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AFT Volunteers Let New Orleans Residents Know They’re Not Forgotten |
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Whenever disaster strikes, union members are among the first to lend a hand. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit New Orleans in 2005, unions members sent supplies and volunteered to help clean up and provide whatever help was needed.
Two years later, there still is plenty of work to be done and once again, union members are in the forefront of helping out. Some 80 teachers and school personnel from across the country are spending part of their summer break in New Orleans—painting high schools, tutoring students and doing other community projects.
The first wave of teacher volunteers in the AFT’s “Lend a Hand” summer program went home Saturday after working two weeks, making room for the next group of volunteers who begin work Monday. The volunteers will paint two high schools, team up with the Children’s Defense Fund to tutor students and work with ACORN and Habitat for Humanity to fix up damaged homes, especially in the heavily damaged Ninth Ward.
Says AFT Secretary-Treasurer Nat LaCour, a New Orleans native and resident:
No matter where teachers are from, they’re like family. Their goal this summer is to make New Orleans and its schools a better place when students and teachers return in the fall.
Although Linda Olsen (far left in the back row) is going back home to Pacifica, Calif., outside San Francisco, she says this experience has been “life changing.” The special education teacher’s aide says her first thought when she heard AFT was looking for volunteers to help rebuild the city was “Isn’t it already done?” The image you get from the media, she says, is that the Crescent City is back to normal. But once you get there, she says, you realize there is so much more to be done. The French Quarter is back to normal, she says, but that is just “an illusion.”
The destruction is so overwhelming. I used to think why don’t these people just move out? There are always floods and hurricanes. But after being here and seeing the culture, the architecture and the spirit of the people, I know we have to bring it back. The people here have suffered and lost everything. But they are handling it with such dignity.
Olsen, who says she is “pushing 60,” spent her time painting a school and helping clean up and restock the Habitat for Humanity warehouse. She and her co-workers slept in the dorms at the University of New Orleans, which she says are “rustic to put it mildly.”
Boy, you can’t help but count your blessings. I feel privileged to be here. I am taking away so much. The main thing we are taking back is the message that things are not fine, these people still need a lot of help. I wish everybody in the country could come here to see for themselves the extent of the destruction and the spirit of the people. You just wouldn’t believe it.
As an educator, Olsen is particularly concerned that thousands of New Orleans school children are unable to get an education. Fewer than half the public schools in the Crescent City have reopened since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005. Most of those are charter schools run by the private sector. 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 most of the rest. Employees in RSD schools have no union representation.
Thousands of school teachers in the city 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/AFT (UTNO/AFT), and 1,900 support staff were forced to retire or just lost their jobs.
Olsen says:
The truth is that there are children here who are unable to get an education. Even where schools are open, there is no bus service and the children are living in a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] trailer. How can they get ready for school or get there? And there’s a shortage of teachers. It’s a horrible situation.
But the bottom line, Olsen says, is that what the volunteers are doing is
not just about what we’re cleaning and picking up. It’s about people here knowing they haven’t been forgotten.
AFT is not the only union helping out. The Building and Construction Trades and the AFL-CIO, along with the Louisiana Works Workforce Commission, established the Gulf Coast Construction Careers Center, which just graduated its first class of workers who are now seeking to enter union apprenticeship programs.
The Construction Careers Center project resulted from AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s commitment to build a labor force to support Gulf Coast reconstruction. Sweeney visited New Orleans last year to announce a $1 billion union-sponsored Gulf Coast Revitalization Program, which would include a training component, as well as $750 million from the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust and Building Investment Trust for construction projects in the New Orleans area.
1 Comment
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It is truly wonderful to read about AFT members and espeically hometown gal Linda Olsen and her perspective on New Orleans.
I live in the same town as sister Olsen; she works in the high school which I graduated from…and we met on the way home from the last CFT Convention.
I know AFT — and other unions and community organizations — have put significant effort into linking people to people projects to folks in New Orleans post Katrina.
These folks, like Linda, will come home and tell their stories..and hopefully, the nation will not FORGET the people there, unlike the current administration and much of the federal bureaucracy.
Thanks to all the folks, and kudos to home-town gal, Linda Olsen!!