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Month in Review

Make jobs a priority

Eight hundred and eighty residents of New Orleans and surrounding areas face job loss if the United States Postal Service’s New Orleans Processing and Distribution Center on Loyola Avenue is closed.

Such a loss would hit the local middle class hard. And with many of these jobs held by African-Americans, it is a blow our community cannot sustain.

New Orleans’ Black middle class already took a major licking nearly six years ago when Orleans Parish School Board employees—teachers and support staff—were terminated en masse and without cause. That callous act did so much harm to hard working, tax-paying members of our community that another strike against the Black middle class in New Orleans is simply a weight we cannot bear, especially as 5,000 workers in the region (again many of them African-American) have been or will be impacted by the impending closure of Avondale Shipyard if something is not done to convert the shipbuilding company into another commercial venture that will utilize the skilled labor employed there.

These are not just jobs and bottoms lines at stake. These are families—men and women who work hard to obtain their piece of the American Dream, and they deserve more than to have rugs ripped from under them at the slightest sign of distress.

While we understand the dilemma the Postal Service faces, we are hopeful that they can work toward a solution that will keep 880 men and women working and contributing to our community.

Whether it’s Huntington Ingalls, the U.S. Postal Service, or any public or private entity, the priority must be maintaining and growing jobs in the New Orleans area. Keeping our residents employed is the only way to keep our community working.

Tuition-charging schools appear out of step with federal guidelines

The local Research on Reforms has raised concerns about two Uptown charter schools, one operating under the Orleans Parish School Board and another under the state, circumventing the spirit and perhaps even the letter of the law by charging tuition to their pre-school programs and then bypassing the lottery process by setting aside seats in the free, public charter school Kindergarten classrooms for those students whose parents could afford to pay pres-school tuition.

The two schools in question are Audubon Charter, a school operating under the OPSB with language immersion and Montessori programs, and Lycee Francais, a French immersion school chartered by the state that opened this year.

While it appears that neither of the education agencies that license these charter schools have a problem with the public-private configuration that reserves spots in a free, public charter school program for students in a tuition-based pre-K program, U.S. Department of Education guidelines seem real clear on this practice.

With so much uncertainty and ambiguity tied to the operation of charter schools that have taken over public education in New Orleans, we figured it a good idea to go straight to the source on this one.

According to U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program Non-Regulatory Guidance Title V, Part B, a tuition-based pre-school program that becomes a charter school at the Kindergarten level cannot allow students enrolled in the preschool to continue in elementary school without going through a lottery. The guidelines state that “because the preschool program is private, charges tuition, and most likely does not admit all students, allowing its students to gain admission to the elementary program without going through a lottery process would violate the statute.”

In short, all applicants to the public charter school must be selected through lottery, with no guaranteed spaces for students that were enrolled in the private pre-school.

And so it seems that Research on Reforms is dead on in its position that both Audubon and Lycee are engaged in a practice that flies in the face of federal guidelines. And maybe that would be a big deal if U.S. Department of Education guidelines or good, old-fashioned fairness still mattered in New Orleans.