NEW ORLEANS — For quarterback Raphael Reed, this school year has been one step forward, then two steps back. But during a Thursday-night football game in October, he felt nothing but forward momentum.

As the clock ran out that night, Reed, 16, tossed a perfect touchdown pass, winning the game. In the stands, Frederick Douglass High School fans dressed in blue and gray screamed themselves hoarse.

It was a rare moment of pure triumph, in an exhausting school year that has brought one disaster after another, from Covid surges to bus-driver shortages to hurricane blackouts — with barely time to recover and breathe in between. It’s a sharp contrast to how the year was framed, as a return to relative normalcy. As a comeback year.

Reed knows comebacks. Last fall — his freshman year at Douglass, in New Orleans — he rarely showed up on Zoom screens.

“Teachers knew him as a kid on their roster who didn’t come to class,” said Kerry Taylor, 26, Reed’s offensive coordinator and quarterback coach.

Like other New Orleans students, Reed spent the spring of 2020 at home, as the virus plowed through this early national hotspot. At one point, New Orleans had the nation’s highest per capita Covid death rate, by far — twice as high as any other city. Within the public-school system here, one teacher described “unrelenting grief.” Tragedy struck nearly every week, as staff got news that yet another student or a fellow teacher had lost someone close to them.

 “No matter who I talk to, they tell me: ‘This is the hardest year that I’ve ever had in education.’”

Joey LaRoche, chief strategy officer for KIPP New Orleans

Last year, most Douglass students spent the fall semester at home again, before switching to hybrid classes, in which half the student body attended school in alternating weeks. By spring 2021, the school held a near-normal graduation ceremony. One step forward.

Then two steps back. In late July, just before the 2021-22 school year kicked off, the Delta variant slammed into New Orleans, filling hospitals to 2020 levels.

Douglass students reacted by showing up for vaccine drives in unexpectedly long lines that wound through the schoolyard. Reed, his mom and his younger brother Skylar joined the lines so he would be eligible for football, since Douglass, like the city’s other public high schools, required vaccinations this year for students participating in extracurriculars.

Roughly 75 percent of Douglass students are now vaccinated. Health officials observed that, at before-school vaccination drives, Douglass students were more likely than kids at other schools to arrive with their families to be vaccinated — perhaps because the school has long prioritized its role in the surrounding 9th Ward neighborhood. “We talked about doing this for ourselves and for our community,” said principal Towana Pierre-Floyd, a 9th Ward native who has led the school for four years. “Plus, we all wanted dances and pep rallies, things that were pretty risky, even with masking, if our vaccination rate wasn’t higher. So we told them, ‘“If we have this extra layer of protection, we can do these things. We need your help.’”

Reed was eager to put the entire pandemic behind him, and determined to make up for lost time. “He is, like, over it,” said his mom, Jovan Reed.

He earned a 3.6 grade-point-average by late-August. Every afternoon, he jogged from his last class over to the practice field and worked intently. “He was killing it,” said Taylor, his coach, who sees Reed developing into a star, “a pocket passer with a big arm.”

Within the Douglass hallways, teachers seemed determined to successfully pull off the return to in-person learning, while classmates who had been strangers during their virtual freshman year were becoming friends. “We were coming together,” Reed said.

“It’s been fascinating to watch,” said Pierre-Floyd. “I believe that our 10th-graders have the highest attendance rate of any class, for that reason. They are hungry for relationships with peers and adults. They can have real friendships, socialize and get dates to homecoming. These moments where they can connect in person are more precious to them.”

Then, on August 29, less than a month into the school year, disaster struck again, as Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana as a Category 4 storm. The entire city lost power in an unprecedented , extended outage. School children missed three weeks of classes.

Related: City that loved and lost high school football finally gets it back

“They lost the pandemic year. Then they went back to school, but then the hurricane came. What I’m expecting next is the locusts,” said Kathleen Whalen, project director of Safe Schools NOLA, which responds to the needs of trauma-exposed youth.

Even when students returned, they couldn’t seem to settle down. “It’s just hard,” Whalen said. “When there’s so much uncertainty, everyone gets on edge, wondering what will come next. You can’t settle down into a learning framework.”

It was supposed to be easier.

“We’re all saying the same thing: ‘Why is this year so hard?’” said Joey LaRoche, 35, who was principal at Douglass — when it was briefly re-named KIPP Renaissance — until 2018, when he became chief strategy officer for the school’s charter-management organization, KIPP New Orleans.

“Our rhythm is so high, our morale so high.”

Raphael Reed, quarterback for the Douglass High School Bobcats

Whenever LaRoche has a call with educators from other cities, he hears a common sentiment. “No matter who I talk to, they tell me: ‘This is the hardest year that I’ve ever had in education,’” he said.

Within Douglass, too, educators are acutely aware “of what will never be recovered,” said Pierre-Floyd. “We feel a lot of urgency to make up ground. There’s reading-level loss and math-skill loss. We have seniors from last year whose college options didn’t pan out. Juniors whose grades went off the rails in a way that they have to explain in personal statements to colleges. And, we try really hard to make sure that, for nine hours a day, our school is a safe space for kids to be happy and loved. But some kids spent an entire year in other spaces where that wasn’t their reality.”

Students at Douglass had more than academic disruptions to deal with. After making it through the beginning of the semester with relatively few Covid-related quarantines, the hurricane hit hard. While most New Orleans schools made it through the storm with minimal damage, their Gothic 9th Ward building was left waterlogged. Winds popped out upper windows. The building was inundated by Ida’s intense rain bands.

FEMA-funded crews parked sedan-sized generators [RS1] [KR2] on the street outside. The generators powered up hundreds of dehumidifiers to dry out the flooded interior while massive ducts, threaded through the building’s doorways and windows, carried fresh air into the structure, to curtail the spread of mold. Mitigation specialists estimated that it would take at least three months to repair.

Reed and his classmates were again forced apart, logging onto virtual classes from home while Douglass administrators scrambled to prepare a temporary location, in a former school. Across harder-hit parts of southeast Louisiana, 70,000 schoolchildren were similarly delayed, often in rural areas where Internet services had been demolished, making virtual learning difficult.

“Teachers knew him as a kid on their roster who didn’t come to class.”

Kerry Taylor, Frederick Douglass High School’s quarterback coach

In New Orleans, roofs were dotted with FEMA-blue tarps. But by early October, crews were starting to hammer on roofs across town, and Douglass returned to in-person learning on its temporary campus, Uptown.

Because of the bus-driver shortage, about half of the school’s 660 students — many of whom live near the Douglass building downtown and usually walked to school — continued to study virtually. The shortage, caused by the pandemic, became even more severe after the hurricane; some bus drivers, a group of heavily recruited, out-of-town hires, evacuated ahead of the storm and chose not to return, LaRoche said.

Back studying online, Reed’s grades slipped.

“That virtual messed me up again,” he said.

It’s a now-familiar refrain from students stymied by the Zoom class year.

Reed said he couldn’t relate to virtual classes last year. “Usually, it was just the teacher talking.”

Back then, in the pandemic’s first year, Reed’s mom left for her grocery-store job early in the morning. Without her there, Reed and his younger brother would often sleep through their morning alarms or else focus their cameras on their foreheads — which would show they were “present” — so that they could play videogames while in class.

Reed also lost a key lifeline to school — athletics — because there were no buses to afternoon football practice. At first, by taking midday work breaks, his mom was able to get him to the practice field a few times. But those breaks got harder to take.

“Then he just stopped coming,” Taylor, his coach, said.

Given his attendance record, Reed could be considered the archetypal lost student of the pandemic. Soon after schools were shuttered across the nation to curb the spread of Covid-19, parents, educators, and policymakers began worrying that students like Reed would experience learning loss. A July 2021 study by McKinsey & Company estimated that, on average, U.S. students had built up a sizeable learning lag: five months in mathematics and four months in reading.

Lagging test scores raised questions about long-term trajectories. Will the educational losses suffered over the past year put a permanent dent into each child’s future? The McKinsey study suggested it could: the average loss of wages could be between $49,000 and $61,000 over a lifetime for pandemic-era students.

In New Orleans, fears that disruption will just become part of the regular rhythm of schooling have heightened concerns. Climate-change experts predict more hurricanes like Ida. Beyond the academic losses, experts are sounding the alarm about children suffering from anxiety or feeling socially isolated, even as schools search for ways to address higher levels of need, with staffs stretched and stressed due to teacher and counselor shortages.

Related: ‘Just let me play sports’

“Our students who had attendance issues pre-pandemic, they’re really having attendance problems now[RS1] [KR2] . Those with depression and anxiety, they’re really having those issues now. All of those basic concerns have widened,” said Stephen Sharp, president of the Pennsylvania School Counselors Association, who has been studying the recovery from Hurricane Katrina to understand how long it may take pandemic-era students to regain their footing, mentally and academically.

Pierre-Floyd sees greater mental-health needs, without question, among the adults and children within Douglass. “If you had already struggled with depression and then you were home by yourself, alone, you’re more in your head now,” she said. Her staff is working with the KIPP New Orleans network to find creative ways to reach out, bringing in an extra person to do attendance intervention, or adding more social-work interns to expand the capacity of her social-work team. “We’re all tired,” she said. “But the group that is struggling will need more, so we need to give them more.”

To Pierre-Floyd, the larger lesson is that the pandemic has pushed education to the point that the very definition of schools has broadened. “School has often been defined as a building,” she said. “But it’s now clear, more than ever, that school is the community you’re around. School is the people who help make up your day. School has to go beyond a building.”

It’s easy to spin the pandemic learning-loss and climate change together into a whirling mess of worry. But that may misunderstand the basics of what makes children tick, said Whalen, the trauma expert. “It’s not all gloom and doom.”

At Douglass — despite everything — many students seem to be coping with the year’s ups and downs. “They’re rolling with it,” said Coach Taylor.

Whalen explained that children need “relationships and [emotional] regulation” to get through trauma. Athletes who form strong relationships with coaches can likely check both boxes, because they learn emotional regulation every time they take the field. “As you go through winning and losing, you learn to regulate emotions,” she said.

LaRoche sees educators working to shield students from this year’s rollercoaster. “It’s like, ‘You don’t have to worry about the problems of the world, let us handle that part,’” he said. For example, he said, Douglass and other KIPP schools hosted elaborate homecoming celebrations this fall. “But behind those homecomings, some adults wore themselves out, to make them happen in the most normal way possible.”

In the classroom, relationships with adults and other students are also key, Whalen said. “And that is why systems need to support the adults. So the adults can support the children.”

Part of what skilled adults do is cultivate resilience in children, said Whalen, who worked with New Orleans families in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. At Douglass, Pierre-Floyd sees that inner resilience and achievement in students like Reed. “Raphael is a brilliant person,” she said. “And his mom, in particular, pushes him to succeed. But he is not a stark outlier. Schoolwide, our reading levels are going up in crazy ways — our growth data day-to-day is actually better than previous years.”

Though not everything is rosy, Pierre-Floyd and her staff see signs of a transformation, prompted by last year’s lonely virtual year. “Students who once saw education as compulsory are becoming more aware of what an education means to them,” she said. “It’s a philosophy that goes beyond grades to an appreciation of learning. We’re seeing passion in kids who are excited to leave math class having earned a 100 on something, not because that earns them an A, but because they figured out how proofs work.” She has been talking with her staff about how to further encourage that sentiment, which could have long-term lifelong benefits for pandemic-era students, she said.

Sharp, the Pennsylvania school counselor, has studied the pace of disaster recovery in an attempt to understand what it will take to help students and their teachers recuperate from the pandemic. He, too, is optimistic, though guardedly so. “We know recovery is possible,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen in the next year. And it’s not going to be seamless.”

This year seems to prove that point: progress is possible, even if it’s often followed by setbacks.

When the hurricane forced Douglass classes into exile in a temporary building, it also forced the coaches to curtail football practices. Football players who used to walk out the door and onto the practice field now left the temporary location Uptown and spent 30 or 40 minutes on a bus after-school to get to the field.

It meant less time spent on the weight-room training that protects against soft-tissue injuries to muscles, tendons and ligaments. Coaches also saw less speed and endurance in players studying virtually, who were more likely to be sedentary.

The Bobcats’ first three losses were against tougher, out-of-district opponents, but Reed’s winning pass during the fourth game gave the team a good shot at a district championship — partly because the district team they’d beaten, McDonogh 35, had a much higher ranking than they did. So, when the Bobcats played their fifth game, Reed jogged into his team’s first possession with a high dose of confidence.

“Our rhythm is so high, our morale so high,” he said. Yeah, they had started out the year on a losing streak. But Reed had seen his team begin to gel. He felt that they had something special. To him, triumph seemed almost inevitable.

Then, as he was tackled, he felt something pop.

The tendon that attaches his kneecap to his shinbone tore completely.

He had made it through so many obstacles — the hurricane, the temporary building, months of remote learning. “That was a little rough,” he said. But the roughest blow of all was his season-ending injury, just as he was getting back into in-person classes.

As Douglass celebrated homecoming week, Reed was in surgery. His doctors told him they expect him to make a full recovery in time for next season. But he spent most of the rest of November at home, back in virtual classes yet again.

This time, however, his phone was flooded with text messages from school. His classmates — many of whom he had barely known until they arrived at Douglass as sophomores this fall — made a massive banner for the homecoming pep rally, that read “Get Well, Raphael,” decorated with hearts and footballs and signed by every member of the class.

Reed was still physically immobile, watching Zoom classes on his computer. The temporary building had no elevator, so he couldn’t return to in-person classes until Douglass returned to the 9th Ward. It was a definite setback. But it felt different this time. “I got some good classmates — caring,” he said.

He was sitting still. But he felt forward momentum.

This story on a high school quarterback‘s come back was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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NEW ORLEANS — As the clock ticked past 8 a.m., the last car pulled up to the school’s gate where principal David LaViscount stood, digital thermometer in hand. When he opened the car’s back door, two little girls smiled, waved, then hiked up their face masks and climbed out.

“Good morning,” LaViscount said, pointing the thermometer at their foreheads and asking if anyone felt sick that day. “No,” said the girls, shaking their heads and skipping toward the school’s front door. LaViscount followed briskly; inside, a second-grader waited in his office for a daily mentoring session.

This is how days once moved for LaViscount, 36, who helped open Audubon Gentilly Charter three years ago. One task flowed directly into another.

Then, in mid-June, it was over. LaViscount, who resigned this spring, took one last walk around the empty school building. Leaving behind his Audubon laptop, work cellphone and office keys, he pulled his office door shut, jiggled the knob to make sure it was locked, set the school alarm and strolled out the front door.

“That’s it,” he thought, as the gate latched behind him.

In the end, the burden had been too great. He’d tolerated the long days and the never-ending tasks until the pandemic arrived, gobbling up every spare minute. But the job became unbearable when he realized his position demanded almost constant attention, even when his 10-year-old son visited from out of town.

Across New Orleans, public school officials are searching for replacements for roughly 25 percent of the district’s teachers and principals, a slight uptick from the already-high 22 percent attrition rate for principals in the city between the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years, and higher than the state departure numbers of around 15 percent.

The pandemic left people feeling wrung out, said Alex Jarrell, a former principal now working to increase retention of charter-school leaders through the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans. “Our school leaders have done so much over the past year and are certainly exhausted,” Jarrell said.

Nationally, nearly half — 45 percent — of principals said that the pandemic has prompted them to start thinking about leaving the profession or sped up their plans to do so, according to a poll released last year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

In 2018, LaViscount knew what he was signing up for when he agreed to be the founding principal for his Montessori and French-bilingual school. The model, which is challenging in itself, is particularly hard at Audubon Gentilly, an open-enrollment public charter school: children who speak not a word of French can arrive at his doorstep at any age. And though the Montessori method has an elitist reputation, almost 70 percent of Audubon students come from working-class families that qualify for free lunches.

The school was one of the city’s most sought-after from the moment it opened: 1,200 children applied for the school’s initial 171 seats. The competition for seats has continued, even as the school added additional grade levels each year. For the 2020-21 school year, enrollment was up to about 250 children, in pre-K-3 through fourth grade.

Beyond the curriculum, LaViscount was determined to create an equitable, welcoming school environment. The cornerstone: culturally responsive teaching that prioritizes anti-racism philosophies and the social-emotional wellbeing of students, more than two-thirds of whom are Black.

That mindset doesn’t jibe with the rigidly strict discipline frameworks often devised for majority-Black schools. “We pushed away from that,” he said. “Black boys and girls, they need hugs, they need to be shown affection and love.”

To cultivate that culture, LaViscount hired a dedicated crew for his classrooms, where teachers teach French along with art and core academics. He wanted to be visibly there for them. So, he would run to a classroom at a moment’s notice, to talk down a child in crisis or even bring a fresh roll of paper towels to wipe up a spill.

For Audubon Gentilly to succeed as the third school in a small charter network, LaViscount needed to pay close attention to every detail.

“It’s what we took on. I never thought twice about it,” he said.

