It’s 11 a.m. on a Monday and Bernice Horne is sweeping the front porch. Inside, her son fixes himself a quick lunch—he’s on the clock—while her granddaughter gets ready for a class at the local community college. “Erica,” she calls. “Grab me a dust pan. We don’t need any more mess around here.”

The view from Horne’s front porch is bleak: a weedy lot, the dark, gutted house of a dead neighbor, and beyond that, a derelict affordable-housing development  stretching as far as the eye can see. Occasionally, a bird swoops in or out of a broken window. A ripped chain-link fence borders the  development, which never reopened after Hurricane Katrina.

“One day my baby granddaughter was sitting out on the porch swing and she said, ‘Why that building have eyes? It look like it looking at us’,” Horne, a retired school custodian, says.  “I said, ‘Baby they supposed to be windows and doors to keep little girls like you safe.’”

A New Orleans entrepreneur has received $46,000 in Road Home grant money to rehab a single unit in the otherwise uninhabitable Press Park complex, across from Horne's ranch house. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

After Katrina, Horne used a state grant to rebuild her tidy ranch-style house from the ground up. For reasons both emotional and financial, she never seriously considered not doing so. “We don’t have any other place,” she says quietly. “This is where I raised my children. We can’t afford to go anywhere else.” But others with more options also continue to attract government grants to properties that are almost certain to be bulldozed eventually.

Upon her return, she installed a jungle gym in the backyard and inside, a plush sofa with plenty of room for chatting with the neighbors she expected would return.  They haven’t. The population of the Upper 9^th Ward’s Desire neighborhood has dropped 68 percent since 2000, falling from 3,791 to 1,213 in 2010, U.S. census data analyzed by GCR & Associates shows. Where there were once occupied homes, weeds grow. The only commercial establishment within miles is the Money and Honey One Stop, a concrete-fronted corner store with unpredictable hours and an inventory heavy on 99-cent soda and potato chips.

Though New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s recovery plan includes putting an $11 million community center and health clinic in the neighborhood, the only city project to be completed so far is a modestly outfitted park with a small swimming pool, a few sports fields and a donated Kaboom playground. On warm evenings, the sound of children playing football reverberates through otherwise quiet streets.

“No traffic. Nothing. It’s a ghost town other than the park,” a neighbor, Hardy Price, says. Price is one of four residents on his block.  One of the others is his adult son, who lives across the street in a vinyl-sided shotgun-style house sandwiched between two overgrown lots owned by families who never returned after Katrina. The remaining two are renters who moved in next door after the property’s prior owner moved to Texas after Katrina and converted his home into a Section 8 rental. Another half-dozen empty houses and lots line the block. “The neighbors,” Price says, “they moved on.”

The view from Price’s front stoop pretty well matches the bleak scenarios laid out shortly after Katrina by urban planners. In the months after the storm, experts from the Urban Land Institute — a Washington DC-based urban-planning think tank invited by then-mayor Ray Nagin to advise his Bring New Orleans Back Commission — warned that without a coordinated strategy for rebuilding neighborhoods in sync with repopulation trends, those areas that lost large numbers of households would fall victim to “the jack o’ lantern effect”: gap-toothed redevelopment in which occupied homes would be surrounded by swaths of blight and abandonment. Instead, the planners recommended transforming hard-hit areas into green space while concentrating rebuilding efforts in the city’s less-damaged core, but residents recoiled.

On a now infamous map rolled out at a commission hearing, Horne’s neighborhood, along with other parts of the Lower 9^th Ward and Eastern New Orleans showed up as a green dot.

The dots reflected depth of flooding, some of it in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods like Lakefront and Broadmoor, but with so much of it concentrated in largely black neighborhoods, cries arose that the redevelopment proposal was a plot to keep black homeowners from returning to New Orleans. Overnight, the notion that some neighborhoods wouldn’t be rebuilt became racially charged. Nagin, then facing a re-election fight, abandoned his pledge to respect the blue-ribbon commission’s recommendations and began encouraging everyone to rebuild, even in neighborhoods like Horne’s.

An arrow marks the Horne family residence. Their neighborhood, Desire, was one of several that post-Katrina planners recommended be turned into green space. (The Lens/Google) 

A year after the storm, Reed Kroloff, then the dean of Tulane University’s architecture school and one of two people who were to have overseen a recovery planning process for the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, told The Times-Picayune that rejecting the Urban Land Institute’s advice amounted to “a complete failure of leadership at almost every level.”

In fact, weeds had been growing high in Horne’s neighborhood long before the hurricane hit. For more than a decade prior to Katrina, a quieter disaster had been unfolding. In another, spectacularly bad policy decision, low-income housing, both public and private,  a community center and an Orleans Parish School Board elementary school had been built atop a 95-acre municipal dump so toxic that it was eventually declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Shrinking cities, big worries

Welcome to the new normal–where swaths of once bustling city neighborhoods deteriorate behind fences. The circumstances that brought New Orleans’ neighborhoods into their current limbo are a combination of singular events and larger national trends. Many communities around the country currently confront similar fates. For evidence, look to the urban prairies of Detroit; Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Mich. In New Orleans, abandonment was brought on by Katrina. In the other cities, it was the slower winds of economic and political change, deindustrialization, the overseas emigration of American manufacturing, the foreclosure crisis, decades of population loss, spending cuts and federal policy changes.  Now cities must decide how to proceed: continue to maintain city infrastructure and services in communities too hollowed out to qualify as urban, or simply disinvest and mothball these neighborhoods.

Press Park was built on top of a landfill. Since Katrina, it has been empty, awaiting demolition. (photo by Ariella Cohen)

“We are paying a big price for decades of bad decisions at local, state and federal levels,” says Dan Kildee, president and co-founder of the Center for American Progress, a national nonprofit that focuses on urban revitalization. “We are paying the price of decades without a vision.”

President Obama is the first president to bluntly assert that new strategies must be found for communities like Desire where abandoned housing is rife and no one seems interested in repairing or occupying it. Unlike prior administrations that have changed individual programs and hinted at a broader need to reshape the way the federal government supports urban development, Obama’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, has said from day one that the agency’s entire approach must be transformed to take into account changing economic and environmental considerations as well as a new geography of poverty that has low-income populations,  once concentrated in cities, now dispersed across sprawling suburbs.

“For generations in America, we have measured success by the number of housing units we are able to construct,” says Kildee, in arguing for a different approach.

Kildee has a point. When politicians want to claim an economy is robust they cite the number of housing starts. To demonstrate a community is financially healthy, they cite rising home values. The implicit assumption is that populations will keep pace with the market and that the new housing will be absorbed. It is that assumption that Desire and hundreds of other similarly abandoned communities are now proving catastrophically wrong.

