Guest Essay from Former RSD Superintendent, Patrick Dobard

Seven years after watching the Circle Food Store underwater on CNN, I found myself helping to rebuild the schools in my hometown.

That image never left me. The day after Hurricane Katrina hit, I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my Baton Rouge home, glued to the news. The screen showed helicopter footage, water covering streets I couldn’t quite place, the Superdome in chaos. And then something familiar came into view.

There it was, the Circle Food Store. Water halfway up the building. I leaned forward, eyes wide. I’d walked to that store so many times as a kid, just six blocks from the house where I grew up in the 7th Ward. We’d stop at Vaucresson’s Meat Market on the way. The smell of hot sausage. The sound of neighbors catching up. That place held community. It held memories. I felt the tears come and said to myself, “Oh my God. This is bad. New Orleans is gone.”

Katrina didn’t just flood our neighborhoods. It took homes, lives, churches, schools. And for many of us, it took the version of our city we thought would always be there.

But amidst all that destruction, people came together to rebuild.

I started as a classroom teacher in New Orleans in 1989. There were some good schools, but they weren’t accessible to everyone. For most families, especially Black families like mine, the system wasn’t working. It wasn’t designed to serve every child well.

At the time of the storm, I was working at the Louisiana State Department of Education. Through a series of unexpected steps, I ended up helping lead the Recovery School District by 2012. I never planned it. But there I was, home again, trying to fix what had been broken for too long.

The Recovery School District was created to turn around Louisiana’s lowest-performing schools, and most of those were in New Orleans. The job was to rebuild both the physical infrastructure and the academic foundation. Sixty percent of the schools in the city had been deemed “academically unacceptable,” essentially failing kids and families.

What came next wasn’t perfect. But it was bold. I believe we helped create one of the most unique school systems in the country. It was built around three kinds of people: regulators, innovators, and collaborators.

The regulators, folks like me, tried to govern schools differently. We created a centralized enrollment system, a citywide needs fund, new approaches to expulsion, and funding models that gave more to students who needed more. Schools signed multi-year contracts, and those contracts were tied to performance.

The innovators were the people inside the schools. Teachers. Leaders. Staff. They were given the freedom to make their own choices about curriculum, hiring, and programming, but with that freedom came the responsibility to show results.

And then there were the collaborators. The nonprofits. The partners. The neighbors who stepped in to support schools, launch new ones, advocate for good policy, and make sure families had a seat at the table. They held the rest of us accountable.

Even after state control ended and the local district took over again, that structure we helped to establish held. In 2005, 60 percent of New Orleans schools were failing. Today, that number is zero. The high school graduation rate went from 54% in 2005 to 79% in 2023.

I also think often about the buildings themselves. Before Katrina, the city had no school facilities master plan. The Recovery School District led what came to be a $4.3 billion school reconstruction effort. About $1 billion of that went to minority and women-owned businesses. We set up Louisiana’s first Disadvantaged Business Enterprise requirement for a state-led project. That money didn’t just rebuild schools; it put local people to work rebuilding their own neighborhoods.

And now, when I think of that kid walking past the Circle Food Store today, I imagine he’s the son of someone who helped pour the foundation of one of those new schools. I imagine he’s headed to a school his family chose, a school that tells him he matters.

The water receded. But the work that came out of that moment, the effort, the care, the intention, is still rippling forward.

Twenty years is just a point in time. This work is generational. And I hope that the people leading schools twenty years from now are still doing it with courage and with love, for this city and for the children who will one day lead it.