Related: The job of a school principal was always difficult. The pandemic has made it impossible.

But after the pandemic hit, his work pressures intensified exponentially. Many of his cherished teachers experienced elevated levels of stress and anxiety. They scrambled to find childcare for their own children while trying to engage their online and in-person students in actual learning. Another stressor was the school schedule, which bounced back and forth between all-remote and hybrid instruction throughout the year.

The school community also struggled with grief after the coronavirus touched Audubon Gentilly directly: a student lost her father and a teacher lost her sister.

45 percent of principals in an August 2020 survey said that the pandemic prompted them to start thinking about leaving the profession or sped up their plans to do so.

The year took an enormous toll on local teachers and school staff. According to an unpublished survey shared by the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies in New Orleans, a quarter of responding teachers and staff showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Denese Shervington, the CEO of the institute, said that school leaders bore an exceptionally heavy burden.

“No one wants death on their hands. And they knew that we didn’t know as much as we said we know. But they still had to make decisions, difficult decisions,” she said.

When in-person classes became an option, in late September 2020, LaViscount realized that his teachers needed to talk with him more regularly. He kept his office door open, jettisoning his previous habit of carving out daily private meditation time. As his to-do list grew, he found that he needed to set an hourly alarm on his Amazon Echo to remind him to drink water.

On weekends, LaViscount would pick up boxes of hand sanitizer and other supplies and head to Audubon’s turn-of-the-century Craftsman-style building, located amid the leafy green blocks of the city’s Gentilly neighborhood.

Once there, LaViscount would take advantage of the rare quiet time to complete operational paperwork. Sometimes he would go into classrooms to move desks back to proper coronavirus-protocol distances. Along the floors of all the hallways, he placed green and purple lines of tape to show students where to walk.

It was just him, walking the silent hallways lined with children’s artwork. At those times, the isolation of his position was palpable. “Loneliness as a principal is huge,” he said.

Rashida Govan, the executive director of the New Orleans Youth Alliance, wonders whether the city’s charter environment places outsize operational burdens on its principals in a way that became unmanageable during the pandemic. “In a large traditional district, there are other people to do that work,” said Govan, who holds a doctoral degree and served on LaViscount’s dissertation committee.

LaViscount agrees.

“I am relatively young, and I didn’t mind just flying around the building when I had to,” he said. “But there were so many times when I was tied up with operational stuff, like whether there was A/C on the second floor, when I could have been spending a little more time engaging intellectually with teachers, helping them develop their craft a little more closely.”

During the week, there were constant little emergencies: a student exposed to the virus, or the internet failing for a child or a class. Nearly every day, LaViscount and his administrative team led classes or covered recess duty, as staff absences increased across town, triggering a shortage of substitute teachers. Since students could no longer eat lunch together in the cafeteria, LaViscount added lunch delivery to his duties, leaving his office at 11 a.m. to spend the next hour toting insulated bags to each classroom. His work days stretched to 12 hours.

“You get to the point where you burn out,” he said.

Related: Tears, sleepless nights and small victories: How first-year teachers are weathering the crisis

As the school year wound down this spring, LaViscount was still weighing his options for next year. His highest priority was to be closer to his son, who lives in Texas. He also wanted to continue his work in education, but differently. “I’m trying to go back to my purpose, to remember why I do this work,” he said.

Mentoring reminds him of his purpose. All year, LaViscount carved out time for daily one-on-one conversations with several boys who needed that personal attention.

His first mentee, Caleb, a second grader, walked into the principal’s office every day at 8:15 a.m. “Everybody knows he’s smart, but he was getting into trouble because he is so active,” LaViscount said.

During one chat, Caleb griped about the “disgusting” breakfast pancake sticks. “Does syrup make a difference?” asked LaViscount, who then shifted the conversation to Caleb’s behavior.

Caleb told him about a punishment he received for poking another student with a colored pencil. “But the pencil wasn’t even sharpened,” he said, wrinkling his nose.

LaViscount doesn’t make instant pronouncements when students or staff are upset. Instead, with Caleb, as with others, LaViscount sat attentively, listening.

For the last five minutes of their talk, the two watched a guided meditation on a laptop.

“It’s like a balloon in your stomach,” LaViscount said, putting his hand on his own stomach to show it rise and fall as he inhaled and exhaled. Caleb closed his eyes next to him and inhaled.

Outside the principal’s door, administrative assistant Donishia Dorsey tried to protect the pair’s time. Dorsey has served as LaViscount’s right hand since the pair opened Audubon Gentilly together in the fall of 2018.

“He’s inside his office doing belly breathing with Caleb,” Dorsey explained on the telephone, as the voice of an upset teacher came through her earpiece.

Without missing a beat, she hung up the phone and hit a button to buzz in a tardy student who had arrived at the front gate.

“Take your temperature, baby,” said Dorsey, pointing at the wall-mounted thermometer. By the time she had asked the third-grader about her health, taken her temperature and waved her on to class, Dorsey’s desk phone rang again. A situation upstairs was at a stand-off. A teacher whose students typically ate breakfast in the yard felt it was too chilly to eat outside. But a staff person had balked at allowing the group to eat inside, fearing it would violate social-distancing requirements.

Dorsey took a deep breath and peeked into LaViscount’s office, apologizing to Caleb for the interruption. “But Madame is concerned. She feels strongly that it’s too cold,” Dorsey explained.

“I’ll go deal with it,” said LaViscount, as he walked Caleb out of the office.

Related: How do you turn around a school amid a pandemic?

Early in the pandemic, the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies began their assessment of school staff, after a social worker described teachers walking into her school office and falling apart.

 “We had been focused on the pandemic’s effect on students,” Shervington said. “But we realized that we couldn’t expect children to do well if the people responsible for them were not well.”

It cuts both ways. Because teachers and staff are motivated to be of service, the pandemic’s effects on children and their learning also affected their teachers, Shervington said.

Teachers and parents alike say that LaViscount has an almost-instinctive understanding of struggle. Because of his upbringing, he can relate, he says. He grew up in high-rise public housing in Spanish Harlem, a New York City neighborhood, with his mother and his grandmother, both teachers. His mom would drop her sons off at the bus stop in the early morning on her way to her full-time job at a daycare; she would not see them again until after night college classes. “It’s almost like she never slept,” he said.

As a teen, LaViscount enrolled at Cardinal Hayes High School for Boys, an oasis in the South Bronx. LaViscount was a quiet student who blossomed with the encouragement of a French-language teacher.

“He told me I was capable,” LaViscount recalled.

His father was also a powerful influence. “Son, read everything,” said David Phillip LaViscount. When the teenage LaViscount stumbled in high school biology, his father responded by picking up a study guide and working with his son every night after work.

It was the same sort of fatherly devotion that ultimately prompted LaViscount to step down from his job at Audubon Gentilly. As much as LaViscount wanted to help other children, he felt he was neglecting his own.

“We realized that we couldn’t expect children to do well if the people responsible for them were not well,”

Dr. Denese Shervington, president, Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies in New Orleans

“It became clear that there are things in your life that you can’t sacrifice,” he said. When the pandemic first hit, his 10-year-old son, David Eli LaViscount, was visiting for spring break from Dallas, where he lives with his mother. Because David Eli could learn virtually, his parents extended his stay in New Orleans by a few months.

“It was then that I really saw how much time this job was taking from me,” LaViscount said. “Too often, I found myself saying, ‘Dad’s not finished.’ Or: ‘Dad has work to do.’” Before the virus hit, LaViscount visited Dallas often, and was able to spend a few hours each night on the phone with his son, doing homework and catching up. That became impossible.

Also, as the pandemic raged, and people around him lost loved ones, he felt it was time to distill his own life to its most important elements, he said. “I needed to be close to my son.”

LaViscount hasn’t nailed down what professional road lies ahead. His possible options include a return to classroom teaching or work as an education professor.

On his last day at Audubon Gentilly, he was alone in the building as night fell. He’d already toted piles of handmade goodbye cards to his car, including a handwritten one from Caleb that said “Thanks … for never giving up on me.”

Then LaViscount took one last walk around, looking at the student artwork on the walls. Outside the cavernous multipurpose room on the first floor, he stopped to remember a play that they’d mounted there in the spring of 2020, just before the pandemic descended on the city. In his mind, he saw the space as it had been then, transformed, with draped white Christmas lights and tall cardboard appliance boxes painted like trees.

The dank, ugly room had been so alive that day. Beyond the beautiful sets, families had packed the room, to see children perform in costumes and masks they’d made themselves.

“There was this sense that we had made something memorable together,” he said. “It was something out of nothing. And that in many ways is what we had done with Audubon Gentilly too. Something from nothing.”

On the next morning, a Saturday, LaViscount watched New Orleans fade in the rearview mirror of a U-Haul truck as he drove west, toward Texas. Then on Monday, Dorsey texted him, letting him know how summer camp was going.

“A part of me feels like I’m still there,” he said.

This story about principal burnout was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post A principal leaves his beloved school after an intense year appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Satoriya Lambert was still a toddler when Hurricane Katrina struck her hometown. After the levees burst open, her family carried Satoriya to a waiting car on higher ground and they fled the flooded city.

Satoriya is now 18. Last month, because of coronavirus restrictions, she was allowed to bring exactly three family members to her 15-minute, individualized, graduation ceremony from Walter L. Cohen College Prep.

All across the nation, students with senior years truncated by the pandemic are feeling a sense of loss as they try to understand what exactly it means to be part of the Class of 2020. But in New Orleans, some have dubbed this year’s graduates the “Katrina to Covid Class,” because their academic careers are book-ended by Hurricane Katrina and the pandemic.

These students trace their earliest memories to 2005. Satoriya, who had just turned 3, remembers looking out the car window to see downed trees and “so much water everywhere.”

The family house that Satoriya lives in now had water to the ceiling. Memories of the disaster are particularly vivid in graduates, like Satoriya, from the city’s Black households, whose homes were far more likely to be in the low-lying, heavily flooded areas of New Orleans due to historic patterns of discrimination and segregation.

Jarrin Rainey, 20, a 2020 graduate of Frederick A. Douglass High School, remembers his uncles pushing the family to safety in a boat. All he could see for miles was “dirty, nasty water” and ruined, flooded houses, he said.

“They are going to have memories in their bodies reacting to things they felt or heard or maybe observed, if their parents were in a state or despair.”

Denese Shervington, CEO, Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies

Mental-health experts say that because of Katrina, those in the Class of 2020 in New Orleans are likely to be more affected by coronavirus upheaval. “We know this is true, though they’re not going to be able to make that connection — ‘Oh, I’m feeling this way about Covid because, you know, early in my life these other things happened,’” said Denese Shervington, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Tulane University School of Medicine who focuses on community wellness as CEO of the Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies, the nonprofit she founded 27 years ago.

In interviews for this story, some of this year’s graduates described feeling a constant sense of internal struggle. This, too, could be a legacy of Katrina, which affected the way their young brains formed and how their bodies react to stress, Shervington said. “They are going to have memories in their bodies reacting to things they felt or heard or maybe observed, if their parents were in a state of despair.”

Class of 2020 graduate Trevianne Turner, 18, feels a certain tug inside when she looks at the Katrina blight left near her school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. High School in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. “Sometimes I walk or ride by rundown houses or empty lots filled with weeds and I think, ‘There’s a history back there. What would it have been like without Katrina?’”

That question is personal. Beyond the storm’s visible scars on New Orleans, Trevianne associates it with a series of losses that took a more invisible, internal toll on her life. “My Katrina is different,” she said.

TREVIANNE TURNER

SALUTATORIAN

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. HIGH SCHOOL

Just hours before Hurricane Katrina began to push storm-surge water into the area, Trevianne Turner’s grandfather, Harry Turner, saw satellite images of the monstrous hurricane spinning over the Gulf of Mexico and decided to take his grandchildren out of harm’s way.

Trevianne and her four older siblings had planned to wait out the 2005 storm in their parents’ home in St. Bernard Parish, just past the southeast edge of New Orleans. Though she was only 3 years old, she remembers her grandfather arriving when it was still dark and hurrying the children into his pickup truck. They drove west to Houston.

“Sometimes I walk or ride by rundown houses or empty lots filled with weeds and I think, ‘There’s a history back there. What would it have been like without Katrina?’”

Trevianne Turner, 18 

Eighty percent of New Orleans flooded; all of St. Bernard Parish flooded. Nearly everyone that the Turner family knew was displaced to other cities.

Because of this widespread displacement, few members of the city’s Class of 2020 started kindergarten in New Orleans itself. Many Katrina-evacuee families stayed on the move for several years, seeking better work and housing. High numbers of evacuee children fell behind in school and suffered unaddressed mental-health concerns, according to a study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

That instability has likely had lasting consequences. “As much as it’s important for children to attach to a loving family, it’s also really important for them to attach to a loving school as early as possible,” said Shervington. “Because when kids feel safe and connected in school, that becomes a secondary line of defense for them if things should happen at home.”

Trevianne and her family returned to St. Bernard Parish in 2007 to live in a FEMA trailer park. Though she loved school — “It’s always been a major part of who I am,” she said — she didn’t stay in one place for long. When she was attending first grade at Willie Smith Elementary in Violet, her mom died. She was at another school by second grade, at a third school by third grade.

Then, in eighth grade, her grandpa died in his home in St. Bernard.

Broken-hearted, she moved in with her dad in New Orleans and filled out OneApp, the city’s universal application for its public high schools. Her heart fell when she saw her OneApp placement: King High School in the Lower Ninth Ward.

She didn’t have a problem with the location; her family had roots in the Lower Ninth Ward. But she knew nothing about King, so it had been her last-choice school: No. 8 on her list.

Related: The lost children of Katrina

In the fall of 2016, she started classes in King’s brand-new building, set amid blocks of thick, tall weeds, signs of the neighborhood’s badly stalled recovery from Katrina. She found that most other freshmen had gone through King’s nearby K-8 school. She worried that, socially, she would be an outsider.

But King’s “family dynamic” embraced her in a way she’d never felt before. “By the second week, I felt at home.”

For the first time in her life, she had Black teachers. Though she had excelled under white teachers in predominantly white St. Bernard, she felt that King’s faculty had a better understanding of her struggles. “I found the school more nurturing,” she said. “And it didn’t stop with the teachers. It was the faculty, the staff, everybody.”

She entered her senior year with grades so strong that she hoped to be the top scholar in her entire class. She landed a scholarship to Louisiana State University, where she’ll study pediatric nursing. During Carnival, in February, she paraded happily through the streets in her red-and-white cheerleading uniform.

But a few weeks later, the coronavirus hit the city with a vengeance and the governor closed schools. Friends’ parents got sick; one died. Her family circled around their grandmother, running her errands and isolating themselves from the rest of the world to keep her safe.

In mid-May, school officials hosted a Zoom version of a King tradition — the class roll call. Trevianne participated from her cell phone while standing in her sister’s front yard, with a few of her siblings.

Lindsey Moore, the school principal, broadcasting from the school office, read each name from the school’s official 2020 graduation list, then rolled right into the class’ Top 10 students, starting with 10 and counting down. When he got to two, he paused. Then, in a big, grand voice, he said: “Graduating second in the Class of 2020, Salutatorian Trevianne T. Turner!”

Standing in her sister’s yard, Trevianne looked shocked, then cried. At the very least, she thought she’d be co-valedictorian, she said, as her siblings comforted her. From the phone in her hand, a voice told the class about the upcoming car parade. “I’m not going,” Trevianne said, sniffling a little.

She was still feeling wounded the next morning, as she stood by her sister Taravia’s black Honda Civic. Her siblings were determined that Trevianne participate in King’s Class of 2020 car parade. Balloons waved out of the windows; Taravia used a chalk marker to write slogans on the glass. “Congrats,” she wrote on a side window before reaching across the car’s rear window and scrawling: “We want all da smoke! Salutatorian!”

Along the parade route, crowds were ready. Lower Ninth Ward neighbors stood at the curb, waving and cheering. All the way down the street, King teachers, from pre-K to 12th grade, were spaced six feet apart, banging on noise makers.

Taravia cranked the volume on her car radio. Trevianne felt a rush of triumph.

“I’m number two,” she yelled at the top of her lungs, raising her fist into the air. From the sidewalk, the crowd cheered. “I’m number two,” she yelled again. “Number two in the whole class!”

SATORIYA LAMBERT

SALUTATORIAN

WALTER L. COHEN COLLEGE PREP

Like Trevianne Turner, Satoriya Lambert got her last choice on OneApp: Walter L. Cohen College Prep. She debated trying to transfer mid-year, but she was hungry for stability after attending three different schools in four years.

For four years, she had blended in. No more. “I left behind the ‘trying-to-fit-in’ in middle school,” she said. “I became my authentic self.”

Along with her determination to re-invent herself, she set lofty academic goals: She wanted to become president of Cohen’s student government and be named class valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA.

She forged strong relationships with her teachers and staff. But Satoriya never felt she got what she needed at the school. The work at Cohen wasn’t challenging enough; she had to settle for xeroxed work packets instead of textbooks. So she worked out the frustrations of the day on the school’s Green Hornets dance team, where she rose to captain.

