Jordan Brown, 17, would be flying north later in the day. So he walked into Delores T. Arthur School for Young Men wheeling a large black suitcase stuffed with warm winter clothes, plus extra socks and Emergen-C added by his mom.
It was his last time inside the school that he’d hoped to attend until he graduated in the spring.
On Thursday morning, the high school senior planned to ace his final exam in his law class before boarding a plane to Minneapolis, to where he’ll compete against students across the country in a debate tournament this weekend.
There — his voice will be heard.
During each round, he’ll argue in back-and-forth debate speeches, speaking at a rapid auctioneer-style pace indiscernible to the inexperienced ear. It’s a format used in Lincoln-Douglas debate – Jordan’s specialty.
The rapid-fire speaking is necessary because students must make complete arguments and cross-examinations during limited-time windows, ranging between three and seven minutes.
Last week in New Orleans, Jordan faced the ultimate resolution. In debate-style parlance, it would be phrased like this: Resolved: That the Orleans Parish School Board should not close Delores T. Arthur School for Young Men mid-year.
Like everyone who made a public comment, he was given just two minutes to convince the Orleans Parish School Board about his beloved 89-student school — the place where he’d found himself, through debate and community. Though the school had experienced an enrollment drop this year that tanked its budget, he argued that the board should resist closure.
“You’re shutting the doors on young black men,” Jordan stated, speaking at a passionate clip, as his schoolmates stood in a row in the back of the boardroom to show their support. “People are dying. Look at the area you’re shutting us down in. Gentilly. When the East has constantly shown you people are getting robbed. People are resorting to carjackings, stealing because they don’t have access to things,” he said.
But those kids on the wrong path are not coming from Delores T. Arthur, he said. “This school has stopped people from doing this.”
He ended his argument with a question. “What is the reasoning behind shutting a school down, if you have seen they have done such good?”
In response to Jordan and other classmates who spoke, board president Katie Baudouin said the board wasn’t technically voting to close the school, because the high school’s board had voted to turn in its own charter-operating contract. The board was only voting to accept the charter’s “voluntary action.”
Board member Olin Parker pointed to the Gentilly charter school’s administration and its projected budget deficit. “That is a failure of the adults who are leading your school,” Parker said. “It’s unfortunate, but it is a reality that this school could not remain financially sustainable.”
What would it cost to keep the school open, asked board member Nolan Marshall Jr. Fateama Fulmore, the district’s acting superintendent, said the school was looking at a $1 million deficit.
Baudouin redirected the conversation. “The action item before us is to accept the voluntary surrender, Mr. Marshall,” she said.
After a request by Marshall, who asked that district staff to review the budget, and a last comment from Parker, who praised the school’s debate team, the board voted to accept the school’s closure. Only Marshall voted against it. In the back of the room, students who had stood straight in a row while their peers spoke heard the vote and slunk into chairs, their heads in their hands.
A week later, when the final bell of the day rang on Friday, the school closed its doors.
No time to grieve
Jordan left the board meeting with his mom. He was sad, he told the TV cameras waiting outside. But he couldn’t stop to mourn.
He went home and studied. It was crunch time. He had to prepare for semester finals and for an upcoming debate invitational held that weekend at Isidore Newman School, where he won four rounds and advanced to the finals, often sweeping the votes of three-judge panels.
In this system of charters, which prioritizes student choice, Jordan had chosen Delores T. Arthur because the school’s focus and foundation on speech and debate was unlike any other in the city. There, he’d found “Black excellence,” he said.
But now, his mom, Yoshekia Brown, was focused on his other high-school options, which were fairly limited. She got onto her computer and logged onto the New Orleans Common Application Process (NCAP), commonly called OneApp, its previous name. She spoke on the phone with other parents to strategize, about how Jordan and his classmates might be able to land together at one school.
Some of the best schools were unavailable to them: Benjamin Franklin Senior High School doesn’t accept mid-year transfers, neither does New Orleans Military and Maritime Academy. Among private schools, though Isidore Newman had a debate team, its credit system would complicate Jordan’s path to graduation and its annual tuition tops $24,000.
The choices did not seem like choices.
Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and founded the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University, told Forbes that school closures defy comparisons to simple consumer economics. “If Pat and Sam are tired of eating Big Macs, they can switch to Whoppers with little trouble or cost,” he said. “But switching schools comes with high costs, both academically and personally. New school may mean either missed material or wasteful redundancy. And starting over socially can be hugely taxing for students.”
The Browns mulled their priorities: keep Jordan with his classmates or find a school with an established debate program, a rarity among New Orleans public schools, as it turns out.
“I’m trying to keep Jay in debate,” said his mom, who believes it shaped him into who he was today. “Through speech and debate,” she said, “Jordan has been transformed into a critical thinker who champions for the disenfranchised and undervalued parts of society.”
