Tanya Bryant is one of many educators who taught in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit 20 years ago and have since quietly shepherded its schools and its students through an extended season of trauma and transformation.
When she moved to the city as a young single mother and new Teach For America member in 2003, Bryant didn’t know how long she’d stay in the Crescent City—or how long she’d work in education.
Now, 22 years later, she leads ReNEW schools, a charter network known for transforming schools through ambitious turnaround strategies. She is one of many educators whose career has been profoundly shaped by the storm.
To a degree, the debates over the city school system’s unique trajectory since then have elided one important factor: Teachers and educators like Bryant were instrumental in schools’ recovery. They staffed the buildings after the waters receded. They helped get new schooling models off the ground. For some, the tragedy was final: 7,000 teachers working in the public schools before the storm were let go when the state canceled out the teachers’ contract, and not all of them returned.
But through it all, those educators who stayed, along with those who came to New Orleans to help, played a major role in rebuilding the schools.
“There are so many brilliant minds that contribute to the successes that we’ve seen in this city,” Bryant said.
The novice
After getting a degree in finance, Bryant grew bored at her post-college accounting job in Illinois and began looking for a Plan B. After a colleague praised her innate teaching skills and gift for explaining new concepts, she began toying with a career in education.
Months later, as she scraped the ice off of her windshield during a bitter Chicago winter, she weighed two options: an alternative teacher-training program in Illinois, or a Teach For America placement in New Orleans.
“I was like, ‘You know what? Enough of this cold weather, snow, and ice! I’m going to New Orleans,’” Bryant said.
So Bryant’s education career started when TFA placed her in a second-grade classroom at Joseph A. Hardin Elementary School in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, a high-poverty part of the city that would later gain international attention when the hurricane breached a levee wall, causing catastrophic flooding.
At the time, New Orleans was the second poorest performing district in the state, struggling with budgetary and management issues. They spilled over to teachers’ day-to-day classroom experiences, too.
Bryant’s school was so ill-equipped that teachers didn’t even have copy paper. She bought an inkjet printer to print worksheets at home and added toilet paper to her school supply list so that students didn’t have to go without.
She also stayed up after her two-year-old son went to bed at night to plan her lessons with very few resources, consulting fellow TFA members about how to teach concepts—and teach them a second time if students couldn’t master them.
“We had great families and kids and staff at the school, but we just did not have the resources that we needed to be able to be effective, especially in comparison to today,” Bryant said. “There’s just basic things that you expect a school to have in order to educate kids, and I just did not have those basic things at my school.”
After completing her TFA service, Bryant opted to go back to school to get a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction so she could help change the system from the inside. But those plans were interrupted by the storm.
The storm
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, flooding a majority of New Orleans, causing billions of dollars of property damage, and displacing families from their homes. Nearly 1,400 people were killed.
Bryant resisted evacuating at first. After leaving the city during a previous storm, she’d learned how costly and cumbersome the process can be, especially if warnings don’t materialize.
“People say, ‘Why didn’t they just leave?’ But it was expensive to leave,” Bryant said.
But, as the storm’s projected path got closer and closer to the city, she decided to evacuate with her son and fiancé. They eventually ended up back in Illinois, where she took classes online as the city started its recovery.
When Bryant and her fiancé, who worked at a university, first returned, his parents’ Gentilly neighborhood was closed off, but they managed to access it by showing the patrolling National Guard members his school ID.
“Eerie is a great way to describe it,” Bryant said. “I remember getting out of the car, the streets were thick with mud and the air wasn’t moving. It was quiet—there were no animals, no birds.”
Katrina destroyed 110 of the city’s 126 public schools, forcing conversations about what leaders should build in their place.
As waters receded, a decentralized model emerged for the school system, which had long struggled with low graduation rates and test scores well below state averages. The existing state-run recovery district assumed control of the lowest-performing schools; buildings that once served as traditional public schools were converted to open-enrollment charters with broader flexibility to design programs and policies. New Orleans would eventually become the country’s first all-charter district, giving parents freedom to enroll their children at any school in the city.
Education reform advocates praised the model’s accountability: poorly performing schools could be quickly closed. Critics said the new system could be challenging for parents to navigate.
Ever since, the novel experiment has generated debates about to what extent it could serve as a model for improvement elsewhere.
The aftermath
But in the months after the storm, educators weren’t at the helm of policymaking efforts. They were focused on their students’ immediate well-being. Many students who remained had lost their homes and the stability that came with them. Thousands of others had been displaced throughout Louisiana and into neighboring states. In 2006-07, enrollment in New Orleans schools dropped from 65,000 students to 25,000.
Educators, some who still work in New Orleans schools today, went to great lengths to help their students. When a group of young teachers at a KIPP charter school heard from displaced students in the Houston Astrodome, they moved to the city for a year to open a temporary school that tended to their recovery needs.
“At a time when it would have been easy to walk away from the wreckage, the educators here today thought of the children who would be left behind,” former President George W. Bush later told the city’s teachers, on the storm’s 10-year anniversary. “You understood that bringing New Orleans back to life requires getting students back to school. And even though some of the educators had lost almost everything you owned, you let nothing stand in your way.”
Bryant took a job teaching math at a middle school overseen by the recovery school district in the 2006-07 school year. She was quickly overwhelmed by the trauma her students—and her colleagues—continued to grapple with.
Bryant had a difficult time processing her own experiences, too. Her own son attended four different kindergarten classes. Some of her students had switched schools several times in the year since the storm; some hadn’t attended school at all. Some had memories of staying at the city’s Superdome, a football stadium that served as an ill-equipped “shelter of last resort” and later became a symbol for officials’ poor preparation. Along with the students, most educators lacked permanent housing.
“There were so many stories, and it was all very fresh and very real for kids trying to process all of that,” Bryant said. “Kids are resilient, so it was hard to watch them struggle to reconcile the things going on in their lives.”
After a year, Bryant made the difficult decision to leave teaching, one that still pains her today.
The recovery
Looking for a fresh start, Bryant switched master’s degree programs, became an accountant, and took a job auditing nonprofit organizations.
As her enthusiasm built for the growing number of charter schools in the city, aided by an infusion of philanthropic dollars and recovery aid, Bryant enrolled her son in a charter.
One day, she was assigned an audit of a charter school where a business manager had stolen money. The details brought back memories of that first teaching job.
“They had plenty of copy paper, and two copiers!” Bryant said, comparing the school to her first assignment. “To find out that this person was stealing money from the school—after schools are finally getting the resources they need and kids are finally getting the resources they need to be successful—it was devastating.”
Bryant grew a network of contacts in education and nonprofits through her work. In 2009, she became a finance director at a charter school and in 2010, the leaders of ReNEW reached out to offer her a similar role in their charter network, which had two schools at the time.
“They said, ‘We don’t start one grade level at a time,’” Bryant recalled. “‘We take the school, K through 8th grade, with the kids who are in the school at this time, and we turn it around to be a high-performing school.’”
Sold on the concept, and on the network’s plans to expand, Bryant took the job. By 2011, she oversaw all of ReNEW’s finances, a job that blended her work in education with her experience in accounting.
Working with the network’s leaders, she worked to organize the finances and priorities in a strategic way. She learned to bill Medicaid for some student services, which helped cover the cost of hiring a nurse for every school. She found money to hire counselors and social workers for kids, and she worked to keep the system nimble enough to respond as new needs emerged.
In 2018, Bryant reluctantly took over as CEO of the system, convinced by a board leader that it needed consistent leadership. Today, the system has five schools and an early-childhood program.
When the COVID-19 pandemic upended education and led to sudden mass school closures in 2020, Bryant and ReNEW’s educators quickly established new norms to bring as much stability as possible. They delivered packages of learning materials to students’ homes and asked them to attend remote learning sessions with cameras on to encourage connection.
Over the summer, the network bought 2,000 computers and internet hotspots for students. Teachers worked to maintain rigor.
“There was a feeling of, ‘We have to make sure that there’s continuity for kids,’” Bryant said. “That thought pattern was probably stronger because we had gone through Katrina.”
Epilogue
In 2018, the state returned control of Recovery District schools to the local Orleans Parish School Board, forming a system of mostly charters with a centralized enrollment process. Charter schools and networks retain control over issues like staffing and curriculum. The local system also adopted a weighted-funding model used by the Recovery District, which directs more funds to schools with higher enrollments of students living in poverty, English learners, and students with disabilities.
“From before Katrina to post-Katrina, the biggest difference that I see is the ability for leaders to make decisions closest to the children, having those resources, and to be able to manipulate them in a way that works best for the kids,” Bryant said. “If you give people the right resources, they will do the work.”
Educators don’t share their Katrina stories as frequently as they used to, Bryant said. As the landmark 20th anniversary approached, more of them gave interviews, stirring up emotional memories.
Like the city, many educators’ lives can be divided into two chapters: before and after the storm.
“We are put in spaces and in places for a reason, to make whatever impact we are there to make,” Bryant said. “I feel blessed and lucky to have been able to walk in the spaces I’ve walked in.”
