New Orleans City Council member Cynthia Hedge-Morrell introduced an ordinance Thursday to pay Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club at least some of the $800,000 the mayor awarded them on Lundi Gras.

In the days following the surprise announcement, neither city officials nor Zulu leaders who submitted the application knew whether the money would be an outright grant or a loan. The measure by Hedge-Morrell read into the record Thursday did little to resolve the issue, and it did not give a dollar amount.

In less than 30 seconds, the clerk of court read a boilerplate item that says the city and Zulu will enter into an agreement “to stimulate economic development” using money from the federally financed Urban Development Action Grant program.

It said the details were laid out in an attached agreement. But the clerk’s office couldn’t immediately provide a copy of that document.

Council rules require new legislation to sit for two weeks before action can be taken, so the matter won’t be debated by the full council until its next meeting on March 25 at the earliest.

The Lens has reported that Zulu is a type of non-profit institution that may make it difficult to accept the money without jeopardizing its tax exmept status.

At the krewe’s riverfront Lundi Gras celebration, the krewe got an oversized check from Mayor Ray Nagin, himself a member of the 101-year-old group. Zulu was one of four groups to respond to a city’s request for proposals for economic development. That request was posted for 30 days, starting on Dec. 30.

An aide to Nagin, Kenya Smith, ranked Zulu second out of four (pages 21 through 24 in the above link). The mayor made the decision to award the money to Zulu. It’s not clear, however, whether the other organizations also were successful in their efforts.

City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields has yet to fully comply with a public-records request from The Lens for all the information surrounding the award or any payments from that federal Development Action Grant program in the past year.

Zulu members have said little since the week of the announcement.

Over the course of the week President Obama has barnstormed the country for his comprehensive healthcare package with firebrand speeches outside of Philadelphia and St. Louis reminiscent of his campaign, in an attempt to get his signature legislation over a last few Congressional hurdles. (P.S. As a Philadelphia and unapologetic Obama-lover, I’d recommend the Philly speech if you want to get fired up.)

In concert with the President’s efforts, Organizing For America (OFA), the legacy of the Obama campaign’s celebrated grassroots infrastructure, has launched a massive effort to leverage bottom-up pressure on undecided Representatives.

OFA’s rollout of the effort has been tightly executed thus far, with each day bringing a separate and specific action. On Wednesday, “Day 1,” I was asked to print out fliers to hand out on my block. Today, on “Day 2,” I have been urged to call Congressman Cao directly.

This week I have received three emails, two phone calls, and a text message from OFA volunteers and organizers asking that I call Congressman Cao and urge him to support the President’s bill.

One might think that President Obama’s favorite Republican and one who in December voted for the comprehensive bill that came out of the House of Representatives would be enthusiastic about voting for healthcare reform this time around but Congressman Cao is leaning toward   a vote against.

Cao is reluctant now because the language related to abortion is not as explicitly restrictive as in the bill he voted for previously. His stance is similar to that of Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, who is leading a coalition of pro-life Democrats that want to reach some sort of accommodation on abortion language.

Still, in spite of Representative Cao’s consistently inflexible stance on the abortion issue, it is hard not to probe the Congressman’s incredibly unique political position. As a Republican representing an overwhelmingly Democratic district, he has had to vote carefully.

If he defies the President on the most important piece of his entire agenda, Rep. Cao is guaranteed to be dead meat in November.

Yet, he cannot simply vote with the President on every issue or switch parties without running the risk of alienating his financial contributors.

Then again, there is significant evidence that GOP fundraisers have taken advantage of the Congressman by taking huge fees out of the Congressman’s haul. Earlier this week, Cao ended his relationship with  the Washington firm that handled the money-sucking fundraisers fr, but not until after he had already spent $400,000 on its  services, dwarfing the approximately$300,000 he actually has on-hand and available for his reelection campaign.

Given the likelihood of a strong Democratic opponent, his seat would remain very much in doubt even if he were to change parties to more actively support the President and vote the preferences of his constituents. Both State Representatives Cedric Richmond and Juan LaFonta have been quietly raising money and courting endorsements. d Even if Cao were to join them as Democrats, they may not yield to him.

Yet as it is,  the congressman’s support for some of the President’s agenda – including his earlier vote for the healthcare reform – could result in a primary challenge from within the GOP, especially considering the purist nature of the contemporary conservative electorate.

