Education Matters US

As I was working on this speech last night, wondering how it would be possible to compress the past four months into some sort of order, I kept trying to think of what every one of us here had in common during that strange time. Was it the blue tarps covering our roofs? Was it not having a roof at all? Was it the evil brown ring where the water crept up and ruined so many precious souvenirs and memories? Or was it the relief and the guilt of perhaps being one of those lucky enough to live in the random areas with no mold and only a few broken windows? The more I tried to think of concrete examples of what we all shared, the more I realized that what tied us all together was this: loss. We’d all lost something significant, something important to us. We were experiencing a form of death, the death of all the comfortable and manageable and carefully planned lives we thought we’d been living together, in our own community here at Franklin. We’d all been grieving, together and separately, wherever we landed, in Houston, in Lafayette, in New Orleans, for the lives we took for granted and the lives we were forced to live during those uncertain and unreal four months.

The school’s destiny is being driven by Ms. Christen, 59 years old, a tenacious ex-nun who rubs some people the wrong way. She’s reconstituting Franklin as a charter school that will be nonunion and largely free of New Orleans’s broken-down city bureaucracy. Her plan is financially risky and union leaders hate it.

Alongside the principal are hundreds of parents, teachers and other supporters who refused to let the school die. They cherish Franklin’s status as the state’s best public school, where strivers gain a shot at an Ivy League education and 99% of graduates attend college. In the past four months, these backers found their way past National Guard barricades, tore out moldy carpets and raised money to cover gaping budget holes.