She became known throughout Cohen as a popular but soft-spoken young woman, a self-identified bookworm. Even before the coronavirus brought stay-at-home orders, she usually could be found inside her grandparents’ house in the Sixth Ward, where she’s lived since she was 11.

At the start of her junior year, the stability she’d built began to evaporate. Cohen lagged on state performance ratings and attracted about 40 fewer students than it had expected. To balance its budget, the board opted to make emergency staff layoffs, which prompted more staff to leave. Satoriya started her senior year without most of the people she trusted. Darren Lewis, the principal who was hired in 2018 to turn around the failing school, saw how the high turnover affected students like Satoriya. “The people she grew to love chose to leave,” he said.

Satoriya tried to do her part. She had a 4.0 GPA and was ranked first in her class at the end of her junior year. She was elected president of the student council, was voted Miss Senior and became captain of the dance team. She was accepted to Southeastern Louisiana University where she plans to study business administration.

But she “felt unappreciated,” she said. She wanted more from Cohen than Cohen wanted for her.

During the coronavirus stay-at-home order, Satoriya’s household stayed well. Even their routines changed very little. Her grandma, Ether Bullock, 70, a retired teacher, donned gloves to hand over the trademark fruit-cocktail huckabucks — frozen cups — that she sells to neighbor kids. Satoriya and her grandpa were in charge of the household’s grocery shopping, outfitted in masks and gloves.

As initial fear of the virus receded, she started working at a fast-food restaurant, to make money for college. She also used the quiet time to grow closer to her dad, who was sent to prison on a drug charge a few years ago. They began speaking by phone at least every other day. “I want you to go to school and do better than I’ve done,” he told her. In turn, she told her dad about her frustrations with her school.

A few weeks before graduation, Lewis and an assistant principal made a surprise stop at Satoriya’s job to ceremonially hand her a gold-satin salutatorian sash. Behind them, a car full of customers waiting for chicken honked and yelled, “Congratulations.”

Another student had been named valedictorian, having squeaked past Satoriya with a margin of a few hundredths of a point, said Lewis. But she could still deliver a speech during the school’s rolling graduations, where a single student graduated, followed by another, in filmed, socially distanced ceremonies that will be edited together to create a comprehensive graduation video.

On the last Wednesday in May, Satoriya walked across the stage in front of the three-person audience she was allowed: her grandma, mom, and sister. Then she took the microphone. “Being as I am your student-council president, as a leader, I believe you should always go above and beyond what’s expected of you,” she said. “With that being said, my fellow classmates and I haven’t received a lot of support, but have gotten a lot of hostility, backlash and unprofessionalism from the majority of Cohen’s staff.”

Though staff was present, scattered around the room, and heard her controversial speech, no one said anything to her, Satoriya said. “Nobody even acknowledged it,” she said.

“Everything had piled up. We had ruckus and chaos at school, America had Covid and police brutality. We’ve dealt with so much.”

Satoriya Lambert, 18

“It was disheartening,” Lewis said later, wondering if Satoriya would have felt the same way if her senior year hadn’t been cut short by the coronavirus. “I’m hoping we will get a chance to discuss it at some point,” he said.

After their separate mini-ceremonies, Satoriya and her friend Jade posed for photos in front of a Cohen Green Hornet photo backdrop. They started to sing, then broke down sobbing.

“I felt her emotion, mine bounced off of hers; hers bounced off of mine,” said Satoriya. “Everything had piled up. We had ruckus and chaos at school, America had Covid and police brutality. We’ve dealt with so much. We needed that moment to release everything that’s going on.”

JARRIN RAINEY

BASEBALL STAR

FREDERICK A. DOUGLASS HIGH SCHOOL

The front room of Sheila Rainey’s house in the Lower Ninth Ward is bathed with a golden glint, from sunlight bouncing off the baseball trophies that crowd the front windowsill, all engraved with the name of her tall, soft-spoken grandson, Jarrin Rainey. He’s a star player at Frederick A. Douglass High School who hopes to keep playing ball next year while taking up welding at a local community college.

Jarrin started school in 2005 as a Katrina evacuee at Bush Elementary in southwest Houston. He recalls missing a lot of school, acting up in class, and running from the school nurse when she tried to give him his prescribed medicine for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Rainey, his maternal grandma, returned to New Orleans before her family, in late 2006, replacing her destroyed family home with a modular structure set on cinderblock pilings. “It’s a trailer, but it’s home,” she said. The rest of the family returned in 2007, a time when the school system was in tumult. Jarrin and his little sister Jamia changed schools so often over the next few years that keeping up with classwork was difficult. Some days, Jarrin, who earned extra money tap-dancing in the French Quarter, arrived at his middle school dead tired. He mostly danced on the weekends, unless supplies in his grandma’s refrigerator got too low. “If it was one of those hungry days, I’d go down there on Monday or Tuesday, just to help us live,” he said.

Then Jarrin met a mentor, Jonny Bartlett, the principal of KIPP Leadership Academy middle school and the varsity baseball coach at the nearby KIPP high school, now Frederick Douglass. Baseball talent had run in the Rainey family for four generations, starting in the 1940s. His grandmother takes pride in Jarrin being a fourth-generation baseball player, part of a family tradition that began with her father and continued with her brothers, her sons, and Jarrin’s dad. Jarrin played tee ball almost as soon as he could walk; he practiced batting by swinging at soda-bottle tops with a broomstick. When he began playing high school baseball for Douglass in eighth grade, he was immediately one of the best players on the team.

But school didn’t capture his enthusiasm. When Jarrin started missing too many schooldays, Bartlett began going to his house every morning, to wake him up and bring him to school. Still, he was held back twice, in fifth grade and again in junior high. “It just made me want to drop out, I ain’t lying,” he said.

Related: Held back, but not helped

He was already 19 when he began his senior year — one of the city’s many “overage” students. A 2018 analysis found that roughly half of New Orleans public-school students were retained at least one year. For Jarrin, turning 19 made him ineligible to play his senior season in baseball. Although the season was scuttled after four games because of coronavirus, Jarrin felt a little lost without baseball to anchor his schooldays.

But his mom and grandma — and Bartlett — urged him to stick it out, and he did.

Before graduation, Bartlett pulled up to Sheila Rainey’s house with clothes for Jarrin to wear: a necktie and the pair of leather shoes that Bartlett had worn at his own wedding. As Bartlett knotted the tie around Jarrin’s neck in the family’s driveway, he got sentimental: “I’m so proud of you, man,” he said. “I love you to death, like a son.”

Typical, Jarrin said. “That’s something he been doing always, for the whole 10 years I’ve known him, making sure I’m straight.”

Bartlett recalled that seven years ago his star player was known for sliding down school bannisters and acting out. Looking back, Jarrin believes he was acting that way because of lagging academics. “I felt like I wasn’t sharp enough in the classroom,” he said.

Because a separate ceremony was held for each student, Frederick Douglass Principal Towana Pierre-Floyd wrote 120 graduation speeches, one for each of graduate. For Jarrin’s, she recalled his freshman year, when he was paired with reading interventionist Ellie Kramer. “You came in like a quiet storm,” she said from the podium, as his grandma, mom, sister, and cousin cheered loudly, along with the teachers and coaches positioned at socially distanced intervals across the school’s auditorium.

“Anything Ms. Kramer put in front of him, he would get it done without fail, without argument — just cleanly, crisply, always got it done,” Pierre-Floyd said. “And when we looked back in May, Jarrin had jumped 300 Lexile points in one year.” She said that was about four times the typical annual growth in reading for his age group.

No one before or since has topped his freshman-year growth, said Pierre-Floyd, as she turned to speak directly to the 6-foot-3-inch student who’d first shook her hand as a polite eighth grader playing on her high school team. “The thing that’s even cooler is that Jarrin has continued to outpace himself,” Pierre-Floyd said. “Year after year, he’s at these crazy numbers of growth. And he doesn’t show off his skill, doesn’t show off the fact that he’s the greatest grower of all time in the history of Douglass. Instead, he just operates with quiet leadership.”

This story about the ‘Katrina to Covid Class’ was produced as part of the series Critical Condition: The Students the Pandemic Hit Hardest, reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter. 

The post The ‘Katrina-to-Covid Class’: How the coronavirus era affects New Orleans students more acutely appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW ORLEANS — School absences were rare for Lorenzo Elliott, the drum major of the George Washington Carver High School band and an honor roll student with a 96 percent attendance rate.

So a social worker called his home on a December morning in 2015 when he didn’t come to school. His family said that police had picked him up. He was accused of being a getaway driver for two of his cousins, who had robbed someone in New Orleans East. Because he was 17, he was charged as an adult in Louisiana.

Even with his impressive list of accomplishments, Elliott worried that his education would be derailed.

“I see a lot of black kids like me lost to the system,” Elliott said. “But my school had my back.”

Specifically, Lisa María Rhodes, a social worker at Carver at the time, jumped into action.

Early in her teaching career, when she worked as a Spanish language teacher, Rhodes had witnessed how jail pulled promising young people onto a hard-to-reverse path. “Students would be missing from class; I would call home and find that they’d been arrested. It kept happening,” Rhodes said. Because most of her students could not afford even modest bail, they often stayed in jail for months, even years, awaiting trial.

A few hours after Rhodes heard about Elliott’s arrest, she wrote a detailed letter to the magistrate judge, to provide context about the drum major that went far beyond the brief incident summary that the arresting officers had supplied. The following morning, she went to Orleans Parish Criminal District Court to deliver the letter in person.

As Elliott sat with his public defender, Rhodes introduced herself to his lawyer and told Elliott that she was there to advocate for him. Elliott seemed a little scared about what faced him, but he was still focused on school: He told her that he was worried about missing an exam in his Advanced Placement environmental science class.

“He was a responsible kid, eager to learn,” said Rhodes.

Elliott’s arrest was a tipping point for Rhodes: She vowed to commit whatever time was necessary to advocate for the roughly 200 students at Carver — nearly 1 in 4 — who need legal help each year.

While not every arrested student is on the honor roll like Elliott, they all have strengths that Rhodes and her team describe to judges: Some love Harry Potter books; some excel at band or athletics; others have never been issued a behavioral demerit.

It’s a unique effort for a problem that’s difficult to quantify.

Justice experts across the country can name few other school-based projects like this, in which teachers have become outside advocates for students.

“I didn’t see a lot of teachers taking time off from school to go to court. Often, they can’t,” said Robert Schwartz, a visiting scholar at Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law.

Yet there is no shortage of students who need the help. In New Orleans, at the time of Elliott’s arrest, no school consistently supported its students in courts, even though Louisiana’s incarceration rate topped the nation, with 776 prisoners per 100,000 residents (the incarceration rate for black Louisianans was twice as high, making prison time seem much more likely for Elliott).

Related: From prison to dean’s list: How Danielle Metz got an education after incarceration

Rhodes was determined to do something. “Educators can change this,” she said.

School staffers like Rhodes, focused on what’s best for a student, can force courts to shift their focus, said lawyer Anne Lee, the executive director of TeamChild, which has provided free legal advice for Seattle youth for more than 20 years. “Typically, judges and prosecutors look more narrowly, asking if there’s enough evidence for the case before them. But [Rhodes is] asking the judge to consider the child and how detention will have an impact on that child’s education. She’s interrupting what would be the natural course for kids who might not have the resources to get themselves out.”

The day after his arrest, Elliott, shackled for his first appearance in magistrate court, shuffled into the inmate box and sat in a row of men clad in orange jumpsuits. He had been through a lot in his young life, growing up in a public-housing development where he and two of his cousins ran with a crowd that stayed in trouble. “I was supposed to be dead or in jail. That’s what the family used to say,” he said.

Then he saw Rhodes consulting with his public defender. “I saw that they were out there fighting for me,” he said. “It gave me hope.”

The magistrate judge didn’t read Rhodes’ letter. He simply looked at the charge, said it was serious and set a steep bond that Elliott’s family couldn’t afford.

Elliott’s lawyer told him that he could expect to spend the next two months in jail — and out of the classroom — while the district attorney decided whether to accept his case.

R

hodes began working furiously behind the scenes for the drum major’s release. At the same time, a new set of students arrived at Carver with very different legal issues.

Though Carver’s student body had been nearly 100 percent African American for years, the school — like its sister schools in the Collegiate Academies charter-management organization — was now starting to enroll its first groups of immigrants. Many had migrated alone or with other children, unaccompanied by adults, from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, fleeing violence. Immigration officials placed thousands of these children in New Orleans with family members who had been drawn to the area by jobs several years earlier, as the flooded city rebuilt from Hurricane Katrina.

Almost immediately, new students needing help began looking to Rhodes, a fluent Spanish speaker whose mother emigrated from Colombia.

One of Carver’s earliest immigrant arrivals was Monica Zelaya. She enrolled as a freshman, after a grueling, 17-day journey to the United States.

Related: Why a Texas school district is helping immigrants facing deportation

Growing up in Choluteca, in south Honduras, Zelaya was known to be studious. Her cousins ran to play soccer after school, but she’d go home to finish her homework first. “Monica, you’re always thinking about the future,” her cousins would tell her.

When she walked in Carver’s doors, she knew one English sentence: “Hello, I’m Monica.” True to form, she began studying late into the night, repeating phrases and learning new vocabulary from English language recordings she checked out from the library.

At Zelaya’s request, Rhodes connected her with a lawyer who could help her start the long process of applying for residency. Other immigrant students asked Rhodes to accompany them to immigration court, a place where undocumented parents were wary to go. Initially, she mostly provided language interpretation. But Rhodes also saw similarities between criminal and immigration courts. In both, her presence in court calmed fears and provided context to judges hungry for more information.

Or, as juvenile-justice expert Schwartz explains it: “In criminal courts, you’re saying, ‘This isn’t a bad kid, Judge, this is a kid who is developing, growing, and trying to find their way.’ It tells the court, ‘This child is well-supported. You can take a risk with this child.’ ”

Schwartz, who co-founded the Juvenile Law Center in Pennsylvania in 1975, said that the same goes for immigration courts. “Judges also want to know who this child is in front of them,” Schwartz said. “You’re rounding out a portrait of a kid as a human being.”

R

hodes knew Elliott and his family. She knew his potential. She knew how many arrested students never returned to her classroom. She also knew the neuroscience of adolescence. “We know that the brain doesn’t finish developing until age 25,” Rhodes said.

Though Rhodes didn’t yet know if Elliott’s charges were warranted, she did know that — even if he was guilty — his still-developing brain made him not only more susceptible to peer pressure, but also more amenable to change.

Because of evolving research about neurological development, many judges, from the U.S. Supreme Court on down, have begun reconsidering how the justice system treats young people. Louisiana, like several other states, recently struck laws that allowed teens younger than 18 to be treated as adults, though the change has not yet been fully implemented.

Elliott had made bad choices, as many teenagers do, but he also excelled in school. It was his escape, a place where he dreamt of becoming a mechanical engineer. “Math was my favorite,” he said. “I loved school. I always found a way to make the honor roll.”

That winter, as Elliott sat behind bars, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to catch up and graduate on time. He pictured the band room, where his bandmates were spending long hours in rehearsal getting ready for the city’s Carnival parades without him.

In February 2016, he was brought back to court to be formally arraigned. The district attorney had accepted the charges; Elliott would be prosecuted on three counts of armed robbery. If he was found guilty, he could serve 15 years in prison, the judge advised.

“I didn’t even know who had been robbed,” Elliott said. “But because I was the oldest cousin by a year, the prosecutor was trying hard to give me all the charges.”

Elliott pled not guilty. But this time, the judge assigned to his case read Rhodes’ letter, which included a new paragraph about how Elliott had missed two months of school and was in danger of not graduating.

The judge reduced Elliott’s bail.

Elliott’s family still couldn’t afford it, but members of the surrounding Ninth Ward community helped raise enough money to secure his release a few days after the arraignment.

“Ms. Rhodes played a big part,” Elliott said. “She was really pushing for them to let me out.”

On the day Elliott walked out of jail, the city was decorated in purple, green and gold. It was a week before Mardi Gras 2016. Though he had been replaced as drum major, he played in the band’s percussion section for a few evening parades, twirling the cymbals with a special flair. That week, he also had intense conversations with teachers, as he tried to figure out how to make up for the 60 days he’d missed.

Many others in his place give up: A multiyear study of 1,000 adolescents in Chicago found that arrested teens were 22 percent more likely to quit school. “But I refused to drop out,” Elliott said. “I hit the books hard.”

A

s spring break passed, then prom, all the college-bound seniors that Rhodes knew were wrapping up their college paperwork. But a Honduran girl who’d had difficulties with her Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, didn’t make it. As Rhodes attempted to resolve the issue, the girl explained that she was undocumented. Without a Social Security number, she could not receive federal financial aid or pay in-state tuition in Louisiana.

