New Orleans – With several New Orleans schools scheduled to reopen today, scores of parents, children, educators and community activists gathered Wednesday to protest the continued closure of another one: Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science & Technology in the Lower Ninth Ward, which has remained unfit for occupation since Hurricane Katrina.
Race and class discrimination, they said, were at the core of why school officials had failed to ensure that educational facilities in certain neighborhoods could make their scheduled debut this week.
“There is a sense of urgency to getting you in school. We know that. That’s why we’re here today,” King school principal Doris Hicks told her pupils, who were perched on the steps at their temporary home, the former Colton Middle School.
School officials said they hoped that King would be able to reopen at its original site in January.
The Colton campus, which suffered years of neglect before the storm, is in a neighborhood a mile or so from the Lower Ninth.
It was supposed to be ready to open for King students and faculty Aug. 17. That date was pushed back to Wednesday, which is when school administrators said that because electrical repairs were still needed, classes would not start until Monday.
“It’s about black folks and poor folks,” said Charles Steele Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of several civil-rights groups at Wednesday’s rally.
“Predominately white schools were in far worse shape, … but they are ready,” said the Rev. Byron Clay, a local activist.
Robin Jarvis, superintendent of the state-run Recovery School District, which after Katrina took control of 107 academically failing campuses among Orleans Parish’s 128 public schools, dismissed the notion that race played a role in deciding which ones would reopen on time. “The majority of the children in our schools are African-American,” Jarvis said.
Many middle-class and white parents shifted their kids from New Orleans’ notoriously underperforming public school system to private facilities years ago.
