to someone.

Chris Meyer is from Shreveport, Louisiana.

First in his family to go to college.

He graduated from Tulane in 2004 and joined Teach for America.

He taught English and coached basketball at John McDonough High School in Mid-City.

He was 23, one year into his teaching career when Katrina started gathering in the Gulf.

That's when Chris drove to Shreveport to wait it out.

I think it was sometime mid-morning and they started reporting like there's a problem and that's when you just see the calamity unfold and you just can't peel yourself away from the TV.

Less than three weeks after the storm, Chris was hired to teach at East St.

John High School in Laplace, about 30 minutes outside the heart of New Orleans.

East St.

John took in somewhere between 500 to 1,000 new students from the storm, seemingly overnight.

Somehow they had procured this like double-wide trailer that was just empty.

It was just a double-wide flat forward trailer.

So that became a classroom and would take several weeks before we got like real desk, real materials to even do anything with.

The principal was handing out teaching assignments like a field general, improvising a battle plan in real time.

She's like, you know, what do you teach?

I was like, well, I was teaching high school social studies back in New World.

She's like, great.

Like, you go teach that.

I was like, which part?

She's like, all of it.

Just,

we're going to manage through.

Like, there wasn't any real sanity.

My like classroom every day was different.

The kids who would show up one day, the next day they had moved on to Houston or somewhere else with their families.

It was just a wild, wild time.

The disaster recovery effort in New Orleans was still unfolding.

FEMA trailers, relocation plans, unanswered questions.

Chris was teaching kids from all across the city, bringing vastly different experiences, both academically and emotionally.

It wasn't until kind of post-Thanksgiving that there was any kind of moment that we could begin to kind of understand like, okay, this is going to be, you know, permanent for a while.

This is how it's going to look and feel.

And of course, these students weren't just ordinary transfer students.

Many had been separated from their parents.

Some still didn't even know where their families were.

Chris and his colleagues needed to figure out how to balance academics with grief, logistics, and trauma.

There was a lot of just helping kids emotionally process and understand together like this was a changed humanity we were all living through.

Every day, Chris drove to Laplace from New Orleans, and every night, he returned home to a city that felt adrift.

It just was like, what are we doing?

There's got to be a better way.

Because in my mind, we were working to try to put the best school we possibly could into that site despite the horrible circumstances that led to us being there.

It was just clear to me that we were missing some really key ingredients in that formula.

And that just became this breaking point that we had to do it a different way.

A different way.

That's exactly what was beginning to take shape back in the city.

The local Orleans Parish School Board was too weak to respond.

Too slow.

Too under-resourced.

Kids and families couldn't wait much longer.

Two weeks after the storm, U.S.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that federal regulations would be waived to speed up the approval of charter schools in New Orleans.

The rationale was simple.

Charter schools could move faster.

In November, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 35, transferring control of most of the city's schools to the Recovery School District.

Governor Kathleen Blanco signed the bill into law on November 30th.

There were a lot of policies that were put in place in the years just before Katrina that became useful levers.

And one of those was passing the charter school law.

Doug Harris, who chairs the Tulane Department of Economics, is one of the foremost experts on the school system in New Orleans.

Katrina had happened 10 years before.

They really wouldn't have been able to do this for the fact that Katrina hit at that point.

The stars were aligned, in a sense, for something like this to happen.

Not just evacuation of people, but evacuation of leadership.

Like there wasn't anybody here to stop anything.

So what the state wanted to do, the state could do.

The RSD had big authority, but very little capacity.

Just 10 administrative staff, most of them still based in Baton Rouge, and no permanent office in New Orleans.

Yet now they had control of the city schools, and the clock was ticking.

In the RSD's case, Everybody just needed to open schools because there were people coming back.

They didn't know how many people were coming back, which created some problems too, but they just needed to open schools.

And so even the RSD was direct running the schools themselves.

They had no capacity to do this.

It was a disaster.

And I think they would even acknowledge that they were in no position to do this.

The RSD turned to charter operators to oversee more schools in New Orleans.

So they had to quickly change their mission and get some schools off the ground.

but quickly established that the goal was going to be to turn those over to charter operators.

From very early on, there was no real intent for them to continue doing that for very long.

They knew it was a temporary thing, but it was necessary to get anybody to come back because people couldn't come back unless the schools were open.

The local school board, the OPSB, could have tried to operate their remaining 21 schools like a mini-school system, but they mostly followed the RSD's approach.

It was just easier.

for them to reopen schools.

If they wanted to do it fast, they could have a charter operator and then they were starting fresh.

They didn't have to worry about hiring anybody back from before.

It was a new organization.

They could hire fresh, whoever they wanted to hire.

The district could give them control of the building so they could garner whatever resources they could for that.

The OPSB, the RSD, charters, non-charters.

Sound confusing?

It was.

And it was messy.

Local school board members were still being elected, but they no longer had control over most of the city's schools.

Families would show up to the Orleans Parish School Board meetings to complain, only to be told that the school in question wasn't under local jurisdiction.

If you wanted to speak to someone who did have control, you often had to drive to Baton Rouge, where the Recovery School District was based.

The first wave of post-Katrina charter schools were mostly founded by local educators.

People who had worked in the system for years.

People who had led schools through dysfunction, budget shortfalls, and bureaucratic paralysis.

The first public school to reopen was a district-run school called Benjamin Franklin Elementary School.

The building, located uptown, had had been spared the worst of the flooding.

It reopened as an open enrollment school on November 28th, 2005, welcoming any elementary age student in the city.

Many students had to be bussed in from neighborhoods like the 9th Ward, on the other side of town.

Roughly 300 students showed up that first week, and it made national news.

The New York Times interviewed principal Christine Mitchell, who called the moment a turning point for the city, saying, quote, now parents will start to return to the city.

