It’s a recent Tuesday morning at New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School. In Rahn Broady’s environmental science classroom, groups of three or four students analyzed an assignment as instrumental trip hop played through a speaker.
Broady is a biologist by study, but he’s been a teacher for 24 years and has brought his eye for nature into the classroom. On a low table beside the whiteboard sits the white skull of a feral pig, framed by a robin’s nest, a songbird suspended in a glass jar, and bug specimens pinned by his students. Around the room are wooden engravings with narratives his students wrote about native plants and animals. He came to Sci High last school year after the school board closed the Living School, the high school in the East where he used to teach.
“Alligator your computers,” Broady says at the beginning of class time, motioning for his students to angle their laptop screens down towards their keyboards. “I need y’all to focus.”
He stood at the front of his honors environmental science class in a pair of black skinny jeans, combat boots and a Yankees hat. He wore a leather cuff on one wrist, four silver rings on the other hand, and a black t-shirt with white text that reads “you can’t love freedom & hate diversity.”=
Broady regularly challenges his environmental science students to solve real-life problems in the world around them. Today, in the second week of school, he asked his students to turn their attention to a new intersection of Louisiana legislation and culture: balloons.
Last month, a new Louisiana law went into effect banning the “planned, intentional release of 12 or more balloons,” folding it into a littering statute that can levy up to $2,500 in fines for repeat offenses. Louisiana is now the 12th state to ban balloon releases. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. John Illg (R – Harahan), pointed to the harmful impacts of releasing plastic, latex, or Mylar balloons into the environment.
Entergy says balloons are among several non-weather-related causes for power outages affecting thousands of customers. One balloon caused a power outage that led to a nearly citywide boil advisory in 2024. Later that year, Entergy pushed the New Orleans City Council to enact a partial ban, targeting the release of Mylar, metal, and foil balloons, which conduct electricity when they hit utility lines. Similarly, a foil confetti cannon set off during Mardi Gras at the 2023 Cleopatra Parade knocked out power for 1,500 people, prompting a confetti gun ban. The council did not outlaw traditional balloon releases of latex balloons, which pop when they hit wires.
But balloon releases are a long-held New Orleans tradition, especially common at funerals and memorials in the city. The students split into groups, huddling around laptops as they made final tweaks to the slideshows they were preparing to share. Broady strolled around the class, peeking at screens. In the front row, senior David Peña, born and raised in the city, pushes back his long hair while checking through his slides. He said he’s found that balloon releases are especially common when honoring someone killed by gun violence.
“The times that I’ve seen it, it’s always victims of violence,” said Peña.
Broady challenged the students to find a way to replace climate-damaging balloons with something affordable and accessible that would still fit New Orleans culture.
The students’ specific task was to examine the environmental effects of balloons and explore other options. But in the larger sense, Broady wants students to engage with climate issues in practical, immediate ways, here in their own city.
“We’re far beyond coming up with solutions for climate change, because we have legislation, we have people in the office that are actively against that,” Broady told The Lens. So he asks his students, “‘What do we do as individuals?’” he said. “It’s important they’re hitting issues that they can see at home.”
Balloons harming wildlife
As Broady’s students presented, it was clear students appreciated how New Orleans’ geography — surrounded by wetlands and not far from the open Gulf of Mexico — make the issue especially relevant here.
“Sea turtles often mistake balloons for jellyfish, which is their primary prey,” said junior Abijah-Wood Dawson, who wore Sci High’s royal blue uniform and sat in the front row of the class. He had analyzed the legislation and saw some problems with it that he was excited to share, he said, rubbing his high-top-fade haircut.
Broady sat down across from student Ireal Wood, who blinked at her screen, eyelids dusted with glittery shadow. Wood recalled being part of a balloon release for her uncle’s passing when she was younger. “But then I didn’t see where the balloons go after they’re done. I used to think they went to space, actually,” she said.
Balloons don’t reach space, but they can reach a height of about six miles before they deflate. As they fall back to earth, they often wind up in waterways or the open ocean, where vulnerable wildlife can mistake them for food, ingest them, then starve to death as the debris blocks their digestive system.
As Dawson noted, endangered sea turtles eat balloon debris that they mistake for jellyfish. And balloons are many times deadlier for seabirds than other types of plastic: nearly one in three seabirds that eat even a single piece of balloon die.
