Leslie Jacobs
Founder, Educate Now!, Former Orleans Parish School Board member, Former Louisiana State Board of Education member New Orleans
What is extraordinarily hard to capture for anyone who walks in New Orleans today — or you at arms-length read about it — is the immense personal toil that everyone went through ... Families were relocated to every single state in this country ... But what people don't then connect is what happens when they came back. I was talking to a principal, he had a charter school he had opened up right before Katrina, and was one of the first to reopen after Katrina. I was having coffee with him one day, and he said, "We have to teach these children how to play again." We were dealing with a population that had gone through a war.
The remnants of that exist today. We have not recovered as a city in having good mental health services and supports for families. When folks look at academic results and data, and whether they want to support us, or they want to say it doesn't work, they're totally forgetting the human element that an entire generation of kids went through a war. The adults who served them went through a war. Every institution that you know, that you depended upon, went through a war ... So, if one was committed to stay there and rebuild, it wasn't to rebuild what had been. It was to rebuild the city as to what it could be. That resolve manifested itself in the K-12 education system. It manifested itself in coming up with the neighborhood redevelopment plan. It manifested itself in criminal justice reform. In water management.
