Flickr/Carissa GoodNCrazy

John, an eighth grader at the time, gives another student on school grounds a candy bar. He is spotted by a security guard and told he now faces suspension. Frightened, John runs, getting caught twice and slapped with handcuffs as many times, acquiring bruises along his wrists in the process. A jacket his grandmother purchased is torn during the scuffle with the much larger security personnel.

“Knowing how my dad has been in and out of jail his whole life and always had handcuffs on… I promised myself it would never happen to me,” John says. “I’m a kid, and kids shouldn’t have handcuffs on them. It disgusts me putting kids in handcuffs and jail.”

Another student, identified as Chris, is handcuffed to a radiator in the central office of the school after completing an out-of-school suspension. He’s shackled for three hours, and not even the protestations of a teacher, and finally his mother, lead to the release of the boy.

“They just kept handcuffing me. Even other students got handcuffed,” shares Chris. “One kid was in special-ed and he would holler and cry when they handcuffed him.”

Last December, the Southern Poverty Law Center transcribed these stories of Chris and John, students attending New Orleans schools, along with half a dozen other first-person accounts of the increasing penalization on the playgrounds and hallways throughout the city.

Yet the brute force chronicled speaks to a much larger dissonance affecting New Orleans public education, supplying more ammunition to critics of New Orleans schools that bulk up on young, cheap and inexperienced teachers to educate a community particularly blighted by poverty.

Poverty and punishment explained

The intersection of punishment, student poverty and teacher experience begins, strangely enough, with a paper comparing transfer rates and international test scores in over five dozen countries.

In a study published (PDF) July 6, researchers for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) noted countries that hold students back an additional year or shuffle students out of schools for academic or behavioral problems are more likely to support education systems marked by inequity, low student performance and unnecessarily bloated budgets.

In gathering the data, the writers of the brief collected results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 65 member and partner countries, representing a wide spectrum of GDP per capita, and principal surveys from participating schools.

The authors conclude that:

PISA 2009 reveals that countries in which more schools transfer students for the abovementioned reasons show poorer overall performance. In fact, over one-third of the variation in student performance across countries can be explained by the rate at which schools transfer students, regardless of the wealth of the country.

School systems that transfer students more frequently also tend to show a stronger relationship between students’ socio-economic background and performance, and a wider gap in performance between schools, even after accounting for countries’ national income. This suggests that transferring students tends to be associated with socio-economic segregation in school systems, where students from advantaged backgrounds end up in better-performing schools while students from disadvantaged backgrounds end up in poorer-performing schools. However, this does not necessarily mean that if countries abolish their transfer policies, their performance will automatically improve; PISA doesn’t measure cause and effect.

In New Orleans, dismissing students from schools for behavioral infractions or poor academic performance is a common occurrence, and one disproportionately affecting students of color or living in low-income households.

During a conversation with The American Independent, a doctor of education and radio host Raynard Sanders said, “In this city, we have a system where the kids are separated by race and class. Kids that … are expelled are placed into schools that are not close to home, with bad facilities.”

And while the state-managed Recovery School District (RSD) — part of a dramaticdeconstruction of the city’s school system following Hurricane Katrina that resulted in the majority of the schools being taken over by Baton Rouge and turned over to charter schools — is often skewered for a chronically underperforming student body, charter schools are guilty of their own quick-triggered dismissal of students.

The Big Easy is rather breezy with its expulsion rates: As previously reported by The American Independent, the rate of expulsion among RSD students in 2008 was ten times the national average. Suspensions were also extremely high, with 29 percent of RSD students losing at least one instructional day — over four times the national average. The punitive landscape is exacerbated further by the number of security personnel in RSD schools. The year before Katrina, the city-wide school district Orleans Parish School Board spent (according to according to a 2010 report from the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative) $46 per student on security. The first full year of RSD in 2006-2007 saw that number soar to $2,100. And though that figure went down in 2008-2009, it was still nearly $700 per student.

The reasons students are dismissed are often egregious and can have a deleterious effect on a child’s long-term academic prospects. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on a U.S. Department of Justice study that found abusive punishment inflicted on a student by school authorities increases the child’s risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder five-fold. The SPLC document continued:

An over-reliance on these disciplinary methods can lead to the loss of valuable learning time, while contributing significantly to dropout rates. The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that Louisiana loses more than $6.9 billion annually in wages as a result of policies that push students out of school before graduation.

The degree to which race and class factor into disciplinary measures is also highlighted by SPLC:

• In RSD schools, 98% of students are African American and 79% of students are low income. RSD students are suspended at a rate that is more than three times the rate of suspension in neighboring, mostly white, affluent school districts.

• In St. Tammany Parish, where only 18.5% of students are African American and 42.5% are low-income, only 8% of students were suspended.

• In St. Charles Parish, where only 36.4% of students are African American and 45.1% are low-income, only 4.1% of students were suspended from school.

Charter schools expel, suspend and fine students for being late or snacking

Charter schools in the city, motivated by a desire to demonstrate high student-proficiency numbers according to state tests, use both selective admissions processes and implement codes of conduct that allow them to dismiss students not making the academic cut, says Lance Hill, a former professor of cultural studies who now heads the Southern Institute for Education and Research.

“Most of the charters enroll students by way of lottery to exclude high-needs, high-costs students,” he begins. “Yet a lot of the selectivity is after the admissions process — they use minor excuses for expulsion in case they enroll low-performing students.”

Research on Reforms (ROR), a collection of education scholars critical of the charter movement, and Learning Matters, an education reporting unit regularly featured on PBS, provided the legal justification and details of New Orleans charter school dismissal policies in a report on the ROR website. What follows is a sampling of their findings, along with original reporting by TAI.

At Lafayette Academy, “Removal of food from cafeteria” “Lying/falsehood,” “Sleeping in class” and “Leaving classroom without teacher’s permission,” along with 48 other infractions are described as risking “an orderly environment for learning” and can lead to suspension or expulsion, according to the school handbook.

