NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 23 — The schools here have fresh paint, the bathroom stalls have doors, the library at the largest high school has books again and the angry demonstrations that met last school year’s chaotic opening have not been repeated.
Hurricane Katrina
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Students on their first day at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology in the Lower Ninth Ward.
For all the problems remaining in the battered public school system here, a wind of renovation is blowing through it, infused with the energy of dozens of young volunteer teachers from all over the nation and of a new superintendent with gold-plated credentials who is vowing transformation.
The schools need it: Hurricane Katrina wiped out what was already a skeleton of a system, and last year’s false start — overcrowded, violent, dispirited — was hardly a fresh beginning.
Two weeks in, the hallways are calm and heads are bowed in study. Principals report only minor discipline problems — a few fights — and a surprising willingness to buckle down.
But against that hope is the underlying reality: a bleak social breakdown decades deep. The new superintendent, Paul G. Vallas, has already seen it up close.
On the first day of school nearly 30 percent of the students did not show up, a truancy rate almost four times the national average.
Hundreds of parents or guardians registered their children at the last minute, in numbers that shocked even Mr. Vallas, a veteran tamer of hard-case schools in Chicago and Philadelphia. Many students — nobody knows how many — are hungry.
After several generations of harsh poverty and diminished expectations, for many children and their relatives here going to school has become a matter of indifference.
By the end of the last school year, fewer than half the students in the system were showing up, said Mr. Vallas, who left Philadelphia last spring for the challenge of running the New Orleans Recovery School District, one of three systems in the city.
So the terrain could not appear more infertile for himself and the other eager school reformers who have descended on the city to fix its broken public schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
“I’m just not sure there’s very much room to accomplish anything,” said Carl L. Bankston III, a sociologist at Tulane University who has written extensively about Louisiana schools. “There was relatively little family control before; there’s even less so now.”
Yet of all the many outside experts attracted here by the storm’s social revelations, Mr. Vallas has had perhaps the most brutally direct confrontation with them — and is correspondingly well-placed to meet these challenges head on.
Mr. Vallas, a newcomer with an unblinkered eye, has a plan. It is not exactly like the plans he had for Chicago and Philadelphia, cities where as superintendent he was credited with making sizable dents in the troubles of dysfunctional school systems. He raised test scores, for instance, with the help of after-school programs, and he improved math proficiency and opened new schools.
In New Orleans, the strategy cannot be the same, for a simple reason: “There’s much deeper poverty here,” Mr. Vallas said. “So you take deep poverty and then you compound that by the aftermath of the hurricane, by the physical, psychological, emotional damage inflicted by the hurricane. It’s like the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
His plan is to have the schools be more than schools. They have to be substitute families, an idea that has been tried elsewhere, though rarely to this extent, and which remains a new concept in New Orleans.
Children are arriving at the schools here hungry, Mr. Vallas said, and they are going to bed hungry. In the summer, children broke into one school to raid a vending machine, they were so hungry. More than 90 percent of his 12,000-odd students in the Recovery School District, now run by the state, are in poverty, and the vast majority are being raised by single parents. Many are not being brought up by their biological parents, Mr. Vallas said, and some are not even living with guardians.
Under these circumstances, he said, focusing on the classroom is not enough. “You begin to provide the type of services you would normally expect to be provided at home,” Mr. Vallas said. That means giving the students three meals a day, including hot lunch and dinner. It means providing dental care and eye care.
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