New Orleans Day 2 (4/21)

Today is an ICW day. The ICW is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is, of course, that I get all my citation teaching done during breaks by keeping the ICW up-to-date with new exercises and answers each year (along with my co-author Christine Hurt). The curse is that, while we have three sets of 18 exercises that we rotate through on a three-year cycle, inevitably either the Bluebook (for which I didn't get one of their offers of free online access -- hmph) or the ALWD Manual (which always remembers me with a free review copy) comes out with a new edition, requiring a scouring of the problems and answers for changes to be made. This year, the scouring is taking place over the newer edition (3d) of the ALWD Manual. The next time we use this set of exercises, I'm guessing we'll be updating for the 4th edition of the ALWD and the 19th edition of the Bluebook. Good times . . .

So anyway, on Day 2 of the NOLA III trip last week, we all split up into our teams and headed out to our placements. I was at Common Ground with a colleauge and four students. Our first day was spent the way many first days at SHN placements are spent: figuring out what they need and how best to accomplish it. With law students coming in and out year-round for one-week stints, it's easy to keep losing some of your institutional memory. Considering the disconnect that the various agencies experience with this revolving door of help, it's amazing how much SHN has managed to move the ball forward on the legal issues affecting New Orleans.

We were told about a couple of issues that Common Ground needed more information about. Many of them seemed to fall under the general category of "New Orleans schools." It seemed like there were issues with charter schools having admissions criteria that made them inaccessible to most students, public schools being far away from many students' homes, and students being expelled for the slightest infraction. It certainly sounded bad.

Sidebar: I was never a big fan of The Bramble Bush. However, during times like Day 2, I'm reminded of Karl Llewellyn's advice that you have to scratch your eyes out and then scratch them back in again. I suppose more modern learning theorists would tell me that we needed to educate ourselves in the particular language and rules of the discourse community of New Orleans education so we could figure out what needed to be done. But it felt more like scratching my eyes out.

So we spent a day trying to figure out the byzantine system of New Orleans schools. There are charter schools and public schools. Some are operated by the Orleans Parish School District; others are operated by something called The Recovery School District (set up in 2003 to help the city's schools recover from low test scores; obviously, "recovery" had taken on a whole new meaning after 2005). Orleans Parish school district operates the handful of high-performing public schools as well as another handful of charter schools with admissions criteria that include prior academic achievement, prior behavior, and parental involvement. The Recovery School District operates everything else. Attendance at all schools is on an "open enrollment" basis, which means that students are not necessarily assigned to schools based on which are closest to their homes. Although students in the Recovery School District get to choose which school they go to, selection for particular schools is done by lottery and requires that the parents navigate a maze of applications and deadlines. Parents who need help can consult the online parents guide that spans 110 pdf pages. I can imagine that a family planning on returning to New Orleans might get easily discouraged after stumbling onto the parents guide and its explanation of the school system. Don't get me wrong: it's a good guide. But it's 110 pages. And it describes a school system unlike any that my team had encountered before. It helps to have not only the guide but also a live person sitting next to you saying, "Yes, this really is how it works."

So we decided that what parents could use was a one- or two-page brochure that made the process more manageable. Fortunately, right around this time, my teammate and colleague Marjorie Silver connected with a local judge, David Bell. Judge Bell is the Chief Judge of the Juvenile Courts in New Orleans and knew a lot about the school system pre-Katrina and post-Katrina, and he could also shed some light on some of the juvenile justice issues Common Ground was concerned about. To our utter amazement and delight, he agreed to come address everyone in NOLA III after our check-in meeting that evening. Judge Bell described innovative programs in the New Orleans juvenile justice system (Google: judge david bell). After he spoke to us about the aftermath of the levee breaches and the changes that had been made in the schools and the juvenile justice system, he offered to set up tours of a variety of schools for the next day. Bingo!

Now we had a mission (create the back-to-school brochure) and a source of first-hand information (school contacts and tours). At the end of Day 2 we were ready to scratch our eyes in again!