Miller-McCoy Academy for Mathematics and Business also warnsstudents and parents cutting class, school, detention and related mandatory school events can lead to suspension or expulsion. Other offenses that warrant out-of-class dismissal include possession of electronics and printed text deemed vulgar or profane. The handbook also states items confiscated can be held by the school permanently, irrespective of costs and fees.

According to the 2010 handbook of the New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, a child with 12 unexcused absences for the year can lead to the school reporting the parent to the Louisiana Department of Social Services. Hill says the school included the ‘can’ only recently, meaning prior to the switch, the school did report parents to child services.

KIPP Central City Primary appears to be the most draconian: The handbook explains five or more instances of the student being tardy or absent can result in a $250 fine, an official police report, a summons to perform 25 hours of community service by the parent, guardian or child or permanent removal from the school. If a child is missing from school for twenty consecutive days, even with parental notification, that child is automatically withdrawn from the school.

Charles Roemer, an RSD committee chair and member of the Louisiana Board of Early and Secondary Education, said in an early-June public meeting that, “The charter school determines what they can and cannot do autonomously. So that is their decision, their discipline policy, their expulsion policy, their attendance policies, which can be determined at a school by school basis for charter schools.”

In a follow-up question that asked if state law permits that type of autonomy, he said: “It is consistent with the Louisiana Charter School Law. That’s what it is consistent with. It is. Absolutely.”

If more experienced teachers keep students calm — do better test scores follow?

Given the increase in disciplinary punishment meted out in New Orleans schools, what changed after the storm? Some could point to poverty as an excuse for ramping up security in the playgrounds and hallways, but the leading indicator of low-income status in schools, qualifying for reduced lunch programs, hardly changed enough since the antediluvian period to warrant constant surveillance.

In 2004, before the state put the city’s school system through a tectonic shift and wound up with an archipelago comprising dozens of self-governing academies (and the abrupt dissolution of the collective bargaining agreement between teachers and the city,resulting in 8,500 layoffs), 77 percent of Orleans Parish students qualified for the lunch programs; 89 percent of New Orleans public school students are eligible today.

But while poverty increased, the experience level of teachers took a turn in the opposite direction, and with it, a talent for managing at-risk pupils.

“There is a saying in teaching if you cannot manage your classroom, there’s no way you can transfer your knowledge,” begins Davina Allen, a Teach For America alumna in New Orleans currently earning a post secondary degree in educational leadership. “If you’re struggling with behavioral issues, then there’s a very good chance you’re not teaching well.”

TAI spoke to Allen about the tandem force of keeping teachers in schools over a longer period of time and how a high turnover of labor in education hobbles the community.

“No one is saying all old teachers are better, but the new paradigm is that you don’t want veteran teachers around” is flawed, she said.

According to an internal document from the American Federation of Teachers obtained by TAI that uses 2008-2009 Times Picayune teacher experience data in New Orleans, experience matters. For RSD schools, which tend to perform poorly, 42 percent of teachers in K-8 classrooms have less than two years of experience. One in six eighth-grade students are proficient in math. At Orleans Parish, which was spared a handful of schools following the state takeover of schools in the city, thirteen percent of teachers had less than two years of experience and two out of three eighth-graders were proficient in math.

The class and race criticisms Dr. Sanders imputed for the region’s schools are likely fueled by these findings, also from AFT:

• A typical White high school student attends a school in which 17 percent of the teachers are in their first or second year, but a typical African-American high
school student attends a school in which 37 percent of teachers are in their first or second year.

• For a typical African-American student in a state-run RSD high school, the vast majority of teachers (64 percent) are in their first or second year.

• A typical White student in grades K-8 eligible for free lunch attends a school in which only 15 percent of teachers are in their first or second year, but a typical free lunch-eligible African-American student attends a school in which double that percentage of teachers (29 percent) are similarly inexperienced.

• An African-American student who is ineligible for free lunch is more likely to have a first- or second-year teacher (21 percent) than a White student who is
eligible for free lunch (12 percent).

Part of the blame for the disparity in performance falls squarely on the shoulders of the Recovery School District at large. As a report on education strategies in New Orleans and other large cities from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform states, “Many respondents [New Orleans educators, school officials] felt that, with the possible exception of some charter and [Orleans Parish School District] schools, teachers and leaders overall are not getting the level of support they need either from administrators or the system at large.”

But RSD appears satisfied with its human resources model. This year alone, 250 experienced teachers will lose their jobs, with a cadre of Teach for America fellows filing through in replacement to help educate the some 40,000 students in New Orleans. That decision continues a trend of favoring younger educators.

An education scholar who requested not to be named offered a moral vignette: “Knowing how to manage behaviors with kids who watched their parents drown in Katrina is not something a French Literature major from Long Island can learn overnight.”

Information on student test scores and teacher experience levels in other cities buoys the data mining at AFT. A 2009 study out of the University of Virginia observed that teacher effectiveness continues to slope upward at a steep incline into the 21st year of being on the job.  And while the instructor’s performance begins to sag in the subsequent decade of experience, the 30th year on the job posts higher levels of effectiveness than was achieved after ten years of teaching.

Is it fair to draw conclusions from low socio-economic status and high transfer rates among affected students? The writers of the OECD study do little to betray that notion, putting some of the onus on educators:

These results suggest that, in general, school systems that seek to cater to different students’ needs by having struggling students repeat grades or by transferring them to other schools do not succeed in producing superior overall results and, in some cases, reinforce socio-economic inequities. Teachers in these systems may have fewer incentives to work with struggling students if they know there is an option of transferring those students to other schools.

The Recreational Vehicle Industry Association and a few dealers explained it to me this way. Through the 2000s, the market for RVs boomed, due to the economic good times and successful advertising campaigns targeted at younger buyers. By 2006, manufacturers were shipping 390,000 units per year to dealerships — a decent proxy for new-RV sales.

