Uphill Both Ways
Why getting to school has gotten harder for kids in the Big Easy.
At 5:15 a.m., it is easy to spot the Jones household on its quiet residential block. In the darkness of this December morning, it’s the only place with the lights on.
Renata Jones and her three kids live in the Westbank area of New Orleans, across the Mississippi River from the bright lights of the French Quarter, where many of the bars are still serving drinks at this hour.
Although the school day for Renata Jones’ youngest son, Kai, age seven, will not begin until nearly 8 a.m., his daily trip to Lafayette Academy, the pre-K-through- eighth-grade charter school that he attends on the opposite side of the city, takes an hour, and the bus is often late.
Inside the house, Kai, a spindly little boy, comes down the stairs from his room in a trance, grumpy and mute. “It’s always a fight,” says his mother, who works as a registration coordinator in the radiology department of a local hospital. She manages to dress him in his embroidered-polo-and-khakis uniform without a complaint. “He doesn’t understand why he can’t get up when the rest of the kids do.”
The chronic absenteeism rate among students from kindergarten to third grade in New Orleans is 16.2 percent—about 60 percent higher than the national average.
Renata is an old hand at this routine, having perfected it with her older son, Ronjaé, 16, and her daughter, Amya, 14. She sent them to Lafayette Academy after years of severe misgivings about Paul B. Habans Elementary, a nearby but consistently low-performing school that last year received an F ranking from the state of Louisiana.
“They weren’t learning anything,” Jones says. “When I took my children out of Habans, I was just like, ‘I’m so gone.’ It was such a disappointment.” Because of changes to the New Orleans school system over the last decade, Jones and her kids were able to “vote with their feet”—as school-choice advocates are fond of saying—and leave a failing school. What they didn’t expect was how far away that vote would take them.
Last year, New Orleans became home to the first school district in the nation made up entirely of charter schools. The effects of this transformation have been dramatic, complex, and heavily debated, but one of the more straightforward consequences is that kids simply travel much farther than they once did to get to school.
In a city where schools have lost virtually all connection to their students’ neighborhoods, 25 percent of all New Orleans students, including Kai, live five miles or more away from their school, according to the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, an organization at Tulane University that examines local school reform. That’s distance as the crow flies, which doesn’t take into account the vagaries of urban density, road conditions, traffic, and bus routes that make frequent stops to Uphill Both Ways - Pacific Standard: