Katrina Pod People

by Tula Connell, Sep 15, 2006

It wasn’t enough for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to leave thousands of trailers rotting for months unused in acres of swampy fields while Louisiana residents remained homeless.

FEMA now has come up with pod houses—big white boxes resembling cargo containers on stilts—except not as large. And get this: The houses are an incentive to lure public school teachers back to New Orleans.

As reported on the AFT blog via the EdLog:

In an attempt to get the “best and the brightest teachers to return to New Orleans,” New Orleans is giving teachers…a large walk-in closet to live in.

Worse:

…officials brag that these storage pods—at a cost of $56,000 a pop—show their “commitment to helping displaced teachers find their way home and encouraging others around the country to take a chance and join us.”

First the city fires or forces into retirement some 4,500 public school teachers, mostly members of the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT. Now, it’s creating pre-fab incentives to lure a new batch.

So what’s going on?

Before Katrina, New Orleans had 128 public schools. As of September, only 53 will have reopened. Thirty-three are autonomous charter schools, the largest group of charter schools in the nation. The local Orleans Parish school district only operates five schools. The rest are run by the state-controlled Recovery School District, which took over schools with performance scores below the state average, even if they were meeting yearly progress goals. Employees in those schools have no union representation.
 
We looked here at the real Katrina cleanup agenda of the Bush administration and its local lackeys—pushing legislative and other action that, under the guise of making room in the budget for rebuilding costs, actually cut social programs, undermine survivors’ chances of returning home and fail to support them in starting over elsewhere.

Twenty-five-year-veteran school teacher Gwen Adams was among the New Orleans teachers forced to retire. She says the real motive behind slashing teacher jobs  was to break the union:

They had been trying to break the union for years. They just used the hurricane as an excuse. Now without a union, they can tell the teachers to work on Saturday. I have a friend who teaches at one of the schools who is not scheduled for a lunch break one day a week. School officials told her that could be her “diet day.”

A pod house and a diet day. The flush-government-down-the-toilet group at its finest.

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