As a result, Cao must be closely weighing his options, relying both on his conscience and his political self-preservation instincts as he considers his final vote on healthcare reform.

The Lens recently visited the Rampart Street studio and office space of Spike Lee, who’s been in the city the past month filming a sequel to his HBO documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” He’d just gotten back from Houston, where he was interviewing people displaced by the federal levee disasters, and remained there – either by choice, or because they felt they couldn’t return due to lack of housing, health or education problems.

On that note, Lee shared with us his belief that no schools in New Orleans were open for kids with disabilities. While not entirely true, it has been reported that public schools have widely varying rates of accepting special-needs students. But what left Lee under the impression that absolutely no schools were taking these students was an interview he had with Catherine M. Gordon, currently living in Humble, Texas. Lee said Gordon told her that she could not come back to New Orleans because she couldn’t find a school to admit her autistic son, but Humble schools were able to accommodate her son’s needs.

“She doesn’t want to live in Texas,” Lee told us. “Her family is here. That’s the reason she can’t move back to New Orleans because that’s (educational services) not here, but it is where she is in Texas. She’s doing that for her child.”

Of course, if this is true, this is a violation of federal laws. There are organizations in the city who’ve already been peering into this issue, but come Aug. 29, when Lee’s movie premieres on HBO, this issue will fall under the national gaze.

Another point that Lee shared with us was that he believed that the “bulk” of recovery money in the city has been spent. While this is certainly contestable, this is what Lee learned from dozens of people in the area.

Last month, Lens writer Ariella Cohen reported from a City Council meeting that actually only 5 percent of recovery money has been spent, in terms of checks actually written out and delivered to those who’ve invoiced for goods and services rendered. Lee admitted he had no actual quote or range in mind about how much exactly he believed was spent.

“I don’t have a study in front of me,” said Lee. “But I’ve been told by various people that a lot of money – the bulk of the money appropriated specifically for the recovery program has been spent.”

Other things Lee shared concern about was the fate of the Charity Hospital saying: “I find it ironic that people can come back and build their houses from the ground up and then these guys can say we want to build this VA/LSU hospital so we’re just going to wipe out these 200 houses and businesses. … Charity Hospital is still a viable building. … The stuff that’s built now can’t stand up to the workmanship and materials, the stone of Charity. I mean that’s a rock.”

Lee said one interview he’s not been able to secure yet is with Gov. Bobby Jindal, who he says he approached on the sidelines of the Saints’ Super Bowl game in Miami. Lee said Jindal promised in that exchange that he would do the interview for the movie.

Lee was, however, able to interview incoming mayor Mitch Landrieu, who also appeared in “When the Levees Broke.” Lee said he knew Landrieu because he “comes to New York a lot of times” and he met the new mayor through Wynton Marsalis. As for how he thinks Landrieu will do as the Crescent City’s new mayor:

“I think he can do better than what Nagin’s done. But he’s going to need a whole lot of help. … Just because Mitch is mayor doesn’t mean presto change overnight. It will be a welcome change for the people here and that was reflected in the way the voting went.”

Seven.

It is a situation so shameful and so infuriating it is becoming difficult to find new ways to condemn it. Any officers responsible for acts of brutality should be punished and I hope that, finally, they will.

You could simply isolate the guilty officers and get them off of the force and into prison.

But I’m not sure people are buying the bad-apple argument anymore.

This is a pattern.

While police brutality is a problem many other cities, no city in America has experienced the level of nonsense that we have here in New Orleans.

It isn’t one bad cop or seven bad cops or even fifteen bad cops.

We have a bad police department.

The citizens of New Orleans deserve better and so do the honest police officers tainted by the shortfalls of their colleagues and superiors.

With at least seven open FBI investigations, it increasingly appears as though the U.S. Justice Department could easily build a case for a consent decree to officially monitor the NOPD.

I’ve mentioned the idea of a consent decree before.

In 1994, Congress granted authority to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to file civil lawsuits against police departments that exhibited a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional conduct in order to obtain a court order to eliminate the behavior. Whether it is through a consent decree or an agreement signed between the Justice Department and the locality under threat of a lawsuit, generally, the feds outline a series of reforms that the department must implement and provide for a federal monitor of the local police force.

If seven open investigations don’t constitute a pattern or practice, I’m not sure what does.