In response, HUD has come up with a  Sustainable Communities initiative and the Choice Neighborhoods program. Sustainable Communities takes a cross-agency approach to build more cohesive, connected regions in which funding for transit is better coordinated with housing development and job growth. Choice Neighborhoods seeks to transform isolated public housing developments into integrated, mixed-income neighborhoods.

But those changes are taking place in a context of drastically reduced federal support for cities and housing. Despite Obama’s commitment to rethinking cities, HUD’s budget was slashed 9 percent to $37 billion, the largest reduction in funding of any major federal agency. Adjusted for inflation, the total is  lower than any HUD budget since 2003, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The spending package includes an 8 percent cut to the capital fund for public housing—a reduction that could have grave implications for already overburdened housing agencies. In the Upper 9^th Ward alone, the Housing Authority of New Orleans manages at least a half-dozen abandoned or partially abandoned complexes, including the Press Park subdivision visible from Bernice Horne’s porch.

Adding to the challenge: a nearly 40 percent cut to HUD’s  largest affordable-housing block grant program, the HOME program, which provides municipalities with grants for affordable housing or direct rental assistance. A smaller but still sizable 6 percent reduction hit the agency’s most flexible community redevelopment tool, the Community Development Block Grant program. CDBG grants provide funding for the sort of neighborhood-level intervention needed to clean up the messy blocks surrounding Horne’s home.

“Every local housing authority is going to be picking up the pieces and absolutely funding only its highest priority communities,” says Linda Couch, a senior policy analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

But as budget cuts and political pressures force triage,  what happens to those neighborhoods that wind up on the wrong side of the red line?

Home ownership in harm’s way

If New Orleans is “the city care forgot,” Desire is the neighborhood care ignored.  Built on drained swampland west of the Industrial Canal, the neighborhood grew up alongside a dump where refuse was burned in open pits from 1909 until 1948, when neighbors’ complaints about thick, putrid smoke forced legislation barring dumps inside the city. Instead of abandoning the dump altogether, city officials circumvented the legislation by converting it into a landfill. Burying the refuse underground was seen as more sanitary, an argument that ignored leaching and other forms of chemical pollution.  The Agriculture Street Landfill persisted until 1965 when it was last used an emergency dump for debris from Hurricane Betsy.

Soon after the landfill closed, the local housing authority began eyeing the unused city  land for affordable housing. In 1969, the first of two federally financed developments,  Press Park and Gordon Plaza, rose on above the landfill. Though project engineers    worried about subsidence, politics quickly trumped environmental concerns.

Throughout the 20th century, new neighborhoods were built over the Agriculture Street landfill with no thought to the toxins under the ground.

In a  desegregating city where much of the housing available to black families was  substandard, the idea of building a modern housing development from the ground up—  even if that ground were  contaminated—appealed to the city’s leadership. No   remediation of the contaminated soils was attempted.

HANO began to aggressively market Press Park’s new,  affordable townhouses to striving black families, instituting programs that allowed low-income public housing residents to become homeowners. Gordon Plaza sprang up on the former landfill’s eastern edge in the late 1970s. Containing homes for senior citizens, rentals and affordable single-family homes, the development was, like Press Park, paid for with federal grants and loans.

The strategy reflected the modus operandi of the city at the time: build more and build cheap. Over several decades, the strategy transformed previously undeveloped, drained swampland in the 9^th Ward and farther east — areas now synonymous with Katrina’s devastation —into an area dense with federally subsidized affordable housing, populated overwhelmingly by black families.

New Orleans officials built the Shirley Jefferson Community Center within the Agriculture Street landfill, on the edge of a housing development, near a public school. Neighbors want the abandoned center to be demolished. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

Following the families into new neighborhoods, the Orleans Parish School Board went on a construction spree.  Even before Moton Elementary opened in 1985 on the edge of the landfill, elevated lead levels in playground soils led school officials to contemplate abandoning it.  Again, pressure for a ribbon cutting won out. The school opened. By the time of the 1990 census, about 1,000 people lived on the landfill or along its immediate periphery.

“We moved there because the schools were down the street,” said Horne, who bought her privately developed home on the eastern flank of the landfill in 1983. “The children didn’t have to cross a lot of traffic. They could walk to school.”

But while the population continued to grow so did concerns about the area’s environmental safety. People were finding stray landfill debris in their yards.  The Environmental Protection Agency, which according to legal documents had found evidence of contamination as early as 1986, came down again in 1993 to do testing that found higher-than-allowed levels of lead, arsenic and polychlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons. In 1994, Moton, located across the street from Press Park was closed, and Horne’s granddaughter Erica, then a Moton first- grader, tested positive for lead poisoning.

“Around that time, we stopped growing vegetables in our garden because we were worried about what was in the soil,” Gordon Plaza homeowner Ruth Parker says.

Legal limbo

That same year, the EPA recognized the 95-acre Agriculture Street Landfill site as a Superfund hazardous waste site. Though many homeowners urged EPA officials to buy their homes and clear the land, the EPA decided on a cheaper fix: removing contaminated soil and replacing it with clean clay atop a fabric liner. The soil remediation cost $42.8 million and took nine years, wrapping in 2003, but the site remains on the Superfund list.

Still bouncing through the federal appeals system is a class-action lawsuit filed in 1993 on behalf of residents, homeowners and students who unknowingly bought homes, rented apartments or attended school on top of the landfill. After more than a decade in the courts, only a portion of residents included in the class of certified plaintiffs have received settlements, despite a 2006 ruling by Civil District Court Judge Nadine Ramsey who declared the neighborhood “uninhabitable” and “dangerous.”

“If this was another kind of neighborhood we wouldn’t have to fight so hard,” Horne, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said. “It’s like we don’t exist, like we keep having to tell the courts and the city and everyone that we are still here. That’s what it feels like.”

Bernice Horne says her neighborhood has been left behind in the city's post-Katrina rebuilding. (Photo by Marc Fader/City Limits)

In November, an inspection of the landfill site done by EPA officials mentioned a  resurgence in illegal dumping at the site. Plaintiffs in the class-action suit say they hope for an eventual settlement that will allow them to move elsewhere. Parker bought her Gordon Plaza home in 1981 for $40,000. Thirty years later, its assessed value is $45,000. She and her husband are retired. Both have cancer.  “The settlement was our only hope,” Parker says. “No one is going to buy these houses, knowing what is back here.”

