The "official" Hurricane Katrina bus tour is a big tourist attraction in New Orleans. But another kind of storm tour recently took off — more of a Katrina "reality" tour, documenting the last decade of the New Orleans school system.
Karran Harper Royal, a local education advocate, is the tour guide of this school-themed trip. She points out notable sites. The bus passes gleaming new school buildings — some still under construction — and an empty lot, where a school was bulldozed and never rebuilt.
Harper Royal chose these spots to make a point.
"You can't have a whole, healthy community without schools in the community for children," she says.
Harper Royal says the neighborhoods that have been slowest to come back are the ones without schools. Like the former Desire housing projects, now called the Estates.
"After Katrina the government rebuilt all this public housing and did not put one public elementary school here," she says.
Pat Colbert-Cormier is a teacher in Lafayette. She says she's disappointed, but not surprised, that some neighborhoods still don't have many, or any, schools.
"The areas that have been fixed up and the ones that have not been, I expected that to happen," Colbert-Cormier says.
Ten years out, she says, she would would have liked to see more progress.
Support for education reporting on WWNO comes from Baptist Community Ministries and Entergy Corporation.