There are several examples of consent decrees in major metropolitan cities since the law was introduced, including Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Detroit.

New Orleans has, unfortunately, had a negative experience with the HUD’s takeover of HANO but the Justice Department’s track record with consent decrees has been largely positive.

The first major city to experiment with a federal monitor was Pittsburgh in 1997, after the NAACP and ACLU compiled scores of complaints. Years later, the Justice Department conducted an extensive study to examine whether its consent decree there had been successful and how future monitor agreements could be improved.

You can read the whole thing here but the conclusion is as follows:

The overarching questions in Pittsburgh were: Can a reform process imposed on a local jurisdiction by a federal court succeed? And if so, could that process continue after the federal court withdrew? The simple answer to both questions is “yes.” It is clear that the requirements of the consent decree dramatically changed the culture of the Bureau of Police. It is also clear that the reforms remained in full force more than a year after most of the requirements of the decree were lifted. Officers and supervisors are accountable for their interactions with the public in a way that is qualitatively different from the situation that existed prior to the decree. Although officers continued to express resentment toward the city for agreeing to the decree, many acknowledged that the reforms did, in fact, increase police accountability. Administrators now have a powerful tool to monitor officer productivity as well as misconduct.

The report stresses the importance of unified embrace of the reforms by city officials and “the determination of the police chief to make the decree part of his own reform agenda.”

Speaking of police chiefs, Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu’s task force on the NOPD is charged with guiding the selection of the new police superintendent.

Aaaaand they’re holding a community meeting Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in the South West Club Claiborne Room at the Superdome to hear the public’s opinions on that important decision.

If you can’t make it, you can always just fill out their pithy survey.

It, naturally, doesn’t ask how important it is if the next police chief is determined to make a consent decree part of his or her reform agenda.

So if that is as important to you as it is to me, I’d suggest schlepping to the Dome tomorrow evening.

The city has paid the private company managing the bulk of New Orleans’ recovery projects more than $3 million for work actually done by city employees, according to an internal memo written by the ousted city capital projects director just weeks before he left City Hall.

Bill Chrisman wrote in the Feb. 20 memo that the engineering and project management monolith, MWH Americas Inc., is charging the city for work on recovery projects that were “completed by [the city’s Capital Projects Administration] either before MWH was even contracted and/or MWH had little to no involvement in.”

“For the majority of the small projects MWH transferred to CPA to manage they have billed dollar values in excess of the entire project cost leaving no funding available to construct the project while providing little to no management services,” he wrote.

The memo was sent as an e-mail to Chief Administrative Officer Brenda Hatfield and copied to other top city officials, including Mayor Ray Nagin.

Chrisman raises the redevelopment of the Municipal Auditorium as an example of one project the city is paying MWH to manage with little or no return. He writes that the city is “now negotiating with a separate contractor to manage” the $80 million project. That firm will charge “a maximum fee of 5 percent of the project’s total cost,” he wrote.  “However,” he added, “MWH is currently charging the City a fee of 6.5 percent not to manage the project.”

Under its agreement with the city, MWH is allowed to charge up to 8 percent of the total capital cost of a project for management costs.

Nagin spokesman James Ross did not respond to questions about the Municipal Auditorium agreement, but he said that MWH generally earns a “reduced fee” on projects that are handled by other contractors or city employees. The money is paid in exchange for “support.” The spokesman did not respond to questions about the specifics of either the reduced rate or the support provided, but if what Chrisman writes in his e-mail is correct, the company will earn $5.2 million for delivering little more than a Web page to display information generated by other entities.

Chrisman is not the only one asking questions about MWH.  New Orleans Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux told Lens investigative partner Fox 8 today that he has reviewed MWH’s contract with the city and that his report “covers much of the same ground” as Chrisman’s memo, but in “much greater detail.” He said he can’t elaborate on details of the report until the city responds, which it must do within 30 days.

Many New Orleanians recognize the MWH insignia from the blue and white “Recovery in Progress” project markers unveiled by the company shortly after it signed on to coordinate the reconstruction of those hurricane-damaged sites. Others may remember the company from the city Web site it created. The site, which serves as the most comprehensive record of the hundreds of public projects now in the pipeline, has the logos of MWH and The City of New Orleans prominent along the bottom of the site, the two logos facing each other on opposing sides.