Last year, a non-practicing attorney in Houston named Robert Spencer bought the largest vacant Gordon Plaza tract for $1 from HUD. The property’s previous owner, Desire Community Housing, had defaulted on a HUD loan, leaving the federal agency to foreclose on the 2.6-acre property and auction it off. Spencer, who has said that redeveloping the complex would be his largest project to date, was the only bidder.  He has made little progress on the site since buying it in May, neighbors say. Despite loud complaints from these nearby residents, Spencer has filed no permits for the demolition of the blighted housing, a fire hazard.

Meanwhile, HANO maintains that it can’t demolish Press Park until it buys out 67 private townhouse owners within its 237-unit development. It can’t do that until the courts resolve the class-action suit, officials say.

Neighbors impatiently wait for the wrecking ball. It’s not hard to see why. Walk in through breaches in Press Park’s chain-link border and you will find apartments with moldy, water-damaged pictures on the wall and toys on the floor, crusted in six years worth of dirt.  Water from leaking sewerage and water pipes pools in the overgrowth, leaving a faint aroma. At community meetings, residents blame HANO for failing to take cleanup action that could inspire private owners like Spencer to get moving.

Still investing in disaster

Further complicating matters, the federal government continues to invest in Press Park and the struggling blocks that surround it. Since Katrina, HUD has sent about $9.3 million in Road Home hurricane recovery grants to remaining owners of the 1,137 housing units included in the census tract that includes Press Park’s 237 apartments, Louisiana Office of Community Development records show.

On a warm Tuesday in October, one of those grant recipients, John Spears, climbed through an opening he cut in the development’s fence and showed a reporter the townhouse-style condo he restored using a $70,000 Road Home Small Rental Program grant from the state community development office. Buckets of white paint and Spackle litter the otherwise empty, three-bedroom unit. In an upstairs room, a brand-new plastic-framed window looks out over the development’s deserted, trash-strewn inner-courtyard. If you forget about Katrina, it looks like the set for a dystopian horror movie about a low-end suburb depopulated by a deadly pathogen.

John Spears received $46,000 from the state Road Home small rental recovery program to renovate a unit within Press Park. Now he can't find a tenant willing to live in the bombed-out complex. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

In order to receive the $46,000 in grant money the state awarded Spears for completing the affordable housing rehab, he had to show the unit to an inspector, he said.  “The inspector said, ‘I don’t see anything else around here. Why would you redo it,’” Spears recalled, tapping his foot on a glossy, adobe-colored floor tile.  The question, however on-point, didn’t stop the landlord from receiving his grant money or a certificate of occupancy from the city.  Now he is waiting for a tenant to agree to move in so he can receive the final $24,000 installment of the grant allocation. He’s shown the place to a few Section 8 voucher holders but no one has taken up the lease, he said.

“I’m hoping HANO will fix the rest of this mess up so someone will actually want to live here,” he said. “Otherwise, they can buy me out and tear it down. I’ll give them this and they can give me a new unit, somewhere else.”

In a recent interview, the HUD-appointed administrative receiver who runs HANO, David Gilmore, acknowledged that he has met with Spears but declined to talk about his specific situation.  “We’re trying to buy everyone out,” Gilmore said.

While Spears is the only recipient of Road Home money that has actually completed a renovation within Press Park, there could be dozens more who received grant money to fix storm-damaged units that are now slated to be demolished.  This means that taxpayer money will be spent twice on the same housing units, first to repair it, then to tear it down.

Gilmore said that while FEMA will eventually pay for the demolition of the Katrina-battered complex, redevelopment is years off.

“I don’t have any plans at the moment. That doesn’t mean there won’t be,” said Gilmore, who was sent from HUD’s Washington office to clean up and modernize the long-troubled housing authority put under federal receivership in 2002.

A new model for housing

Developing Press Park into anything other than an open field will be tricky. Federal regulations prohibit using HUD housing grants on Superfund sites, meaning that HANO would have to transfer the property to a private owner if it wanted to see housing developed there. Beyond that, the notion of rebuilding a neighborhood on a landfill in a far-off section of the city with few public services contradicts the essence of Obama’s holistic, cross-agency Sustainable Communities agenda.

“That was developed in a different time,” Gilmore said of Press Park. “I am not sure if I would’ve ever built there in the first place.”

For HANO, the rethinking of federal housing policy coincided with its own controversial transformation. After Katrina, the agency never reopened its four largest, traditional public housing complexes, instead implementing HOPE VI programs that turn traditional public housing into smaller, mixed-income communities operated by private developers. The projects, which housing officials expect to complete in the next two years, reflect HUD’s reorientation towards mixed-income, mixed-use communities located in urban cores and connected to public services. One of them, Harmony Oaks in Central City (formerly C.J. Peete), features wrap-around tenant services in a new community center. A cross-city greenway has been incorporated into the design of another development, the old Lafitte complex, now called Faubourg Lafitte.  The master plan for a third, Columbia Parc (formerly the St.Bernard complex), includes a revenue-generating golf course.

But while residents are publicly enthusiastic about amenities in the new developments, their shrunken size and mixed-income portfolio means that many of the neediest pre-Katrina tenants remain locked out of the modern offerings.

Before Hurricane Katrina, HANO had 5,100 occupied housing-development units and 8,500 vouchers, for a total of 13,600 units. HANO now plans to provide 22,500 households with assistance, but nearly 80 percent of families will receive the housing subsidy in the form of a Section 8 voucher, according to the agency’s 2012 budget. The number living in traditional public housing will have fallen by 20 percent.

Again following federal policy trends, HANO has traded thousands of public housing units for a market-based voucher system that the agency hopes will encourage people to move into privately owned units, thus de-concentrating poverty. The agency does not specifically track whether such a de-concentration is occurring, making it tough to evaluate the policy’s success. Available data  suggests the policy implementation has a ways to go: A 2010 analysis of census-tract level data shows that most of the houses that are approved for voucher usage are located in low-income neighborhoods, within close proximity to the former housing projects.

In addition to the tens of millions of dollars going to complete developments shuttered after Katrina, HANO last year took on another high-profile project — the redevelopment of Iberville, the city’s last major traditional public housing development, and the only one located in touristy downtown New Orleans.

HUD selected Iberville as one of five developments to receive federal support through Choice Neighborhoods.  Its reinvention as a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood will cost upwards of $600 million over the next decade of planning and construction, $30 million of which will come from the Choice grant.