Rhodes wondered if the girl’s situation was more commonplace than she’d realized. Though the number of Central American children entering Carver was rising rapidly, she never knew how many of her new students were undocumented. And she couldn’t ask them to disclose their immigration status — doing so would violate federal law.

The intersection of immigration law and education is a murky area that few groups fully understand. “I would say there are maybe five organizations like ours across the country,” said Valeria Do Vale, lead coordinator for the Student Immigration Movement, which was started in Boston in 2005 by immigrant students attending high school with hopes of attending college. To expand their scope, they co-founded an organization called Unafraid Educators to organize teachers and to help students access college.

For her part, Rhodes feared that she and her colleagues had inadvertently misled their first cohort of immigrant students. “We told them, ‘Work hard, keep your grades up, do well on the ACT and you’ll be fine.’ But then they didn’t qualify for FAFSA — we didn’t know.”

Still, as the school year closed, Rhodes saw that her work was also cause for celebration. In May 2016, Elliott walked through Carver’s commencement ceremony with his classmates, feeling a burst of affection for high school and the people he’d met there. “I love my teachers; they made me learn,” Elliott said. “And I love the people that went to Carver. And I love the Rams. I love Carver forever.”

Related: Held back, but not helped

By the time Elliott took his graduation photos, Monica Zelaya was walking Carver’s junior hallway feeling much more confident. Her English had significantly improved, and she was earning straight A’s.

As she started her senior year, Zelaya looked in the mailbox every day for papers granting her permanent residency.

But she had heard nothing by January 2017, when her FAFSA was rejected due to “incomplete information” — because she, too, had no Social Security number.

Her spirits fell. “I felt like I had worked hard for nothing,” she said. Devastated, she visited Rhodes’ office. Zelaya had been dreaming of college forever, she told Rhodes. It felt so unfair.

Rhodes encouraged Zelaya to keep her academic focus, despite her disappointment. In May, at age 17, Zelaya graduated near the top of her class, with a 4.5 grade-point average. But college was not yet possible for her.

S

ince 2017, Rhodes has gotten a crash course in college financial aid. For a time, she mulled pushing for in-state tuition for Louisiana’s undocumented students. But ultimately, immigration advocates in New Orleans advised her to stick to the basics: Carver’s undocumented students were most likely to make it to college if they became permanent legal residents.

National data shows that legal help is crucial to that process: A 2014 report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that when juveniles in immigration court were helped by an attorney, the percent that were allowed to stay in the United States jumped from 15 percent to 73 percent.

Timing is key. That’s because students hoping to submit a federal application for residency through what’s called “special immigrant juvenile status” must first petition a state juvenile court while they are still considered minors — a designation that stretches to age 21 in many states but ends at age 18 in some states, including Louisiana.

University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Amy Wax questioned whether immigrant students’ college attendance should be a focus for any public schools. “Even if we somehow decide they can stay, they need to line up behind our fellow citizens,” Wax said. “There are many worthy American citizens who cannot afford college and deserve our help. … They are our fellow countrymen, our fellow citizens. In a war we would fight alongside them. I would try to help them first.”

Wax’s perspective is part of the struggle that immigrant students face, especially with today’s heightened anti-immigrant rhetoric, said Vale, of the Student Immigration Movement. “Sometimes people ask us, ‘Why aren’t the schools helping?’” she said. “It is a structural issue, because schools don’t have enough guidance counselors, for instance. But we’ve found it’s also a bias issue.”

For Monica Zelaya and other undocumented students still on Rhodes’ watch, Rhodes began forging connections with reputable immigration attorneys who were willing to work pro bono and could file pleas before the students turned 18.

In 2018, after waiting a year, Zelaya finally got her permanent-resident credentials and that all-important Social Security number. She became Carver’s first student to move from undocumented to documented status and to enroll in college.

Zelaya is now in her second year of college courses. She talks about attending law school and becoming a lawyer who can help students navigate the immigration system. “I know what it feels like to be stuck within this process. I want to help people who go through it,” she said.

Zelaya and Rhodes are still in close touch. Within the halls of Carver, word about Rhodes has gotten out. Now, immigrant students regularly come to her for help and volunteer their immigration status.

That level of comfort and trust is unusual, said Lee of TeamChild. “For youth without legal status, it can feel dangerous to come out of the woodwork and ask for help. So, to gain that trust and catch the cases early is huge — life-saving, really,” Lee said.

Rhodes is now looking into the possibility of a special scholarship fund or in-state tuition awards to help undocumented students who are enrolled in college and are working toward legal status. “If Monica [Zelaya] had had that, she wouldn’t have had to sit out for a year,” Rhodes said.

In 2019, Rhodes formed a new nonprofit called Free Alas — which means “wings” in Spanish — to help teachers and social workers in other schools replicate Carver’s legal support. Ultimately, Rhodes hopes, educators at every school can be trained to assist all New Orleans students who face legal challenges, whether in criminal or immigration court.

Elliott’s case was not resolved until nearly two years after his graduation, when he pled guilty to lesser charges and received three years’ probation, rather than jail time. Prosecutors were amenable to the plea deal largely because of the dedication he’d shown to his academics and, after graduation, to his job as a manager at Walmart and to his two young daughters, London and Zoey.

“The idea is not that we help only kids who the court considers innocent,” Rhodes said. “Lorenzo pleaded guilty to his charges. But look what happened when he was given a second chance.”

Elliott has insight into his mistakes. “It was the decisions I was making at the time. That’s what was messing me up. I learned to think for myself, to use my own brain,” he said. He hopes to have completed his coursework for a commercial driver’s license by the time he gets off probation next year. “I’m a whole lot smarter in the things I choose to do.”

Though Rhodes has now helped hundreds of students return to school or apply for permanent residency, Elliott is special. After all, his case helped to launch the efforts that would eventually become Free Alas.

“Getting out and going on with his life helped his case,” Rhodes said. “Now he’s able to work and go to school. And at the end of every day, he comes home and tucks in his two little girls.”

This story about kids in courts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Two years ago, Nathaniel Albert walked into a first-grade classroom at Andrew H. Wilson Charter School in New Orleans and quietly made connections with children. Soon, he became an indispensable part of their school day.

“When he wasn’t there, the students would ask, ‘Where were you?’” said teacher Kierston James, 40, who oversaw Albert, a fellow with the Brothers Empowered to Teach (BE2T) Initiative. The program recruits college-age people of color, particularly African American men, and pays them stipends to work in schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

At Wilson, like many of New Orleans public schools, most of the students are black — and it was Albert’s personal mission to reach each of them. “Even with the ones that were shy, Nathaniel would always push up his chair: ‘What you reading? What can you tell me about it?’ And on the playground, he’d go play with them,” James said.

Though Wilson has maybe a dozen African American male teachers on its K-8 staff, only one of them teaches within Wilson’s primary school, in the second grade. “It’s a rarity to see male teachers in the classroom at all on this floor,” James said.

Growing up, Albert, now 22, saw almost no men teaching. “I had one male teacher, in my ninth-grade year,” he said. “Other than that, I had nothing but females leading my classes. I remember asking myself, ‘Are only women allowed to be teachers?’”

Wilson’s principal, Lee Green, 55, sees an urgency in getting more young men like Albert into teaching. “I need more African American males at the lower level, influencing our youngest scholars. I need more African American males in teaching, period,” said Green, who is African American.

With his fellowship, Albert wanted to test the waters, to see if he should become a schoolteacher, even though he’d struggled throughout his school career with a profound speech impediment. The deciding factor was pragmatic: He really needed a paid job that fit his school schedule.

BE2T exists to meet these two needs. Schools in New Orleans are desperately seeking a more stable teaching force that better reflects the race and background of students here, 84 percent of whom are African American. The program is also intended to improve supports for the black college students it recruits. Fellows receive monthly stipends that start at $450 and rise each year, up to $700, in an attempt to combat steep post-secondary dropout rates — 33 percent of black college students drop out after one year of college, often because of financial shortfalls.

“We’re not trying to force anyone into teaching,” said Kristyna Jones, who co-founded BE2T in 2014. “Our way of convincing our fellows is with experience. We get you talking about your educational experience, get you working with children.”

Those destined to be teachers will enter the classroom and find their purpose in the classroom, Jones believes. “Teaching is tough,” she said. “If you don’t see your value in teaching, there’s no reason to do it.”

Related: A New Orleans summer teaching fellowship is wooing young black teachers — but is it enough?

Nationally, there are a growing number of efforts, like these, to create more pathways to the classroom for black teachers. Overall, black teachers are only about 7 percent of the nation’s public-school teaching force, while the U.S. student population is about 14 percent black. Black men make up less than 2 percent of teachers. In New Orleans, the under-representation of black teachers is particularly acute. After Hurricane Katrina, 4,300 public-school teachers were fired, ushering in state-led reforms that eventually transferred all public schools to charter operators. The vast majority of the fired teachers were black and seasoned, with an average of 15 years of experience.

The proportion of black teachers now stands at 49 percent, far below pre-Katrina levels. Teacher tenure also dropped drastically, with the proportion of teachers with 20-plus years of experience dropping by 20 percent, while turnover increased: Each year, about 900 individuals, nearly one-third of the city’s teaching force, leave New Orleans and its schools for jobs elsewhere.

This year, with overall state test results for Orleans charters declining or stagnating for the fourth consecutive year, Orleans Parish School Board Superintendent Henderson Lewis said the district needed to work harder to stem its high levels of teacher attrition.

Parents and advocates have also called for more teachers who can relate culturally to black New Orleans children and make connections with the communities they serve. They’re backed by research showing that teachers of color who instruct students of the same race are more likely to set high expectations, discipline appropriately, and identify students for gifted programs. Black students who have a black teacher in elementary school are more likely to graduate high school and go to college.

In response to the concerns and the research, several new fellowship programs have sprung up to strengthen the teacher pipeline in New Orleans. In 2017, a group of four educational nonprofits partnered with two local universities, Xavier and Loyola, to land a $13 million federal grant that will produce 900 “highly effective, culturally competent teachers from diverse backgrounds” by the year 2020, according to one of the partners, New Schools for New Orleans.

Last year, Brothers Empowered to Teach received a three-year, $550,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to help scale up its organization’s work, which has grown from seven fellows in 2014 to more than 40 fellows in 2018. (The Kellogg Foundation is among the many supporters of The Hechinger Report.)

Throughout his two-year fellowship, Albert consistently saw himself in his New Orleans students and wondered about his own life’s path. “I was once in their position,” he said. “I was an inner-city kid, growing up in a single-parent household. And my mother did a fantastic job raising us. But sometimes I wonder how it would have been to have had a male role model. Would he have pushed me to be more confident, to speak out more? Would I have turned out better?”

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s a child, Nathaniel Albert seemed unlikely to become a teacher. His attitude toward school was unenthusiastic, at best.

That was largely because of his speech impediment. “It was a personal blockade,” he said.

He and his twin brother Nathan saw a speech pathologist who helped them enunciate more clearly. But Albert’s struggles with speech lasted all through high school. “I had it real bad,” he said. “Nathan used to talk for me. I was terrified to speak in front of a room or to read a passage.”

At Benjamin Franklin Elementary and Eleanor McMain Secondary, Nathaniel and Nathan Albert were inseparable. Though they were in school during the early years of the post-Katrina reforms, their Uptown-area schools experienced little of the turnover and tumult that lower-performing schools went through during that time. Both brothers earned good grades, but Albert said he “didn’t really like learning.”

His brother nodded and chimed in, to emphasize the point. “He was not hyped about school,” Nathan Albert said.

At the Southern University at New Orleans, the brothers took the same college courses, socialized with the same friends, made the dean’s list together, and even shared a major: computer science. Though they are known as hard workers, they also laugh easily and are quick with quips in conversation. “We just vibe off each other,” Nathan Albert said. “We have synergy.”

Finally, in college, Albert began to feel comfortable. “One day, I told Nathan, ‘Don’t talk for me tomorrow,’” he said. “That’s when I started speaking out.”

Related: New Orleans’ uphill battle for more black and homegrown teachers

He became a leader in the SUNO chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. and heard about Brothers Empowered to Teach from a fraternity brother who had been a teaching fellow in another local program. “I told him that I was looking for a job; I was really open to anything,” said Albert. “He told me that he could see me leading a classroom. At first, I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t so interested in teaching.”

But he told his twin about the program, and both applied, hoping only for interesting work that paid decently.

In his junior year, Albert joined James’ first-grade classroom, often leading reading groups and working one-on-one with students. At first, he found that students wiggled around and got distracted. Since his own mind wanders easily, he was able to respond intuitively to keep their attention, interjecting pop questions to the students he worked with. “You can’t just read to them,” he said.

James watched closely as Albert coaxed responses from even the quietest children, often through a combination of humor and kindness, she said.

That method felt natural, he said. “Being the one student who didn’t have a voice growing up, I can push students to open up more, to voice their opinions. I think that’s where I find teaching fits me.”

While his twin remained ambivalent about teaching, Albert began to see the job as a calling.

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o Albert, the Wilson school, located in the Broadmoor section of town, felt both loving and orderly, a lot like his own elementary school growing up. Wilson’s staff is made up of seasoned African American teachers and its students — like the school district itself — are primarily African American. Green, the principal, took a special interest in placing teaching fellows in the right classroom. “You have to put them on a strong teacher,” said Green, who placed Albert with James, an 18-year teaching veteran. “And you’ve got to make sure that they understand the culture of the school, but at the same time, you’ve got to make them feel needed.”

Through Green, who also grew up with a speech impediment, Albert saw how his struggles as a child gave him strengths as a teacher. Because that’s how Green views his impediment, which he still reminds himself of every single day. “I tell my teachers that you have to understand that a kid can overcome a disability,” he said. “It’s not a stop. It’s not the end-all. Kids can achieve no matter what.”

Research shows that black teachers are more likely to stay at schools that provide the kind of steady leadership and mentoring that Albert had at Wilson, with Green’s deliberate placements and James’ steady mentoring. But in the fellowship’s second year, Albert found himself more at sea.

Brothers Empowered to Teach placed the twins at Bricolage Academy, in the city’s 6th Ward. For the Albert brothers it was as if Bricolage and Wilson existed in different worlds.

Though New Orleans is 60 percent black and 34 percent white, this demographic is not reflected in its public school enrollment: Overall, enrollment at the city’s schools is about 82 percent black and 85 percent economically disadvantaged. At Bricolage, there are more white students than black students, 51 percent to 37 percent, according to 2016-17 demographics. Only 42 percent of its students come from economically disadvantaged households, compared to 94 percent of Wilson students. Like other launches that were part of the city’s post-Katrina school reforms, such as Morris Jeff and Homer Plessy elementary schools, Bricolage is part of a national trend known as “diverse by design.”

 Last year, Bricolage school leader Josh Denson, 40, oversaw the school’s relocation into a plum location, a gorgeously remodeled historic building that had once housed John McDonogh High School. By placing the twins at Bricolage, the BE2T program sought to combat historical mismatches, in which teachers of color are often placed at the most challenging, high-poverty schools.

Related: Where have all the black and brown teachers gone?

For Albert, shifting to this new school culture was a challenge. At Bricolage, teachers typically pull misbehaving students aside and talk with them, rather than track their behavior on a stoplight chart. There was even a meditation option for off-task students who needed to focus.

Because Wilson had been more regimented, the twins needed to observe and adjust once they started at Bricolage. “I didn’t want to be the guy who enforces rules that are now non-existent,” said Albert, noting another key difference: Students at Wilson walked the hallways in lines, silently, unlike students at Bricolage. “They just walked freely to the next class,” said Albert. “That was a shock to me. I grew up walking in lines and studying in strict classrooms. But I saw that the students at Bricolage were definitely grasping the material they were taught, even though the classrooms didn’t always feel as orderly as they had been at Wilson.”

The twins wished there were a model that combined Wilson’s more structured approach with Bricolage’s innovative new approaches. “I’d like to see a blend,” Albert said.

They also wished there were more teachers like them. Last year, in addition to the two BE2T fellows, Bricolage had just two African American male teachers, compared to a dozen or so at Wilson. In grades K through 4, no black men were in lead teaching roles, though some worked in the primary school as paraprofessionals, said teacher Laureé Akinola-Massaquoi, an African American veteran teacher of nine years, who oversaw Nathan Albert for the year.

Albert saw fairly small numbers of African American male teachers in both schools. He became curious what it would have been like to spend more time in their classrooms. “I caught snippets of their styles, just observing them,” Albert said. “But sometimes I thought that it might have been nice to shadow under an African American man, just to see how it would be.”

Across the city, post-Katrina hiring patterns led to overrepresentation of white teachers, according to a teacher-diversity study published in 2015 by the Albert Shanker Institute. That uptick in the hiring of white teachers was counter to national trends. Yet the Institute’s study concluded that even in places where hiring has improved, it may no longer be the most urgent part of the equation: “Nationally, minority teachers are being hired at a higher proportional rate than other teachers. Rather, the problem lies in attrition: Minority teachers are leaving the profession at a higher rate than other teachers,” the study concluded.

