It’s the first day of a new school year. While some kids cling to their parents, Tilaya looks confident and composed, with her pearl necklace tucked under the collar of her uniform.
But inside, her feelings are more complicated.
“I’m nervous because the school that I went to last year is kind of different,” she says, searching for the right word.
She’s standing outside a big brick building on South Carrollton Avenue. Last year, it bore the name Lafayette. Now, it reads Leah L. Chase.
It’s the same building, but a whole new school.
For Tilaya, that means new rules, teachers and most likely friends, since most of Lafyette’s students didn’t re-enroll here. “I’m really nervous.”
Last year, this was a charter school. Like every other public school in New Orleans, it was run by an independent board, using public funding.
But when Lafayette Academy didn’t meet the district’s criteria to be renewed, the city’s school board did something it hadn’t done in nearly two decades: It decided to reopen and run the school itself — permanently.
It’s a big deal, because if this school succeeds, more could follow.
The week before The Leah Chase School opened, things were looking good. Despite some board members’ doubts, the K-5 school was almost fully staffed and had enrolled nearly 300 kids, within its target range. The floors were waxed, the walls freshly painted.
Avis Williams, the district’s superintendent, was making the rounds. She popped her head into every classroom, asking teachers, “Do you need anything?”
By then, the answer was no. They were ready.
“It’s like, this is real. This is happening,” Williams said, letting out what sounded like a sigh of relief that turned into laughter.
When the board — unable to find another management company to take over — first asked Williams to step in to run the school in January, she pushed back. Not because she didn’t want to, she argued, but because the timeline was possibly too tight to open a school that met her standards.
Some board members agreed that waiting another year was the best idea, but others insisted the district owed it to families to continue providing an option in that building.
In early August, with a few days until the school’s opening, Williams said she was confident they were “meeting the mark.”
If so, it meant she and her team had put together a brand new school in five months and, in the process, rebuilt the district’s capacity to run schools after decades of outsourcing.
Naming the school for one of the city’s most beloved figures, the Queen of Creole Cuisine, renowned chef of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant and a civil rights leader, has further upped the stakes.
“Opening a school named after Leah Chase, we knew it was important for New Orleans to live and breathe throughout everything that we do within this building,” Williams said.
She said the name, and what it stands for, helped recruit students, only about 30% attended Lafayette, and an entirely new staff. The majority of employees are native New Orleanians, Williams said, something that wasn’t always true for the city’s charter schools.
While students will learn about the city’s arts and culture, she said the first priority is high-quality academics, something the Chase family has always stressed.
“My mother felt education was the key to success and that if we did not educate our children well, then we have failed as a community,” said her daughter Stella Chase Reese at the school’s ribbon cutting.
The Leah Chase School shows a fundamental shift in New Orleans’ approach to public education, said Celeste Lay, a professor at Tulane who wrote a book about the politics behind what had been the nation’s only all-charter district since 2019.
“For a long time, the philosophy in New Orleans has been that the best way to run a school is privately,” Lay said.
Now, that appears to be changing.
While test scores and graduation rates improved under the charter system, Lay said the promise reformers made of a “complete turnaround” never materialized. Plus, families have long been pushing for the stability and sense of community that traditional public schools can bring.
But Lay said just changing the way schools are governed isn’t enough.
“If we really want to see transformational change in terms of those educational outcomes, then we’re going to have to do some really significant investment.”
Not just putting more money into public schools, but all the other things families need: health care, housing, transportation.
‘Leap of faith’
For the school’s principal, her new job is a homecoming.
Crystal LaFrance was a student in the building before Hurricane Katrina. She remembers being put out of her third grade classroom for talking. Twirling a big flag at parades and pep rallies.
She takes pride in being back, but said it also adds to the pressure.
“Like, ‘You went to this school? You better do good.’”
LaFrance feels a deep sense of responsibility to the school and its students.
She wants everything to be perfect. So much so that she’s been waking up in the night to write down reminders only she can understand.
LaFrance acknowledged the significance of being part of “truly something different,” as the city flexes a muscle it hasn’t exercised in years. She didn’t frame the school’s founding as a struggle between traditional and charter schools. Instead, she and other school employees WWNO spoke with focused on the excitement of building something new with community involvement.
She said after eight years as an assistant principal at a well-established charter school, she wanted to try something new, to push herself.
That’s how her teachers feel too, she said. “They see greatness in the possibility of what this will be and they’ve taken like a leap of faith to be here.”
Lilia Carrion taught in nearby Jefferson Parish’s public schools for a decade and at a charter in New Orleans for the last two before signing on to work with English language learners at Leah Chase.
“It’s just a different vibe,” Carrion said, describing what she sees as the school’s focus on what makes each kid unique. “I love it and want to be a part of it.”
Williams, the district’s superintendent, initially told the board she feared hiring challenges could get in the way of a successful opening, pointing to a shortage of educators in Louisiana.
Not only was the school almost fully staffed on the first day of classes, she said, many are very experienced, including several who are National Board Certified, the highest credential a teacher can obtain.
This all bodes well for the school since research suggests teachers are the most important factor in a student’s learning.
“I know that’s going to give us the best shot of making sure we’re effective academically,” Williams said.
When the city’s school board asked Williams to lead The Leah Chase School, they also instructed her to come up with a plan to manage more schools in the future.
Board member Ethan Ashley stressed at last week’s board meeting that there’s room for both, and that the city’s charter leaders have supported the opening of Leah Chase.
“To not be us versus them. But a whole system working towards the success of our students,” Ashley said.
No one knows what the ultimate split between traditional and charter schools might look like as the district inches toward a more hybrid model.
Still, when the first day of school at Leah Chase finally came, it was hard not to look at it as the start of something much bigger.
Inside, first graders introduced themselves and shared something they love to do: for Destiny it was coloring; for Sam, playing football. In fifth grade, students were already learning about the school’s namesake. “Leah Chase was a famous chief,” Emmeleigh read aloud to her classmates. “Chef,” her teacher corrected gently.
LaFrance, the school’s principal, had been busy moving behind the scenes that morning, and she looked relaxed.
“It’s going amazingly well,” she said. “Better than I anticipated.”
She knew not every day would be like this. That things wouldn’t always go as planned. But for now, her old school hummed with new life. She took a breath and soaked it in.
