New Orleans – Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina changed the face of education in New Orleans forever. The school system was completely destroyed and then completely transformed, becoming the first and the only school district of all the country of the country.
Before the storm’s birthday, the Associated Press asked three survivors to think about what it was to be a student or a teacher during this tumultuous period.
For some, the relationships they have developed with educators who helped them to cross the crisis inspired careers as a teacher. Their experiences also offer lessons to teachers and schools that are going through natural disasters today.
The following are the accounts of educators according to their own words, condensed for publication.
1. Chris Dier, professor of history at Benjamin Franklin high school in New Orleans, was just starting his last year of high school in Chalmette Voisine when Katrina struck. He evacuated to a hotel, then a refuge for the survivors of Katrina in Texas.
I remember woke up at my aunt Tina striking on the hotel door. I remember that she said, “There are hundreds of bodies everywhere”, that the dikes broke. I will never forget to get this blow to the door that let me know that everything has changed, that everything is different.
There was an elderly couple who came to the refuge and spoke with us, and they offered us their trailer so that we can really have a space to live. We stayed in this trailer for the rest of the year, and I finished my high school in Texas, Henderson High School.
One of the reasons why I wanted to become a teacher was because of how these teachers have dealt with us at our lowest points. I remember that the coach offers, the football coach who obtained football crampons and took care of us in this way. I remember that Mrs. Rains, the English teacher who had us in our class and had all the ready supplies. I remember Ms. Pellon, the Spanish professor who also had supplies for us. Mr. McGinnis, he came in the early hours to kill me in chemistry because I had missed school weeks.
They made me feel welcome. They made me feel that I belong. They made me feel that I was part of a wider community, as opposed to a statistic.
The last thing I wanted to do as it grows was to be a teacher, because I saw how my mother was a teacher and all the time and the efforts she put in her job. She would cook with her left hand and would classify the papers with her right hand. I wanted more in life. But Katrina changed me this way, because I saw how these teachers responded.
Everything we are talking about is “before Katrina” and “after Katrina”. Now I have “before Covid” and “after Cavid”. I started to see the parallels right away, when schools closed on March 16 (in 2020). The questions (the students) had, these same questions that I had after having evacuated during Hurricane Katrina. I remember thinking, “Are we really never going back to school?”
I returned home this weekend and I wrote an open letter to the elders, offering some support and advice. I wrote about what it is to lose your last year. I said people were going to minimize the situation because they don’t know what it does to be deployed their last year. But I know. I try to tell them that they are not forgotten: teachers think of them. We care about them.
2. Jahquille Ross was a primary school teacher and director and is now working for new non-profit schools for New Orleans. When Katrina struck, he was a student of eighth at the Edna Karr Magnet school on the West Bank of New Orleans.
We decided after watching the news on Friday to leave on Saturday. I just remember being on the highway forever. Literally forever. I lived with my brother and sister-in-law during this period, because my mother died at the age of 12, in 2003. We head to Alexandria, where my sister-in-law comes from. I remember being hungry for a long time.
It was devastating to see what was going on in New Orleans on national television during this period. When you have seen the large amount of people, the impact of water and the floods and the damage that were caused because of the wind, it was like: Oh, we are going to be in Alexandria for a while.
At that time, “a moment” was like, maybe another week or two. And that was not the case.
It was one, two, three, four schools in a year. Exhausting. It was difficult to make friends wherever I was going, because I was not sure at that time, how long are we going to be in a particular setting? The places do not feel like New Orleans.
We moved to Plano, Texas, for about six months. Really nice neighborhood, really nice people. There were more whites than I have never seen before at school. I felt racism a little more. It was more widespread by students.
I did not play academically at the level that I had normally been in New Orleans. The simple fact of trying to stay afloat in my lessons was a fight. The teachers did not really put themselves in four. They were strictly, like: “It’s the lesson, it’s the material, that’s when the test is”. I simply did not get love and attention to which I was used to New Orleans.
I returned to New Orleans in March or April. It was good to be back home. I had my base of friends from the college. I had friends from primary school. I was back among the family and the elders, like my grandmother, my aunt, my cousins, everyone. We lived 10, 15 minutes in each other, which is really good. We had a school -based schooling, you know, before Katrina.
This has changed the trajectory of my life. I didn’t always want to become an educator. With my deceased mother, the school anchored me. It was the teachers and leaders inside these school buildings that supported me, pushed me and encouraged me.
I had hinged educators of my life who played a big role in my education and my journey. In return, I felt like I could do it for other children from New Orleans. I chose to go to elementary education, so that students from their first years of education would have the possibility of being educated by a black man.
3. Michelle Garnett was an educator in New Orleans for 33 years, mainly in kindergarten and kindergarten, before retiring in 2022. She taught kindergarten at Parkview Elementary in New Orleans when Katrina struck and had to evacuate to Baton Rouge.
When we were able to return to town, going back to my school of origin, Parkview, it was devastating to see the school simply destroyed. This memory, I would not want to start again through it if I could be spared this.
My mother was a teacher and she had given me a lot. Just memories that you just can’t recover. My mother was a bit of an artist, so she drew a lot of tale book characters for me. My father also gave me a cassette with the song “Knowledge is power” that I played for my children. I lost the band he had given me. So you know, sentimental things. Everyone in the city has lost a lot.
My classroom was just molded and deformed water, and it felt, and it was simply horrible. I can say that no one could save anything from this particular school. That was just everything – everything was lost.
We were all in Baton Rouge together with the family, 23 of us strong in my daughter’s house. Brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles. In addition to the 23 people in my daughter’s house, she was eight months pregnant at the time. But we were happy. Everyone was safe and we had to accept things that we couldn’t change.
I loved what I did. I entered strictly out of necessity. My second daughter, who has now died, had a very rare form of muscular dystrophy. The parish of Orleans hired me as a specific assistant for my own child. She was only in school, shortly from December to May, and the following month, two days after her sixth anniversary, she died. I was asked to continue working as a specific assistant to the child. During this process, it was when I had the passion and the desire to return to school, to be certified in education.
We think we choose a path for ourselves, and God puts us in the place where he wants us to be. Teaching is where I had to be. And I really enjoyed.
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