A successful transformation of Iberville carries huge political potential for the city’s leadership as well as for Obama, who has highlighted the community in speeches about the power of Choice Neighborhoods to reinvent American cities. Unlike the Press Park section of Desire, which is separated from New Orleans’ downtown core by railroad tracks, a smoggy stretch of industrial businesses and the Interstate, Iberville can’t be ignored.

“The Treme community plays a vital role in the city’s heritage and cultural identity,” Landrieu said in a press release put out when the HUD announced New Orleans would receive the Choice award. “This grant provides us with an essential tool to transform lives and revitalize one of the greatest neighborhoods in the country.”

Gilmore admits that even if Press Park were his top priority, it would not qualify for the federal support Iberville is getting. “It just would not satisfy the vast array of issues Choice Neighborhoods takes into account,” he says.

HANO is slowly rebuilding the Desire public housing complex, despite its remote, industrial location. HANO chief David Gilmore says that the authority decided to rebuild because residents felt strongly about returning, not because its location makes sense as a place for housing. (Photo by Marc Fader/City Limits)

Winners and losers

Ninth Ward Councilman Jon Johnson was mad.  It was day 10 of the City Council’s hearings on the city’s 2012 budget and the only clear message he was hearing seemed to be that his district, which encompasses a large swath of the city’s northeastern neighborhoods, including the city’s most storm-devastated areas, was not going to get much help in the coming year. As the director of the city’s Regional Transit Authority explained that population losses in the 9^th Ward would mean fewer buses, Johnson turned to an aide and spoke quietly for a moment. As soon the authority’s presentation ended, Johnson turned back to his microphone. “We have to stop dumping all of our resources in the core of the city,” he told the crowded Council chambers. “We have communities out here that are struggling to hold on while downtown, things are getting built, things are improving. It is simply not right.”

Kildee, a Democrat who has announced he will run this year for a U.S. House seat from Flint, Mich., his hometown, has made a name for himself as a leader in the burgeoning “Shrinking Cities” movement. Kildee’s mission is to align the size of cities with their population, creating smaller cities wherein resources and services can be better targeted.  A consultant to municipalities around the country, Kildee has advised the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and stationed an outpost for his organization’s Vacant Properties Campaign in the city. In June, the organization will hold a conference here.

Kildee acknowledges that Johnson is right. There will be losers.

“I would love to live in a world where the federal government could provide enough resources to do it all at once but until that day comes someone has to make hard choices,” he says.  “We know for certain that the old way of spreading money around is not working. But it does keep me up at night, worrying about those communities who may not benefit.”

This report is published in partnership with City Limits, a national urban affairs journal. 

I was saddened by Ariella Cohen’s feature on problems at Blair Grocery’s urban farm and school because, without ever setting foot on the property or meeting its leader, Nat Turner, I felt an intimate familiarity with the situation Cohen identified.

As a volunteer with another post-Katrina non-profit back in 2007, I watched it  go through the syndrome that has led Blair Grocery to its current crisis.

Step one is leadership built around charisma rather than common sense. Foundations and the media are suckers for a colorful or glamorous honcho (being a male of color helps a lot) – and along with funding come feature stories and invitations for the leader to sit on panels.

Step two is the arrival of volunteers and indentured Americorps workers. The colony (which has yet to become an organization) begins to grow.

Step three: The leader is more and more often absent, as invitations to conferences and other promotional opportunities prove more tempting than the day-to-day burden of actually running a non-profit.

Step four: The trappings of organizational capacity are established, but they are largely illusory. Money starts to go missing; funds cannot be accounted for. Programs are initiated and disbanded with few tangible results proportional to the funds received.

Step five: Disaffected volunteers and staff begin to leave. The colony falls into decay. The leader blames the staff; former staffers blame the leader. Accusations and rumors swirl, but there is rarely proof – except, as Cohen’s piece demonstrates, a lack of certifiable programming results, which speaks for itself.

On the sixth anniversary of Katrina, as a “new normal” supplants fading memories of the disaster, those of us who have seen the mistakes of inspiring but unaccountable leadership are surprised only that foundations and private donors still fail to provide the oversight that might result in their funding being put to better use. Yes, emergencies require swift action, but when the dust settles, there comes a period of reckoning in which lessons must be learned.

Three years after Katrina, when Our School at Blair Grocery set up shop, what excuse was there for the funders who so eagerly thrust money into Turner’s hands? Did they see any evidence of community support or buy-in? Or were they simply dazzled by yet another charismatic man with a missionary zeal to solve the abundant problems of a Southern city struck by disaster?

I have no reason to doubt that Turner was an excellent teacher back in New York City, a hometown we share. But as Cohen’s feature suggests, what’s really at issue are his learning skills, not his teaching skills. With the hundreds of thousands of dollars heaped upon his program, youths could have received full tutoring and mentorship, or attended a sustainable program able to deliver real results. From all appearances, the actual outcomes achieved at the Blair Grocery school might have been financed for a few thousand dollars and maybe an additional $5 in late fees owed the public library.

Perhaps Turner has learned a (very expensive) lesson. What’s dismaying is that those who funded his  ambitions don’t seem able to acknowledge their mistakes, learn from them – and start to hold project leaders more accountable for their performance.

Our progressive movements suffer from a muddled  understanding of what it means to be accountable not only to funders but to the communities in which we work.  We perpetuate and even encourage arrogance and an internalized sense of superiority that transcends skin color. A progressive movement that prizes charisma over the unglamorous work of movement building will continue to produce these frustrating and disappointing outcomes.

The irony is that, though the failure of charismatic leadership is rooted in its ignorance of the community context, all of us are collectively held accountable for these failures. They metastasize outward from one individual and a few foundation program officers to an entire community of social justice activists and advocates. Ultimately they impair the reputation of the city itself as a place where progressive work can happen. Rather than blame themselves, foundations will conclude, as have some in Congress, that New Orleans can not be trusted to execute programs responsibly.

As earnest as he is in his desire to rectify errors and regain standing as part of a movement for economic and racial justice, Turner’s mistakes likely will not stick to him. They will, however, stick to New Orleans. When he moves on to his next project here or, like the prodigal son, returns to New York City, he’ll be able to dine out on the myth of what he attempted to do with Blair Grocery. The failure  will be left behind to sink slowly into the muddy soils of the Lower 9^th Ward like so many toxins released during the Great Flood.

Even Casper-Futterman, who came down from New York to do post-Katrina volunteer work, is pursuing a master’s degree in urban planning at the University of New Orleans.  

Click to enlarge.