Beyond its role in communicating and packaging the city’s efforts to rebuild, the company serves as another layer in the city’s bureaucracy. For instance, when a citizen sends a question about a recovery project to City Hall, it is likely to end up in the in-box of an MWH employee. Likewise, when an architect or builder sends an invoice for work on a new school or police station, it is an MWH employee who will sign off on the paperwork to get the contractor paid.

Chrisman, an architect who ushered forward hundreds of recovery projects over the 20 months he worked at City Hall, raised his questions as within a broader discussion of the city’s practice of using disaster grant money in a revolving state construction fund to pay for project management services.

While the city cash stash has been known locally as the “revolver fund,” it operates as two separate funds overseen by the state Division of Administration, but under the direct control of the city. The construction fund is a $200 million pot of money given to the city by the state to pay for projects before FEMA checks are cut. The revolver is the fund the city replenishes with FEMA reimbursements. Eventually, the construction fund will be emptied, but ideally the revolver will stay in the black until the recovery is complete. As of Feb. 28, the city had $79 million in the construction fund and another $28 million in the revolver, or a total of $107 million.

Chrisman has raised steady concerns about the pace at which the city is tearing through the recovery money and has said it could be completely eviscerated by the beginning of the next mayor’s term if the Nagin administration doesn’t change its spending habits.

You really can’t put a price on getting crunk.

Still, the Ying Yang Twins, performers of the Saints anthem “Halftime (Stand up and Get Crunk!), had to put a price on their appearance with Mayor Ray Nagin at the Super Bowl celebration parade.

Nagin recently signed a contract to pay the hip-hop stars up to $2,100 for singing their hit song at Gallier Hall with a passel of politicians. They then got to watch the black and gold take a beaded victory lap around the Central Business District.

The contract was recently posted on the city Web site.

Likewise, Nagin signed a two-page contract to pay for catering at the Mayor’s Mardi Gras Ball. The contract doesn’t get into the specifics of what is to be provided, but it referred to the original bid for services. The city’s online database shows the city plans to pay up to $36,539 for catering.

A technology vendor to the city of New Orleans shut down a key computer system Monday because the city hasn’t paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in past-due bills, the contractor said Wednesday.

Based on a tip from a developer unable to move a project forward, The Lens uncovered the problem in a joint investigation with Fox 8 News.

The computer system for the city’s Safety and Permits Department has been inaccessible since Monday evening, frustrating contractors and homeowners looking for basic city services. Likewise, the system has made it tougher on the city employees. The software provides an automated system for building inspectors to work from the field.

Two city employees in the permits department said Wednesday morning that they weren’t issuing permits at all.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Ray Nagin said the issue was being resolved, but she didn’t know whether that involved actually paying the vendor, Accela Inc. of San Ramon, Calif.

As of Wednesday afternoon, access still had not been restored.

Until the computer system is up, city employees were told to issue permits manually and then enter them into the system later, spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett said. Asked about people who already had been turned away empty handed, Quiett said, “I don’t know what happened earlier.”

She also said she didn’t know how much the city owes Accela.

The problem affects not only the City Hall computers, but also the kiosks set up at Winn-Dixie grocery stores by the city, which put them there to make permitting more accessible. Those terminals were dead Tuesday and Wednesday.

Accela spokesman Paul Davis told Fox 8 said the company works with hundreds of government agencies across the country, and they’ve never had to shut down anyone.

“Following many months of a lack of communication, we deactivated, and that’s unprecedented for us,” Davis told Fox 8 news.

He declined to say precisely how much was owed, but he said, “It goes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Interviewed outside the mayor’s office Wednesday morning, city technology chief Harrison Boyd said he was just getting back into town and getting familiar with the problem. He said no one told him about it Tuesday.

But residents are telling others about the hassles that are bedeviling their efforts to get permits for electrical and mechanical work, as well as overall building permits.

City Council member Stacy Head told Fox 8 that her office has fielded several complaints.

Although Quiett began a brief discussion of the problem by pointing out that the City Council cut $7 million from the operating budget over the objections of the Nagin administration, Head said that’s not part of this problem.

She said the council approved money for payments to vendors such as Accela, but it is up to Nagin and his administration to keep track of bills and make sure they’re paid on time.