But RV sales are highly sensitive to high gas prices and recessions: RVs are generally a luxury item, not a necessity, and sales require good credit conditions because RVs can be quite expensive. (Apparently motorhome sales are a bit different: During downturns, some buyers that might have purchased a house will instead purchase a motorhome — though nice motorhomes cost more than small houses in many areas.) In 2007, manufacturers started producing far fewer vehicles, and sales of new RVs have plummeted more than 60 percent since the start of the recession.

The RV market is also unusual in that well-built American RVs tend to last for years, meaning that there is a vigorous resale market. (Your average RV will go through a number of owners, and a typical RV user might hang on to her camper for 20 years before deciding to buy a new or newer used one.) That means that while there are millions of RVs in circulation, relatively few new ones are manufactured per year.

Suddenly, in 2005, near the top of the RV production market for the decade, the government purchased approximately 145,000 RVs — meaning that rather than producing 3.7 percent more RVs in 2005 than in 2004, manufacturers actually made 43 percent more.

Soon after, the market for RVs seized up due to the recession. And soon after, the government started moving New Orleans residents out of the trailers and into permanent housing. In 2009, the government sold off more than 90,000s of those RVs — flooding certain sectors of the resale market and driving down prices during the worst of the RV recession. Needless to say, dealers aren’t particularly happy about that.

FEMA trailers being shipped to New Orleans. (Flickr/factoryseashell)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

A few weeks ago, in Henry County, Ga., a woman named Angela Wilson led a local television anchor into her camping trailer, a standard white-clad box on wheels, ready to be pulled into the woods by an RV or a truck. She described how her eyes started to tear up after standing in it a few minutes – not due to emotion, but due to the chemical preservative, irritant and carcinogen formaldehyde.

[Environment1] Unknowingly, Wilson bought one of the 145,000 infamous Katrina trailers – the mobile camping and housing units the Federal Emergency Management Agency bought to house the hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians displaced by the devastation wreaked by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “We were told that this trailer was in no way related to Katrina, that this trailer came from North Dakota,” Wilson told the camera. She said the out-of-state dealer assured her that chemical contaminants were not an issue. Later, she found a pamphlets from FEMA and state officials in Mississippi tucked away.

Five years after Katrina, the infamous trailers – bought for billions, sold for pennies on the dollar – are still causing trouble. And that trouble and those trailers are now widespread. The campers were once congregated around New Orleans, but now blanket the entire country, uncounted and mislabeled in dealers’ lots, back lawns and sites for oil spill cleanup.

On the Gulf Coast, organized into parks of a few hundred trailers each, at the peak occupancy, FEMA trailer housed more than 92,000 families. The government intended the trailers to act as temporary shelter – a place for families to stay for up to 18 months.

Many of the trailers are not mobile homes, but units meant for temporary stays, like camping trips. The problems with them were always manifold. First there weren’t enough: FEMA let tens of thousands of trailers sit idle while New Orleanians suffered without homes. Then, argue advocacy groups, FEMA took the trailers back from families too soon, exacerbating homelessness. The worst problem, though, was the formaldehyde.

As soon as Katrina survivors moved into the trailers, some noticed a harsh chemical stench, soon followed by nosebleeds, coughing, irritated eyes. Formaldehyde, a preservative used in the trailers, was to blame, as was the fact that many of the trailers were not meant for permanent living – just temporary use.

The Sierra Club and other advocacy groups led the fight for testing of the FEMA trailers, and the problem came under congressional investigation in 2007. Dozens spoke out about their experiences. Lindsay Huckabee, for one, gave wrenching testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology about her FEMA mobile unit in Kiln, Miss.  Huckabee’s six-year-old, Lelah, developed moderate asthma and sinus infections so bad they required an operation to widen her sinus passages. Lelah also had “pneumonia, ear infections, throat infections, asthmatic bronchitis, nose bleeds, headaches, two MRIs,” and four surgeries. Huckabee’s four other children had similar problems.

The Huckabee family lived in FEMA trailer housing for two and a half years – as did thousands of other displaced families. But they moved out, and then the trailers sat – thousands of them – in storage, for years.

In the late summer of 2005, FEMA had paid about $2.7 billion for 145,000 trailers, campers and mobile homes, approximately one for every home hurt by the storm and flood. The trailers came from Gulf Stream, Forest River, Fleetwood and other major manufacturers. While campers and other recreational vehicles are enormously popular in America – about one in 12 families that owns a car owns an RV — the request for 145,000 new units posed a tremendous shock of demand for the RV market, according to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, a trade group. In 2005, manufacturers shipped about 384,000 RV units – campers, trailers, motor homes – to dealers, in line with production and sales in the years before and after. The government’s request meant producers had to come up with an additional 40 percent their entire years’ production – and yesterday.

As a result, Uncle Sam has paid for about one in 11 or 12 trailers produced since 2005. The companies and subcontractors started redirecting and pumping out new units. They purchased extra parts, mostly from abroad, for assembly in Indiana, where the camper industry is based. They put out calls for additional workers and kept them on midnight shifts. By September, ordered trailers started to arrive on the coast, shipped by train.

Now, however, the government has little use for those units and has flooded the market for trailers, driving down prices. FEMA endeavored to move families from the trailers to permanent housing as soon as rebuilding started, and by 2007, the number of people living in the trailers had fallen by half, to less than 50,000. In May 2009, FEMA officially ended the temporary housing program, forcing the residents in 4,600 remaining trailers out. (Thousands purchased their trailers for the government, others did not want to move and needed to be evicted.) Today, there are about 800 families in Louisiana still residing in government-owned trailers.

“Ninety-nine percent of these residents have now moved on to more permanent housing,” Mike Karl, FEMA’s Louisiana Recovery Office Interim Director, said in a fifth anniversary statement. “To date, approximately $5.8 billion has been spent to assist Katrina/Rita survivors, including $4.2 billion in housing assistance and $1.6 billion in other needs assistance.”

