At mid-morning on a school day, Julie Lause stood in the lobby of a new, modernist school building created for “Constellations,” a program serving about 90 pre-k to sixth-grade students with autism and other cognitive disabilities.
Standing next to a lobby wall covered with student photos and artwork, Lause greeted the occasional late student or passing staffer.
She knew every student, teacher and school employee. “Hello, friend,” she said to a little boy, who gave her a hug as he walked toward his classroom. She said hello to the school nurse and stopped to chat with a teacher in the hallway as she moved between rooms.
The building’s minimalist exterior is ornamented by stripes and squares of bright yellow with turquoise, Lause’s favorite color.
Inside, a set of locked double doors separate the lobby from the classrooms — a security measure that prevents “eloping,” a behavior common in children with autism, said Lause, aco-founder of Crescent City Schools, a New Orleans charter operator that runs three K-8 schools, including Harriet Tubman Charter.
This campus, Harriet Tubman Park, serves nearly 500 students, including about 130 with special needs. In addition to the Constellations program, the campus houses Crescent City’s Aurora program, which serves about 40 children with emotional disturbance, and its Montessori school, which has about 350 students in general education classrooms from pre-k through second grade.
Crescent City also runs Mildred Osborne in New Orleans East and Dorothy Height, located a few miles from Tubman Charter on the West Bank.
When it opened in 2011, Crescent City chose the North Star as a symbol for Harriet Tubman, and it uses celestial symbols for the schools on its Tubman Park campus, Lause said.
Constellations is situated on the Tubman Park campus, formerly the site of St. Julian Eymard Catholic Church and its rectory. While the campus has been renovated to take on the look and function of a school, its past is clear in areas like the school gym, for example, which has a vaulted ceiling and a stained-glass window.
Beyond classrooms, the Constellations building also contains observation rooms, sensory spaces and a small gym with accessible equipment, all necessary for the development of students in the program.
‘Filling in the blanks’ in the city’s decentralized school system
Crescent City’s special education services not only follow moral guidelines and legal requirements — they are essential to a functioning school system, Lause said.
The decentralized school system in New Orleans creates service gaps that would typically be addressed by the district.
“To serve every kid, some of us as operators had to fill in the blanks,” Lause said.
In New Orleans, most students with cognitive disabilities receive services in their home schools. Constellations is the only publicly funded program to serve those students in a separate setting. The program is not yet breaking even financially, Lause said, and Constellations “foots the bill” for the increased cost of providing some services.
But Lause is passionate about creating an environment where kids can become their best selves, and she’s grateful for the opportunity to address every aspect of that goal with the charter schools that Crescent City operates, she said.
“I care about the pressure washing, I care about the pencils, I care about the curriculum,” Lause said. “I get to think about all that stuff here.”
Students at Constellations take the LEAP Connect exam, an alternative assessment for children with cognitive disabilities. They are grouped into small classes based on their ages and needs, as well as their “adaptive skills,” which include practical abilities such as feeding themselves and using the toilet as well as social skills like following rules and making friends.
In some rooms, one or two adults work with a small group of students; in others, students with more intensive needs receive one-on-one support from teachers and paraprofessionals.
Constellations works hard to meet students’ needs and challenge them to learn new skills, Lause said. Many students in the program eventually return to their home school, where they are re-integrated into larger special education classrooms.
“I think there are low expectations for kids in this group, and that all they need is babysitting,” Lause said. But Constellations instills high expectations, she said, and sees consistent results. “We really are working on skills everywhere.”
Accessible to all students
In teacher Rachel Straehle’s classroom, third through fifth graders worked on letter sounds.
On a digital whiteboard, students practiced rhyming by changing out the consonant sounds at the beginning of words. They talked about how to change the word “tin” to “fin” by switching the letter T to an F.
The classroom was dimly lit, with galaxy-print fabric over the ceiling lights to reduce sensory stimulation, which can be a trigger for people with autism.
Straehle, who has taught at Constellations since the program opened a year ago, particularly appreciates this curriculum because it’s accessible for all students, including those who are nonverbal, she said.
Students who are unable to speak can just walk to the front of the room and touch the whiteboard to be part of the lesson, she explained.
“They can still access it,” she said. Other children participate by placing hand-held magnets on the board.
Students at Constellations also take physical education classes tailored to their sensory, motor and social skills.
Tamara Shuit — known as Coach T — teaches an adaptive PE class in a room with a trampoline, obstacle course and a rainbow crawling tunnel. Shuit started the school year by observing students move and play, taking notes and developing personalized plans for each one.
She also helps students work on their gaits, as people with autism often “toe-walk” without their heels hitting the ground and other atypical walking patterns. With help from Shuit, students learn the importance of bending their knees and distributing their weight evenly on their feet, she said.
Shuit also helps students address specific needs. One high-needs student, an 11-year-old with autism, has worn a helmet his whole life because he often banged his head as a “sensory-seeking behavior” that’s common among children with autism. Some children ask for tight hugs, spin in circles or rock back and forth to get muscle and inner-ear feedback they need. To help the student, Shuit encouraged him to hit his head on a yoga ball instead of hard surfaces like his desk.
“He really liked it, actually,” Shuit said. “He started bouncing on the ball full-steam, with his whole body, and giggling the whole time.”
With the ball, his sensory-seeking moments dissipated much more quickly, she said.
Running buses and the cafeteria in-house
After school, students go home on Crescent City’s in-house transportation system — a fleet of 36 yellow school buses with drivers employed by the charter operator. The buses take more than 1,800 students to and from Crescent City’s three schools.
The bus routes, particularly those for special education students with high needs, can be complex. But hiring in-house helps ensure that the drivers know every student’s needs, and understand that patience is part of the job, Lause said. The charter operator also hires monitors to sit on buses transporting students with particularly high needs, she added.
In-house transportation is a rarity in New Orleans, where the decentralized district means that charters must coordinate their own transportation, an expense that eats up a high proportion of many school budgets, because buses from each school must travel the entire city to pick up and drop off any child who enrolls. Most organizers outsource it to local bus companies.
Crescent City has been running its own buses since it took over Mildred Osborne Charter School in 2023, and it’s helped ensure students are safe, cared for and getting to school, Lause said.
Crescent City also employs its own kitchen staff at all of its schools, which led to less expensive, higher-quality food with local produce that students eat more of, she said. Kids beg the cooks to make certain meals, like red beans and rice or pepperoni pizza for lunch and grits for breakfast.
“There’s this really nice cohesion when everybody who is working to get the kids here, fed, taught, everything, are all on the same team,” Lause said.
That team extends to visitors, too. Curious students were quick to welcome a reporter and a photographer into their classrooms, showing them what they were learning. In one case, a young student took the reporter’s notepad and pen to do an interview of their own.
The young girl, named Diamond, gripped the pen with concentration and wrote down the reporter’s name before returning the notebook and waving goodbye.
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