February
6, 2007
After-School
Conference
By Dan Baum
A
huge dreadlocked boy shouldered past the security guard at Frederick A.
Douglass High School on St. Claude Avenue and growled, “Thanks for getting me
in trouble.”
“You
got your own self in trouble!” the uniformed guard, an African-American woman
with a lacquered wraparound hairdo and long multicolored nails, shouted at his
retreating back. “Go to your classes! You a basketball player! You’re supposed
to be an example!”
Past
the security guard, in a Frederick Douglass computer lab, the principal, three
teachers, and eight interested citizens sat on plastic chairs under fluorescent
lights and talked, straight through the dinner hour on Tuesday night, about
ways to make the lives of the school’s students a little better.
The
principal, Allen T. Woods, a large, light-skinned African-American with a
gentle voice, laid out the context: “The truth of the matter is, there is a
vast population of kids in our school with no parental involvement. They’re
back living on their own. Living with relatives. Living with boyfriends or
girlfriends. We have one or two students taking the bus from Baton Rouge every
morning.” (That’s at least ninety minutes each way.) “Most of them are
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,” Woods continued. “They have missed a year of
being in school. Some are on target. Some are two years behind.”
Robert
George, a middle-aged white man with glasses and a graying mustache who teaches
English at Frederick Douglass, said, “For our first open house, I had one
parent show up. I have eighty-five kids. I’ve had maybe five parents call since
then. Usually, they say, ‘I’m the aunt, I’m the grandmother, I don’t really
have time.’” He paused, and his voice dropped. “I have one young lady I’m
really sorry for,” he said quietly. “Both parents are dead. And the grandmother
says, ‘I don’t really have time for this.’” George sat back and his voice grew
suddenly louder. “You need to have one adult somewhere who has the time to
worry about your problems.”
The
school’s choir teacher, Marie deYoung, added, “The only thing different between
New Orleans and Philadelphia, or Detroit, or Oakland, or any other urban
district? The federal government is putting in resources now, since Katrina,
that they should have put in twenty years ago. We had a band teacher who was
murdered. It’s hard to keep teachers because of the violence.” After Hurricane
Katrina, the Louisiana
Department of Education created a new state-run Recovery School
District for New Orleans schools that had been performing below state
standards. The state also allowed local public schools to become charter
schools.
More
than half of the fifty-six New Orleans schools that have reopened since Katrina
are charter schools. They tend to be in the wealthier parts of town. Frederick
Douglass High School sits in a part of the Ninth Ward known as the Bywater,
where abandoned houses and shady characters lie one street over from the kind
of bohemian grace that is often described as “the way the French Quarter was in
the nineteen-fifties.” The Frederick Douglass Community Coalition decided not
to seek charter status for the school, which reopened in September. But Monday
night, Woods said, “I’m asking the state lawyers how I can set up a Friends of
Frederick Douglass.” He’s been waiting for an answer for a month. One possible
source of income would involve turning the school’s auditorium, a neglected Art
Deco hall that seats sixteen hundred, into a community theatre.
Principal
Woods stepped into the hall to scold a uniformed cheerleader who had
cartwheeled past the open door. DeYoung, the choir teacher, said, “I’m a little
appalled at the food that’s served to the kids.”
“Leave
that one alone,” Woods said, returning heavily to his seat. “Go to the next
one.”
“What
about the physical ambience of this building?” deYoung asked. “Leave that
alone, too. That’s way above us,” Woods said. “It’s not perfect. The last time
the building was repainted was 1988, and it took ten months.” Sitting in on the
meeting were two representatives of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Foundation, who
were applying for a grant. “We are looking for a building, and for someone
willing to hire someone who can teach theatre or television or music. We’re
looking for a principal who’d be interested in that,” one of them said.
Woods
made a come-hither motion with his hand. “No problem there,” he said. “I’m open
for anything. We’re trying to revitalize the culinary arts program, get that
kitchen fixed up. There are chefs in the area who say they’d like to be a part
of that.” He sat back in his seat and raised his palms. “I keep throwing out my
cane pole and see what I can pull in,” he said.
This article was originally online here:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/neworleansjournal/2007/02/afterschool_con.html