Since the trailers’ original residents moved out, the government has spent some $220 million storing vacant trailers, stickered as not intended for permanent residence. Most of them sat on deserted lots until Jan. 29 this year, when FEMA sold 93,000 trailers plus a further 9,300 mobile homes – for approximately 7 percent of what the government initially paid. As with the purchase, the sale of the mass number of units messed up the trailer market.

“I’m certainly hopeful we’re approaching the end of the story for the Katrina units, which we have been maintaining in the hundreds and thousands of units, at the expense of taxpayers,” FEMA Associate Deputy Administrator David Garratt told The Washington Post. “I’m hopeful we can reduce the inventory of units which we can no longer use, and actively maintain the units we can use in actual disasters.”

Where are the trailers now? Everywhere. They are being sold on the internet. They are housing workers for the Gulf Coast oil spill cleanup. Someone suggested sending them to Haiti. They are owned by individuals. And they are part of the RV market’s persistent resale culture: An RV unit, one Texas dealer says, gets resold 10 or 15 times in its lifetime of use. Katrina trailers, more faded with each sale, could be circulating the country for years.

A decline in construction jobs in New Orleans has not created a decline in wage theft, workers' rights groups say. (iStock photo)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with the Congress of Day Laborers in New Orleans, tells a story about the abuse of workers rebuilding the city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. She once met a man who went to his employer’s house to demand payment for his labor on a construction site after the employer stiffed him of his dues. The man’s boss came at him, swinging a hammer. The worker immediately called the police.

[Immigration1] When they showed up, she says, the first thing they did was ask for his immigration status. “These are the sort of situations that prevent day laborers from asking for help when their wages are denied,” Gonzalez says.

The politics of immigration are thorny, but it is a simple truth that construction companies routinely use day laborers without checking their immigration status: Thousands of those workers have helped and are helping to rebuild New Orleans. But those workers commonly suffer abuse due to their immigration status, including threats of violence and wage theft. Despite the best efforts of workers’ rights groups, five years after the hurricane, advocates say abuse remains rampant. Now, those groups are calling for specific legislation to protect vulnerable workers — documented and not — and to make sure they get their due.

After Hurricane Katrina, the number of undocumented workers in New Orleans increased substantially, in part because of a Department of Homeland Security directive to suspend employment immigration enforcement in the area immediately following the storm. The suspension expired quickly, but it created an inviting environment for undocumented immigrants, says Elizabeth Fussell, a professor at Washington State University.

“Conditions were set to attract a labor force of Latino immigrants,” Fussell says. “There was a large population of undocumented immigrants who were coming to do the work that was necessary in the city.”

Though there are no firm numbers on undocumented workers, social scientists point to increases in the Latino population to show the influx of immigrants. The Latino population increased from a 4.4 percent share of the population in 2000 to 6.6 percent last year, according to Census data. Advocacy groups say it is likely higher, about 10 percent.

Thousands of those workers came to work rebuilding New Orleans — clearing debris, fixing roads, building houses, constructing schools. “After Katrina hit, there was much more work and much more wages for people — there were other wages to be found,” Gonzalez says.

And along with the rise of undocumented workers and construction problems came wage theft — to which undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable. In a 2007 survey of Mexican migrants at the Mexican mobile consulate in a suburb of New Orleans, Fussell found that 24 percent had experienced situations where an employer did not pay, while about 16 percent had been paid less than they were promised. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed were working in the country illegally. The Congress of Day Laborers last year found that 80 percent of the workers it represents had been victims of wage theft in the past year.

The consequences are particularly dire for undocumented workers, who do not have access to the same legal and policing resources as other workers. “When you’re not paid for that money, the consequences can be much more serious. It’s the difference between being able to pay rent and being homeless,” says Gonzales.

Nonprofit and advocacy groups stepped in to fill the void, helping undocumented workers regain wages from bosses who stiffed them. The Pro Bono Project and Loyola New Orleans’ School of Law help workers sue their employers, for instance. At the Pro Bono clinic, established in 2007, lawyer Vanessa Spinazola says 90 percent of the workers represented are undocumented. Last year, in a nine-month period, lawyers at the clinic saw 476 workers, filed 365 cases and helped draft 146 demand letters.

Oxfam America funds the Pro Bono clinic, but was forced to discontinue its project on workers’ rights in July due to a lack of funds. Ilana Scherl, a field representative for Oxfam who previously worked on the worker’s rights project, says New Orleans just had too much need and too little funding for the initiative. “I guess a lot of foundations feel like five years later everything should be taken care of,” she says. “The problems are still there but the funds are not.” Spinazola says the clinic has enough funding from Oxfam to operate until July 2011, and she is “writing grants as fast as possible” to find money to continue the clinics.

The clinic is still very much needed, particularly because workers often face violence from employers for demanding their wages, she says. The clinic tells workers to put the address of a clinic P.O. box on their demand letters, so that if employers want to retaliate they won’t have their home addresses. Workers whose employers know their addresses often move before sending the letter. Fear deters some workers from seeking their wages, but others move forward with claims, Spinazola says. “They’re afraid but they need the money or they think they deserve their money — which they do.”

Of course, for illegal immigrants there is also a fear that their employers will call ICE. Spinazola said she suspects that happened a few years ago, when the clinic helped a group of about 40 men who were living and working in an apartment complex to send a letter demanding wages. Most of the men moved out before the letter was sent, but seven were still present when the employer received the demand letter. Two days later, Spinazola said ICE raided the apartments. Three of the men were deported.

Worker’s rights advocates argue that a city ordinance is essential to combating a wage theft problem too big for advocates and undocumented workers to deal with on their own. “The workers need protection, they’re not getting it right now,” Scherl says. “The only way we see to achieve that is to have a policy in place protecting the workers.”

The New Orleans Center for Racial Justice helped develop a policy, but the exact direction of the potential ordinance remains unclear. New Orleans City Councilman Arnie Fielkow has said he would support a wage theft ordinance, and groups are now negotiating the ordinance with the mayor’s office and other officials at city hall.

