New Orleans was not a city…

January 2, 2006 at 2:14 pm | Posted in New Orleans | Leave a comment

…It was a collection of neighborhoods. And the biggest flaw in any plan to provide health and welfare services to the people of New Orleans is to treat it like a city, and administer the program centrally.

At work the other day, a teacher from McMain (high school?) came in to pick up a prescription. She made a comment while she was there about the draconian rules the New Orleans School Board has in place for teacher conduct, and how simply missing three days of work (with appropriate notification) could get you fired. Apparently, the school board is under the impression that there’s a line of teachers eager for a job teaching the underprivileged youth of New Orleans. I scoffed at that remark, and it led to a conversation about the school district’s plans for McMain. The news has been saying that the notoriously corrupt New Orleans School Board had been ousted in favor of state-run charter schools. Or something along those lines, and supposedly all schools in New Orleans would now become charter schools or magnet schools. However, this is apparently not so, because according to this teacher, McMain is slated to become the dumping ground for all the students who can’t get into any other school.

Now, it’s a bad enough idea to assemble all the poorest, least motivated students of a school system into one place. But there’s an added dimension to playground politics in New Orleans of which I had not previously been aware. Apparently, there are entire neighborhoods whose children can’t coexist peacefully with those of certain other neighborhoods in a single school, or classroom, or at the same lunch table. And when everyone was evacuated to the Superdome, and the Convention Center, and eventually to the Astrodome and various neighborhoods in Houston, no attention whatsoever was paid to this issue. So you had feuding neighborhoods thrown together in New Orleans shelters, in desperate circumstances to begin with, having no idea what the future held for them, and without adequate police to keep the peace between them. It’s no wonder all hell broke loose.

The government has promised McMain an abundance of assistance with teaching, counseling and maintenance of order. But I think I won’t be driving by that school much while it’s in session nonetheless.