His mother thought back to the beginning of his senior year this fall. She had no inkling that he would be spending Christmas break this way: applying for high school and college at the same time. This week, after helping Jordan pack for his trip to Minneapolis, she dealt with OneApp and then turned to the next pile, big envelopes containing college-acceptance letters, some with scholarships offers, from the University of Kentucky and Michigan State University, the first of a broad field of schools who’d reached out to Jordan, impressed with his debate skills.
Sudden school closures had bookended Jordan’s school career, beginning with Lagniappe Academy, where he’d started as a kindergartener, and ending with the Arthur School closure five months before graduation. “We have been down this road before and I’m so glad he is resilient and able to press past this,” she said.
She’d hoped for a less abrupt ending this time. At the OPSB meeting, students had begged the school board to allow Arthur School to stay open at least through May, to avoid a mid-year transfer for students, especially the school’s 21 seniors.
“If y’all really care about us, let us last until the end of the year,” said senior DeCarlos Griffin, as he recalled a previous visit to the board, after the Delores T. Arthur debate team competed at Loyola University. Board members had praised the team as the embodiment of Black Excellence and gave them certificates.
But to Griffin’s mind, his school hadn’t failed him alone. The board had seen that the school could produce excellence, he said, questioning the board’s fairness and their understanding of what it meant to choose a school like Delores T. Aaron that offered a specialized curriculum. “There’s no other places to go that offer these classes,” he said.
A mother who spoke at the meeting shook her head sadly at the pain she saw in the young men’s faces. “This is not the closure of a building. It is the erasure of a lifeline,” she said. “These young men are paying the price for the failure of leadership, accountability and the governing body of the school board.”
The buck stops where?
In recent years, the city’s charter system has added some guardrails that restrict its free-market approach. For instance, it can be very difficult for students to transfer schools during the year unless they qualify under a limited number of “hardship” transfers that must be cleared through the district, which typically requires signoff from the transferring school, and sometimes a hearing, before approval or denial from the district.
But an entire school can close mid-year — forcing students to transfer – without the same level of deliberation.
Certainly, school closure is baked into the free-market charter system, which closes failing schools and renews charters for passing schools. But as New Orleanians have seen over the past few decades, school closures are painful.
Because of the power dynamics and pain experienced by parents, children, and communities, some observers see deeply tragic, historical echoes. “Every time a school closes, I think about the history of our city as the largest domestic slave-trading market in the country. I wonder about how the disruption caused by school closures echoes this deep history of forced removals and human capitalization,” said Adrinda Kelly, head of BE NOLA, short for Black Excellence NOLA, which helps to support schools, to assure that Black children can thrive.
Kelly, who has been critical about the city’s charter system, asks why failing schools or schools on the brink of closure are not supported further by the district instead of simply closed. “The decision to close a school is never easy,” she said. “It is also never just about improving education, particularly in a landscape as historically and politically inflected as this one.”
Even for those who fervently believe in the charter system, the same question resounds whenever charter schools close in New Orleans. Inevitably, people ask: who is to blame?
Authorizers like the Orleans Parish School Board point to the charter school administrators. Schools authorized by those bodies ask why their school wasn’t supported through its struggles. Communities ask why shaky schools in other parts of town stay open but theirs had to close. In this case, students like Jordan ask why their school was allowed to open in the fall, only to have the rug pulled out from under them mid-year.
There is no predictable path for families whose schools close abruptly.
In 2018, two other schools slated for closure got a boost from school district personnel. The school board asked the financially mismanaged Edgar P. Harney Charter School on South Claiborne Avenue to surrender its charter mid-year. But the district took the school over and operated it directly for the rest of the school year. That same year, Cypress Academy on Orleans Avenue, told parents in May that it would not reopen in the fall. The district stepped in to run it for a year.
It’s unclear what role the district’s current financial crisis plays in its decision not to step in, to operate.
In 2018, the district was not in a financial crisis – and more of its schools were able to reach sufficient enrollment, because of higher student numbers.
Closures more likely to affect small, ‘unconventional’ schools
With the closure of Living School last year, followed by Delores T. Arthur this year, the system is gradually eliminating unconventional options for high-schoolers. Small schools that specialize in curriculum or attract certain populations, such as non-English speakers or students with social-emotional issues, work with much tighter budgets. An unexpected decrease in enrollment, or an increase in, say, students with special needs – such as the increase seen at Noble Minds, which also handed in its charter this month – can quickly strain budgets or skew test scores.
Given those variables, the Delores T. Arthur closure could be an instructive lesson in how the board and the district could better support unconventional schools and anticipate and/or forestall closures.
Three years ago, school leader Byron T. Arthur – who had worked at Jesuit and Holy Cross high schools, and The Stuart Hall School for Boys – started a school that he named for his mother, Delores T. Arthur, a longtime educator in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. Located on Gentilly Boulevard, in the former St. James Major Catholic School building, the school started with grade nine in the fall of 2021 and added a grade each year. This year’s 12th graders made up its first senior class.
But the October 1 enrollment count, which determines each school’s state funding in Louisiana, came in lower than expected. Last year, according to state data, Arthur School enrolled 114 students. This year, October enrollment stood at 98, a drop that resulted in significantly less funding.