In New Orleans, some advocates of a wage theft ordinance said they are concerned growing anti-illegal immigrant sentiment will play into their effort to pass the ordinance. But they are hoping the general goodwill many New Orleans residents feel toward the workers who helped rebuild their city will make matters easier.

“In this climate, the fear of opposition is always there,” Gonzalez says. “But New Orleans is a city that recognizes that day laborers did participate and did come to the rescue in terms of reconstruction.”

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu hopes to make contracting more fair, and to help local businesses. (Flickr, dsb nola)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

Two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ mayor, Mitch Landrieu (D), just three months into his tenure, made a major announcement. A hundred recovery projects, from libraries to fire stations to parks, were ready to go after years of red tape and implementation scandals.

[Environment1] “I can say this with certainty: that these 100 projects are a priority in somebody’s mind in the city, that they are 100 percent funded, that they are part of the city’s long-term master plan and will be built, or are in the process of being built,” Landrieu told The Times-Picayune. “Some of them are further along than others. But you can take these to the bank.”

In a city that has long suffered from halting and ineffective efforts to contract municipal recovery funds, the news came as a welcome relief. It stoked hopes that Landrieu’s administration would offer a clean break from Mayor Ray Nagin’s (D) fraught eight-year tenure. “I think this city is ready to soar,” declared City Council President Arnie Fielkow.

But as the mayor gets ready to cut ribbons and break ground, a number of local labor and anti-discrimination groups are voicing worries that the new projects will not benefit the city’s local businesses. Their concerns center around the city’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program, intended to make good-faith efforts to help local, women, and minority-owned firms secure city contracts. Wary due to rampant cronyism and corruption in the past, leaving local companies adrift, the NAACP and other groups are seizing on Landrieu’s announcement. For them, turning around the DBE will be the litmus test for success.

Even before Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans, activists and businesses charged that the city had an opaque and cronyism-ridden system for awarding building and contracting deals — a major hurdle for local firms. The Bureau of Governmental Research, a private, independent research organization released a major report entitled “Contracting with Confidence” to call attention to the matter and make recommendations in March.

“An $81 million energy efficiency contract saddled the city with two decades of excessive payments and resulted in the convictions of an administration official, political supporters, and contractors who skimmed money from the deal,” the report said in its lengthy summary of recent examples of political patronage. “A contract for home monitoring of municipal offenders went to a politically connected firm that possessed no experience providing the service and that scored lowest on the city’s evaluation of proposals. The public paid 60 percent more to install and manage electronic parking meters than it would have had the city contracted with the firm that scored highest in the city’s own evaluation. A post-Katrina car removal contract went to the most expensive of 14 bidders through an evaluation process that did not account for the cost of services. The list goes on.”

Former Mayor Ray Nagin was implicated in the political patronage system as well after revelations that his family vacationed in Hawaii and Jamaica due to the largess of Mark St. Pierre, who held numerous city technology contracts. Later, St. Pierre was indicted, along with Greg Meffert, Nagin’s chief techonology officer, on 63 federal counts of bribery, money laundering, tax evasion and other crimes.

In the wake of the hurricane, when federal recovery money began pouring in and outside firms often secured work for complicated projects, rather than local businesses, the city’s opaque methods and history of corruption ginned up anger and outrage from an underemployed citizenry. Particularly troubling in the eyes of local business owners, particularly black business owners, was the persistent sense that the city was allowing the money to be funneled to out-of-state contractors who made little effort to hire local businesses.

“We’re dealing with local contractors on a daily basis and they’re not getting the work,” argues Barry Kaufman, secretary treasurer of the Construction and General Laborers Union Local 689. “There are more out-of-state contractors in here than holes in cheese. Local contractors are being low bidded by out-of-state contractors. It’s a shame how [Nagin] let that happen.”

When, in February 2009, the New Orleans City Council passed an ordinance that required Nagin’s closed-door review panels to meet in public, the mayor vetoed the bill and later issued an order that scrapped the evaluation panels altogether. That process, or the lack thereof, remained in place until Landrieu assumed office in May and made contracts reform a signature priority of his administration.

In addition to restoring transparency and expertise to city contracting, Landrieu’s administration also tried reaching out to disillusioned local groups. The mayor set up a “provisional certification program,” which allowed businesses certified as “disadvantaged” by state and other agencies to compete for city contracts alongside City Hall’s previous designees. He also created an Office of Supplier Diversity, tasked with enforcing city ordinances and implementing programs like DBE.

These new programs and agencies, however, have yet to perform up to expectations. A report on DBE released by the city’s Office of the Inspector General in early August made a number of damning observations about its effectiveness, including, “(1) that the personnel responsible for implementing this program did not have a clear understanding of the applicable legal standards; (2) that the certification procedure implemented did not have written rules or comply with open meeting laws; and, (3) that the responsible office lacks sufficient staff and funding to carry out its intended functions.”

The Inspector General’s observations, the report noted, reflected more on the failings of the DBE program over the years than any of Landrieu’s specific efforts, but they also highlighted that, thus far, progress has been substandard. Groups like the NAACP seized upon the report, voicing fears that the administration is faltering on its promise to help New Orleans-based and minority-owned businesses secure contracts on new recovery projects.

“We have requested documentation from the city on previous contracts, but our focus right now is not what has happened in the past but on the one hundred projects just announced by Landrieu,” explains local NAACP chapter president Danatus King. “That’s a billion dollars worth of projects that the mayor publicized in the media last week. No matter what happened in the past, we want to make sure the law is enforced with respect to that.”

In order to keep tabs on all the contracts, King and other leaders have demanded that the city gather records for all its contracts — and all the required documentation contractors are required to submit for them — in publicly accessible folders that volunteers can access and use to monitor for compliance. “If the city doesn’t have the manpower to do it,” King explains, “we’re asking for citizens to get involved.”

Neither the city nor activists possess data on whether New Orleans is complying with an ordinance requiring that half of public spending go to locally owned companies and 35 percent to “socially and economically disadvantaged businesses.” It is not even clear which businesses qualify as “socially and economically disadvantaged.” While the ordinances originally included race- and gender-based criteria, the Supreme Court has since declared such rules to be unconstitutional. As a result, the city has tinkered with its certification process over the years but has yet to come up with firm criteria.