Signs of the siege were scattered across East Grand Terre Island at the mouth of Barataria Bay: a pile of rakes crusted with oily mud, drenched absorbent matted into the sand, baby pools filled with greasy mud-colored water, wooden scrub brushes that looked more appropriate for a bubble bath than the cleanup of the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. A crew of 36 had been working on the island since June 2, said Deepwater Horizon response team spokeswoman Gail Dale, but even after three days of raking up oil-contaminated soil and sand, thick black gobs still clung to marsh grasses and mangrove trees.

“More oil is getting into the mangrove every day. It’s in the water. The fish are using it for cover,” said Clint Edds, a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Biologist leading a tour of reporters. The biologist grew quiet as he toweled thick black oil off the twisting above-ground roots of a mangrove plant. Instead of its usual splay of waxy green leaves, barren branches hung over water flecked with rust colored bits of oil.

Biologist Clint Edds wipes oil from a mangrove tree.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Especially after alarmed Jefferson Parish officials, frustrated that BP wasn’t responding to their calls for boom to protect the area, commandeered a few dozen idle cleanup boats May 22.  But by then, the oil already crept past the containment line, threatening fragile wetlands that were fighting to survive even before the encroachment of crude.

Edds’ job is to track the oil, and he had been working in the area for weeks. Since the crude landed here, the trees looked sicker each day.

“The outside edges are dying off where the oil landed,” he said. He called a colleague to radio his coordinates to the command center.

East Grand Terre and neighboring West Grand Terre separate the Gulf of Mexico from Barataria Bay, serving as a crucial buffer against tropical storms. In recent weeks they have become  the front line for this latest, wholly man-made storm to hit the region. In just one day last week, 35 oil-drenched birds were reported in the area, according to Fox 8 television.

The BP-hired contractors were instructed to begin “immediately” reshaping sand barriers to protect islands, including East Grand Terre, said Wildlife and Fisheries lab director Myron Fischer.  He could not comment on why BP boats were not out there taking preventative action earlier.

“Obviously oil has gotten into the system,” Fischer said. “We are doing everything we can do to prevent that from happening again.”

But two weeks after the parish seized control of BP cleanup vessels and state officials ordered up more protection, it’s become obvious that the state’s “everything” may not be enough.

The immediate response ordered up by Fischer took two days to materialize, Dale said.  She said that no report of oil washing in came into the command center until the May 24, two days after media coverage of Jeffferson Parish’s emergency response began. When the islands appeared in the command center report that day, 10 people were sent out to do “maintenance,” Dale said. She said she doesn’t know why the boats were idle on May 22 or why no report was made earlier.

The day Edds wiped oil off East Grand Isle mangrove, the island was on track for assessment by a shoreline cleanup team composed of government officials and private contractors hired by BP, according to Deepwater Horizon response team spokeswoman, Mary Martin. Wednesday, however, rain delayed a scheduled visit to the island, according to another command center spokesman, Charles Taplin. By Thursday, the crew of 36 workers was back, but another oil tide had washed over the East Grand Terre, covering the pelicans that nest in its vegetation in thick black goop. The next day the 35 birds were rescued and cleanup workers returned.  Yet oil still continued to wash up on shore over the weekend.

Did any changes in the way boats were being sent out happen as a result of the May 24 breakdown in communication?  Nothing official, Dale said, but “you are always tweaking things as you go to make things more efficient.”

All photos by Andy Levin. Visit Andy’s website for more images of the oil spill and the Louisiana coast.

After sitting on most of a half-million-dollar grant for nearly two years, the city of New Orleans has convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to give it another three months to spend the money on getting citizens more involved with government.

Without the extension past Monday’s expiration, the city would have had to return the unspent balance, which is more than $300,000. This week’s deadline was already an extension of the original grant agreement, which went almost nowhere under former Mayor Ray Nagin.

The foundation extended the deadline so Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s new administration can find the best way to use the money as intended, Landrieu spokesman Ryan Berni said. The re-examination of the city’s needs is particularly important given the changes in the city over the past two years since the grant was written, he said.

“Rockefeller is a great partner with the City of New Orleans and understands that our community-engagement needs continue to evolve,” Berni said. “They are affording us the opportunity to identify those needs and come back to them with a proposal for the use of funds.”

Rockefeller officials declined to comment.

The $503,700 originally came to the city’s Office of Recovery and Development Administration in August of 2008, before the departure of Recovery Czar Ed Blakely and subsequent departmental reorganization. The grant’s purpose, as spelled out in the proposal approved by the foundation, is to improve communication between the city and its citizens, including the “creation of new forms of outreach.” To do those things, the city promised to improve its website and create a community advisory program, print guides to City Hall and neighborhood organizing, and a leadership-training institute led by community organizations.

Though website changes have been made, the other programs never materialized. When Nagin left office, most of the money was unspent.

“We are just hoping we don’t lose the money,” Neighborhood Partnership Network Executive Director Timolyn Sams told The Lens in April.

Sams’ organization, an alliance of neighborhood groups formed after Katrina to help members better make themselves heard in city planning, worked with grant writers to create the proposal that Rockefeller approved.

“This grant was supposed to build capacity in neighborhoods,” Sams said, “and make the grassroots groups that have been leading the recovery since the beginning partners with the city.”

Though most of the grant remains available to fund whatever Rockefeller-approved strategy the Landrieu administration hatches, some of the money has been spent.

About $145,000 paid for a website for the Office of Community Development, http://www.rebuildrecoveroneneworleans.com. That office became the city’s chief recovery agency after Blakely left New Orleans last summer, and was run by longtime Nagin aide Kenya Smith. But while there were high hopes for how a more citizen-friendly website could help readers, it site never took off. Months after going live, it feels incomplete, with pages that haven’t been updated since December and only a few links connecting it to the city’s main website or other sites that would bring traffic.

Perhaps more critically, it is unclear how the new administration will use the site, a simplified guide to City Hall meant to inspire confidence in this city’s ability to recover and explain an alphabet soup of programs and departments that were responsible for its progress under Nagin and continue to evolve under Landrieu. One the page entitled “Our Progress,” the site explains that “almost five years after the greatest natural and man-made disaster in our nation’s history, our City has worked hard to rebuild. Through the leadership of our Mayor C. Ray Nagin, New Orleans has been making steady progress.”

(The contract for the work is available here.)

In addition to putting money towards web design, the Nagin administration put cash into creating a new $93,000-a-year Neighborhood Communication Coordinator to manage the programs. That coordinator, Sisa Moyo, however, was let go in March, before any of the programs had gotten off the ground. While she kept a city e-mail address and desk in the months she was working with the Office of Community Development, the city’s law department could not find any records that she had ever been on the city’s payroll, and Berni did not return e-mails inquiring into how much of the grant had already been spent on Moyo’s employment.

