But in mid-November, in an old Houston neighborhood school converted into a middle school for displaced New Orleans students, there’s no place I’d rather be.

Towana couldn’t wait in her classroom. Kalamu, Ashley, and I met her on the stairwell, exchanged hugs as 12-year-olds slid around us. At that moment, about a month into Towana’s teaching career (well, a month and a half—she had those almost two weeks before the storm hit), I confirmed what I already knew. Towana’s a great teacher.

I knew she had that curious mind and big heart, that drive to excel. She grew up poor and working class and black in New Orleans. She’s part of the people, the people who gave the world gifts forged in circumstances most people wouldn’t even have survived.

Imagine having all that, and then having what I call that basketball player awareness, digging back to what I did before I started teaching 20 -some years ago. Her eyes told it. She can concentrate and smile, communicate and move, with 20 people and more tasks swirling around her.

And picture this: Towana could be doing anything she wanted. She’s already produced award-winning films and radio commentaries. She was valedictorian of one of the top high schools in the state. She graduated from Howard University in four years, birthing and raising a son all the while. She’s got that Louis Martinet (among others) thing. (Who’s Louis Martinet? You can read Rodneka’s essay about him at www.strom.clemson.edu/teams/literacy/sac).

But she wants to teach. She wants to be with her students. She wants to teach in New Orleans again. She wants to continue the Students at the Center work.

And she’s not alone. Just that morning I hopped out of the shower to grab a call from LaQuita, who’s three years younger than Towana and graduated from Douglass not McDonogh 35. But like Towana, the storm had tossed her to Houston after a couple stops on the way. And LaQuita wanted to join us (and disturbed my shower to get driving directions) even though she’d worked the night shift and had classes at the college later that day. LaQuita’s studying to be an elementary teacher.

LaQuita, like many of our students, started teaching as part of the SAC program. It starts with teaching each other. And then it involves working with younger students, which LaQuita turned into a job with a community learning center that SAC helped start with a number of neighborhood partners, the same ones who are working to rebuild a neighborhood school in the ninth ward right now.

One of LaQuita ’s teachers at Douglass was Erica DeCuir, one of the students who designed Students at the Center back in 1995. Erica never had the opportunity to take an SAC class, but when she graduated from Washington University, she decided to pass, for the moment, on law school or grad school in African history. Instead she wanted to give at least two years to teaching with SAC. She now has a master’s in teaching from Teacher’s College at Columbia University and is teaching in Atlanta.

I can see, because I’ve already seen it, LaQuita and Damien (a year older than LaQuita and also displaced to Texas, a Douglass High and SAC graduate, and an elementary education major), teaching students at Drew Elementary, right across the street from their alma mater on St. Claude Ave. in the ninth ward in New Orleans. And across the street at Douglass there’s Towana down the hall from Erica, passing smiles and ideas between classes.

That’s where I really want to be and where I’m heading: In New Orleans, in the Douglass High School office, asking for a visitor pass to climb those old marble stairs and hang out with some students being taught by some of my former students. And that’s what New Orleans needs most, our people back and developing each other.

(NOTE: In January, 2006, a wonderful interview with Towana about her experiences will be available at the Listen to the People project site, accessible through www.kalamu.com. )

I’d seen Z in the halls the previous school year. He’s the sort of young man who didn’t always go to class. And his size and facial expression and body language might seem menacing to someone who sees him around school but doesn’t really know him. But I’ve been a student and teacher in the public schools in New Orleans for over 30 years, so even last year when I didn’t know him, I had no problem just hurrying Z along to where he was supposed to be or telling him to watch his language.

So when he asked to cut into our precious 30 minute lunch break for a conversation in the hall, I was glad to join him.

“Let me file these essays before I lose them, and then I’ll be right there.”

When I made it outside, he was leaning against the wall in the dimly lit hallway, clutching his rag and nodding at fellow band members as they rushed to the stairwell.

“Mr. Randels, I wanted to ask if you’d teach me how to read.”

******

Z’s request calls to mind four key issues about the educational circumstances and strategies under which Students at the Center has been working both before and after Katrina.

1) Our district high school had a population of approximately 20% special education students. This proportion was about the same for the twelve other neighborhood high schools in the New Orleans Public Schools. Before Katrina, our system also had six selective admissions public high schools. The only special education students at these schools were those who were academically gifted, talented in the arts, or had an exceptionality concerning their physical abilities.

