Is there any school district whose students experienced more disruptions than those in New Orleans?

Between the major storms of Katrina and Ida there have been dozens of hurricanes and tropical storms that have interrupted students’ schooling in that city for extended periods. The New Orleans school board tries to make up lost learning time, but the reality is that the weeks lost can’t simply be restored, and people don’t necessarily heal their traumas along a set schedule.

When schools reopen, students may not be ready to enter them. Flooding, wind damage and power outages may keep individual families out of their homes and away from their own district beyond the official school start date. How can students be prepared to learn when they literally don’t have a roof over their heads? It will take weeks and months for some families to receive homeowners’ insurance payments; that span of time should be a measure of school disruption.

And let’s not overlook the daily economic catastrophes that many Black families face even when the skies are clear. The years-long, manmade disruptions of school reform in the aftermath of Katrina made every year a different one by design. Conversions from traditional to charter schools, closures, and takeovers put student learning on a treadmill. School choice brought some benefits, but consistency wasn’t one of them.

In addition, with a 24 percent poverty rate, New Orleans remains one of the poorest large cities in the country. An uncounted number of school days are lost due to high levels of poverty, which limits families’ access to services like healthcare, housing, transportation and broadband. Virtual learning required equipment and internet access that too many families didn’t have. The pandemic exacerbated these issues. The connected issues of inadequate healthcare, housing, and job protections had a grim impact.

Students, especially in the Black community, lost many family members to the virus. Although Black people represent 60 percent of the city’s population, Black residents accounted for 77 percent of the 492 people who had died of coronavirus in the city as of June 5, before the current surge, according to reporting by NOLA.com. When deaths in long-term care settings like prisons and nursing homes were excluded, the disparity was even more stark: Black residents accounted for 88 percent of the deaths.

Read the full article about students in New Orleans by Andre Perry at The Hechinger Report.