John White
Louisiana State Superintendent of Public Education New Orleans
In a place of such dramatic homelessness, such dramatic transience, such dramatic unemployment, such dramatic violence — for all of its strengths, New Orleans has those issues — we can sit around and wait for somebody in the central office or in Washington to start some program that might solve it, or we can just do it ourselves.
I so admired that spirit in our principals. I remember when I first got here, a principal told me how he had just gone to a full three meals per day for every child — breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I asked him, "Was that a function of a change in federal policy?" And he said, "No. I just decided we were gonna spend our dollars in that way." And I said, "Well, you had previously worked in other districts. Why was it that you didn't do that there?" And he told me, "Well, we would've had to adjust the union contract. We would've had to renegotiate the bus contract, we would've had to get the food vendor to be willing to do three meals, and we would've had to do all this stuff because these city-wide contracts necessitated that we do them for my kids. And when I'm sitting here with these kids and these families, if that's what they want to help their kids, and it's gonna help them, I'm gonna find a way to do it, and here I'm free to do it."
That's an incredibly special opportunity. It's also an incredible individual. And the key in New Orleans is gonna be sustaining individuals like that one, like that school here, to make sure that we're continuing to do what's right for our families and for our kids. That is the essence of the New Orleans model. It's what makes the model work. The question is, "Can we sustain it?"