2) We work in the conditions in which we find ourselves. Those of us who work in Students at the Center at Douglass (and other schools) have not spent our time complaining about these educational situations. Instead, we want the public and policy makers to understand the different types of schools we have in New Orleans. And more importantly we want to learn how to teach Z and his classmates as best we can. Only engaged in practice can we learn the solutions we need. In Z’s case, I believe his willingness to ask for assistance after less than two weeks of time in our class comes from the fact that we engaged him in oral processes. His thoughts and words had a space of respect in our classroom.

3) We understand students as a resource. I could not fulfill Z’s request to learn to read on a personal level. He needed daily one on one attention. We do, however, have veteran SAC students who have trained in our classes to be resources in literacy development to our students. Rodneka Shelbia, who would have been a senior at Douglass, has been part of SAC since her 9th grade year. She has trained in Reciprocal Teaching and other methods for helping to improve reading abilities. She and Z are also friends. Rodneka agreed to work with Z on his reading every day as part of her elective SAC course. Z was eager for this help. Then the storm came.

4) Young people such as Z are eager to learn, given the right conditions. We need to help create those conditions and find ways to assess and respect the whole student. Labeling schools such as Douglass as failures based primarily on their test scores is a disservice to the education of our students. Instead of one size fits all approaches, we need ways to measure what it means for me to teach Sophomore English in a class that includes about 20% of students who face educational challenges similar to Z’s. Instead of Z’s state test scores being the only way to measure his worth and success as a student, we also need ways to measure (and to compute into the formulas that allow states to hand over public schools to private entities) Z’s desire to read and the efforts that brought him to that point.

These questions are pressing as we return to a public school system in N. O. that will now be run by the state and by foundations and universities, designed by national experts and university presidents not by teachers and parents and students who have worked hard and with pockets of success to educate the young people not allowed admission into schools the state has labeled academically acceptable.

The Roberts’ house is gone now, completely flooded out like the other homes in Pontchartrain Park by the breaches in the London Avenue Canal. And the story of their neighborhood hasn’t really been told in the national media. It’s easy to see the poverty and racism and downright evil unearthed by Katrina. What we don’t see is that the largest group of black, college-educated homeowners in New Orleans were teachers. What happens to this group when public schools are shut down?

I doubt that Ed and Leatrice carried out the old diplomas from the first graduating class of McDonogh 35, of which Mrs. Reed, Leatrice’s mother, was a member. I expect all the photographs and memorabilia from Amerzion Baptist Church, the lower 9th ward church down the street from my fiance’s house and where her family and Leatrice’s family have been members since the Reconstruction era, are gone now. Leatrice was head of the history committee and had enlisted our SAC digital media crew to help with the 135th anniversary celebration in October. And Keith Ferdinand’s drawings, the ones he did as a kid in the late 1950’s are probably gone. Most of them were lost in 1965, when Betsy flooded the Ferdinand home in the lower 9th ward. Ed and Leatrice, dry back in 1965 in their new Pontchartrain Park home, had some of the few surviving youth drawings of their godson.

But if I know Ed and Leatrice, their hearts are especially heavy about the threats to American Federation of Teachers Local 527 that the post-Katrina state of public education in New Orleans have laid bare.

I remember Maria putting down her pen, and smiling with pride and mischievous conspiracy when Ed talked about how his elementary school classroom became an adult literacy center. Ed and his union colleagues knew that developing literacy for their students needed to include parents. But they also knew that in the Jim Crow south, the education had to be political too. Parents needed to register to vote, and the classrooms were important spaces for developing democracy.

Maria practically cheered when Leatrice explained that she started teaching in 1949, the year that black teachers finally won equal pay. Maria had just finished a new writing on Veronica Hill (you can read it—and see a picture of Leatrice and Maria—at www.strom.clemson.edu/teams/literacy/sac), one of the teachers who helped launch the first white collar union in the south, AFT Local 527. This black union had as one of its main goals to pursue the struggle for equal pay for teachers in the Jim Crow South.

And Maria had been angry when she read the headlines in the local newspaper that the school district was considering dropping its contribution to the Health and Welfare Fund, a union and district partnership that the Roberts and fellow teachers had fought for—not just for the dental and vision benefits but for the professional development provided by the teacher center (now the Center for Professional Growth and Development)—the most stable avenue for improving teaching practices and sharing resources that black or white teachers in New Orleans have had for the last 30 or 40 years.

Maria concludes her essay on Leatrice, entitled “Sharing a Life, Passing a Torch,” with these paragraphs.