Today, another NOPD investigator was charged in the alleged conspiracy to cover up the killings on Danziger Bridge. Jeffrey Lehrmann also just happened to have been the lead investigator of the 2006 Central City massacre, a quintuple killing for which Michael Anderson was convicted and sentenced to death. Earlier this week, Judge Lynda Van Davis ordered a new trial in that case. See Lehrmann’s police report in the Anderson case here.

This Chippewa Street property that was donated to Galilee Housing sits still boarded up more than three years after the non-profit received it as a donation from the Housing Authority of New Orleans. At least the neighbors get some off-street parking from what some describe as an eyesore.

By Karen Gadbois – Staff writer – Three years after getting a piece of taxpayer-owned property for free, a New Orleans non-profit has yet to make improvements to the blighted site or fulfill promises made when it took the donation – and it apparently tried to sell the six-unit apartment house for $230,000 in pure profit.

The Galilee Housing Initiative and Community Development Corporation took ownership in March 2007 of 2318 Chippewa Street in the Irish Channel via a donation from the Housing Authority of New Orleans. The property was valued at $130,000.

It was among the first actions taken when HANO was looking to donate or demolish 773 of its individual or small properties across the city, referred to as scattered sites.

It’s not clear how Galilee was chosen to receive the donation.

Galilee Executive Director Carolyn Williams said the organization still plans to renovate the property. She said the house was accidentally listed for sale on the Web site Craigslist instead of another property the agency acquired privately. However, one neighbor said he spoke with the agent  several times about this particular property being for sale, leaving him with the impression that it wasn’t an accidental listing.

Galilee has been in operation since 2002. According to the mission listed on its tax forms, the organization “is operated exclusively for charitable and educational purposes to provide and restore housing to low income families.”

Because HANO is overseen by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, that agency had to give its approval for the donation to Galilee. It did so, ordering HANO to include language that would give the property back to HANO if Galilee failed to live up to its promise of providing housing for homeless and disabled people.

However, such a reversion clause is not in the donation papers. Neither the current HANO attorney, Wayne Woods, nor a HUD spokeswoman could explain why that language wasn’t included. Woods was not working at HANO when the donation was made.

HUD spokeswoman Donna White said that omission doesn’t bother her because Galilee officials have told her they will move forward with their plans as soon as they get the money.

Williams said she plans to demolish the apartment building and build two single-family homes. She said she was waiting on a $110,000 grant from the city to demolish the building.

Regarding the possible sale of the property, White said that Galilee would have to get HUD permission to sell. She said a 20-year-old agreement between HUD and HANO gives them that sign-off power.

But the act of donation says Galilee is granted “all rights, title and interest” to the property. Clearly, Galilee felt it was able to sell the property.

By e-mail, White said, “HANO is discussing with Galilee the advertisement that appeared on Craigslist.”

Developer Peter Gardner, who lives in the area, first flagged the proposed sale in an e-mail to then-HANO chief David Gilmore, and copied to three City Council members.

He wrote that he talked with the real-estate agent who was advertising the Chippewa Street property. The nearby houses range in value from $75,000 to more than $200,000.

“The property has sat vacant and abandoned since the donation and has been an eyesore and nuisance to the community for years,” Gardner wrote. “The agent is selling this apartment building for $230,000.

“It seems wrong to me that HANO would give a non-profit a property, especially since it wasn’t available to the general public for sale, and then the non-profit can go and sell the property after doing no work on it, for a profit.”

Gardner said he never got an answer to his e-mail.

Subsequent exchanges with the seller’s agent seller revealed the property was not listed in the multiple-listing-service database commonly used by Realtors, and that the seller – who the agent described as “my uncle” – was motivated and the price negotiable, Gardner said in a recent interview.

Williams read a prepared statement to The Lens Tuesday that she said was issued her Realtor, Ben Guillory, where he claimed responsibility for the Craigslist posting, and said it had been done “in error.”

She said instead that Guillory was trying to sell a property at 738 Jackson Ave., which has been listed for $430,000 by the same agent.

Shopping carts line the side of the Chippewa street property. Neighbors say they belong to a homeless woman who sometimes stays there.

Guillory did not return calls for comment.

The six-unit  apartment building  sits in an unflooded part of town, boarded and unattended. The front yard serves as an ad hoc parking lot for the neighbors. One neighbor said the shopping carts lining one side of the building belonged to a homeless woman who lives in one of the units.