And while the DBE participation goals are “aspirational” in nature, the paperwork required to demonstrate a good faith effort in achieving them is not. Despite this fact, the Inspector General’s office noted that the current panel that approves companies for the city’s DBE program holds monthly meetings that are not advertised and are not open to the public — nor is there an adequate avenue of appeal if a business’s application is rejected. Moreover, the city’s Office of Supplier Diversity currently has only one employee, who has no time sufficiently monitor or enforce compliance on the part of contractors with the DBE program’s participation goals.

The mayor’s office announced earlier this year that it would undertake a “disparity study” to begin putting numbers on the debate. (The office declined to speak to TWI about the issue.) In the meantime, businesses, unions and activists remain unconvinced.  “I can tell you at the Langston Hughes school right over by the race track,” notes Kaufman, of the Construction and General Laborers Union Local 689. “This contractor from Biloxi, Miss., built that school. You’re telling me, with all the local contractors in New Orleans, we can’t build a school?”

“I think there’s one person in the office [of Supplier Diversity], but that’s no excuse,” he notes. “I think they’ve been doing this for years and years, and I think it’s business as usual. I hope it changes. We’re going to give Landrieu an opportunity to prove us wrong.”

A school damaged by Hurricane Katrina. (Flickr, Paul Baker)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the federal government began the most expensive long-term rebuilding project in American history. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other organizations sent billions of dollars — the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center puts the total at $45 billion — to the Gulf Coast for the repair and reconstruction of housing, primarily, but also for the rebuilding of infrastructure like roads, sewers, libraries and prisons. In Louisiana, however, by far the biggest chunk of infrastructure funding is going to schools. But that does not necessarily mean that schools have come back online quickly enough. Indeed, despite the government’s best efforts to funnel a lot of cash fast to education, the pace of recovery remains slow.

[Environment1] Over the past five years, the recipient of the largest slice of rebuilding money in the state has been the Recovery School District, which took over most of New Orleans’ public schools after the storm. Since Katrina, the RSD has been allocated more than $763 million, according to a TWI analysis of data from the Louisiana Recovery Authority. In his speech Sunday, President Obama touted a settlement between FEMA and New Orleans’ schools that would send another substantial injection of funding into the system. “Just this Friday, my administration announced a final agreement on $1.8 billion dollars for Orleans Parish schools — money that had been locked up for years — so folks here could determine how best to restore the school system,” he said.

Even before this agreement, K-12 public schools as a group were slated to receive more than $1.7 billion — more than three times as much as the next largest group of recipients, hospitals and health care providers. Add to that sum this new infusion, which represents more than $900 million in additional funding, along with money received by K-12 private schools ($521 million), public higher education ($195 million), and private higher education ($144 million), and the total rebuilding money for Louisiana schools comes to more than $3.4 billion.

Since taking office, the Obama administration has promised to “cut the red tape and bureaucracy” for the recipients of disaster recovery money, as the President said Sunday, and the agreement with New Orleans’ schools helps the administration argue it is keeping that promise. The process that the Recovery School District had to navigate to get to this point, however, goes a long way towards explaining why, five year after Katrina, the city is still just beginning the process of rebuilding.

As recently as December, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, looked outside the Recovery School District for an example of how FEMA funding was reviving New Orleans. She held up Holy Cross, a private Catholic academy, as evidence that the administration was helping to “cut through red tape and streamline and expedite the decision-making process for public assistance” in the Gulf Coast. (The red tape trope is a refrain for the Obama administration: Secretary Napolitano used similar language when describing the RSD settlement on Friday.) Holy Cross’ old campus was located in the Lower Ninth Ward. After Katrina, the school’s leaders decided to move it to Gentilly, a neighborhood left less damaged by Katrina. In the fall of 2009, the school welcomed students to its new campus; by this winter, phase one of the school’s reconstruction, complete with a new gym and performing arts spaces, should be complete.

Holy Cross raised money from private investors to help finance its rebirth, but it is also down for $82 million of FEMA funding, more than $70 million of which the school has already received, according to the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s data. The school ranks 20th on the list of the Louisiana funding applicants who have had the most money obligated to them, according to TWI’s analysis.

Holy Cross had to overcome its share of bureaucratic hurdles, but with the help of a local consultant with experience in public assistance grants and with the support of officials from the local to the federal level and of the surrounding community, the school was able to navigate the  process, says Stanton Vignes, who served on the executive committee of the school’s board for the past six years. “The process is tremendously bureaucratic and ever-changing, but we always realized it was a process,” he says. “We had a direction; we knew what we were doing; we knew where we wanted to be. That’s why we were so far ahead of the curve.”

The Recovery School District is not lagging so far behind; it opened the Langston Hughes Elementary School in August 2009, around the same time Holy Cross occupied its new campus. But ultimately, between rebuilding and repairing, the district needs to bring 87 school campuses up to snuff. (The final total depends on how the city’s population rebounds.) Langston Hughes was one of five Quick Start schools chosen for fast-tracked construction. Students occupied three additional schools in January 2010, and the fifth, L.B. Landry High School, opened in early August.

Across the city, however, more than 7,000 public school students, almost one out of every five, are still learning in “modular classrooms” — essentially, trailers. The New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, known as SciAcademy, has been in modular classrooms since 2008, its first year of operation, for instance. SciAcademy is one of the success stories of the post-Katrina education system: In its first two years, it has taken struggling high school students, some of whom were reading at a third-grade level, and brought them up to age-appropriate levels of achievement. This month, the school’s staff was preparing for the students’ arrival, rehearsing their plan for the first day and practicing responses to dicey situations, when the news came that they would have to pack up the entire school and move to a new, but still temporary, site.

“The capacity to find a facility is not tied to school performance,” says Ben Marcovitz, the school’s principal. “I understand that, but I really wish there was a clearer path.”

