SEARCH
‘It’s Un-American for Children to Not Be Able to Get an Education’ |
|
 |
|
| Maria Alexander says children in New Orleans have a right to a decent education. | |
In his State of the Union address, President Bush called for reauthorization the No Child Left Behind Act but did not mention that children in New Orleans whose lives were devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are being left further behind because his administration and state and local officials have bungled the recovery effort.
Just last week, 300 New Orleans school children were shut out of schools and denied an education they badly need because the city says it doesn’t have enough space or teachers. So, instead of studying in classrooms, 300 students are sitting at home waiting for space to open up in schools. All the while, more students are coming into the city daily as families who left after Katrina are beginning to return home.
What makes the lockout of school children even more outrageous is that the city’s school enrollment is less than half of pre-Katrina levels and there are thousands of unemployed school teachers in the city who lost their jobs or were forced to retire when local officials closed schools to gut the teachers’ union. Shortly after Katrina, some 4,900 public school teachers, mostly members of the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO)/AFT, and 1,900 support staff were forced to retire or just lost their jobs.
A broad coalition of unions, civil rights, religious and community groups is demanding the city, state and federal governments bring the city’s teachers and school professional staff to the table so they can help create a quality school system.
Brenda Mitchell, president of UTNO, says 17 months is more than enough time for officials to get their act together and provide a decent education for children:
It is a public outrage and criminal that the student victims of Hurricane Katrina are not only being left behind, they are also being shut out and denied the educational foundation that they so urgently need to start to rebuild their lives after Katrina.
It’s un-American for children to come into a place and not be able to get an education.
The policymakers need the voice of the teachers and the school employees at the table. We could tell them what’s really happening in the schools.
You can take action to help change the situation for New Orleans school children. Click here for more information on what’s really happening in the schools and then contact Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and David Vitter (R-La.) and tell them the situation in New Orleans is unacceptable. Tell them that it is time to work with parents, teachers and community leaders to ensure that all the city’s children receive a decent education.
Mitchell says state and local officials seized the opportunity after Katrina to eliminate the union.
They thought that with the economy of the region declining teachers would take less and they wanted to be able to hire and fire teachers at will. They cannot silence our voice. We need to be involved as we craft our new school system.
Maria Alexander, who returned home to help rebuild her native city after living in New York for 20 years, says New Orleans parents demand quality schools for their children.
They have a right to a good education. They went to different places (during the evacuation of New Orleans) and saw good public schools with resources and good teachers. It’s crazy that teachers lost their jobs when they are so needed.
Alexander, education director for the advocacy group ACORN, says more than 300 students are not in school. She says the process for enrolling in school is so cumbersome and time consuming that it scares off many parents who also have to work. The city is ready to open another 1,200 public housing units, bringing even more children into the city.
It’s all about the kids. We have to fight for the kids.
To make matters worse, proponents of school vouchers are seizing on the collapse of the public schools to try and create a voucher program that would further erode the ability of public schools to educate New Orleans’ children.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans again is pushing a measure in the state legislature to pull money away from public schools and put it into vouchers so children can attend private schools. The measure has failed several times in the legislature and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) is known to oppose vouchers.
It’s not surprising that proponents of vouchers are using the school crisis as the staging point for something they long have pursued, Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan told the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
It’s not the solution any more than the solution to the Orleans problem was the dissolution of everything that was there before.
Before Katrina, New Orleans had 128 public schools. Now, only 55 have reopened. Thirty-one are autonomous charter schools, the largest group of charter schools in the nation. The local Orleans Parish school district operates five schools. The state-controlled Recovery School District (RSD), which took over schools with performance scores below the state average, even if they were meeting yearly progress goals, operates the rest. Employees in RSD schools have no union representation. Those schools are the ones that have placed children on the wait list.
The problems in the schools are just symptomatic of a larger, more widespread neglect of New Orleans by federal and state officials, city’s leaders say. During a field hearing yesterday in Louisiana by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said:
There is not a sense of urgency in this administration to get this done. You get a sense that will has been lacking in the last several months.
The Center for American Progress reports New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (D) said the federal government was “abandoning its legal obligation to help his city recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.”
Much of the growing tension between state and local officials in Louisiana stems from delays in a federal program that reimburses local officials for a host of infrastructure projects, including road repairs, public building construction and debris removal. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “has paid Louisiana roughly $5.1 billion to reimburse local officials for infrastructure projects following Katrina, but only about $2 billion of that money has reached communities 16 months after the storm” due to cumbersome audit procedures, Nagin says.
Yesterday at the field hearing, Nagin said:
The reality is that it has been 17 months since Katrina, Rita and the flooding that followed and citizens are tired, frustrated and angry. Worst of all, they are losing hope. We need systemic, meaningful change now.
No Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