Basically, job satisfaction matters. And in schools where the staff is overwhelmingly white, black teachers can struggle.

Wilson’s principal, Green, has seen first-hand how school leaders often assume that African American men can serve best as disciplinarians, rather than as experts in academics. “We are often stereotyped as having ‘good classroom management,’” Green said. “So I wanted to make sure that Nathaniel knew that I saw him as an educator first. Because people can leave the profession quick and we can’t afford to have too many African American males leave the profession.”

Jones, of BE2T, also has seen school-to-school differences in how her fellows are supported. “If 85 percent of teachers are white, black and brown educators tend to have a difficult time,” she said. “What seems to work well is when folks are shown that they’re valuable at the student level and the educator level.”

During the fellowship’s second year, Akinola-Massaquoi printed out pictures of her students with their names before he arrived, so that Nathan Albert could form relationships starting on his first day. They talked, texted, and emailed outside the classroom. “I asked him what he was interested in: Did he like math or science or reading? And what was it that he liked about education? Because if he didn’t feel useful, it would be a bad experience,” she said.

While at Wilson, Albert experienced a similar closeness with his lead teacher, Kierston James. “I gave him certain language drills — sight words, phonics, blending — to work on with the kids,” James said. “He would observe me and I would say, ‘Did you see how I did that?’ and then he’d do it on his own the next day. I’d send him the lesson plan the night before. And if I wasn’t around or I was absent and a sub came in, he kept the flow going.”

In contrast, at Bricolage, Albert drifted, without a set classroom or a teacher who saw him as a protégé.

Denson, the school’s founder, blames himself for that experience. As head of school, he said, he was too far removed from the classroom to supervise each fellow’s experience. After first being assigned to the second grade, Albert was moved to the fifth grade, where he moved between three different classrooms.

His favorite spot was the fifth-grade innovation class taught by Alex Owens, 33, a white, nine-year teaching veteran.

One day last spring, Albert walked into Owens’ lab-style classroom as the students dispersed to the room’s different stations, where they could build machines with Legos, or grab iPads, which they could use to code programs or create rhythms and beats. “Kids in this generation are so creative,” Albert said with a grin, as the students dug into their projects. As he passed, some students said “Hey, Mr. Nate” and high-fived him.

He walked around the room, observing and joking with the students. One student handed him an iPad and headphones and asked him to listen to newly created rhythms. Albert slipped on the headphones, gave a thumbs-up and suggested that the students put in a little more work. “I think you can get much more imaginative,” he said.

Across the room, Owens had pulled himself onto one of the lab’s counters and was sitting cross-legged, giving precise but casual directions to his class. “I feel like I can learn something from him,” Albert said, taking note of how Owen managed his classroom without raising his voice. “He’s able to grab their attention. He makes sure that students are engaged, with no distractions. But he’s more like a supporter than an enforcer.”

Sometimes, Owens pulled Albert aside for a few minutes to suggest questions he could ask the students as they worked on projects. But the two never communicated outside of class and they never really talked about what Albert could or should be doing longer-term, since Albert wasn’t formally placed in Owens’ classroom.

“Nobody said to me, ‘This is your guy, check in with him, make sure he’s doing well,’” said Owens, who sees it as a missed opportunity.

Despite that, Albert saw his experience as positive. “I see Mr. Alex as a role-model teacher,” he said. “If I become a teacher, he’s one of the teachers that I most want to be like.” Albert said that he wasn’t comfortable being “an enforcer,” because he didn’t like being handled that way by anyone else. “So my personal dilemma was trying to find a teacher who could lead a classroom while remaining cool and calm. Mr. Alex fit that picture for me.”

This spring, the Albert twins graduated from SUNO and began job searching. With the help of BE2T’s Jones, Nathaniel Albert has had a few interviews for positions in local charters where he could teach in the classroom while working toward his teaching certification. Recently, as he stood in the checkout line at a grocery store, a little boy ran up to him. Albert recognized him as a former first-grader from Wilson.

“Do you remember me?” the boy asked excitedly, reminiscing about some of the moments the two had spent together, as the child’s mother nodded and smiled. “He had told his mother about me,” said Albert, who felt proud as he walked away with his groceries.

“I don’t know what difference I made with that student. But I could definitely tell I did something,” he said.

Connections like these that did something for Albert. He caught the teaching bug. “You’re actually part of a child’s development,” he said. “It’s powerful.”

This story about African American teachers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Two percent of teachers are black men. A city is trying to recruit more. appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW ORLEANS — As they walked in the door last spring, fourth grade students grabbed wrapped breakfast sandwiches from a milk crate on a table, then strolled to their desks in the sunny, ground-level classroom in Harriet Tubman Charter School in New Orleans.

Their teacher, Nicole Molière, knew that some of the children don’t always get enough to eat at home at night. When there were extra breakfasts, those children usually asked for seconds.

Though it was just her first year of teaching, Molière, 49, was already an expert at motivating students, who raised their hands high in the air and vied for her attention, then beamed when they got it.

Early in the day, Amyrié, 9, began working on a math problem. Her answer was incorrect. “Some teachers might just mark it wrong with a big check,” Amyrié said. “But Ms. Molière was really nice about it. She told me that I’d made a simple mistake and showed me where it was.”

All around Amyrié, her classmates were gripping pencils tightly and adding columns of numbers. Their pencils moved to the left as they shifted from the ones column to the 10s, to the 100s. Molière was watchful, walking slowly down the rows of desks, looking to catch small mistakes in action. Here and there, she would lean in, put her hand on a child’s shoulder and make a small correction.

With children, she’s learned that patience fosters learning, Molière said. “You shut kids down when you shame them.”

In New Orleans, the schools that teach the poorest children are facing dire shortages of teachers, especially those like Molière, who are both culturally connected to the city’s kids and committed to the profession for the long haul.

Nearly four of 10 of New Orleans’ public school teachers have three years’ experience or less, according to a new, year-long analysis that will be published this fall by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, NOLA Public Schools, W. K. Kellogg Foundation (the Kellogg Foundation is among the many supporters of The Hechinger Report) and Baptist Community Ministries. Clustered in high-poverty schools, the most inexperienced teachers don’t last: More than a quarter of them leave teaching each year. This year-to-year instability leaves the city’s most vulnerable kids with fewer familiar adults who know the children and their families.

Similarly, across the country, shortages of credentialed teachers are more acute in high-poverty schools, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute. “The fact that the shortage is distributed so unevenly among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds challenges the U.S. education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children,” the report concludes.

Though Molière is brand-new to teaching, she brings layers of other experience to the job. That means she understands the basics of what children need to succeed, having already raised a son of her own and worked for seven years with local schoolchildren in after-school programs and summer camps.

Molière also grew up in the New Orleans area and was educated in its public schools. And, like 84 percent of public school students here, Molière is African American, which can be an advantage, she said. “A lot of times, it’s nice to look up and see a person who looks like you that’s teaching you. It gives you a sense of security, a sense of trust.”

That used to be standard in New Orleans. Before Hurricane Katrina, nearly three-quarters of public school teachers here were black and most were committed to the profession, with an average of 15 years’ experience. They were fired en masse after the storm, as state-led school reforms were ushered in. Now, black teachers make up less than half of public school teachers in a highly fluctuating teaching force. Research shows that black children are more likely to succeed academically when they are exposed to black teachers.

Molière is also a standout at connecting with parents — another necessity for school success — said Tubman principal Julie Lause. “I’ve had a couple of occasions where I was dealing with a real tangled-up situation with a parent, an angry parent or whatever it was — and because Nicole was walking past me in the hallway, she joined me to chat with the parent,” Lause said. “Not many first-year teachers would feel confident doing that — jumping into a conversation with their principal and a parent.”

Typically, those hired to fill vacancies are newcomers to the profession: Roughly 38 percent of all New Orleans educators have three years’ experience or less, according to the Greater New Orleans Foundation analysis. Such teachers are concentrated in one-third of the city’s schools where more than half the teachers are novices, GNOF analysts found. A majority of those schools serve a student body that is at least 90 percent black and 90 percent economically disadvantaged.

And New Orleans’ new teachers have a high attrition rate  — 28 percent, twice as high as other comparable cities and increasing steeply since 2010, according to the analysis, which was shared with The Hechinger Report. “Early career attrition is often driven by more than just compensation; teachers often feel unprepared and burn out quickly,” the study says.

From a workforce perspective, the high turnover creates a vicious cycle in which new teachers start, get overwhelmed and leave, forcing schools with the greatest challenges to spend precious time and resources hiring and training replacements.

To foster better teacher retention, especially in schools with the worst churn, local academic leaders recently launched several new initiatives. In 2017, the National Center for Teacher Residencies gave a $13 million SEED grant to local training programs. The grant described the need for new teachers as a crisis: “In New Orleans, building pipelines to meet the demand for excellent teachers is perhaps the most pressing citywide challenge we face.”

Related: How New Orleans leaders built a segregated city

One of the SEED grants helps to pay for the innovative teaching residency that put Molière in the Tubman classroom. The residency program aims to stabilize high-poverty schools with excellent, committed and culturally competent teachers.

Molière felt ready. But after the first few months of school, the sky-high level of unmet student needs in New Orleans left her feeling overwhelmed, despite her level of experience and roots in the city. “I had to leave and cry,” she said. “You can’t truly understand the need unless you’re right in the midst of it.”

More than anything else, Molière yearned to do right by the children she met. “Maybe, even more than the subject matter, it’s my job to make sure that they’re validated as human beings, that they know that they’re seen and heard and loved,” she said. “A part of me knows that under the right conditions they’d be stars.”

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early 40 years ago, when Molière was in fourth grade at Jefferson Davis Elementary School in eastern New Orleans, she was screened and found eligible for the district’s gifted and talented program.

The nearest school that could serve a gifted student was two miles away. Molière joined a class of unfamiliar children and immediately felt inferior. “Imposter syndrome was born really early in me,” she said. “I wondered if I was really gifted, and did I really belong there? And because of Ms. Janie Malveaux, I knew that not only did I belong, I could be a star pupil.”

Malveaux was Molière’s fifth grade teacher. She embodied what it meant to be an educator. “She taught in a way that you could tell that she wanted you not only to retain this for a test but for a lifetime,” Molière said.

In Malveaux, Molière found both affirmation and a role model. Her parents were young renters raising her in a duplex apartment while they worked long hours, trying to find their way in life. Malveaux was an accomplished African American teacher who owned a home in a nice subdivision called Academy Park and lavished her students with love and attention.

At the beginning of every quarter, Malveaux set a specific goal for her class. She’d plan something special for students who met the goal. One magical evening still stands out in Molière’s mind. “After taking a small group of us out for pizza, she purposely took me home last so that she could meet my parents,” Molière recalled. “Because I loved her, that was so special to me.”

In Molière’s home, Malveaux told her parents that they had a remarkable child. “Make sure she gets what she needs,” Malveaux said.

After fifth grade, Molière’s parents moved the family to a nearby New Orleans suburb where she excelled academically, bolstered by the confidence of her fifth grade teacher. “Of course, I never forgot her,” Molière said.

Related: A New Orleans summer teaching fellowship is wooing young black teachers — but is it enough?

A few decades later, Molière returned to her hometown after living elsewhere to raise her son and work a range of jobs, from Fortune 500 companies to state agencies. In suburban New Orleans, she landed a job working with children in after-school and summer-camp programs. There, tutoring and leading games with children, she felt like she’d finally tapped into her passion. Her work was helping students get the extra boost they needed.

Then she saw an advertisement for the Norman C. Francis Teaching Residency, based at Xavier University in New Orleans, a historically black college. Because many of her family members had graduated from Xavier, she knew the Xavier philosophy, “The idea is that we’re all responsible for each other, that we rise and fall as a group,” she said.

Enthusiastic about extending the Xavier philosophy into public school classrooms, she applied and was chosen to join the residency’s second cohort.

The Francis residency was launched in 2016 to recruit teachers who can relate to the struggles of New Orleans students and who ultimately want to create “a more just and humane society.”

Like all first-year residents, Molière was placed in a classroom with a mentor teacher — in her case, Charlie DePietro, a seasoned educator at Harriet Tubman. She also had to complete 36 hours of academic coursework at Xavier, by attending night and summer classes rooted in the ideals of equity, justice and anti-racism. Molière and her Xavier colleagues committed to the two-year residency and three additional years of teaching within high-poverty schools in New Orleans.

At Tubman, Molière immediately noticed that many of her students arrived with little in their backpacks. Louisiana falls at or near the bottom of nearly every indicator of child well-being when compared with other states, and at Tubman, a pre-K through 8 school, 93 percent of students are economically disadvantaged.

She began to keep supplies at the ready: spare pencils, crayons, erasers, little snacks.

But other needs were less easy to address. “Much of what I see is emotional need: the need to feel seen, heard, valued,” Molière said. “It’s difficult. Seeing children who are sad. Hearing children cry. And there’s very little you can do as a teacher besides being calm and steady.”

One student in particular caught her eye. He clenched his fists. If he was looking at a worksheet, he might growl or give a loud, exasperated sigh.

She would later discover that he had a beautiful big smile, with dimples. But first, all she could see was his frustration. “He’d throw his papers on the ground, flip a desk, do anything to take a break,” she said.

Molière learned that the boy’s family had been homeless on and off for a few years running. Though he was a bright student, he had missed a chunk of school because of his family’s situation — and he’d slid academically.

“That exasperated him because he is a sharp kid. He’s not special ed by any stretch of the imagination. He was just behind. And he hated being behind,” Molière said.

Though Molière and DePietro had 30 students to juggle, she deliberately devoted one-on-one time to this child. “He absolutely thrived off personal attention,” she said.

Still, there were challenges.

“He would cling and push, cling and push, cling and push,” she said. “When I was working with him, I’d have to constantly tell him, ‘You’re fine; it’s okay.’ He was very fearful about not knowing. So rather than feel that vulnerability, he’d just act out.”

Molière was no stranger to trauma: As part of her classwork at Xavier, she was screened for Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. “I scored really high,” she said. “So, I understand these kids. I’m driven by that. But I also know I can become overwhelmed by it.”

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hough Molière often started her lessons in the front of the room at the smartboard, an electronic blackboard, she preferred to stand among the desks, within arm’s length of the children. One morning, as the other children worked on math problems, Molière put down her smartboard marker and gravitated to the desk where the child with the dimples sat. She saw that his first answer was incorrect and tried to get to the root of the mistake.

“What’s 7 times 7?” she asked.

“51,” he said.

She told him to re-think it, counting by 7s to show how 7 became 14, then 21, 28, 35, 42 and 49. But it seemed like he couldn’t hear her as she explained. All it took was one wrong answer to shut him down.

“Even if he gets nine answers right and one wrong, it deflates him,” she said.

At such times, she tried to explain that he had to build up his skills. “Take it a step at a time, kiddo,” she’d say. “But he didn’t want to hear that: He is an all-or-nothing kind of kid. He doesn’t want to build up; he wants to be on a par with his peers immediately.”

To others, the boy might come across as a behavior problem. But Molière saw his potential and didn’t want to see it wasted. “You’re not supposed to want to save people. God knows that I know this,” she said. “But it doesn’t stop me from wanting to swoop in and help.”

Related: A little girl’s school helps her deal with trauma at home

Molière admired the work of her lead teacher, DePietro, who arrived at school thoroughly prepared for the day’s classes. “I always felt confident that I was in good hands, that my mentor had my back,” she said.

But she saw that her students were far less prepared. Some students had quietly admitted to Molière that they couldn’t read, or that they didn’t know basic multiplication tables. Soon, she realized that a significant proportion of the class — maybe even half of the children — were lagging badly. “For the first couple of months, I was in shock at how far behind the students are. I could see it in their eyes; they wanted to be on grade level. But they were nowhere close,” she said.

By the end of the school year, Molière was spending her morning drive running through the day’s challenges in her mind. How could she help the quiet little girl who was embarrassed because she hadn’t learned her multiplication tables beyond the number 4? What about the boy who had seen so much violence in his life that he scanned each room for threats?

She would arrive by 8 a.m., as the sun poured into DePietro’s classroom from the large, carefully restored windowpanes of Tubman’s blue, Craftsman-style building.

As she walked past the rows of desks, Molière could see that her students were making daily progress — but they still fell short of state standards. Some schools use smaller intervention classes to help floundering children get back on grade level. But two-thirds of DePietro’s class qualified for intervention, which made it difficult for Molière to provide much individual attention during the designated intervention periods. She knew from her classes at Xavier that other residents were having similar struggles. “In most New Orleans schools, resources can seem egregiously inadequate,” Molière said.

The Greater New Orleans Foundation report shows just how thinly stretched schools are: Its analysts conclude that current resources — provided by the school district and its nonprofit partners — can only supply academic support for, at most, half of the K-8 students who need it, and social-emotional programming for, at most, one-third of children who need it.

And even though state and local education officials agreed to provide federally required special-ed assessment and support to New Orleans students after a 2014 lawsuit, many needs are still unmet: By the GNOF report’s calculations, there are only enough resources in the city to support one-fifth of the students who need it.

