Dearly Beloved,
If you grew up below the Mason-Dixon, you know July 31 the way other people know the first frost. It’s not a date. It’s a door closing.
Everything after it — the school supplies, the haircuts, the last cousin’s visit — is just counting down to the first week of August. That’s when school starts back below the Mason-Dixon line and the good part of summer is over. I’ve noticed that my whole life. I’m a noticer of patterns.
And every year, right about now, the noticing turns into something closer to grief.
Living and dying by the calendar
For years, as I oversaw student teachers through Brothers Empowered to Teach, my life ran on two calendars: the public school year and the college academic year. Add New Orleans to that, where every charter network runs its own schedule, and you get a third calendar that isn’t really one at all. It’s dozens, each with its own start date, break week, and idea of when a semester ends.
That was the job. Not metaphorically; but literally. Thirty-four young people one semester. Fifty the next, and by then we’d grown into Baton Rouge too. This meant two cities’ worth of calendars, and none of them planned by talking to each other. New Orleans is nearly all charter (Leah Chase is the exception), meaning every school runs its own schedule. Baton Rouge still has traditional public schools alongside its charters, which means a third system layered on top of the other two. All of it scattered across two cities where no two schools started, broke, or tested in the same week.
When your region is dominated by fragmented, decentralized school systems, the start of the academic year highlights a systemic crisis, of clashing schedules, and of dozens of students who live on the same blocks heading off to different schools after spending the summer talking online to their school friends across town.
You learn to hold all of it at once, because a kid’s whole week is shaped by a calendar somebody else set without thinking about anyone outside their own building. It determines when they can meet, when they’re wiped out, when they’re testing, when they’re barely hanging on.
So when I say I get a little sad watching the school year gear back up, it’s not nostalgia. It’s muscle memory. Some part of me is still doing the math.
I was reminded of that math sitting in on the steering committee for The Village, a real estate investment cooperative I’m helping think through in its earliest stages. How do you even structure something built around buying back and preserving community spaces for the people who were raised in them? One of the people who helped catalyze the whole thing said it almost offhand: doesn’t it seem like school starts earlier every year, and like none of the calendars match anymore?
She wasn’t in education. She was just noticing the same thing I’ve been noticing my whole life, from a completely different angle. That’s usually how you know a pattern is real: when it shows up in a room that has nothing to do with the thing that you thought you were the only one tracking.
The new building that got it wrong
Here in New Orleans, we built big after Katrina. Beautiful new schools, funded by disaster money and good intentions. About 15 years ago, when I was early in the work of Brothers Empowered to Teach — an organization I co-founded — and sitting on a local school board, I walked through one of the first new charter schools to open in the city, a Gentilly campus near Dillard. I noticed something odd: the kindergartners were on one end of the building; the lunchroom was on the other.
Pretty. New. And logistically built for nobody who actually has to walk it every day.
And honestly, the districts don’t always know who walks its schools every day, until they show up trying to close them based solely on data, not people.
The older buildings tell a more complicated story, and it’s not a simple new-bad, old-good split either. Some of the most beautiful schools in the city right now are the historic ones that finally got renovated.
Sophie B. Wright, built in 1912, sat visibly blighted for years before a $27 million restoration in 2016 brought back its original cypress windows and heart pine floors. Eleanor McMain, a 1932 Art Deco landmark, had peeling paint and parapets leaning outward from water damage before a 2019 renovation fixed it. But that’s not universal. Other historic buildings are still waiting on money that hasn’t come, including the one that houses the high school that is now closed and merged into JFK.
That’s not nostalgia talking; it’s math. New Orleans has lost 3,000 students since 2020 and is projected to lose another 10% by 2029. The district needs to close five or six K-8 schools and two or three high schools just to get remaining buildings up to 92% full. Four high schools have already announced they’re closing or merging next year.
And when the district tried to close the Leah Chase School named for the woman who fed this city, the community didn’t wait for the board to change its mind. They raised the money themselves, including a $2 million gift from one student’s grandparent, that bought the school another year.
That’s Louisiana. The private sector acts, then the public sector shows up. Even when the private sector is a grandmother.
The pendulum, in two cities
New Orleans’s old buildings are old by their own timeline — 1912, 1932, built for a Gulf Coast city, not for winter.