Williams said she calls the police when she sees the homeless woman entering the building but asked, “What can you do”?

Nearby resident Belvia Isabell complained that the neighbors had no idea the property was being sold and would have considered buying it to use for  senior housing.

Galilee was donated the Chippewa property along with another apartment building on Dryades Street. That building has been renovated, in large part through a contract with the city that provided the housing group with $650,000 in repair money through HUD.

Walking around that building, the renovation appears thorough and solid, but half of the 12 units are unoccupied. Galilee is the landlord of the property.

These two properties aren’t the only taxpayer-owned parcels to be given away to Galilee. The city of New Orleans also has donated several properties to the group, which the city took over when the owners failed to pay property taxes.

The Lens is continuing to investigate those properties and will have another report soon.

Karen Gadbois may be reached at kgadbois@TheLensNola.org

I feel like I’ve been reminded 1,000 times that the city of New Orleans HAS NO CONTROL over education policy. Library Chronicles reminded me of it today, as a matter of fact.

Even though I think Jeffrey was being somewhat facetious, the mayor can do some pretty important things with education as a leader and as an advocate, even if the city does not and will not regularly contribute any money to the public school system.

The charter movement in New Orleans has been widely lauded as a success even though it is beginning to lose the shimmer from its armor as studies show limited improvement in many cases. (I’m very interested to read former charter-booster Diane Ravitch’s change of heart.)

I used to write often about education policy and the move away from traditional public schools, but I stopped as I became disillusioned and confused about the application of school reform. The brutal way in which teachers were fired after Katrina and schools were taken over by the state was impeding my ability to evaluate a way forward from the new starting point.

I’m still not quite sure what to conclude about New Orleans schools. As wonderful as it is to see so many resources and energy applied to public education, I don’t think the current governance structure (near-total decentralization managed by a state agency with no local oversight), nor the current reliance on teachers expected to work 70 hours a week are anywhere close to representing a sustainable education system. .

That said, there should be some areas around which Landrieu can build consensus and some ideas for which he can use his rhetorical gifts to advocate.

1. Federal funding for school construction

Though I had my reservations about the school facilities master plan passed in 2007, I now want nothing more than to see that plan accelerated. When the American Recovery and Reinvestment  Act was being negotiated in early 2008, the Recovery School District stood to receive a windfall that would have moved up the timeline on many of the city’s school renovation and restoration projects. Unfortunately, when tens millions of dollars were stripped out of the stimulus bill in the Senate to win the vote of Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, the RSD lost out big, since it has such a backlog of shovel-ready projects that almost certainly would have been awarded money.

Landrieu has no control over school construction, but he could be an ambassador for school construction funding at the federal level.

2. Create a charter school oversight body within the Office of Inspector General or the mayor’s office.

While the debate over whether charter schools are a worthwhile long-term solution will doubtlessly continue, all education advocates should agree that the multi-tentacled governance structure of the New Orleans public school and charter school systems do not allow for independent oversight. As you might recall, the business manager of Langston Hughes Academy, a stand-alone charter school, recently pleaded guilty to stealing $660,000 from her school’s budget. That should never, ever happen, especially given that corruption and waste were among the main factors  behind the dismantling of the traditional public school system.

Landrieu has no control over school budgets, but he should appropriate city funding and seek a state match to establish an oversight board or office to investigate complaints, and monitor the financial books of charter schools operating within Orleans Parish.

3. Encourage the RSD, OPSB, and charter associations to mandate an African American studies or a cultural studies course be added to all senior year curricula.

Maybe the coolest thing Paul Vallas did in Philly, when he was schools superintendent there, was to introduce this kind of course to all graduating seniors. Though the effort may have been poorly branded in ways that ruffled the feathers of some of Philadelphia’s diverse ethnic communities, a cultural studies course, especially one that focuses on local traditions, could be an important forum for great discussion and a real source of pride. The class was implemented after I graduated from high school but my kid sister absolutely loved it. I certainly have fond memories of individual teachers’ emphasis of African American literature and history throughout the school year. I think we spent a full two months in eighth grade English class on the literature and history of the Harlem Renaissance – it was awesome.

Mitch Landrieu has no control over the school curriculum but he should be an advocate for courses that reflect the cultural unity he has pledged to fight for.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of recommendations but that’s what my comments section – and presumably Mitch Landrieu’s education task force – is for.