But even without knowing exactly how much money will be dedicated to community engagement, Sams said that this time she is hopeful.

“We have heard from this administration that they have found the money, or most of it, and are redrafting the proposal,” she said. “I’m really hoping that this administration finds some value in the work we do. And right now, I think they do.”

The embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars from an independent New Orleans public school could jeopardize its lone-wolf status.

Acknowledging that it needs tighter financial controls, the nonprofit board that runs Langston Hughes Academy will vote in coming weeks on whether to hire a charter management organization, FirstLine Schools, to take over operations at the three-year-old Gentilly campus. If the board chooses FirstLine, management of the K-8 school’s finances as well as its day-to-day logistics will fall to the new operator.

Although the charter would not be transferred immediately to the new operator, FirstLine has made it clear to the current operating board, NOLA180, and the school community that its intention is to eventually absorb the school into its own board-run network.

“We are more interested in having Langston Hughes join the network,” FirstLine CEO Jay Altman said.

The longtime educator said that the organization allows its campuses to run “pretty autonomously,” which would give the school the power to retain traditions like calling teachers “dreamkeepers” that students and parents don’t want to see go.

“We have a set of guiding principles that our schools adhere to,” Altman said. “At Langston Hughes, they are already following them.” At its most basic, what this means is that an independent school founded in the first round of post-Katrina charter  conversions would itself be converted to a member of  a burgeoning network of charters that includes Arthur Ashe Charter School, Samuel J. Green Charter School and John Dibert Elementary.

“We’ve been through a lot and now we need stability. FirstLine would bring that,” said Andrew Sullivan, a teacher at the school. “Will there some slight changes, yes, but will we retain a good deal of the LHA spirit and way of doing things? Absolutely yes.”

The move could set a precedent for charters struggling with financial management.

“For schools that don’t have the wherewithal to handle the back office work it is incumbent upon them” to secure that expertise, Folwell Dunbar, academic director of charter schools for the Louisiana Department of Education, said.

While the state plays only an advisory role in management of individual charters, all charters in Louisiana must after three years of operation submit to their authorizing board reports on school performance, financial management and adherence to their charter contract. The board, which in Hughes’ case is the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, votes on whether to renew the charter for another two years, give a one-year extension, or in the instance that a school is not meeting state standards, throw it back under the direct control of the Recovery School District. Next month, the school is one of nine charters due for that review.

The embezzlement incident is being taken “very seriously” as state education officials write their own evaluations of the schools and make recommendations that will be presented to BESE, Dunbar said. The state charter office adviser said he expects that Hughes will be granted a one-year extension if it shows significant commitment to  “greater financial accountability.” He declined to comment specifically on the FirstLine proposal, saying that the decision was for the NOLA 180 board to make. New Orleans BESE representative Louella Givens did not return calls for comment.

Langston Hughes Academy was the first New Orleans public school rebuilt from the ground up after Hurricane Katrina, moving in August from a post-storm campus of trailers into an impressive two-story building equipped with the latest in high-tech education gadgetry and clad in windows.

The new building’s paint had barely dried when the nonprofit board that runs the school discovered money missing and reported it to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Shortly before Thanksgiving break, the school’s former business manager, Kelly Thompson, was booked on charges of theft and the school’s founding father and CEO, John Alford, resigned, though he was never fingered in the criminal investigation.

In February, Thompson told a federal judge that she stole $660,000 from the school to support a gambling addiction. On Thursday, she was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

“I am glad to see that justice was served,” said school president Kathleen Padian. “She was stealing money while telling teachers that there was no money for books. This was a despicable crime.”

But with a week left to go before summer vacation and no final decision made on the school’s future, emotions have been running high this week at the school. Police escorted one angry mother out of a Tuesday public meeting. Another mom has collected 100 signatures from parents on a petition calling on board members to resign because of a board motion to reduce the number of administrators at the school and residual anger over perceptions that John Alford, a beloved figure, was forced out unfairly.

“The board is not being fair to the parents,” said the creator of the petition, Kowana Lyons. “All we want is our kids to keep getting the education they are getting.”

At a board meeting Thursday evening FirstLine and the board attempted to assuage these concerns from parents.

There are no signs that any of the school’s teaching staff would be let go if FirstLine comes on. All teachers performing up to standard have been offered contracts to return, Padian said. What hasn’t been decided is how being absorbed into the larger network would affect school administrators and contracted service workers such as bus drivers, janitorial and cafeteria staff who, if the new operator takes over, would be the responsibility of the managing network.

“There are certain operational questions we can’t answer until we get a better look at the contracts and see how satisfied the school is with what they are getting,” FirstLine CEO Altman said.

Altman said that “most educational and staffing” issues are done by the network’s individual schools, not the organization. He said that the nonprofit normally takes 12 percent of a school’s per-child funding to pay for contracted and operational costs. The management fee would be dropped to 8 percent for Hughes because of the school’s tight financial situation.

“All of the money goes back to the schools,” Altman said. “None of it is accumulating in the central office.”

The move to a new charter operator is emotional for parents and teachers who have feel as if they have built the school from the ground up with the organization.

“I saw the little sign ‘Langston Hughes’ in the ground and I called the number,” Lyons recalled. “I love NOLA 180. Mr. Alford recruited every student who is there and they have teachers who are really working hard for our children.”

“Them children ready to picket or do whatever it takes to keep it the way it is. Dream it. Do it. Be it. That is our motto,” she said, repeating the school’s slogan.

A 26-year-old alumnus of Yale University and Teach for America, Sullivan has been at Hughes since the school was setting up in trailers and its leaders pounding Katrina-damaged pavement recruiting students for the school’s first year. He wears a cheery red school T-shirt on his days off and can be found at the school on Saturdays discussing things such as grading rubrics or seventh-graders who curse like sailors under the influence of bounce music.

Sullivan sits on a board committee that has spent the last half-year searching out leadership to replace Alford. Though sensitive to fears from parents and teachers that the school’s character will be lost in the transition, Sullivan says the greater risk is losing the school completely.

He says that the high-profile theft at the school could weigh more heavily on the BESE renewal vote if the state body does not see a strong management team emerging at the school.

“We’ve heard we will be renewed. On the other hand if there is strife and uncertainty…” he said, his voice trailing off.

The former business manager of a New Orleans charter school was sentenced today to five years in jail for embezzling $660,000 from the school, according to U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office.

In February, former business manager Kelly Thompson pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to making more than 150 cash withdrawals from Langston Hughes Academy over the 15 months she was employed by the independently run public school. Thompson was charged with stealing federal money because the school received more than $10,000 in taxpayer dollars from Washington. Thompson told a federal judge that she stole the money to support a gambling addiction.