From visits to family in Ohio, I see how Cleveland’s and Columbus’s are older in a different way. A lot of what’s closing or being reused in both cities was built by the WPA in the 1930s, during a depression to outlast one. Thick brick, real stone, the kind of construction nobody budgets for anymore and they’re still standing. The institutions inside them are the ones running out of people.
Cleveland is doing the thing New Orleans is circling: it just did it all at once. One December vote closed or merged 29 out of 88 schools. It was driven by enrollment that’s been cut in half since 2004, a reduction from 70,000 to 34,000 kids.
Who occupies district buildings becomes a different equation when student populations dip. As communities grapple with empty schools or changing structures, districts that spent years going off track can suddenly be reminded exactly who they were supposed to serve.
The city of Cleveland is now accepting proposals from developers to reuse a dozen of those buildings. The request for proposals offers the flexibility to lease rather than sell and to go below market rate in neighborhoods that have been disinvested in for decades.
It’s the most honest version of what New Orleans is inching toward: school buildings that are closed, empty for a moment, then given a second life doing something the neighborhood actually needs.
But a 15-minute drive away, in the suburb that’s always been in my family’s background, the opposite is happening. Shaker Heights is tearing down part of the old Woodbury building. Woodbury was Shaker’s junior high from the early 1930s until 1985. Whichever generation of my family passed through Shaker at the time knew it as exactly that: a junior high.
But now Shaker Heights is demolishing the pool, the gym, and both wings and keeping the 1918 center to renovate into a new Middle Years building, opening in 2027.
It won’t be a second middle school. It’ll replace the current one, which has been sitting a mile further from the high school since the ‘80s. That was before it got demoted to an elementary school and the district built distance between its middle schoolers and its high schoolers that never needed to exist.
Forty years later, they’re undoing that. The district now runs a full Universal Pre-K program. Families are moving back.
Same county. Same decade. One district emptying out. One district is rebuilding to hold more kids than it has in years — and it’s not even that simple within Cleveland itself. Downtown Cleveland’s population has grown 32% since 2010, even as the city as a whole kept losing people for decades.
This isn’t a Cleveland story or a Shaker story. It’s a national one.
Across the country, people are moving back into urban and urban-adjacent places. Not evenly, not everywhere, but in specific pockets where something about the place still works.
Shaker is one of the clearest examples of it: an urban-feeling suburb with a school system strong enough to meet the moment, deliberately and imperfectly integrated for 60 years. The kind of place that Beverly Daniel Tatum could have chosen for her writings about work on race and schools. Where the district’s reputation has risen and fallen for decades depending on how Black the building looked to outsiders, regardless of what was actually happening inside it.
What’s happening at Woodbury isn’t really innovation. It’s the district recognizing it forgot more than it remembered, and rebuilding its way back to a floor plan it already had 40 years ago.
It took Shaker 40 years to get back here. I never grew up there, not in any continuous sense.
But my own time in the buildings, scattered between my family’s IBM relocations across the country, amounts to first grade at Moreland, then the spring of my junior year and all of my senior year at Shaker Heights High School.
But for us, the town is always in the background.
My grandparents lived there. So did my aunts, uncles, cousins. I’m a third-generation Shaker Raider; my brother and cousin might be the fourth. The place raised generations of my family even in the years it wasn’t raising me.
If you read the 49 and Outside issue a few weeks back, you already know the shape of this. IBM chose my parents’ address more than once. Shaker was one of the few addresses that my family continued to choose when they returned to Ohio, generation after generation.
My first-grade year at Moreland is where I learned to code turtle graphics and took an honest-to-God cooking class, before the population drain. White flight, the drug years, the tax base thinning out, closed it and turned it into a library.
Then IBM chose Oklahoma, which I see as the in-between. It had the opposite problem. I was the only Black kid in my Christian school building, and when we moved to public school, half the classrooms were trailers parked on the blacktop. The district had outgrown its buildings faster than it could fund new ones.
Overcrowded there. Emptying out here. Same country, same decade, opposite math.
To me, what brought Shaker back wasn’t a slogan. It was the closeness. People wanted to live somewhere they knew their neighbors’ names.
The fight nobody wants to have
Columbus is stuck in the middle of that pendulum, and it’s ugly. The district enrollment peaked at 110,173 students in 1971. Now, it’s around 46,000. A task force flagged 20 of the district’s 113 buildings for possible closure; the board managed to talk it down to five.
At that meeting, a political scientist said something I haven’t been able to shake. For too long, he said, districts like this one have operated as much like an adult employment agency and a real estate holding company as they have like a school system.
