Kendell Goes Back To School
The Lewis-Robertson family returns to New Orleans, thanks to the woman who rebuilt their children's school in the Lower Ninth Ward
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The family celebrated with dinner at the steak house where Joe was back at work. Over ribeye, shrimp and lamb chops, says Tanya, "we were all talking about how good it was to be home."
While they'd been gone, Doris Hicks, whose own East New Orleans house survived undamaged, had been hard at work. "I was angry because there were people in the city where I was born who did not believe that children of color should be educated in an appropriate environment," she says. Facing the confusion of a city-run school system that had collapsed and not yet rebounded, she determined that the best course of action was to form a charter school. With the help of her old teachers and staff, scattered as far away as Baton Rouge, she secured one of the city's first post-Katrina school charters and commandeered $7.8 million in FEMA funds to cover the loss of the school. Finding support for her crusade wasn't easy: At one point, members of a consulting firm that had received $29.3 million in public funds to oversee rebuilding of the city's schools threatened to have volunteers helping Hicks thrown in jail, citing safety concerns. In front of local news crews, she then presented an engineering report of her own stating that the building was structurally sound.
Nevertheless the building was seriously flood-damaged, with broken windows, no electricity and water-logged debris in the hallways. Workmen found dead flounder on the second floor, where 14 feet of water had stood, and since the flood, termites had begun to move in. There was no choice but to rebuild, says Hicks, who supervised from a makeshift office in a nearby vacant school.