Part of the problem is that, initially, to receive funds from FEMA, the Recovery School District had to work on each project independently, which slowed down the entire process. Each building had its own project worksheet, used to assess damages and determine compensation. “Very early on, you may have had the same problem on every project, but FEMA treated every project differently,” says Lona Hankins, the district’s director of capital projects. “They’d rule differently. We’ve had to learn to fight those battles on a system-wide level.”

Without the lump settlement, it was more difficult for the district to plan the wholesale reconstruction of the school system. Earlier this month, for instance, the Recovery School District released a draft plan of long-term building assignments for all schools currently operating in the district. The reconstruction plan is divided into phases, however, and school leaders slated for buildings in later phases wondered if the district would be able to fund its ambitious plan.

Now, however, that worry is moot. The district estimated the cost of its master plan at $1.6 billion; the $1.8 billion FEMA settlement should be sufficient to rebuild or repair the rest of the district’s schools, if the process continues according to plan. The district has hired a pool of architects to take on the remaining projects as they reach the head of the line. Now all that remains to do is build the schools. The 24 new or totally renovated schools in phase one of the reconstruction plan should all be open by the fall of 2013. After that, the district will have only five more phases of construction to complete before New Orleans’ schools are finally rebuilt.

“I just had been by this corner a thousand times, and I had never noticed it’s right there,” [one resident] says. “I feel like that’s what happens here. You don’t think about Katrina. You don’t notice Katrina. Then all of a sudden it’s right next to you.” Twenty-five cent martinis are an offer at Commander’s, and much of the city has been rebuilt. But traces of Katrina are still around.

One of those traces, some people argue, is the suicide rate in Orleans Parish. In 2008 and 2009, the rate of suicide was about twice as high as it was the two years before the levees broke. The rate of suicides in Orleans Parish has basically doubled.

A second, very different story focuses on how the cost of insurance for buildings, homes and businesses has skyrocketed, slowing the recovery, though the government has tried to step in to help:

“Katrina obviously exposed the fact that the state is riskier than had been previously assumed,” said Robert Hartwig, who heads the industry-sponsored Insurance Information Institute. “Insurers look at models. The models suggest that we are in a period of heightened hurricane activity. Not just for one year or two years, but over the long run. That makes Mississippi and every other coastal state more vulnerable.”

Katrina cost insurance companies $45 billion in today’s dollars, he said. Claims for the entire year were $70 billion in today’s dollars. “In order to be prepared for years like that,” Hartwig said, “insurers simply have to charge a rate that reflects the risk.”

“It’s a re-evaluation of the risk, but it’s also a recognition of the risk. Katrina made it pretty obvious what that risk was.”

Critics contend the industry has overestimated that risk. Nevertheless, insurance rates continue to climb. The state’s willingness to work with insurers has helped the market, Hartwig and others say. Commercial rates, in particular, have declined from post-Katrina highs and coverage is more widely available.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans needed to remove thousands of tons of debris and trash, some toxic. (Flickr/Editor B)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

In the late summer of 1965 — almost 40 years to the day before Hurricane Katrina — Betsy, a Category Four hurricane, devastated New Orleans. City officials reopened a shuttered dump in the Upper Ninth Ward to collect debris and waste left by the massive flooding. The dump, which became known as the Agriculture Street Landfill, closed in 1966. Ten years later, the city covered it with dirt and repurposed it as a residential community, and mostly lower-income black families moved in. None of the residents knew they were living on a former dump. Then people started getting sick, the cancer rate significantly higher than in nearby neighborhoods.

[Environment1] For more than 30 years, environmental activists, New Orleans residents and federal and state officials have struggled with the Agriculture Street site and its periodic flooding in the hurricanes that batter the city. Since Hurricane Katrina, activists have raised broader questions about the safety of local landfills given New Orleans’ propensity to flood. Activists have also raised questions about the impact of local trash-disposal sites on low-income communities and communities of color. Five years after Katrina, in the midst of the Gulf oil spill disaster, those questions and struggles remain.

“We should have learned from Hurricane Betsy with Agriculture Street and we didn’t,” says Darryl Malek-Wiley, a New Orleans-based field organizer for the Sierra Club. “We should have learned from Katrina and we didn’t. Now we’re doing it again with the Gulf oil spill.”

“The Agriculture Street Landfill is the cautionary tale,” explains All Huang, an environmental justice attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council — but not a cautionary tale well-heeded.

It took until the mid-1990s for the Environmental Protection Agency to declare Agriculture Street a “superfund” priority site for cleanup, and until the late-1990s for the removal of contaminated dirt to start. The area had only a few years before been declared nearly cleaned up when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, devastating the Gulf coast and flooding 80 percent of New Orleans. The Agriculture Street site flooded too, leaving many homes destroyed.

Residents soon raised concerns that the flooding had dredged up toxic materials again. Soil testing conducted by the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council months after Katrina found high levels of arsenic as well as “disturbingly high levels of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — cancer-causing chemicals from soot and many petroleum-based products,” according to a report on the tests.

But testing conducted by the EPA found that “the majority of the contaminants detected in flood-deposited sediments and soils at the [Agriculture Street Landfill] posed no apparent public health hazard to residents at the site.” The EPA concluded that flooding had not compromised the area. It took no further measures, despite outcries from environmental groups.

Over time, some residents have moved back to Agriculture Street. Advocates following the Agriculture Street case say residents living on the site, who are almost all poor and black, have no other option but to live there. “There were several people who didn’t have anywhere else to go, so they are back in the community,” Mary Williams, program manager for community outreach at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice says. “I think its criminal that they would allow these people to rebuild in a place that they know is dangerous to live in.”

Other communities face similar issues — and since Katrina, the government has undertaken no specific measures to deal with waste. Worse, the hurricanes do not just flood waste sites, but overfill them: Hurricane Katrina produced an estimated 20 million cubic yards of waste and debris, much of it sent to landfills around New Orleans.