School leaders who attended the sentencing this morning were pleased by the courts decision.

“I am glad to see that justice was served,” said school president Kathleen Padian. “She was stealing money while telling teachers that there was no money for books. This was a despicable crime.”

Hundreds of thousands of people from across the world are logging on to see live video of oil gushing from a broken pipe that is responsible for the gargantuan petrochemical spill in the Gulf of Mexico and increasingly, the coastal wetlands that protect New Orleans.

The live video feed, transmitted from 5,000 feet below the sea’s surface, was posted Thursday on the website of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.  Days later, massive demand to see the damage being done below the earth’s surface has jammed the feed, making the unstoppable spill unwatchable too.

Committee chair  Rep. Ed Markey, a Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, has persistently criticized BP for failing to work with outside scientists to determine the exact size of the spill. Independent scientists using what video, satellite photos and other data BP has made available have determined that the gush of oil may be much more than the  5,000 barrels a day estimated by BP.  With more data, scientists say they could better calculate the flow of oil from the sea floor. The live feed is a first step towards making more information publicly available, Markey said in a May 19 letter to BP.

The owner of the site of the former Methodist Hospital complex in eastern New Orleans has granted Mayor Mitch Landrieu a two-month extension on a $40 million deal to purchase the property, Methodist Health System Foundation CEO Fred Young Jr., said Monday.

“The mayor asked for 60 days so he could look over the deal,” Young said.

The city has until July 15 to decide on the agreement between site owner Universal Health Care and a city-supported nonprofit, Orleans Parish Hospital Service District. The agreement would commit the city to spending $40 million in federal Community Development Block Grant money –  nearly 10 percent of $411 million given to the city for discretionary post-Katrina rebuilding.

Residents of eastern New Orleans say the hospital is needed to bring families back to the storm-decimated area, and that people are now traveling as long as 30 minutes for emergency care.

Landrieu did not respond to requests for comment. In a March 21 e-mail to a neighborhood community organization representative pleading for a quick resolution,  former mayor Ray Nagin said Landrieu asked him to “stop and not purchase” the complex.

Dibert teacher Harriet Welch with one of her students Kiaeen Green. Welch will not be returning next school year.

An infant rattled his mother’s car keys in blissful ignorance as she wondered aloud where his brothers would go to school in the fall. Two students in matching school uniforms whispered and appeared confused by the worked-up parents standing around them. And a toddler covered her ears with her hands as a stranger yelled.

The afternoon atmosphere at the Olive Branch Café was anything but peaceful as parents of nearby John Dibert Elementary School gathered last week to understand the coming upheaval at the school. Operated by the state’s Recovery School District for the past four years, the stucco-clad Orleans Avenue kindergarten-through-eighth-grade elementary is scheduled to reopen in the fall as a charter school operated by First Line Schools, a nonprofit entity.

Nerves were taut. Some were frustrated. Most of the veteran teachers would not be returning. Pre-kindergaren classes were eliminated.

And LaToya Fields was just plain angry.

“The teachers at this school know my children,” she said. “They know my cell phone number and if there is a problem we know how to talk about it.  Why do we have to start over again?

“My kids are comfortable at this school.  I am comfortable with this school. If y’all want a different school, you go to a different school.”

It was a familiar scene for those who have witnessed such a change in New Orleans, which now has more than 60 percent of public-school students attending charter schools, more than any other American city. Such an experiment in urban education is unmatched since desegregation And the scene here likely is one that will play out elsewhere this year, with three more schools being converted to charters. But none of that was comforting to the parents who were just learning of changes.

Annette Lopez and other Dibert parents were there to talk about changes at the neighborhood school that many of them had come to see as one of few stable things in their tumultuous post-Katrina lives.

“I expected my two little boys to go to school with their big siblings,” Lopez said. “Can someone tell me where I am supposed to send them now?”

Lopez registered her two children for pre-kindergarten at Dibert months ago. No one told her then that the school was dropping the program, or even changing leadership, though the matter was decided in the fall.

“Now all the programs I would send my child to are filled,” she said.

In Louisiana, the state covers only part of the tab on public pre-K, leaving the school operator to fill a gap equaling about $2,000 per child, and pay for additional costs that come with educating the younger children.

First Line CEO Jay Altman said when parents were registering for the program, his organization was hoping that the RSD would accept its offer “to host” a program funded by the RSD. The idea of a RSD-charter partnership appears highly unlikely, however, given the steep cuts made this year to the state education budget, and the district’s resistance to taking on financial responsibilities at schools it has given up.

RSD spokeswoman Siona LaFrance said that the RSD has not subsidized pre-K at charters in the past and has no plans to change that policy.

“The RSD plays no role in determining which charters have pre-K,” she said in an e-mail. The state-run district estimates the annual cost of serving one 4-year-old at $7,100, not including start-up costs.

The pre-K conundrum is perhaps the least emotional of the questions parents want answered. Harder to assess is how the change in leadership will change the quality of education being offered at Dibert. Every year, the state scores public elementary schools using a calculation based on student test scores and attendance.

In 2009, Dibert fell short of the passing mark of 60, earning a score of 56.7 on a scale that theoretically tops out near 200. Still, the school’s test scores were climbing. In 2008, 24 percent of its eighth-graders passed the English Language Arts section of the LEAP test; the next year that figure rose to 67  percent. In math, the percentage passing went from 20 percent to 46 percent in that same time.

For context, it’s useful to look at the other two schools First Line operates in Orleans Parish: Arthur Ashe Charter School and Samuel J. Green Charter School. Both schools have shown steep improvements since the nonprofit took over.

Last year, Greene earned a 66.5 on its school performance score and Ashe, a 67.2.  Test scores also point to progress. In the year before Greene’s 2006 takeover, only 11 percent of eighth graders passed the English Language Arts portion of the LEAP test and 8 percent math. Last year, 55 percent passed the English section and 72 percent passed math. The math score puts the school 13 percentage points above the state average.

While only in its second year, improvements have been recorded at Ashe as well, with LEAP scores making gains between 2008 and 2009, and fourth-graders outperforming the state averages in English and science on the LEAP test in ‘09.

Dibert teachers and parents say that numbers don’t tell the whole story. Children are learning, they say, and families benefitting from an intimate, familial environment. This, they fear, will be lost to the takeover.

“We been through a whole lot together and as close as we are, I don’t think that we can have that again,” said Harriet Welch, a grandmotherly teacher from New Orleans who has taught in the city for 10 years, the past four at Dibert.  She will not be back in the fall. “I feel like I was not invited.”

