Very nice story from an area which needs good stories.
No road leads to George Washington Carver Senior High School here. It sits on no street and has no address. No sign announces it.
It is little more than a collection of prefabricated steel-and-wood classrooms floating in a no man’s land by the highway, and its vague location and bootstrap atmosphere sum up the problems and promise of the big education experiment now under way in this city nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina. There is no gym and no auditorium at Carver, and at breaks the school’s 350 students congregate on unshaded strips of concrete between the trailerlike boxes.
Carver’s only context is ruin — it sits across a field from the flooded-out pre-Katrina Carver High — and yet it is trying all over again, with new teachers and new methods, at what largely failed before the storm and immediately afterward: educating its students. Carver High is hope’s challenge to bleak circumstance.
And it is beginning to meet that challenge. Though there is disorder in many classrooms, there is also learning going on, amid the struggle. In an English class taught by Courtney Stuckwisch, the searing hard-times images of a Langston Hughes poem touch a chord, and the students look up eagerly. In Colleston Morgan’s social studies class, students beetle earnestly over textbooks for a lesson on supply and demand.
All around the city there is a similar would-be alchemy. Dozens of new charter schools, a flood of idealistic young teachers from elsewhere around the country — now as many as 17 percent of the total here — and a hard-charging reform superintendent from Chicago are all arrayed to rescue one of America’s most needy student bodies, which ranked at the bottom of a bottom-dwelling state even before Hurricane Katrina.
Only in the last year, with the marshaling of new forces, has anything like a coherent poststorm strategy for the shaky schools here emerged. It is too early for results — standardized-test scores are out in May — but educators here insist that there are some promising signs. At the very least, early shortages of teachers and space for students have been overcome.
Link to article