In October, after the count, Superintendent Avis Williams told him that the board needed to surrender its charter. She was “adamant,” Arthur said. His board members initially refused. “They didn’t want to offer to surrender the charter without exploring all options,” he said, noting that they also had hope of fundraising to close the school’s budget gap, which then stood at $200,000.
After Williams resigned in mid-November, Fulmore took over, bringing a different tone toward the charter. “She never closed the door,” Arthur said. But when the hoped-for money didn’t materialize, his board, mindful of the Williams’ October order, “thought it prudent” to relinquish the school’s charter, he said.
During the OPSB meeting, it seemed that the school board was unaware of Williams’ October order to Arthur’s board. Some parents became upset as Baudouin re-directed the board to its role, saying that the charter had voluntarily surrendered its charter.
“Who told them to??” Shane Griffin, DeCarlos’ father, asked rhetorically over the crowd.
Still, the financial situation was dire. Early in the academic year, after missing the August 15th budget-approval date, the school filed a budget with a negative $200,000 fund balance.
To finish the academic year would have left the school $800,000 in arrears, Arthur said. At the OPSB meeting, Fulmore said that the shortfall could have approached $1 million.
The cumulative effect of school closure
When Jordan approached the microphone last week, he looked at school board members and introduced himself. He nodded at longtime board member Nolan Marshall Jr. Then he provided a little additional context.
“This is the second school I’ve gone to that shut down. Mr. Marshall knows this,” he said.
Jordan had started school at Lagniappe Academy, a charter school authorized by the Recovery School District that closed in 2015. Like many schools of that post-Katrina era, Lagniappe operated in trailers, in the parking lot of the former Winn-Dixie on Basin Street.
The RSD forced Lagniappe to shut down after the Louisiana Department of Education released a damning report on the school’s special-education services.
Lagniappe, and John McDonogh High School the year before, were some of the first school closures in the charter-reform era to be covered heavily by local news.
Lagniappe parents felt powerless, they told The Lens then. They were simply told that, because of how school leaders dealt with special ed, the school must close. “You don’t remove 160 kids over one person’s, maybe even two’s, mistakes,” one parent had told The Lens. “I made the choice last year for my son to come here. And I was proud of that choice because this is a damn good school. And now that choice is being taken away from me.”
Jordan started at Lagniappe in kindergarten and stayed there for three years, through the end of second grade. Then his parents were told that he had to transfer from the only school he’d known. “This feels very reminiscent of that pain for the students I felt back then,” said Yoshekia Brown, Jordan’s mom.
“Parents like me chose the program that was best suited for our children and the path that they were/are on,” his mom wrote in a text. “The unfortunate thing is that those programs don’t always make enough traction in the beginning and are unable to sustain themselves independently.”
In the closure of Delores T. Arthur, the district’s shrinking enrollment played a role, acknowledged Parker. If the district had more students, he had no doubt Arthur would have enough students to balance the budget, he said. Also at play is the need for the district to “right-size,” closing schools to ensure that more schools are fully enrolled. Though the board has called for the district to right-size, the task can only be done incrementally, as failing charter schools come up for contract renewals.
A possible Delores T. Arthur wing at Booker T. Washington
The district’s open seats may have worked to the advantage of Delores T. Arthur students. Because Booker T. Washington High School in Central City, like many city schools, is under-enrolled, it had extra space that it offered to Delores T. Arthur students. Under a fledgling agreement forged between KIPP leaders and Arthur parents, any willing juniors and seniors will be able to transfer to Booker T. Washington school building in Central City.
So far, there have been discussions about a special wing within the school that could accommodate the transferring students – and about extracurricular support, to help the school maintain its debate team.
Arthur said that he’s grateful that KIPP opened its doors to his students as a group. Whether the Arthur school will be able to maintain its curriculum and any of its teaching staff was still unclear, as were the costs of the new school-within-a-school.
Late last week, Jordan’s mom coordinated the details of the possible transfer to KIPP while Jordan prepped for his debate in Minneapolis.
But the arrangement with Booker T. Washington felt too incomplete for DeCarlos Griffin’s family.
On the way home from debate club on Wednesday, DeCarlos stopped by his elementary alma mater, Morris Jeff Community School. After talking with Morris Jeff staff, he drove home and told his parents he wanted to join the senior class there in January. That night, they filled out the paperwork together.
“I’m proud of him,” said his father, Shane Griffin. “At 17, I wouldn’t have gone to another school and seen the admissions counselor. I thought that was real mature of him.”
DeCarlos confirmed with Morris Jeff’s counselor that his credits will all transfer perfectly, said his mom, Chakakhan Griffin. His only disappointment is that he will be separated from his Arthur School classmates, who are like brothers to him, she said.
For the Griffin family, it seems like the best outcome, though they understood that KIPP has had very little time to flesh out its plans for the Arthur kids. “Given that he’s already leaving a disjointed situation, I couldn’t risk putting him back in a disjointed situation,” his mom said.
He needed something stable – like all kids do, she said.