I think this symbolizes to a lot of people that yes, New Orleans is back and will accommodate families.

It shows that we do have families moving back, and I think this is the first of the good things to happen in the repopulation of the city.

By mid-January 2006, 17 public schools had reopened, serving about 9,000 students, just under 14% of the city's pre-Katrina student population.

It was progress, but it wasn't enough.

Families were returning faster than schools could open.

In August 2006, nearly a year after the storm, a grandmother told the New York Times, quote, that's hurting to your heart when a child says, Mama, I want to go to school and you can't find one.

I don't understand what's going on.

And those families who returned, they had new expectations of their school system.

Here's Ken Dukot again.

One of the things related to Katrina was when a lot of the people had had to evacuate and had to live in other cities and their children would attend these brand new schools and they came back expecting something better.

If the city had any hope of meeting those expectations, they'd need more educators to return as well.

And just like the parents, those teachers and leaders would bring with them a higher standard.

After one year in Houston, It was time for many of the Kipsters to return home, to rebuild.

Tawana felt the pull immediately.

There's a new fork in the road at the end of that year where a subset of us are going to stay in Houston and a different subset are going to actually go back to New Orleans.

And I'm a New Orleans girl.

Kip Now, originally created as a one-year school, would stay open for a second year to give families more time, to ease the transition, to make sure no one got lost between the two cities.

But Donnell Bailey and his family were ready to be back in New Orleans.

Donnell was was able to enroll in a KIPP school in the city.

I asked him recently whether knowing he'd have a familiar school waiting for him factored into his family's decision to return home.

There was a level of

trust that was built in that first school year in Houston.

I mean, it was a year of processing and figuring out and piecing together

life.

And there was that

support shifting from Houston back to New Orleans.

I had some of the same faces, same peers who came back as well.

And so that made it easier to transition back.

But returning home didn't mean things were normal.

Here's Tawana again.

What does the city look like now?

How are we all together navigating this new New Orleans?

It just felt like eerie coming back because the city previously was, it was New Orleans.

It was vibrant.

It was loud.

It was musical.

And it just felt like really quiet and somber.

The start of the 2006 school year, almost one year after the storm, was, by all accounts, chaotic.

In June, U.S.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced $24 million in federal aid for the development of charter schools in Louisiana.

By October 2006, 32 of the 56 public schools that had reopened in New Orleans were charter schools.

This made New Orleans charter city, the city in America with the largest percentage of students attending charters ever.

There was a patchwork system of schools, some run by the RSD, which again is the state, some run by the OPSB, which again is the local district, some directly operated, others run by newly approved charters.

There was no centralized enrollment system, no accurate headcounts, and little clarity on where families had ended up, or whether they'd even return.

In some classrooms, no students showed up.

In others, there were 50.

Teachers didn't know how many desks to set out, and principals didn't know how many teachers to hire.

The system, or was it now systems, had been turned back on, but no one could say for certain how well it was working or for whom.

And yet, even amidst the uncertainty, something else was taking shape.

The stage had been set for a radical reimagining of New Orleans' education system.

National funders were pouring money into what they saw as the country's most promising education experiment.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Eli and Edith Broat, Doris and Donald Fisher, all pledged millions in support of public charter schools and broader reform initiatives.

What was happening in New Orleans wasn't just a recovery effort, it was becoming a movement.

And that movement drew in many outsiders.

They came with energy, with urgency, and with a kind of missionary zeal.

And over time, they would help lift New Orleans's schools to academic heights that before the storm seemed unimaginable.

But that progress came with a cost.

Because alongside the test scores and graduation rates came deeper, more difficult questions about democracy, about representation, about who gets to decide what a school should be and who it should serve.

About the role of tradition and the meaning of dignity.

Throughout this series, we'll explore those tensions through the voices of those who live them.

Teachers, students, parents, policymakers, the people who lost their schools, and the people who tried to build them back.

In the next episode, we'll tell you the story of one of those schools.

How in a proud and devastated corner of the city, a school rose from the floodwaters and ignited a fight that would come to define New Orleans' future.

A fight over memory, over results.

over who a school belongs to and who it's really for.

It's the story of George Washington Carver High School.

Carver was always going to be a hotbed because of what it meant to the Ninth Ward, what it meant to the city.

Carver, Ram, the mighty Ram Nation with basketball, football, and band in the community.

And we pull up, and there's a human chain in front of the building.

Protesters were all standing there, locking arms.

Ah, it's part of a regime.

You shouldn't even took that job.

You shouldn't eat that job.

This whole meeting just erupts in chaos.

There's yelling, there's screaming, and Eddie leans over to me.

He's like, I think it's time for us to go.

That's next on Where the Schools Went.

Where the Schools Went is an original podcast from the branch in partnership with Midas Touch.

I'm your host, Ravi Gupta.

The show is executive produced by me, Ravi Gupta.

Our senior producer is Kate Malikoff, and our producer is Paulu V.

Kotamasu.

Research and fact-checking by Ethan Macy Cushman and Katie Nelligan.

Additional support by Liz Smith and Leah Sutherland.

post-sound and music by Chapter 4, sound design and mix by Sarah Gibelaska, and sound and editing by Natalie Escadero, original music by Corinne Duady with Kevin Marringer on trombone, and Chuba and Eric Biondo on trumpet.

Imagine if every person in Texas, New York, and Florida suddenly lost their home.

That still wouldn't equal the 120-plus million people who've fled war and persecution.

Right now, the UN Refugee Agency is responding in 136 countries.

But as violence escalates, your help is needed.

Donate today, and critical relief will reach a refugee family within 72 hours.

While we can't rebuild their home overnight, your gift will provide food, shelter, and hope for the future.

Go to UNrefugees.org/slash donation to make your gift.