Related: These schools are opening their arms to special education students. Can they afford it?

Those statistics don’t surprise Molière, who knew that she had few outside options to help her students, particularly for the frustrated child she’d grown to love. But, one morning, another homeroom teacher told Molière, “You have to see his work today. It’s unbelievable.”

Molière walked over to look and felt a wave of pride. “He’d written five complete sentences. He’d done the multiplication that he couldn’t do in September. It was just perfect,” she said.

She put her hand on his shoulder. “I said, ‘This is fabulous. I’m so proud. Do this every day. You have it in you, if you would just calm down and allow yourself to do what you can. And for the things that you can’t do, ask for help.’ ”

He beamed a dimpled smile in response, while trying to play it cool. “He acted like, ‘I’m a tough fourth grader; I don’t really need your praise, but boy, it feels good to hear it,’ ” she said.

Victories like that kept her going, Molière said. “You know that it’s in them. You know that you can get them there. You know that if you give a child what they need — which is what equity is — they will perform.”

As Tubman classes started this fall, Molière entered the blue building to begin her residency’s second year in an official Tubman teaching position, as a fourth grade math teacher.

She had looked through the school rolls about a week before, but hadn’t seen an important name, that of the boy she’d taken under her wing.

She heard that he might be at a nearby school. Then, on the first day, she saw him, in a teal-colored fifth-grade shirt. “I was ecstatic to find out that he’d stayed,” she said. He was a little taller. “And he looked a little bit more content. He didn’t look like he was trying to escape, like he was last year.”

On the third day of school, when Molière had a chance to visit him, she found out why. An assessment last spring showed that, like 25 percent of Tubman’s children, he had a learning disability that required an individualized education program. That made him eligible for Tubman’s resource classroom, where he will study English and math in a much-smaller setting, with a class of about a dozen other children.

She feels like the smaller size will allow for the hands-on attention he needs. He felt the same way. “He told me that he feels like this year will be really good,” she said.

Molière gave him a quick hug. “You know I’m rooting for you, kiddo,” she said.

As she left, she reminded him that, if he needed anything, he knew where to find her. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

This story about teaching in New Orleans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post New Orleans loses teachers at double the rate of other cities like it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW ORLEANS — As soon as Pamela Prout Foxworth-Carter was named queen of the Mystic Krewe of Femme Fatale, she was clear on one detail: her grand, beaded queen’s mantle for the krewe’s Carnival parade would be highlighted with two colors: orange and green.

She’d been imprinted with those colors 43 years ago, in 1976, when she graduated from George Washington Carver High School in the city’s Ninth Ward, known throughout New Orleans for its orange and green uniforms and its Carver Ram mascot.

For years, she had seen her alma mater’s band sandwiched in the middle of long Carnival parades. She felt they deserved a position of prominence. “Finally, I can get it for them,” she said.

So, to lead her float, Foxworth-Carter chose the Carver marching band dressed in orange and green, with the rams emblazoned on their chests.

Foxworth-Carter’s ties to Carver reflect a strong high-school alumni tradition in New Orleans that was basically put on hiatus for nearly a decade as the city went through high-profile school reforms.

While alumni at a few, select public high schools had no break in their traditions, most New Orleans high-school grads saw drastic changes in their alma maters, as — over time — all of the public high schools that reopened became charters, with most run by new operators. Some schools moved into new buildings emblazoned with new names. Across the city, alumni groups felt left behind, like exiles without a country.

Though a few alumni groups still resent the schools that replaced their legacy institution, others have formally collaborated with leaders at their replacement schools.

Last fall, Lake Area New Tech Early College High School in Gentilly was renamed John F. Kennedy High School at Lake Area, as a way to reconnect a current student body with the Kennedy name, which was attached to a flood-damaged school that was demolished after Katrina.

And in the fall of 2016, Sci Academy in eastern New Orleans became Abramson Sci Academy, after the principal met with enthusiastic alumni from the demolished Marion Abramson High School, whose footprint the Sci Academy structure was built upon.

At Carver, an initially adversarial relationship between charter operator Collegiate Academies and school alumni has faded, as principal Jerel Bryant checks in with Carver grads through regular phone calls, monthly meetings with a small group of alumni advisors and a staff that now includes about a dozen Carver alumni. “I now have a ton of different alumni touchpoints,” he said.

The reknitting of schools and histories gives a new depth to this year’s Carnival parades, as students from schools like Carver see proud alumni like Foxworth-Carter and feel a deeper connection to their schools’ rich histories.

“Sometimes as I walk the halls, I get a feeling of our Carver roots,” said trumpeter Ashlee Brown, a senior with a 4.0 average. “The building where they studied is gone, but I can still feel them with us.”

Related: The lost children of Katrina

Carver sits in an isolated area bounded by the Interstate 10 freeway, railroad tracks, and the Industrial and Florida canals. In its early days, in the mid-1950s, many of its students came from the newly opened, 100-acre Desire public-housing development and from nearby blocks, where African-American homeowners, many of them veterans, purchased homes in a Jim Crow-era New Orleans.

Today, because of the way the city’s new system of charter schools operates, students from any New Orleans neighborhood can choose to attend Carver.

Still, alumni ties play a role: nearly every student interviewed for this story had someone in their family who came through Carver. “There’s my daddy, my mama, my grandmother, my grandfather, and all my aunties,” said Kendrionne Anderson, the top student in this year’s junior class, noting that there’s a name for Carver’s tight-knit community circle. “We call it not a family, but a “Ramily,” she said, in honor of the mascot.

A decade-long battle to keep ‘Carver’ alive

Without its alumni, Carver might not have a home in the Ninth Ward.

After Hurricane Katrina, vocal alumni urged state officials to reopen the school, even though its building was too heavily damaged to repair and renovate. A few years later, in 2007, Carver opened in temporary modular buildings behind the damaged structure.

But in August 2008, the state-run Recovery School District included only one Ninth Ward high school in its first master plan for building construction. It was rumored the school might be built in the Lower Ninth Ward.

As Carver alumni drove in from other states to attend that year’s homecoming football game, they solicited petition signatures across town, demanding that the state choose Carver’s Higgins Boulevard site. Relenting to pressure, the state ultimately agreed and, in 2014, broke ground on a state-of-the-art structure on the Carver site.

Carver alumni also rose up in the spring of 2012, when the Recovery School District opted to phase out Carver as a direct-run school and bring in operator Collegiate Academies. Wearing bright-orange t-shirts, they held signs reading, “Hands Off Carver! We Deserve Respect!”

Related: Held back, but not helped

In 2012, during the protests, Bryant, the principal, was hired to head up Carver Collegiate, one of the two “academies” formed under the Carver name. At first, it seemed overwhelming: his principal training hadn’t taught him what to do when alumni protested his school. “I had been taught that my role was to build school culture from the inside-out,” he said. “But here, I learned it was important to build it both from the inside-out and the outside-in.”

Bryant realized he had homework to do. “I realized that, in order to create the school our students deserved, I needed to become a student of the legacy, the spirit, the narrative.”

The gleaming new school opened in 2016, complete with three-dimensional rams’ heads popping out of the walls at key points. Most importantly, at the ribbon-cutting in 2016, the name above the door read simply, “G.W. Carver.”

To honor what he’d heard from alumni and from Ninth Ward neighbors, Bryant had worked to merge the two academies, Carver Prep and Carver Collegiate, into one unified school. “By then, I knew what they wanted. I had learned that, in my role, I have to think not just about my students but about the community at large,” he said.

That devotion to neighbors applies in the band room as well, as band director Eric French explained during a recent day at rehearsal, as he called the Mr. Magic tune, “Ninth Ward,” a regional hit from 1999.

This song, more than any other, needed to be played correctly, French said. “For every person who attended this school, this is like an anthem. So when you play this song and that community hears it, it does something inside them. This is their Star-Spangled Banner.”

The feeling that song evokes is layered, though it starts with pride about the Carver band, Bryant said. “It is the school pride,” he said. “But it’s also the deep history. And it’s the neighborhood. There’s a trifecta of pride all centered around this institution.”

Cherishing history while challenging old assumptions

On the streets of New Orleans, Bryant often hears from alumni about Carver’s marching band. “For alums who love Carver, but don’t have time to visit or volunteer, their most intimate touchpoint with the school is at Mardi Gras, seeing our band on the parade route,” he said. By the time Collegiate Academies was designing the high school’s new building, Bryant knew that, to maintain Carver’s band legacy, give his students a well-rounded music education, and satisfy those alums, he needed an acoustically strong band room. Last summer, after he hired French, he knew that he had tapped into the perfect person to connect his students to the Carver legacy.

Alumni got their first look at French leading the Carver band in the Saturday Pygmalion parade, on the night before Femme Fatale. But skies opened up midway into the parade and band members were wet and miserable by the time they got back to Carver at around 10 p.m. They thought their uniforms would be clammy for days. French told them to turn their uniforms inside out and carefully lay them out on the gymnasium floor.

Surprisingly, the uniforms were completely dry as they got dressed for Femme Fatale on Sunday morning.

French, 41, led his band off yellow buses, adjusting plumes and checking uniforms. A Carver alum, French has worked tirelessly since he took over the school’s band program six months ago. He arranged marching-band versions of countless new songs, taught every band member to read music, and showed them how to play more precisely. He brought in nearly a dozen Carver-band alumni to help his students hone their skills on drums and horns. He wanted everything to be right.

While French has a reputation for precision, the intensity of his work this year reflects something more, said Lawrence Rawlins, the band director for McDonogh 35, who stood not far away, watching his own students disembark from a bus. “It’s different this year. Because Carver is his home. It’s special to go home,” Rawlins said.

As Brown, the trumpeter, walked from their bus to a schoolyard that serves as a pre-parade staging area for marching bands, a woman in the parade crowd yelled, “Looking good, Carver! That’s my school!”

Brown grinned. She’s heard about the band’s proud past from boasting alumni, she said, but she believes that their hard work with French this year marks more than just a return to a marching band of yore. “We know the old band — that’s our vibe,” she’ll tell them. “But we’re remaking it.”

Related: The painful backlash against ‘no-excuses’ school discipline

Head drum major Cyncere Joseph, a senior with a 4.0 grade point average, led Brown and the rest of the band to an empty spot in the yard. Across the yard, band directors hugged each other and joked, as their students took turns warming up.

But Joseph was interested in marching-band style. As she looked around, she saw bands wearing maroon and gold, purple and gold, blue and gold, and red and black. Compared to Carver’s, these color schemes seem so tame, Joseph said. “Our colors don’t even really go together — who do you know that took orange and green and made it work? Only Carver.”

Meanwhile, standing high in the air, atop her queen’s float, members of the parade’s royal court helped place Foxworth-Carter’s crown perfectly on her head. The queen was ready.

“Now where’s Carver?” Foxworth-Carter said, gazing toward the schoolyard.

Foxworth-Carter sat on her float’s throne and recalled when she first asked for Carver to lead her float. To others in her krewe, accustomed to seeing the same top-school bands lead the parade, Carver seemed like a surprising choice.

“Carver is sometimes overlooked because of its location and its community,” Foxworth-Carter said. “But I’m a product of Carver. I’m proud of me. So I know what can come out of Carver.”

As the band prepared to take its position ahead of Foxworth-Carter’s float, drum major Tyson Brown tightened the strap for Joseph’s hat, making sure it would stay on in that day’s wind.

The band filed out of the yard and onto the street in formation, flanked by a half-dozen alumni volunteers, dressed in matching green track suits with bright orange tennis shoes. Tyson Brown took his place next to Cyncere Joseph at the front and rested his staff on the ground, waiting for the full band to line up.

He was destined for Carver, he said. His mother gave birth to him 17 years ago while she was still a Carver student, at a time when the school had an on-site nursery. During homecoming week, little Tyson was named “Little Mr. Carver.” It all came full circle last fall, during homecoming week, as he was named “Mr. Carver” — homecoming king.

Besides acting as drum major, or playing football or pitching on the baseball team, Brown plays trombone in the Carver band, where he’s seen a tremendous shift. “We don’t have any more ‘horn holders’ in the band — people who only played their instruments part of the time. Everybody is playing.”

Still, Carver sometimes gets pegged “as one of them schools,” he said. Some people see them as a place where students were failing before Katrina, where students are more likely to be wild than disciplined, and where academics aren’t as valued as sports.

But that’s not what he hears from alumni, he said. “Because they always believe that we can achieve, no matter what anyone else says.”

And it’s not what he knows as a student. Though Carver’s overall school-performance score has only risen to a C, Brown, an A student, has watched its steady ascent since he began at Carver as a freshman. This year, the school was one of the highest scorers in the city on a new “growth” measure, which tracks the academic progress of each individual student over one year’s time. Last week, students heard that 98 percent of seniors had been accepted at a college, the highest rate the school has ever seen — and it’s only February.

And then there’s the band, which he sees as a reflection of the school’s other gains.

Word is already out among alumni, Brown said. “They know we’re coming.”

Next to him, Joseph nodded. They’d all heard that their parents and alumni were waiting to see them along the parade route this year. They hoped others, especially those with long-held opinions about Carver, would change their minds once the orange and green uniforms moved toward them with their bigger, more exacting sound.

“I want them to forget who we really are, so that we can surprise them,” Brown said. “I can’t wait.”

This story about George Washington Carver High School was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post Marching in Mardi Gras, a New Orleans school that once struggled shows off appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW ORLEANS — Clutching a small purse, six-year-old Leona Tate walked into McDonogh 19 Elementary School here and helped to desegregate the South.

Images of that November morning in 1960 are seared into the national memory: Tate and three other little first-grade girls in white dresses and hair ribbons walking into New Orleans schools, flanked by federal marshals and heckled by hateful crowds.

From that day forward, Tate, now 64, knew that her lifelong mission was to make the world a more equitable place. Within a few years, Tate will have a new base for that mission, when the nonprofit Leona Tate Foundation for Change finishes its renovation of her former school in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward.

Tate is a practical person. Yes, she knows that many schools in New Orleans and across the country have been resegregated. She’s heard some people say that her walk in 1960 led to token integration, at best. Others tout the idea that segregated schools and institutions are inevitable, the inescapable result of bureaucracy, housing patterns, or poverty.

Tate listens and disagrees. She believes her walk into McDonogh 19 was important then — and she firmly believes that she can help make more strides against racism today. Her plan is to open an educational center on desegregation within her former school.

Once an elegant peach-stucco building, McDonogh 19 was flooded in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge and by a great wave of water from the Industrial Canal levee, which buckled and broke several blocks away. Disaster cleanup crews sent the first floor’s sodden contents to a landfill and shuttered the building. It’s now been closed for nearly 15 years.

Despite the building’s state of disrepair, Tate’s vision for the space is clear. On a recent visit with developers and museum designers, she stood on the building’s gutted first floor and described her plans for the center.

First, she’d like visitors to understand the basic facts of those years, she said. Tate’s parents were able to enroll her in McDonogh 19 because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. Though many other cities fought desegregation orders, New Orleans, like Little Rock before it, became a national flashpoint for white supremacy during years of vehement court battles, legislative end-runs and family sacrifice.

Because schools desegregated so slowly in New Orleans — by one grade each year — Tate’s struggles were shared to some degree by thousands of local black schoolchildren: Hers was the desegregation generation. Almost all of Tate’s years in public school — from first grade to high school graduation — were spent within the turmoil of newly desegregated schools.

Related: How the federal government abandoned the Brown v. Board decision

The story’s breadth is rarely explained, said Tate, who wants visitors to McDonogh 19 to learn the history, within the very space where history was made. “I want people to experience what it was like, what we had to endure once we got to school,” she said. “I want them to see how hard it was for us to get in there.”

But she deliberately avoids calling the space a museum, because she doesn’t want visitors to be rooted in the past. She prefers to call it an “interpretive center.”

For Tate, the center will allow her to re-open a conversation about racism that she believes has been pushed to the margins for most of her life.

She wants the center’s visitors to join her in that conversation. To help facilitate discussions, she’s enlisted help from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, a New Orleans organization that has specialized in anti-racism training for nearly 40 years. People’s Institute trainers are known for breaking racism down into instructional diagrams showing the role of bigotry’s more nuanced cousin, structural racism: the institutional policies and practices that perpetuate inequities.

The first-floor center was jumpstarted by a $500,000 National Park Service grant awarded to Tate’s foundation last year, though most of the building’s estimated $14 million renovation will be footed by developers creating apartments for low-income seniors on the building’s top two floors.

Tate believes that education about racism is the way to get people to open up. “Otherwise, people just don’t want to talk about racism,” she said.

For Tate, the silence on the issue began in 1961, when she and the other three girls entered second grade. Somehow, in a year’s time, the once-celebrated little girls were no longer treated as special, and their role in the desegregation wars forgotten. Now she realizes that the adults around them may have found the memories too painful. “It used to depress me,” she said. “Nobody ever talked about it. It seemed like they didn’t care.”

