Com­plete reset

How 2005’s Hur­ricane Kat­rina changed city’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem

This article was written by Sharon Lurye and was published in the Toronto Star on August 31, 2025.

Twenty years ago, Hur­ricane Kat­rina changed the face of edu­ca­tion in New Orleans forever. The school sys­tem was utterly des­troyed and then utterly trans­formed, becom­ing the first and only all­charter school dis­trict in the coun­try.

Kat­rina made land­fall on Aug. 29, 2005, and The Asso­ci­ated Press asked three sur­viv­ors to reflect on what it was like to be a stu­dent or a teacher dur­ing that tumul­tu­ous period.

For some, con­nec­tions they developed with edu­cat­ors who helped them through the crisis inspired careers as teach­ers. Their exper­i­ences also offer les­sons for teach­ers and schools going through nat­ural dis­asters today.

What fol­lows are the edu­cat­ors’ accounts in their own words, con­densed for pub­lic­a­tion:

A storm evacuee found caring teach­ers in Texas

Chris Dier, a his­tory teacher at Ben­jamin Frank­lin High School in New Orleans, was just start­ing his senior year of high school in neigh­bour­ing Chal­mette when Kat­rina hit. He evac­u­ated to a hotel, then a shel­ter for Kat­rina sur­viv­ors in Texas.

I remem­ber wak­ing up to my Aunt Tina banging on the hotel door. I remem­ber she said, `There are hun­dreds of bod­ies every­where,’ that the levees broke. I’ll never for­get get­ting that knock on the door that let me know everything has changed, everything is dif­fer­ent.

There was an eld­erly couple that came to the shel­ter and talked with us, and they offered us their trailer so we could actu­ally have a space to live. We stayed in that trailer for the remainder of the year, and I fin­ished my high school in Texas, Hende­r­son High School.

One of the reas­ons I wanted to become a teacher was because of how these teach­ers treated us at our low­est points. I remem­ber Coach Propes, the soc­cer coach who got us soc­cer cleats and took care of us in that way. I remem­ber Mrs. Rains, the Eng­lish teacher who had us in our class and had all the sup­plies ready. I remem­ber Ms. Pel­lon, the Span­ish teacher who also had sup­plies for us. Mr. McGin­nis, he would come in in the early hours to tutor me in chem­istry because I missed weeks of school.

They made me feel wel­come. They made me feel like I belong. They made me feel that I was part of a lar­ger com­munity, as opposed to just a stat­istic.

The last thing I wanted to do grow­ing up was be a teacher, because I saw how my mom was a teacher and all the time and effort she put into her craft. She would be cook­ing with her left hand and grad­ing papers with her right hand. I wanted more in life. But Kat­rina changed me in that way, because I saw how these teach­ers respon­ded.

Everything we talk about is `before Kat­rina’ and `after Kat­rina.’ Now I have `before COVID’ and `after COVID.’ I star­ted see­ing the par­al­lels right away, right when the schools closed down, March 16 (in 2020).

The ques­tions that (stu­dents) had, those same ques­tions I had after we evac­u­ated dur­ing Hur­ricane Kat­rina. I remem­ber think­ing, `Are we really never com­ing back to school?’

I went home that week­end and wrote an open let­ter to seni­ors, offer­ing some sup­port and advice. I wrote about what it’s like to lose your senior year. I said that folks will down­play the situ­ation, because they don’t know what it feels like to have their senior year stripped. But I do know. I try to tell them that they’re not for­got­ten: Teach­ers are think­ing of them. We care for them.

A new school left a stu­dent miss­ing New Orleans’ `love and atten­tion’

Jahquille Ross has been an ele­ment­ary school teacher and prin­cipal and now works for the edu­ca­tion non­profit New Schools for New Orleans. When Kat­rina hit, he was an eighth grader at Edna Karr Mag­net School on the West Bank of New Orleans.

We decided after watch­ing the news on Fri­day to leave Sat­urday. I just remem­ber being on the high­way forever. Lit­er­ally forever. I lived with my brother and my sis­ter­in­law dur­ing that time, because my mother had passed away when I was 12, in 2003. We were head­ing to Alex­an­dria, where my sis­ter­in­law is from. I just remem­ber being hungry for a long time.

