Master Plan Truths

NOW IS THE TIME TO DIG IN


The School Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish is a document designed by the private planning partnership between Concordia and Parsons. It, if adopted by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), will represent the blueprint guiding the future capacity of public schools as an institution for learning in New Orleans.

- Though misleadingly billed as a "building boom" on occasion, the facilities master plan, in the word of planners, "landbanks" over 60 schools, which means that the schools will be demolished or shuttered indefinitely. Though the master plan has a rough view of schools that may be eligible for phase two construction, because there is no funding for anything beyond phase one, there is no timeline for reopening of any schools that do not receive the phase one designation.

- Some of the schools slated to be landbanked are not amongst those currently too badly damaged to be occupied by students. In fact, according to Francine Stock's incredibly useful map of the schools slated for landbanking, there are ten high school facilities currently open and serving children slated for closure by 2013. Just one of the ten academic programs functioning within those buildings is being promised relocation to another neighborhood. Those schools include such storied cultural intuitions as Carver, Douglass, O.P. Walker, Karr, Schwartz, McMain, Abramson, Rabouin, Cohen, and John McDonogh.

- Though these institutions have had their share of academic challenges, perhaps none has been more difficult to confront than those related to the traumas related to Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent displacements and relocation. These community anchors and the human beings serving inside represent a stabilizing force for recovering areas of the city. Rather than promoting stability and continuity within these already-open bridges to healing, the master plan pulls the rug out from under the talented administrators striving to institute "school reform" in the here and now. What now is the incentive for principals and teachers to implement a long term academic culture when the district is sending the message that their school programs are being written out of existence? After all that work to eliminate the baby-sitter service mentality that had set in at many schools, principals and teachers are essentially being informed that the programs they're working so hard to implement are actually themselves nothing more than placeholders for yet another academic sweep in 2013.

- Rather than embracing the urbanity of our community, the acreage requirements that inform the closure of many schools located in dense neighborhoods impose an arbitrary suburban-style benchmark that actually has no real correlation with academic performance. This design preference of Concordia-Parsons forces the school district to waste precious time and money negotiating land acquisitions and swap transactions when there are buildings open right now that could be renovated at prices cheaper than building new. Further, the suburbanized campus vision and the neighborhood school closures that the policy necessitates flies in the face of national trends predicting a re-migration to cities and the best academic research on long term environmental benefits of 're-densification' of urban cores spread thin during white flight's asphalt boom.

-Far from "agnostic in respect to operator," the facilities master plan provides no path to funding for any construction beyond phase one and explicitly raises the specter that future school capacity expansion could be left to private operators.


Readers, please treat this as a living blog post to be modified in a collaborative fashion. This is meant to represent a starting point for criticism of the facilities master plan. Please tack on additional concerns or edit those that I've opened with to be more cogent frames. By boiling down the repercussions of this master plan, we will be equipped with a helpful starting point from which to engage uninformed neighbors and confront misinformed adversaries.