“`Just because you retire doesn’t mean you stop being an activist.’ That’s the reason she founded the retiree chapter. Ms. Leatrice and Mr. Edward struggled their whole lives to get teachers the benefits they deserved through the health and welfare fund. They succeeded, but now everything they worked for is on the brink of getting destroyed as the school system considers cutting the Health and Welfare Fund to balance its budget.

“`I’ve done all I can, but before I’m gone I want someone to pass the torch to,’ Ms. Leatrice said.

“That’s why I went to see her. I wanted to let her know that we students appreciate her and that there are a few of us who would gladly receive the torch and run with it.”

I am proud of Maria’s resolve and know that her words aren’t hollow. She’s already planning to move back to New Orleans in January, to carry the torch the Roberts have passed. She understands that this may mean getting a GED, since schools that honor the democratic institutions that Ed and Leatrice and other black teachers fought to establish will probably not be open. And I will be proud to be there with Maria and her classmates, working as hard as ever to give them the best education possible and one that preserves what storms and post-Katrina opportunists cannot wash away.

“The teachers were different: It wasn’t always their input but ours as well. It was their techniques that raised my hands to remove the blindfolds. We sat in a circle. We told stories and discussed real issues that many teachers don’t care about.

“They turned some of my inventions into creations. I love being in class, because it helps make me who I will become. I also learned that reading can be fun. I remember it like it was yesterday, reading the book Coffee Will Make You Black in three days. I was so excited, as if I had written my first book. SAC gives you a chance to enhance the creativity you have or don’t have. I remember when I first did my movie that took weeks and weeks to do. I had accomplished something much more than reading a book in three days or writing a poem. I had written a script that became a movie. I love SAC for what it brought to me. And I love myself for what I brought to it.”
--from an essay by Keva Carr,
2005 graduate of Douglass High, New Orleans

Keva Carr, who’s now a Freshman at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, missed our retreat/reunion in Clemson, South Carolina earlier this month. We had bought her a plane ticket, but a recurring illness put her in the hospital instead of on the plane on Friday, October 7. (Keva’s fine now. She missed our retreat, but she didn’t miss any classes.)

I’ve been thinking about Keva and her writing and want to share a bit of it here—not just because she couldn’t join us on the retreat but mainly because it introduces an important technique we use in SAC work: The Story Circle.

In the first entry in this series, I reflected on the SAC philosophy: “Start with what you know to learn what you need to know. Start with where you’re at to get to where you want to go.” One technique we use to accomplish this in our classes is the story circle, something Keva alludes to in her essay.

A story circle is basically a small group forum in which participants sit in a circle and move around the circle reflecting on a theme or concept that has been chosen for the session. The ground rules direct that the story one tells must be grounded in one's personal experience. At the same time, all participants are encouraged to listen to each person's story without interrupting. We usually agree on a short time limit, generally two to three minutes per story. After the circle has been completed, participants ask questions, summarize lessons learned from the stories, develop visual images and other creative responses to the stories, and engage in other forms of “cross talk.” Although this sounds like a simple process, our experience has demonstrated that the story circle is an effective way for people to get to know one another and to honestly share ideas and emotions. With both young people and adults, our experience has been that the story circle produces individual involvement in the sharing process at a much deeper level than anticipated by the participants when they start the process.

This technique creates classroom conditions in which students can have as much expertise and knowledge as the teacher. Those of us who are teachers participate as equals in the story circle, waiting our turn, observing the time limits, and listening closely along with everyone else. For students who have not had much prior success in traditional educational settings (or who come from families with this history), such conditions are vital to developing academic success.

The oral nature of the story circle is equally important. We have students in our classes who arrive with a range of special education circumstances. We welcome them but not in a shallow, “hello how are you” way. We make sure that they can start with where they’re at, that they can immediately contribute valuable material to our class as they continue to develop literacy in all areas.

The movie Keva describes in her essay is about a teen girl deciding whether to have an abortion or not. Keva’s goal in the movie is to make the range of perspectives and positions on this issue understandable, to flesh them out. Keva and her classmates have talked frequently about the way the story circle process encourages them to move beyond their initial understanding of a topic, refining that understanding as they hear classmates’ stories (and read related material from texts and other sources). Keva’s creation, her movie, comes out of that process.