For many years after graduating from high school, working in a community clinic across town, Tate didn’t talk much about desegregation either. Though she continued to live in the Lower 9, blocks from McDonogh 19, children in the neighborhood knew her mostly as a kindly mother and grandmother, not a civil-rights icon.

Her daughter, Cabrini Cooper, 42, first heard about her mother’s place in history from a great-aunt. Several years ago, Tate’s granddaughter, Beatrice Bartholomew became acquainted with her legacy during a Black History Month project. “I learned that my grandmother was one of the people who allows me to go to school, basically,” said Beatrice, 13, who said her classmates usually respond: “For real?” They are surprised to hear that schools were desegregated that recently, by a person who is still alive.

As he stood outside McDonogh 19 on a recent day, People’s Institute founder Ron Chisom squinted toward the front stairway that Tate trod on her way to making history. “You confronted structural racism here at six years old,” Chisom told her. “But we don’t want people to look at it as something that happened, past tense, in this country.”

Even the history has largely been forgotten, Chisom said. People prefer to view New Orleans as a place where individuals of all races mix, united by an easygoing mindset that’s best illustrated by the local catch phrase, “Laissez les bons temps rouler” — “Let the good times roll.”

It’s an age-old misconception, said historian Raphael Cassimere, Jr., 76. “People thought that because it was the Big Easy, certain things didn’t happen here, that New Orleans was an exception to ultra-racism.” Cassimere knows the falsity of that assumption from first-hand observation: A native of the Lower 9th Ward, he was already active in civil rights by 1960, as president of the New Orleans NAACP Youth Council.

After the Brown decision, the Orleans Parish School Board made no progress toward desegregation without unprecedented judicial intervention, said Cassimere, who knows the history well. Aware of the fervor it would create, U.S. District Judge J. Skelly Wright even withheld held his first desegregation order until February 16, 1956 — Ash Wednesday, the day after Mardi Gras — when he knew that the town would be sleepy and focused on the start of Lent. Over the next four years, state and local officials repeatedly tried to evade desegregation and Wright ruled their efforts unconstitutional, in 41 different decisions.

The Louisiana Legislature did not relent, even as integration seemed inevitable. On the eve of Tate’s enrollment at McDonogh 19, the legislature made a last-ditch effort to stop the schools from opening, passing a raft of laws and orders during a special Sunday-night session that lasted until 9 p.m. By 9:45 p.m. that night, Wright had responded with a sweeping restraining order that barred hundreds of state and local officials from “interfering with the operation of” New Orleans public schools. Named within his order were all 140 members of the Louisiana Legislature, the governor and the lieutenant governor.

Tate’s story began the next day, within the peach stucco walls of McDonogh 19.

Related: Nearly 750 charters are whiter than the nearby district schools

Tate was born in October 1954, five months after the Brown decision. She attended kindergarten several blocks from McDonogh 19 at an all-black elementary school, Joseph A. Hardin, where teachers gave her “a little extra push,” on academics and penmanship, she said. “They wanted to make sure I was on target.” The four girls who desegregated New Orleans schools were selected from a pool of 134 black students who applied and were evaluated academically and psychologically by the school board.

In 1960, news cameras were focused on two schools: McDonogh 19 and William Frantz Elementary School, two miles away, where first grader Ruby Bridges was also escorted into school by federal marshals.

Even from a distance, it’s easy to identify the so-called “McDonogh Three” as they walked into McDonogh 19. Tessie Prevost sported cat-eye glasses; Gail Etienne tied her hair with a large white bow. Then there was Tate. “I’m the one in the front with the purse,” Tate says matter-of-factly, whenever anyone asks her about those old photos.

Early that morning, a car of federal marshals pulled up to Tate’s family’s home on Delery Street. She climbed in with her mother, knowing only that she was going to attend a new school.

White students started classes at 8:30 a.m. that day. At around 9:15 a.m., according to newspapers reports, Tate’s car reached the crowd gathered in front of the school. New Orleans Police Department officers held back the crowd. Tate had only seen throngs like that during Carnival, and she thought a parade was coming.

Even today, Tate can close her eyes and hear the mob. She doesn’t remember individual voices, but television news broadcasts from that time show people standing on the street yelling racial epithets and chanting “Two four six eight, we don’t want to integrate” as Tate climbed McDonogh 19’s steep front stairway with her skinny six-year-old legs. She can still remember the number of steps — 18.

It remains a vivid memory: the wall of sound and how it disappeared once she walked through the school’s heavy front doors. As her exhibit designers took notes, Tate said that she would like visitors walking up the steps to hear that audio, as she did.

On their first school day, the three girls mostly sat on a bench outside the principal’s office. “We waited for hours. We played hopscotch on the squares of tile by the bench, that’s how long it took to enroll us in class,” said Tate. At Frantz school, Ruby Bridges never made it to class — she sat on a chair outside the office the entire first day.

For the girls’ protection, they brought their own lunches from home and weren’t allowed to drink from the school’s water fountains, which were shut off. They were also kept inside during recess, often playing under a stairwell outside their classroom.

During the 1960-61 school year, the New Orleans Police Department kept a 24-hour guard on the homes of the four little girls and their parents, along with the few white parents who dared to keep their children in newly desegregated schools. Though any mail sent to the girls’ families was screened by the NAACP office, others lacked such interventions and ended up moving from place to place all year after receiving serious mailed threats. Many parents were fired from jobs; their names, license plates and home addresses were published in White Citizen Council flyers. Some, including Wright, the judge, found fiery crosses in their yard.

Though McDonogh 19 had been quiet during Tate’s second-grade year, a portion of its funding was deducted by spiteful state officials. Facing shortfalls, school board decided to resegregate McDonogh 19, this time as a school for black children.

Local NAACP lawyer A.P. Tureaud consulted with the girls’ parents and wrote a letter on their behalf to the school board. “These parents respectfully request that their children be assigned to the same school to which their white classmates have been assigned,” he wrote.

Two years later, Tate was again plunged into chaos, this time without federal marshals or any other outside protections. During the 1961-62 school year, the school board had been cautiously desegregating first-grade classes at a handful of other white schools, though it limited the number of black students to 10. In the fall of 1962, the school board allowed the three girls and six additional black students to enroll at T.J. Semmes Elementary, several blocks away from McDonogh 19. Once again, they were desegregating an all-white school.

“At Semmes, the students hated us. And there were teachers that hated us,” Tate said. The small group of black students were spit upon and punched. Two teachers held their noses each time black students passed, implying that they smelled. The girls faced constant insults and physical aggression from white students, who were often egged on by adults within the school.

“I think that was the worst year of my life,” Tate said. After that year, her family moved closer to the Frantz school, where she joined fellow trailblazer Ruby Bridges in class.

Six years later, at Francis T. Nicholls High School, they would again find themselves in the midst of racial animus and physical fights amid backlash over an effort to change the school’s mascot, the Confederate Army “Rebel.”

Related: A university grapples with its links to slavery and racism

Today, Tate is working with the exhibit designers to re-create her first-grade classroom. Almost certainly, visitors will see three small desks pulled close to the chalkboard in the corner classroom. All the windows will be covered in brown kraft paper, as they were in 1960, so that no one could see in or out.

But visitors to her classroom will see no other desks. At Frantz school, a handful of white students braved crowds of hecklers for the entire school year. But McDonogh 19’s enrollment quickly plummeted to three. “For the rest of the year, it was just me, Gail, Tessie, and Miss Meyer, our teacher,” Tate said.

At first, people expected the white students would return to New Orleans schools, after a few days or maybe a few weeks. That didn’t happen. It was a prime example of structural racism in action, Tate said.

Some students from the two desegregated schools in New Orleans transferred to newly built, all-white “private” academies that used state per-pupil funding to operate. Immediately after desegregation, school buses paid for by segregationists picked up white students from the city’s 9th Ward and took them across county lines to neighboring St. Bernard Parish, where the all-white schools took them in, with the state picking up the tab.

Tate would like the interpretive center to include perspectives from some of the students who left, she said, but she hasn’t yet determined how that will be done. Hoping to find some former classmates, she posted a call-out to her Facebook page, but got no response.

Tracking down some of those families was made easier by a list of McDonogh 19 “Room Mothers” from the school desegregation archives of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. The list includes Mrs. Lee Cannizaro of 1210 Caffin St., the mother of Gary Cannizaro, Tate’s classmate for one day.

Reached at his home in St. Bernard Parish, Gary’s older brother, Steve Cannizaro, said that his mother told him she pulled her sons out of McDonogh 19 because she feared the school would be bombed.

For the next year, his family drove him, his brother and his cousins to school in Arabi, in St. Bernard Parish. Then he attended Catholic schools. Like many other white families, the Cannizaros would eventually move from the Lower 9th Ward — they moved to New Orleans East in 1971 and later sold their home on Caffin to a red-hot piano player named Antoine “Fats” Domino, who wanted to enlarge the musical compound he was building in his home neighborhood.*

Like many other white families, the Cannizaros soon moved from the city, selling their home on Caffin to a red-hot piano player named Antoine “Fats” Domino who wanted to return to his home neighborhood.

Cannizaro, 66, has long hated to see his former school dark and empty as he drives into New Orleans. He said he’d welcome the chance to sit down with Tate to talk about the center and what happened at the school in 1960.

“First, I would apologize to her,” Cannizaro said. “I really don’t understand why it was such a big deal. We’re talking about adding a few black kids in my class. How would it possibly have hurt me to know and get along with them?”

When Tate heard what Cannizaro had to say, she stayed quiet for a minute.

Tate said that when she speaks in public, it’s not unusual for white people in the audience to tell her that they’re sorry she had to go through what she did. But she hadn’t before received an apology from someone who actually was there in the midst of it. “Times have really changed,” she said quietly. “Thank God. That’s all I can really say.”

Tate anticipates that, as she moves forward with the center, she’ll encounter others who may have less charitable responses. And she’s prepared for that. “That’s part of the work,” she said.

*Clarification: This paragraph has been updated to include additional details on the Cannizaro family’s move to a different school.

This story about racism and public education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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When Laci Hargrove turned 16, she was a sophomore in high school with nowhere near the credits she needed for her grade level.

She had once planned to graduate with her class by the age of 17. But her young life had taken a few twists and turns and she started to slide behind. Then she dropped out for an entire year to have a baby. When she was ready to return to school, she didn’t want to sit in sophomore-year classes.

So last August, Hargrove, now 18, opted to move into a “school-monitored” high-school equivalency program, a new option now available through a handful of high schools in New Orleans.

From its offices not far from downtown, the nonprofit Youth Empowerment Project (YEP) has begun a pilot program for under-credited, over-age students like Hargrove. Instead of dropping out and waiting months or even years to re-start their education, they can move directly into YEP’s classes and start prepping for a high-school equivalency test right away, without ever officially dropping out.

Across Louisiana, students who fail to complete school can take the High School Equivalency Test, or HiSET, which has replaced the General Equivalency Diploma (GED) in more than 20 states. But most don’t take the test immediately after dropping out.

In New Orleans, the large number of dropouts who lack HiSET credentials drives the astronomically high count of so-called “opportunity youth.” About one in six 16- to 24-year-olds are neither working nor in school, according to Tulane University’s Cowen Institute, which in 2015 calculated the city’s rate of opportunity youth at 18 percent, one of the highest in the nation.

Related: Held back, but not helped

In a number of states, including Louisiana, adult education — which ranges from basic literacy to vocational training to high-school equivalency testing — is lumped with technical and community colleges, separate from the K-12 system. Until 2017, New Orleans high schools had no internal options to help students who fell so far behind a conventional diploma seemed impossible.

There were state incentives in place, however. For roughly a decade, Louisiana asked for, and received, permission from federal education officials to reward high schools that followed up with at-risk students. The YEP program makes the incentives more attainable, by incorporating several existing state policies into a brand-new framework. The resulting program allows at-risk students to stay enrolled in high school while they study for, then take, the HiSET – at no cost to the student.

Under the state’s accountability system, Louisiana high schools can receive 100 points for every student who graduates with a diploma and 25 points for each departing student who fails to earn a diploma but passes the HiSET by October of the following year. For each student who drops out, high schools earn a zero.

In the past, some have viewed Louisiana’s accountability incentives with caution, fearing schools may sit back, knowing that they can push low-performing students into a high-school equivalency program and earn 25 points. The alternative is riskier: digging in earlier to help lagging students achieve a diploma, but risking a zero score if they fail.

In 2013, federal officials scrutinizing the system took a second look at Louisiana, to be sure that the state’s high-school-equivalency attainment was “not masking low graduation rates and that students are not being pushed into a GED [HiSET] track.” Research shows that educational tracking — placing students in lower-achieving pathways — can harm students and constitute a form of segregation: African American and Latino students are disproportionately assigned to lower tracks.

Related: A new movement to treat troubled children as ‘sad, not bad’

But Louisiana has never counted HiSETs toward graduation rates, said school officials, who believe the small 25-point incentive built into the accountability process rewards schools that stick with students and help them get a HiSET. “Otherwise, what reason is there, beyond humanitarian reasons, to continue to focus on that student?” said state Superintendent John White.

Still, that small incentive may not have been enough without a partner program to connect high schools with adult education. Records show that, over the past few years, the Louisiana Department of Education has given out remarkably few 25-point awards for students passing the HiSET within the required timeframe. In 2016 schools earned the 25-point incentive for a total of only 41 students citywide; the 2017 total was worse, a mere 17 students.

That data matches what YEP instructors have heard anecdotally: Students who drop out, even those who eventually take the HiSET, often become completely disengaged from education, sometimes for years. The idea now is to cut that time to zero whenever possible. “We want to stop that disconnection, catch them before they become opportunity youth,” said Jerome Jupiter, the former schoolteacher who heads up YEP’s educational arm, which combines tutoring with case management.

YEP got its start in 2004 as a re-entry program for teens involved in the juvenile-court system. Its founders — a lawyer, a social worker and a teacher — launched the educational arm a few years later, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Countless students had returned to the city only to find that the high schools they’d left were either shuttered or lacked available seats.

Related: City that loved and lost high school football finally gets it back

Then, several years ago, YEP paired with a local high school, Cohen College Prep, to create a program focused on preventing drop-outs. Funded by a three-year grant from the local Baptist Community Ministries, YEP’s mission was to optimize educational opportunities for three groups of Cohen students: 1) those who could graduate on time once attendance or behavior problems were addressed; 2) those who simply needed to recover credits to graduate on time; and 3) those who were over-age and under-credited and at highest risk of dropping out. The goal with the first two groups was to help them earn a traditional diploma, if possible. For the third group, YEP stepped in to provide one-on-one educational work, student supports, tutoring through the HiSET, and help planning for the future.

At the end of the three-year program, participants concluded that the third group, which was the most disengaged from school, would do better at an independent, off-campus site. Last fall, YEP staff set up shop to provide HiSET-prep for at-risk New Orleans high-school students — before they became dropouts — within its Central City campus, housed within a grand historic bank-building that seems appropriately academic in appearance.

Related: A little girl’s school helps her deal with trauma at home

Hargrove, then a 16-year-old sophomore, never expected to land in a HiSET program. All through elementary school, she’d excelled in the classroom, though she spent a lot of time in the principal’s office. “My grades were perfect,” said Hargrove. “But I was a chatterbox.”

She loved days at Mary McCloud Bethune Elementary School, which she attended from kindergarten through eighth grade. She adored the principal, Mary Haynes-Smith.

Coming from that intimate environment, ninth grade at a strict “no-excuses” charter high school felt foreign. “They were always talking to me about my hair, which I’d dyed golden blonde.” Her nose-ring wasn’t allowed. No lipstick. The dress code went beyond the cosmetic: Even if the drafty old building felt cold, she couldn’t wear a jacket.

It didn’t help that, as she started high school, she was experiencing some instability at home.  “I started clicking out,” Hargrove said. She started sleeping in, racking up tardies. Sometimes, she would skip school altogether.

Her grades took a nosedive. She couldn’t see a way back up.

Experts who study young women struggling in school say that a sense of defeat is common. “Once girls are behind, they often give up on themselves,” said researcher Kayla Patrick, an author of the National Women’s Law Center report “Let Her Learn.”

Hargrove transferred to another school. But, since she had fallen behind, she felt increasingly defiant, hung out with the wrong crowd, and played hooky more often, sometimes with a boyfriend. Looking back, she shakes her head. “I wish I never was a teenager,” she says.

Related: A New Orleans summer teaching fellowship is wooing young black teachers — but is it enough?

 Principals across the city see this pattern repeatedly with over-age students. “Lack of self-esteem and depression can really kick in. It takes an emotional toll,” said Jamar McNeely, who leads the Inspire Nola charter network, which includes two high schools.

Emotional support, however, was scarce for Hargrove. She recalled only one time that a teacher reached out to her about her attendance. A favorite civics teacher pulled her aside and told her that her schoolwork was academically strong. “If only you were here,” he said. That comment stayed with her. She pledged that she’d do better. But then her pants started getting tight. She realized she was pregnant. She tried to stay in school, but she was miserable during the hour-long bumpy bus rides to and from school.