Low test scores at Dibert only accelerated a process underway since soon after Katrina when Mid-City neighbors and parents began discussing reopening the school as a community-run charter. In 2006, the Mid-City Neighborhood Association applied to the Louisiana Department of Education for the charter.

When that application was rejected, the group began seeking out charter management organizations to team up with. After a few failed matchmaking efforts, First Line got the support of the committee and in October, the state approved First Line’s application to take over the school. While the PTA and First Line say there were plenty of opportunities for parents to learn about the changes, some parents say that no one from the school or the RSD reached out to make sure that more than a small number of connected parents were informed.

“We never received any information, nothing at all until my child’s teacher stopped me in the hall two days ago and told me, ” Dibert mom Cheryl Conner said.

Conner lives around the corner from the school and has sent her two children there since it reopened after Katrina.

“I am quite upset,” she said. “These teachers have done an excellent job with my children. They are on the honor roll. I am worried that once the teachers they know leave, their grades will drop and my kids will be pushed out too.”

Parent Donnica Conway Strawder said she is excited about the takeover, and that a silent majority of parents at the school are too. A member of the PTA, she said parents involved in the chartering committee told parents in the association of the charter’s plans. The parent organization then sent information about meetings to the school for distribution, she said. Why it doesn’t seem to have reached some parents, she does not know.

“I am not sure how they did not know about this,” Strawder said.  “Apparently, the notices didn’t reach them and neither did the newspaper.”

Strawder said that the real breakdown in communication was between teachers unhappy about the change in leadership and First Line. “Teachers are fueling the anger to advance their own agenda,” she said.

When conventional schools are taken over by charters, the new leadership hires its own staff.  Some employees stay on, but typically, many leave either voluntarily, or because they are not rehired. Altman said the organization guaranteed jobs to all Dibert teachers who earned high marks — a four or five on a five-point scale— on an annual teacher performance review done by the district.

“We just said, interview first to make sure there is a fit,” Altman said.

Those teachers who scored below a four on the review were invited to apply, along with anyone else interested in working at the school. About a third of the existing staff was eligible for a guaranteed spot and of those, a number had informed First Line they would not be returning, he said.

“Our No. 1 goal is to create a good school, and because of that, we base all hiring decisions on performance,” Altman said.

In response to fears that the new Dibert staff would lack the experience at the school now, he  said that the organization prides itself on maintaining staffs with a mix of veteran teachers and younger staff. At Ashe and Greene combined, there are only two first-year teachers and they do not teach full course loads, he said. While Altman could not provide an exact number of second year teachers on the two staffs, he could recall no more than four between the two schools and said that typically young Teach for America participants make up a “very low percentage.”

Teachers at Wednesday’s meeting complained about the rehiring process and said that school leadership was not upfront about the changes being planned. Principal Chad Webb declined an interview request and referred all questions to First Line. But at last week’s meeting, Dean of Students Charles Medley did not dispute the allegations.

“Everyone is to blame, “ Medley said. “Everyone wasn’t doing what they were supposed to be doing all year.”  “This has a lot to do with adults, not kids,” he added. Medley is leaving Dibert at the end of this school year to take a job with ReNew Charter Management Organization, another local school management company. This year, ReNEW will take over Laurel and Live Oak elementary schools, two non-charters now run by the Recovery School District.

Medley warned parents and teachers that if they failed to present a united front, and “all this arguing happens in front of First Line,” they would be “shut out.”

Yet in one recent power play over Joseph A. Craig Elementary School in Treme, it was First Line that got a door closed. After community members raised concerns about local voice in the RSD decision to hand the school over the nonprofit, First Line dropped its bid for the school saying that it did not want to start a school without the full support of the community.

“In the absence of that, it would be really difficult to design Craig as a community school that fully takes advantage of the resources and traditions” of the neighborhood,” Tony Recasner, FirstLine’s president and the co-founder of the city’s first charter school, told The Times-Picayune.

Caroline Roemer Shirley, the executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools believes that without changes in the way charters are awarded, conflicts will continue. “We need to figure out a better process with multiple opportunities for public involvement,” Shirley said.

There is room in the state’s charter school law to allow for parents to vote on whether or not the state should allow a school to be taken over.  Such a vote may help ensure more public outreach is done by charter school operators and the RSD, and should be considered, she said.

“The charter movement is about empowering communities to make choices about their children’s educations, but instead right now it is something people feel that is being being done to them, and that must change.

Despite what her shirt says, one participant needs to take a rest during the Thursday morning protest against new police Superintendent Ronal Serpas.

Police-brutality activists rallied on the steps of City Hall today calling for the removal of New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Ronal Serpas.

“We want a completely new landscape free of people who came up in a NOPD culture of abuse and terror,” said organizer W.C. Johnson. Johnson said that while he is pleased the Department of Justice will be intervening in the city’s criminal justice process, he does not trust Serpas to be a good partner for the federal agency.

Serpas has pledged to cooperate with the Justice Department’s involvement, which Mayor Mitch Landrieu has invited.

The activists, part of a coalition called Community United for Change, attracted questioning stares from passers-by, but little more than impassive shrugs from the uniformed police officers watching from the sidelines as they marched in a circle, chanting and waving anti-Serpas signs.  Mostly made up of activists who have been fighting for NOPD reform for decades, the group also included a handful of younger activists, some of whom joined the fight in the aftermath of post-Katrina police brutality.

“There are some new faces,” New Orleans native Sandra Ewell said. “People are coming in and joining in.”

Ewell said she hoped the group’s presence at 1300 Perdido St. would remind Landrieu of his campaign promise to listen to the city’s residents as he reforms government.

“We need to get his attention so he knows he has to work with the grassroots community,” she said.

Activists have long asked police get to know the people in the neighborhoods and provide more transparent data on crime-fighting efforts.  In a nod to that, Landrieu and Serpas have emphasized their commitment to increased transparency and community involvement.

At the superintendent’s swearing-in Tuesday, he said he plans to open all citywide COMSTAT meetings to the public and the media.  District commanders will be encouraged to open district-level meetings as well, he said.

“It is just plain right to invite people from all walks of life into the process,” Serpas said. At COMSTAT meetings, officers review incident reports, crime statistics and maps in hopes of providing quantitative analysis to help officers do their jobs more effectively.

Unlike more hard-line activists at the rally, Ewell said she would be willing to work with Serpas despite her opposition.

“If he shows that he is fair to the community and the needs of the community, then I will be happy to participate,” she said.