(Photo of 1974 school integration at Thurber Elementary in Columbus by Thomas O’Halloran courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs)
Here’s what that looks like on the ground. I was invited into a conversation in the Mount Vernon area, on Columbus’s Near East Side, where I learned the district’s policy. At the time, they leased or sold buildings and had to retain some percentage of educational use, a smart hedge that keeps the door open for early learning centers even after a school closes.
But the conversation kept circling back to a building that wasn’t even a school. The Neighborhood House had sat on Atcheson Street in Columbus for over a century, serving whole Black families, childcare, senior transportation, a food pantry — until it closed in 2016, starved for funding.
For nine years it just sat there, windows boarded, waiting. A local entrepreneur finally bought it last year, with financing in part from Adelphi Bank, one of the city’s Black-led institutions. No public rescue came. Private capital did the same way it did for Leah Chase in New Orleans, but with no deadline forcing anyone’s hand.
New York, another hometown of mine, hasn’t gotten there yet. 112 of its schools now enroll fewer than 150 kids, and the city spent $388 million this year keeping them open rather than closing a single one. Somebody eventually will have to decide. Mamdani inherits that fight, not a resolution to it.
What the building was never the point
Here’s what I keep circling back to: none of these cities are actually fighting about buildings. They’re fighting about who gets to belong somewhere.
Public schools are largely funded by local property tax, which means the difference between a school with new books and computer labs and a school without one can be a single street.
That’s not new. My grandfather used to say the way integration happened cost us something too, even as he’d tell you plainly he was never for segregation. What got lost wasn’t the fight for the right thing. It was the accident of proximity, knowing the kid down the block whether or not he thought like you, talked like you, or went to your school.
We’re more segregated today across the U.S. than we were in 1968, which was the actual high point of school integration, and not some vague memory of one. In 1968, 77% of Black students nationwide attended majority-nonwhite schools. By 2018, that number had climbed to 81% — worse than where we started.
And it’s not the Deep South carrying that weight anymore. By recent measures, the most residentially segregated cities in the country are Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, New York and Cleveland. Nearly all of them above the Mason-Dixon line.
The segregation is not by law anymore but by address, charter lottery, homeschool co-op, and by private school van route. Kids on the same block going to five different schools, coming home, and not knowing each other’s names.
Here’s the thing that’s been sitting with me, specific to New Orleans. Nearly all of my friends who work in community or economic development send their kids to public school. Sometimes the public school is a competitive-entrance one, sometimes a school they can only access because they teach or work at Tulane. But public, and chosen on purpose. Meanwhile, almost none of the actual educators I know send their own kids to the public schools they teach in.
The people building belief in the system from the outside believe in it more than the people paid to run it from the inside. Sit with that for a second, because I have.
That’s not nothing. That might be the whole thing.
Shake Shack, watching other people’s kids
Not too long ago, I got Shake Shack with my village niece, affectionately known as OG. It was a couple of weeks before her school year started back. She was telling me about her summer: riding the bus into the French Quarter with her friends and the whole loose, unsupervised geography of being a teenager in a place where you can actually get around without a parent driving you.
While OG talked, I watched the tables around us. Half of them were clearly high schoolers too. Different friend groups, different schools. All just out, hanging out. Nobody’s kid was performing for anybody. It was just Tuesday.
It struck me while sitting there that this is the thing the decentralized model quietly costs us, even when every individual choice within it makes sense. When schools are scattered — into charter , public, private, and home, with three different calendars in two different cities — kids lose the built-in version of this. The version where you know the kid down the block because you’re forced to through your community, not because you found each other on a bus into the Quarter.
OG is still finding her way to something like community. But she’s assembling it, piece by piece, the way you assemble a system that used to simply exist by default.
Benediction
The building was never the miracle. The block was.
Leah Chase got saved outright, both the mission and building, because the community moved before the deadline. The Neighborhood House got saved differently. The building survived, financed back to life by a Black-led bank, even though the whole-family mission it carried for a century didn’t come with it.
The Village is trying to build a mechanism that preserves a building and a purpose, instead of leaving it to chance and grandmothers. That range — full rescue, partial rescue, and the attempt to engineer rescue on purpose — is the hope. The grief is that any of it has to be this hard in the first place.
Whatever you decide this year, public, charter, private, or home, the kids down the street from you are still down the street from you. Go find out their names.