It was dev­ast­at­ing to see what all was tak­ing place in New Orleans on national TV dur­ing this time. When you saw the large amount of people, the impact of the water and the flood­ing and the dam­age that was done because of the wind, it was like: Oh, we’re going to be in Alex­an­dria a while.

At that time, `a while’ to me was like, maybe another week or two. And that wasn’t the case.

It was one, two, three, four schools in one year. Exhaust­ing. It was hard to make friends wherever I went, because I was unsure at that time, how long are we gonna be in a par­tic­u­lar set­ting? Places just don’t feel like New Orleans.

We moved to Plano, Texas, for about six months. Really nice area, really nice people. There were more white people than I’ve ever seen before at school. I felt the racism a little bit more. It was more pre­val­ent from stu­dents.

I was not per­form­ing aca­dem­ic­ally at the level that I had nor­mally been in New Orleans. Just try­ing to stay afloat in my classes was a struggle. The teach­ers didn’t really go out of their way. They were strictly, like, `This is the les­son, this is the mater­ial, this is when the test is.’ I just didn’t get the love and atten­tion I was accus­tomed to in New Orleans.

I came back to New Orleans in March or April. It felt good to be back home. I had my friend base from middle school. I had friends from ele­ment­ary school. I was back amongst fam­ily and eld­ers, like my grandma, my auntie, my cous­ins, every­body. We lived 10, 15 minutes within each other, which is really good. We had neigh­bour­hood­based school­ing, you know, prior to Kat­rina.

It changed the tra­ject­ory of my life. I did not want to always become an edu­cator. With my mother passing away, it was school that groun­ded me. It was the teach­ers and lead­ers inside of those school build­ings that sup­por­ted me, pushed me and encour­aged me.

I had some pivotal edu­cat­ors in my life who played a big role in my edu­ca­tion and my jour­ney. In return, I felt like I could do that for other chil­dren of New Orleans. I chose to go into ele­ment­ary edu­ca­tion, so that stu­dents in their early years of edu­ca­tion would have the oppor­tun­ity to be edu­cated by a Black male.

Flood­ing wiped out schools — and memor­ies

Michelle Gar­nett was an edu­cator in New Orleans for 33 years, mostly in kinder­garten and pre­K, before retir­ing in 2022. She was teach­ing kinder­garten at Park­view Ele­ment­ary in New Orleans when Kat­rina hit and had to evac­u­ate to Baton Rouge.

When we were able to come back to the city, going back to my ori­ginal school, Park­view, it was dev­ast­at­ing to see the school just com­pletely des­troyed. That memory, I wouldn’t want to go through that again if I could be spared of that.

My mother was a classroom teacher, and she had given me a lot of things. Just memor­ies you just can’t get back. My mother was a little bit of an artist, so she drew a lot of the story­book char­ac­ters for me. My dad also gave me a cas­sette tape with the song “Know­ledge is Power” that I used to play for my kids. I lost the tape he had given me. So, you know, sen­ti­mental things. Every­body in the city lost a lot.

My classroom was just moul­ded and water warped and it smelled and it was just hor­rific. I can say, nobody could sal­vage any­thing from that par­tic­u­lar school. It was just all — all was lost.

We were all in Baton Rouge together as a fam­ily, 23 of us strong in my daugh­ter’s house. Sib­lings, cous­ins, aunts and uncles. On top of the 23 people in my daugh­ter’s house, she was eight months preg­nant at the time. But we were happy. Every­body was safe, and we had to accept things that we couldn’t change.

I loved what I did. Got into it strictly by neces­sity. My second daugh­ter, who is now deceased, had a very rare form of mus­cu­lar dys­trophy. Orleans Par­ish hired me as my own child’s spe­cific aide. She was only in school a short time from Decem­ber to May and the next month, two days after her sixth birth­day, she passed. I was asked to con­tinue work as a child­spe­cific aide. Dur­ing that pro­cess is when I got the pas­sion and desire to go back to school, to be cer­ti­fied in edu­ca­tion.

We think we choose a path for ourselves, and God puts us in the place where he wants us to be. Teach­ing is where I needed to be. And I abso­lutely enjoyed it.