So, at age 16, she quit going to school completely. Her son Joshua was born a few months later. When he turned one, Hargrove re-enrolled in another school, but it still didn’t feel right. Throughout high school, she’d heard the same thing. “Teachers might tell me to go to school,” she said. “But they never would tell me how to go to school when I was going through something.”

With experience acquired over the last 12 years, YEP’s teachers and case managers are familiar with factors that lead students to their doors. “They’ve either been suspended or expelled. They’re behind in a traditional school setting. They’re either pregnant or parenting,” said Jessica Irving-Marin, a licensed clinic social worker and program director for YEP’s new effort.

For its pilot year, YEP has partnered with five schools. Increasingly, partnerships like these are creating new links between high schools and adult education nationwide. Yet each program puts its own provincial spin on the model. “Education is so locally driven, driven by local needs and barriers,” said Kisha Bird, director of youth policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP).

Differing governance between K-12 and adult education systems also make it difficult to replicate models across state lines. Yet the fledgling YEP program in Louisiana shares key program elements with other states, said Bird, as she rattled off a list: There is the program in Connecticut, run for a school district by a nonprofit, that provides wraparound services; the 24-hour online tutoring program in St. Louis that is run through a workforce system; programs in Washington in which state funding follows students wherever they go; and a community-school partnership in Los Angeles that provides youth instruction in many neighborhoods. A Philadelphia network also provides a range of alternative pathways to youth through community-school partnerships.

 “I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all,” Bird said. “These youth have so many barriers and it can take so much for them to stay on track.”

Related: The lost children of Katrina

Hargrove landed at YEP in August. Since then, six other students have joined YEP’s pilot program from four partner schools, which are working closely with YEP to iron out wrinkles before the program expands next year.

YEP receives some funding for its tutors and support services through a memorandum of understanding with each originating school. To make that happen, students maintain enrollment in their high school, though they attend no classes there. At YEP, teachers adhere to state standards for children enrolled in school and keep careful records — they report attendance, progress, and grades to the originating high school. Still to be determined is how to best address public-school requirements such as end-of-course exams, special-ed Individualized Education Programss, and seat time.

Schools Superintendent White believes that connecting high schools and HiSET programs funnels more resources to kids like Hargrove. “It also allows the school she was originally assigned to get a chance to do the right thing by her,” he said.

Before students are allowed to enroll in YEP, they sit down with Irving-Marin, to make sure a traditional diploma really isn’t possible. “We don’t want to coach people off a high-school diploma track,” she said.

If YEP is indeed the right fit, the student moves into orientation. After an academic assessment, using the Test of Adult Basic Education, or TABE, Irving-Marin asks students about barriers holding them back, and about goals five or 10 years in the future. “One of the first questions I ask is, ‘What are you thinking of doing after you get your HiSET?’” she said. After that initial sit-down, she and her students map out individualized plans, which change as the student masters each topic and moves closer to being ready to take the actual test.

Students who pass the HiSET stay in YEP, working with its post-secondary transition coordinators, who walk them through college financial-aid paperwork and course schedules, to determine what’s possible, given work schedules, daycare, academic abilities, financial aid, and transportation.

Students coming to YEP directly from high school participate in small classes of 15 with other HiSET students who are at the same academic level. Beyond the seven students who are part of the pilot, YEP’s classes include students in their late teens and early 20s returning to education after being disengaged, young parents wanting to earn more for their families, and young adults and teens referred to the program from social-service agencies.

Each week, students receive instruction in all five HiSET subjects: math, language, reading, social studies, and science. Each class has an instructor and a para-instructor. Everyone gets frequent feedback and one-on-one attention, said Irving-Marin, noting that the para-instructors are often graduates of YEP who serve as both mentors and peer coaches.

Personalized attention — “a connection with a competent, caring adult” — and long-term planning are key hallmarks in programs like these, said Betsy Brand, of the American Youth Policy Forum, which has been studying the ways in which alternative education works best.

“In today’s world, a GED alone doesn’t have much value, unless it’s connected to higher ed,” Brand said, adding that schooling may not always be continuous, since students often step away from adult-education programs for six months or a year to work full time or deal with a hectic challenge. “What makes them return [to get their HiSET or a bachelor’s degree] is the personal connections that have been made at a program,’ she said.

Those personal connections have made all the difference to Hargrove. “They take me to the doctor; they offered to help me with money for my daycare when I needed it. Sometimes they take me to IHOP. They show me that they care,” she said.

Through Work and Learn programs, working at a YEP-owned thrift shop and bike shop, she’s been able to earn some money and get on-the-job training. She can also bond with people in similar situations, like Judge Evans, a graduate of YEP’s Design Works who took the photos for this story. Altogether, the support allows Hargrove to focus, she said, and that shows in her grades:  she has been doing extremely well, academically.

Last month, Hargrove began looking at colleges — getting her bachelor’s degree is part of the long-range, individualized plan she created with Irving-Marin at YEP. And every morning, she gets up, gets Joshua ready and puts on her backpack, like the devoted student she’s become. “Rain, sleet, or snow, I’m going to be here,” she said. 

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

The post Getting a GED while still enrolled in high school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW ORLEANS — If Domonique Crosby has her way, she will graduate from high school this spring at age 20. To her, earning her diploma, even two years late, feels like something of a miracle.

Held back in the fourth grade, Crosby was 16 years old when she entered George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans. As a freshman, she constantly got into fights, and spent long hours in a disciplinary classroom. As a sophomore, she worked six hours a night at a burger joint in a shopping mall. She became chronically absent and lethargic when she was in class

“I got home at 9 o’clock and I’d do homework. It was hard to get up in the morning and go to school,” she said. “I wanted to give up. I thought I should get a job. I felt like I was already behind and I was too old to still be in high school.”

Administrators at Carver say that students who enter high school overage feel like they’re wearing a scarlet letter, regardless of why they were retained. “There’s so much shame attached to it. Students constantly tell me, ‘I want to be at my right grade,’” said Jerel Bryant, Carver’s principal. “It’s a huge thing.”

Those doubts and shame are one of the many reasons that overage students are at significant risk of dropping out of school. But in New Orleans, overage students are incredibly common. Nearly 1 in 5 of Crosby’s classmates at Carver are also at least two years overage for their grade. All across the city, the number of students who are significantly older than their classmates is at crisis levels.

The proportion of overage students — those who have been retained for at least one grade — hovers around 40 percent for New Orleans high school students, according to an analysis of 2014 data by researchers at Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, which is based at Tulane University. Forty-six percent of twelfth-graders were at least one year older than their peers.

Interviews with students and experts and data gathered for this story suggest that the instability after Hurricane Katrina contributed to the problem, but the crisis is also partly man-made. For years, Louisiana has been a national leader in the movement to end “social promotion,” or the practice of moving children up through the grades, regardless of their academic achievement. The state enforced strict policies to retain children who failed high stakes tests, ballooning the ranks of those who were held back.

Related: A new movement to treat troubled children as ‘sad, not bad’

Now, after realizing that academic stragglers who were retained frequently didn’t receive the support they needed, the state is changing course. One study by the Louisiana board of education showed that 40 percent of retained eighth graders did not even make it to a high-school campus after being held back.

“We think there is a better route,” said John White, Louisiana’s superintendent of education, who emphasized that state standards were still firmly in place. “We are not getting away from state requirements. We’re getting away from requiring retention,” he said.

Louisiana had long erred on the side of social promotion, often passing underachievers through school despite low reading and math levels. In the mid-2000s, Louisiana implemented high-stakes tests known as Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, or LEAP, which required fourth and eighth graders to show that they were grade-level proficient.

Students who fell short were assigned mandatory summer-school classes, after which they took the test again. If that second attempt wasn’t successful, students couldn’t move on to fifth or ninth grade. The practice of retention in Louisiana also extended beyond the high-stakes grades. In 2015-16, more than one-third of all retained students were from grades K-3. In that same year, 10 percent of all ninth graders were held back. In a presentation a few years ago, a top education-department administrator, Chief of Literacy Kerry Laster, wrote, “We retain students despite overwhelming research and practical evidence that retention fails to lead to improved student outcomes.” Laster’s presentation, based on 2010 data, reported that 28 percent of Louisiana students did not make it to fourth grade on time.

For the overage high schoolers interviewed for this story, formal retention — in which a failing student is required to repeat a grade because of underachievement in class or on the LEAP — was almost always a part of the picture. That seems to match overall results from the National Survey of Children’s Health, which includes a question for each household asking how many students ages 6 through 17 have ever been retained. A 2011-12 survey found an average of 9 percent of students nationwide had repeated at least one grade; in Louisiana, the average was 23 percent.

Retentions in Louisiana peaked a few years after Katrina and have fallen steadily since; nearly 9 percent of the state’s students were held back in 2007, only 5 percent were retained in 2011. By the 2015-16 school year, the latest data available online, Louisiana retained 4 percent of its students, still roughly twice the 2.2 percent national average.

Related: The lost children of Katrina

Overage students give varying reasons for their retention. Some lost interest in school and became chronically absent; others were pushed out or held back for behavioral reasons. Nearly all are lagging academically: The average reading level of students entering Carver High School is fifth or sixth grade.

For Crosby, as with most overage kids, a combination of factors contributed to her being held back. When she was only 7 years old, she lost her dad to gun violence. Hurricane Katrina came later that same year, and her family was forced to find a new home. They traveled first to Atlanta, but eventually ended up in Houston. Crosby guesses that she missed at least two more months of classes before enrolling in a local school in Houston, where she remembers feeling different and confused. “I really didn’t know what they were talking about,” she said. “It felt like I was drained, like I was dragged away from the place where I normally would be. It felt like a place I wasn’t welcome.”

She returned to New Orleans for fourth grade, just in time to take the LEAP test. She failed, and was formally retained.

Without a doubt, Katrina was a key factor for nearly all of this year’s overage seniors, who were not solely “held back” in the traditional sense. Most students lost months or even years of school time after Katrina hit in 2005. The disaster also spurred prolonged displacement, culture shock, and grief for many, students said that they were left reeling and felt as though they were in a fog. For children who came from New Orleans neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and violence, the storm and its aftermath added yet another layer of trauma.

Even as early as 2006 and 2007, it was apparent to sociologists Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill, authors of the book “Children of Katrina,” that students were falling way behind as a result of the storm and its aftermath. “When New Orleans schools really started opening, we would see kids who were a foot taller than their classmates,” Peek recalled recently. “Teachers told us, ‘Oh, of course, that’s a Katrina effect. These are children who missed one, two, even three years of class time.’”

Peek said she has often wondered about the children who were out of school and away from New Orleans for so long after Katrina. “For children who struggled mightily after Katrina, displacement — often multiple displacements — was always at the root,” she said, recalling the children she worked with, whose minds seemed clouded, leaving them with no memory of where they had been living even three months before.

Related: Charter schools aren’t measuring up to their promises

But the proportion of overage students in Louisiana schools outside New Orleans is still startlingly high, averaging around one-third of students in 2014. That suggests that the state’s frequent use of retention may have played a bigger role in producing the high number of overage students than Hurricane Katrina. And though school performance has improved significantly since Louisiana implemented LEAP more than a decade ago, the state still has “a lot of struggling students,” said Superintendent White.

He said he’s determined to offer more support to those children.

Three years ago, the state piloted a program called “transitional ninth grade” that moved students who had failed eighth grade to high-school campuses where they could take a mix of courses, some at-grade-level and some remedial. The pilot came in the wake of the internal education-department analysis showing the high percentage of retained eighth graders who never went to high school, said Ken Bradford, an assistant superintendent in the department who specializes in high-school academics.

Two years ago, the state also temporarily waived mandatory-retention requirements for fourth grade as it prepared to institute a more challenging curriculum. Then in 2015, the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act, allowed states to measure success with more just than test scores. Early this past December, the state released guidance to explain how to institute alternatives to retention in fourth grade, to comply with a resolution passed by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in October.

Students who failed LEAP suddenly have more options than pass or fail.

Related: City that loved and lost high school football finally gets it back

Under the new scenario, retention in fourth grade “should be a rare choice,” said White, noting that now, for each failing student, schools will institute interventions that must be documented in the state’s student-information system until the student achieves basic proficiency on the LEAP test.

Certainly, Louisiana schools still have limited resources and tools to help struggling students, White said. “But they have much better tools than they did in 2005 when the retention policy was put into place,” he said. “And that means that the retention policy should change with the times.”

Domonique Crosby is a now a senior, a straight-A student who seems to know exactly what she wants from her future. She’ll attend college, maybe at UCLA or maybe somewhere closer to home. Then she’ll go on to med school to become an obstetrician-gynecologist who will work in under-served communities.

Bryant, Carver’s principal, nodded when he heard her plans. Crosby can do “anything she puts her mind to,” he said.

The numbers of overage students are higher in schools like Carver that serve students from the city’s most challenged communities. And though Carver is one of the stars among those schools — several education advocates pointed to it when asked which high schools were doing exceptionally well with overage students — graduation rates have generally risen in high schools across New Orleans.

Related: An urban charter school achieves a fivefold increase in the percentage of its black and Latino graduates who major in STEM

At Carver last year, 19 percent of the graduating class was overage — two or more years behind. Bryant expects a similar proportion this year. The statistic is uncommon: Most high schools report only a small percentage of overage students in the graduating class, because the majority drop out before graduation. “I honestly have never heard of anything like that,” said Peek, the sociologist, who was also impressed with a section of the Education Research Alliance analysis showing that overage students in New Orleans are less likely to drop out than overage students elsewhere in Louisiana.

White sees that as the result of the work that the schools are doing. “What’s happening in New Orleans is you have schools that won’t give up on their kids,” he said. “When kids get into high schools, their schools are hanging onto them.”

For teachers and administrators at Carver, the first task is to minimize the perception that age matters. “You don’t have 19 or 20 bouncing around on the top of your head,” Bryant tells students. “No one is seeing that. They don’t know your age.”

On the senior hallway, Crosby is best known as a whip-smart student who is inseparable from her closest friend, Terr’Nique Delair. “She’s my other half. She brings joy to my life,” Crosby said.

Only Crosby and Delair know that there’s an age gap between them, Crosby said. “She’s not overage — she’s graduating on time. But she’s my best friend.”

At Carver, one of Crosby’s biggest adult cheerleaders has been Brian Gilmore, the big-voiced discipline dean who often stands at the end of the senior hallway with a walkie-talkie between classes. “He always reminds me, ‘You’ve come a long way,” she said. “Why give up now?’”

That’s by design, said Bryant, who pairs each student with an advisor, who is instructed to get to know that child “extremely well.” Bryant sees those relationships as especially vital for overage students, who “are constantly weighing other options.” (Though boys generally tend to lag in academics, national statistics suggest that the proportion of girls and boys who are overage is similar.)

Anytime a student is absent, someone on Carver’s staff personally calls the child’s parent or caregiver. One of the city’s largest school social-work staffs — three full-time social workers assisted by social-work interns from Tulane — help students with everything from toothaches to juvenile-court appearances. In December, the school hired a new staffer, charged with tracking down chronically absent students (those with more than 10 absences), in an effort to get them engaged and back on the rolls before they formally drop out.

Related: Is school choice helping or hurting Catholic schools in New Orleans?

Carver is also one of a small handful of schools that works with the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies to create a trauma-sensitive environment in which students and teachers learn to cultivate supportive relationships. So whenever Crosby was disciplined for fighting, she was sent to a classroom run by a teacher named Liza Figueroa, who became a cheerleader of sorts. “Ms. Figueroa would tell me, ‘You shouldn’t be here, you should be in your class, doing your work,’” Crosby said. “After she repeated it enough times, I believed it.”

Though Carver’s official school rating is still a D, its trajectory looks positive. There’s a certain joy emanating from the school’s hallways, which are ornamented with green and orange, the school’s colors. In early December, a student brass band roamed the hallways to spread holiday cheer. As Crosby stood in the senior hallway talking, other students passing by stopped to give her a quick hug.

Here, amid the green and orange, she can be herself, Crosby said. “If I was at another school, I think that my age would come up. I think people would make jokes about it,” Crosby said.

Instead, she’s surrounded by friends, including elementary-school classmate Rory Williams, who also will be 20 when he graduates. Williams was tempted to quit school and go to work to support his ailing mother, he said. But first he consulted with Carver teachers and a favorite uncle, who reminded him that many of his friends work at fast-food places, where few jobs pay enough to support a household. “So I am going to get my diploma and be the first in my family to go to college,” he said.

Crosby nodded. She, too, has family in mind when she thinks about college. Her mother, who does home healthcare, had to drop out of nursing school when she got pregnant with Crosby’s older sister. Her mother’s hopes of returning to school were dashed a few years later, when she became pregnant again, with Crosby.

“Her dream stopped when she had us,” Crosby said. “That made me interested in becoming an ob-gyn and keeping that dream alive.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

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