As I write this entry, Keva has just sent me a few more installments in The Diary of Virginia Banks, the book she started last spring based on her study of Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riots in 1900. She learned about this history by reading Ida Wells’ Mob Rule in New Orleans and William Ivy Hair’s Carnival of Fury. But in this historical context, she is also working out what it means to be an independent woman in a romantic relationship when social and political circumstances interfere with the relationship. In our classes and our story circles, she has learned that her experiences can infuse and inform the way she writes about the history of her city.

Finally, the story circle represents SAC’s concern with placing our work within the history of struggles for human and civil rights and for social justice. You see, we didn’t learn the story circle technique from colleagues or from our education courses. The story circle was developed by the Free Southern Theater (FST), founded in the 1960’s as the cultural arm of the civil rights movement. We are fortunate to have John O’Neal, one of the founders of FST, as a community partner in our school and our classes and to have former FST member and playwright Kalamu ya Salaam as co-director and teacher in SAC. FST developed the story circle because it was dissatisfied with audience feedback sessions after their performances. They wanted a more democratic process that included all voices. They also wanted to emphasize story rather than argument, understanding that stories tend to bring people together, to help them find common ground or at least to understand each other.

And in New Orleans right now, we need unity informed by deep dialogue and careful listening as much as the freedom fighters of the 1960’s needed it. In terms of SAC, the stories we have told and written with each other over the years have kept us close and focused during this time of separation. Keva will be with us in New Orleans for our “homecoming” on Saturday, November 12. She’ll participate in some story circles and share some new writings. Rodneka, who would have been a senior at Douglass this year, will bloom a slow smile of recognition and delight as she hears herself in Keva’s writing, as she remembers a book or essay they both read in class and that now echoes through Keva’s new essay. At that moment, we’ll all be closer to getting back home.

FINAL NOTE

For those of us who don’t know each other already, who haven’t spent time together but share a city, coming together, learning together, and smiling together will not come as easily. But working toward that is still important. In that regard, I want to thank Thomas Lambert and Earl Luetzelschwab, a student and teacher at Franklin High School in New Orleans, for their responses to my previous entry. I appreciate their willingness to share their views. I also hope that one day soon we can come together in New Orleans in a different setting, one that’s more like a story circle and allows us to understand each other and find common ground. We at SAC respect everyone’s right to pursue an education in the best way they know how and encourage that.

As always, the students had plenty to teach the adults in attendance. Damien, sporting the dress shirt and tie required for his new job and asking us to call him Mr. Theodore now, helped us see how to temper anger with humor in his memo to public officials. Christopher, who loves the history of New Orleans and its public schools, laughed heartily, like someone missing home bad, at every writer’s references to our city. And Rodneka showed the grit and heart of a lower 9th ward resident: “Our job’s a little bit harder now, but we’re still going to do it.”

What’s sticking in my mind most, a couple days after everyone’s left the reunion, are writings by Ashley Jones and Maria Hernandez. Ashley just graduated from Clark Atlanta and is entering her eighth year with SAC, now as a staff member. Maria would have been a senior at Douglass High School.

You can tell how Ashley feels about Maria and other Douglass SAC students in this excerpt from one of her essays.

"Before I thought about the place I used to get my chicken sandwiches from on Freret St. or Ms. Sadie, the ice berg lady right off of LaSalle St. in the 3rd ward, I saw Maria, and Rodneka, Earlnika, Keva, Daniel. I thought about Douglass High School and the gloomy hallways that always made me feel that I was in a scary movie or something. I wondered what would be next for them, no longer having SAC. I thought about the schools they may be forced to go to. Those cold, stiff rooms where the real world never becomes part of the lesson plan. . . .

"Revisiting the halls of Douglas in my mind, I never knew how much these kids meant to me, and although I have always been grateful to SAC, I finally realize the saving grace it has been. So many times I’ve walked Douglass’ dusky halls and felt that I had just entered the walls of an abandoned ship stacked high with forgotten treasure. I size up the bounty of pliable, young bodies and make note of the brilliance exuberating from their eyes and their hair and their mouths and I think, 'Why hasn’t anyone claimed this treasure, this fountain of youth, this elixir of life?!'”

There’s a running joke between Ashley, who graduated from McDonogh 35 one of the many public schools in New Orleans with selective admissions, and Damien, who graduated from his neighborhood school, Douglass. Damien hates 35 but loves Ashley. He says her alma mater is her one flaw. When Ashley finished reading her essay, she flashed a big grin at Damien and the rest of us. “You can’t complain now, Damien. See, I thought about Douglass first, not 35.”