Wildlife outside the water is at risk as well. Sci High senior Felicia Carter and her project partner Tiron Young said Broady showed them pictures of birds and cows tangled in balloon string. For them, the images were enough reason to brainstorm alternatives.
Carter even suggested raising the fine to discourage the tradition altogether.
“I feel like they should do more, like $10,000, because for $10,000 you would go into debt. Nobody wants to go into debt because they did a balloon release,” said Carter, her fingertips poking out of the oversized windbreaker she wore over a blue Sci High polo.
Others disagreed.
“The best way to really go about this is less so creating harsh punishments for those who release balloons, and more so to inform communities and push the idea that balloons aren’t good for anyone,” Peña said.
Balloons and infrastructure
Balloons — alongside birds, squirrels, and heavy rain — have also been blamed by Entergy for power outages affecting thousands of customers in recent years.
Students in Broady’s classroom knew those frustrations firsthand.
Just the day before, Dawson’s house had lost power, he said. Online records show that Entergy reported an outage affecting 13 people on Dawson’s street that morning. That day, when he looked up, he saw a Mylar balloon hanging from his utility line, he said. It isn’t clear whether the balloon caused the outage, but several students in class remembered when Entergy staffers visited the school a year or two ago, and showed them firsthand how a Mylar balloon touching a power line could set off a shower of sparks.
Later this year, Broady will work with his students to repair a huge hole in the school’s main field, where students play soccer and hang out during lunch. His students determined that the hole was caused by human error during construction. “Whoever built the school failed to install a downspout, so each time it rains heavily, more sand and dirt and yard fill is displaced,” he said.
They’ll be coming up with a plan to fix it soon, he said. He also teaches about fast fashion, food culture, and how to shop responsibly, he said.
He also urges students to focus on ideas, not grades. “I’m like, …‘Get out of numbers, get out of letters,’” Broady told The Lens. “I want them to leave this class like a totally different person, shift the way they consume and think about every choice that they make and how it’s relative to their environment.”
He’s no idealist – in fact, he’s “all about doom and destruction,” he said — but he tries to balance the environmental realities of the present day by mobilizing students to make a positive impact on a local level.
When it was Dawson’s turn to present, he expressed doubt over the effectiveness of legislation, which he’d carefully scrutinized.
“I don’t believe law enforcement will really enforce it. There’s a couple loopholes in there,” Dawson said. As he saw it, the structure of the “litter abatement fund” where fines go is also ambiguous.
“This money would be used maybe towards beautifying richer neighborhoods instead of the poor neighborhoods that actually need that help,” he said, pointing to a rich Louisiana history of local governments mismanaging funds.
Suggested substitutions for balloons
Broady said he expected some pushback to his proposal to change a longtime part of New Orleans culture, but was pleasantly surprised at how students were open to the challenge.
His students weighed the feasibility and costs of possible replacements: First came ideas drawn from what mourners often already do to honor a loved one. People could light candles or host potlucks. Some suggested releasing white doves or trained homing pigeons. One group wondered whether it would be possible to release butterflies.
Growing up in Arkansas, some people planted trees to commemorate a life, Dawson said.
A couple rows behind Peña, a group of students worked on a bilingual presentation, the slides written up in both English and Spanish. They immigrated to New Orleans from other countries, including Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru. Nohemi Bautista, who grew up in Guatemala, says she didn’t grow up with balloon releases. But in a continuation of the centuries of cultural blending that created New Orleans, they discussed introducing their own traditions: giving flowers, or just having a party with music.
The environmental group Balloons Blow has other suggested further alternatives: ribbon dances, drumming, floating flowers, or blowing bubbles.
Amid the presentations, some students noted that the bill will likely affect low-income communities the most. Native New Orleanians — those most likely to value cultural traditions — have lower economic mobility than transplants. Balloon releases appeal because they are affordable and easy — an acceptable grief ritual that requires only a quick stop at the Family Dollar, as Peña puts it.
Any replacement, then, would have to be affordable. Support from the state could even help residents transition to a more environmentally-friendly tradition, Dawson pointed out. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries could “not only give out free trees, but provide the spaces, and really make that alternative accessible for anyone, no matter your income,” he said.
To capture emotions similar to balloon releases, one group proposed releasing paper boats into a body of water, with beeswax candles that would extinguish over time. That might mimic the feeling of watching balloons drift out of sight, and the feeling paired with it: letting a lost loved one go with grace.
