New Orleans Teachers Get Justice, but Schools Still Under Attack | MyFDL

New Orleans Teachers Get Justice, but Schools Still Under Attack | MyFDL:

New Orleans Teachers Get Justice, but Schools Still Under Attack

by Michelle Chen

(photo: Rain Rannu / flickr)

After Hurricane Katrina washed over New Orleans, many survivors had virtually nothing left to lose. But the city’s teachers were then hit by the storm’s ripple effect: the loss of thousands of jobs in the tattered school system. Recently, a civil district court ruled that the state had effectively robbed thousands of school employees of funds that were supposed to help tide them over as the city recovered.
After Katrina, the New York Times reports, most New Orleans schools were taken over by the state’s Recovery School District, which absorbed a stream of federal aid while the local school board was left impoverished:

In December 2005, the local school board, with few schools and little money in its control, passed a resolution firing 7,500 school employees, who at that time had been on “disaster leave without