Maria’s essay is rawer, more chilling. She describes her six days in the Superdome, not knowing if her father’s dead or alive—all the harrowing details the news reports help you imagine. But at the end of her essay, she makes one of her patented gut shots:

"This uncertainty that’s straggling me is also undermining Douglass, the school my friends were fighting to make better. When we gathered for a weekend reunion on October 8th and 9th, we learned that all the New Orleans Public Schools would become charter schools this year. And worse than that, the only public high schools open on the east bank of the city, where probably over 80% of the population and all of my friends live, would have no public high schools other than those that have selective admission criteria. How can these decision makers open two high schools on the east bank, but none for common folk like me, who either can’t get into or don’t want to get into selective admission high schools.

"I’ve lost my home, my friends, and my school. I’m always on the verge of tears. But the worst part of it all is that the public officials—both elected and hired—who are supposedly looking out for my education, have failed me even worse than the ones who abandoned me in the Superdome. My family and friends have food and water and the kindness of strangers. But we still don’t have control of our lives, and we’re still being abandoned—even worse than at the Dome—by local, state, and federal officials who are supposed to be looking out for us."

Randy Newman, in his song about the 1927 floods in New Orleans when the business leaders of the city decided to break the levees and flood poorer parts of Louisiana in order to save their city, sang “They’re trying to wash us away.” Maria and Ashley and all of us are living that in terms of our public schools.

That washing away hits me really hard. You see, my alma mater, Benjamin Franklin High School, the top-ranked school in the state and the only majority white public high school in a city that before Katrina was about 70% black, just announced that it will be a charter school operating separately from the school district. Those of us who graduated from there haven’t heard from Maria or thought like Ashley. We didn’t think about Maria and her peers first. We didn’t work to open schools for them. We took care of our own, abandoning the most poor and oppressed in our city to a fate crueler than those long days without food, air, water, and security in the Dome.

Part of going back to New Orleans for me will be coming to grips with my alma mater. I’ll start looking now for fellow graduates who want to start a new alumni association, one that supports neighborhood public schools with no selective admissions requirements, one that takes up the moral mandate that our New Orleans ancestor Homer Plessy and his colleagues laid down for us over 100 years ago: no more separate and unequal institutions in our society.

That’s the motto we work by in Students at the Center (SAC), the school/community-based writing program a few students and I started in the late 1990’s.

I must confess, however, that I often drop the motto’s second line. Maybe my 20 years as a classroom teacher has numbed me to the idea of going anywhere. Certainly the way New Orleans figures so prominently in SAC writing for community projects has a lot to do with it. When Katrina hit, we were about to finish The Long Ride, a book of student writings about struggles for civil rights and social/racial/economic justice in New Orleans. Our students were touring a play they had written about the connections between the community organizing that propelled the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in the 1890’s and their own community organizing around education quality and rights. I wasn’t just teaching in my birthplace; New Orleans was what I was teaching.

So on Monday, August 29, when Katrina came calling, I knew where I was at and wasn’t giving much thought to where I wanted to go. I knew if we were hit really badly and the waters rose, I may be holed up in the sturdy old American Can Company (now an apartment complex where my girlfriend’s father was living) for a week or so.

Of course, that projection was way too optimistic. By the end of the storm week, after boating through toxic slime lake water, squinting to see my block from an evacuation helicopter, sleeping on a discarded cardboard box on I-10 and Causeway, and freezing toward Texas on a bus blasting its air conditioner in the middle of the night to keep the driver awake and the germs at bay, I had to start thinking about where I wanted to go.

Now it’s four weeks after Katrina. I’m living, temporarily, with friends in Clemson, South Carolina. This week, ten SAC students and recent graduates will gather here, hosted by the university, to do some writing, some healing, some video-making, and some sharing and
reconnecting. For me it’ll be some early steps in getting back to New Orleans, the place I want to go but can’t really get to right now.

In the next weeks and months, I hope this blog will help in finding my way back to New Orleans. I hope to hear from other teachers who have had to learn what it means to live as part of a diaspora, and to learn to teach from that place. Along the way, I’ll share some of my students’ writings, making it public and talking about it, exploring the shadows of what we used to do in class each day. We’ll think about writing as healing and community building. We’ll look into when and why these goals should be central rather than peripheral to the classroom. And we’ll think long and hard about what my colleague, SAC co-director Kalamu ya Salaam, wrote last week about New Orleans now being more the people who carry our city’s spirit, not the place itself.

We’ll explore in this post-Katrina world, with my hometown now a ghost town, what it means to start with what you know… to start with where you’re at. . .