New Orleans schools show improvement from pre-Katrina days, but families have had to weather the growing pains of the charter movement, including too many school closures, "no-excuses" discipline, and an inordinate focus on academics and not on the extracurriculars that help create well-rounded students.
This year, LEAP scores came back from the state of Louisiana in record time. Do parents understand the scores? Do kids? Now, the state begins to crunch school statistics to create School Performance Scores, which could lead to charter-school closures later this fall.
A state law passed last year required cities to share a portion of school-zone camera tickets with the schools themselves. But the City of New Orleans and local schools have not yet agreed on how to split the money.
It’s unclear how the school’s order affected the student, who did return, but sporadically. But the school district sent Fannie C. Williams administrators a serious ‘notice of noncompliance’ in the case, which is still under investigation.
Armed by scientific studies, reading experts urged a resurgence of phonics, which helps children learn to read by sounding-out words, in a way well-known to older generations. But the state's third graders are still struggling from their Zoom-heavy start to reading.
Parents said that their young child was too sick to go to school. But the school disagreed, and so the child received no services last year, then started this year with no services. It’s still unclear who’s to blame — and how to catch other students before they fall through the cracks.
Over the past five months, as the two parties negotiated, charter leaders have been tightening belts and hoping that the city will finally agree to hand over 100% of property-tax money to schools, instead of skimming away millions each year.
Given that mistake, parents question whether the school is financially ready to repair McDonogh 15 in the French Quarter.
State and district school officials argue that they’ve complied with a 2015 federal civil-rights judgment. But lawyers representing students who still aren’t getting adequate special ed services say that school officials may be complying with the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it.
Council members say they feel beholden to the November agreement that they’d forged with the school board. And though the mayor backed out of the proposal, citing a tight city budget, council members see no worrisome shortfalls ahead, they say.