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin waived certain zoning rules after Katrina to build a new landfill along the Chef Menteur highway on the eastern side of the city. The landfill is just over a mile from a large Vietnamese community. After Katrina, the community fought for New Orleans to stop adding trash to the landfill, and won. But residents say the landfill, which holds millions of cubic yards of waste, is still posing problems.

“It’s closed, but what was put in there is still in there,” says Tuan Nguyen, deputy director of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation, a local group that has been a key voice in trying to clean up the landfill. Nguyen says waste from the landfill is leaking into the nearby Maxent Canal, which runs directly through the local Vietnamese community, one of the largest in the country. “There are many terrace gardens that elders grow,” he said, asserting that waste finds its way into the water supply.

The group is in the process of taking legal action to clear the landfill, but Nguyen says he does not expect a speedy resolution. “We don’t anticipate it to be done any time soon,” he says. In the meantime, Nguyen says Vietnamese elders in the community will continue to water their gardens with contaminated water.

Environmental justice advocates say Chef Menteur is symbolic of the way waste was dealt with after Hurricane Katrina. Split-second decisions were made to truck the waste away, in order to show progress in the recovery effort. But little attention has been paid to the potential long-term impacts, the experts say.

“Those landfills were not properly permitted and many of them were actually hydraulically connected to the groundwater,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist and president of Subra Company, which tests soil for the presence of hazardous materials. She says it is difficult to determine the long-term impacts of the landfills, as many lack monitor wells for testing for groundwater contamination. But, she believes that the “long-term impact is contamination of shallow ground water.”

Similar stories abound. The Old Gentilly Landfill, which had been shut down because of environmental concerns, was reopened after Katrina. Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University says the Gentilly landfill could still pose problems for the poor black communities that live near it. “There’s no guarantee that Gentilly won’t create problems in terms of leaching into the groundwater,” he says.

Bullard says New Orleans learned too few lessons about waste from Katrina. For instance, he worries that the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved landfills for Gulf oil waste too close to communities of color.

“Once again, it’s communities of color that are over-represented in these locations,” he says. “If this kind of waste was going into white communities, it would be an uproar.”

The oil spill has created an estimated 50,000 tons of solid waste. To store it, the EPA has approved the use of nine landfills in the Gulf. Waste from the spill includes tar balls, used absorbent boom, used protective equipment as well as oiled vegetation, sand and debris, EPA said in a written statement to The Washington Independent.

The statement said the EPA tests the waste twice a month to “ensure compliance with waste and debris handling, sampling and disposal requirements outlined in our waste management plan,” which the agency released on June 29.

“The landfills being utilized by BP are state-permitted facilities that undergo state review, monitoring and oversight to ensure that this waste, like all waste streams that go to these landfills is managed in a manner that is protective of public health and the environment,” the statement said.

In addition, the statement said the EPA is working to “minimize the impacts of waste to all communities, including low-income and minority communities, by actively enforcing requirements outlined in our waste management directive, while working within the impacted states’ existing waste disposal structures.”

But Bullard’s research indicates that waste from the oil spill is being sent to communities of color. At the end of July, he wrote, “The largest amount of BP oil-spill solid waste was sent to a landfill in a Florida community where three-fourths of the nearby residents are people of color. Although African Americans make up about 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, three of the five approved landfills in the state that received BP oil-spill waste are located in mostly black communities.”

Advocates have focused their ire on the Tide Water Landfill in Venice, La. Bullard says minorities make up 94 percent of the population near the landfill. But it’s not just environmental justice issues that have led to concerns about the landfill. Advocates say the site is vulnerable to future flooding as well.

“It’s a stupid place to put a landfill. The only part of Venice that didn’t go underwater during Katrina is the top of the landfill,” says Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club. “It’s right in the middle of the marsh. It’s right at the mouth of the Mississippi River.”

Barry Kohl, president of the Louisiana Audubon Council, says the Venice landfill is also vulnerable to significant coastal erosion. “That particular site will erode in the future and the waste will be disposed of all over the coast,” he says. “It should be up on high ground so it will never be disturbed.”

Malek-Wiley and other environmentalists in the Gulf are also raising broader concerns. Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, oil waste for exploration and production facilities is considered non-hazardous. As a result, the waste does not need to be stored in hazardous waste landfills. “It’s not regulated as hazardous and it goes into landfills that are not protected as a hazardous waste landfill,” he says. “There are a lot more regulations as to monitoring on a hazardous waste landfill. In a garbage dump, guys are out there in their blue jeans.”

Williams, with the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, says the group is organizing to “challenge the EPA to come up with better solutions” for the waste. “It’s just really frustrating for those of us who are here on the Gulf,” she says. “We’re still trying to recover from Katrina and now the oil spill. It’s a constant battle.”

I think the most important point is that everything that I was saying to [former homeland security secretaries] Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff prior to Katrina making landfall all came true. The people at FEMA who will now tell you that Washington had become too Washington-centric are absolutely true.

And later:

The lesson to be learned about this is first of all, every agency is going to make missteps. There are always going to be errors made. It’s the nature of the beast. . . .

Whatever your persuasion is, we have to recognize that this federal government of the United States is so large and cumbersome that we really can’t, and should not, expect it to be this kind of well-oiled, well-running machine. It’s not.

Blaming the idea of federal government for the failures of a particular administration or agency is a particularly nifty trick that only conservatives are able to play. Cases of individual negligence and failure are used to bolster a larger ideological stance that federal agencies are generally cumbersome and unhelpful as a rule.

President Obama, on the other hand, could no more blame a leaking oil well and a dysfunctional Minerals Management Service on the federal government being “cumbersome” than he could disavow his core beliefs as a liberal. He recognizes that it wasn’t the size of MMS, per say, but its cozy relationship with the industries it was supposed to regulate, that were to blame for allowing oil companies to evade regulations and safety measures. Admitting this involves accepting a degree of political heat, but it also involves coming up with a way to fix the problem in the future, rather than simply writing it off as an inevitable evil of Washington.

Here’s the full list of events.