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Up From the Ruins

A stopped clock, hanging upside down at Alfred Lawless Senior High School, symbolizes the damage Hurricane Katrina caused to more than 100 schools.

—Sevans/Education Week

State and district leaders are fighting to rebuild and repair New Orleans' schools.

By Lesli A. Maxwell

Alfred Lawless Senior High School in the Lower Ninth Ward—home to about 900 New Orleans students before Hurricane Katrina—remains fixed in time on Aug. 29, 2005.

Cracked mud coats the gym floor. A hole the size of a pickup truck gapes open on the school’s south side, revealing clumps of dangling, rotten insulation. Mildewed athletic shoes are strewn among shoulder-high weeds and piles of brick rubble. And on a moldy interior wall, a bulletin board displays faded photos of smiling graduates in gowns and mortarboards.

The 43-year-old school, which soaked for days in 15 to 20 feet of water following the storm, was one of the city’s hardest hit. Many of its walls ruptured, and some of the buildings on campus were pushed off their concrete foundations. Now, the fate of Lawless—the only public high school in the neighborhood—is tangled up in negotiations between state education leaders and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials over just how...