Leah Chase’s Lafayette Academy Still Needs Qualified Educators Before Opening

According to Orleans Parish School Board member Olin Parker, the number of positions the school needs is based on an enrollment figure of 300 students, but since the school currently only has around 200 students, the extra positions might not have to be filled after all.

In February, New Orleans’ NOLA Public Schools was awarded the opportunity to run a school directly for the first time in decades on the site of a low-performing charter school, Lafayette Academy. The school would be renamed in honor of Leah Chase, the legendary New Orleans chef who died in 2019 and would include grades K-5 initially, with a plan to expand to pre-K through eighth grade.

According to NOLA.com, the Leah Chase School is now two weeks away from opening and still needs to fill approximately 13 jobs, four of which have pending offers, including a first-grade teacher, two second-grade teachers, an art teacher, a Spanish teacher, and a physical education teacher. In addition to those faculty positions, the school also needs to find four classroom aides, an operations manager, and a maintenance worker.

According to Orleans Parish School Board member Olin Parker, the number of positions the school needs is based on an enrollment figure of 300 students, but since the school currently only has around 200 students, the extra positions might not have to be filled after all.

“It’s not concerning,” Parker told the outlet before, adding that the smaller number of staffers is helpful for the school’s budget. “The number of vacancies is helpful from a deficit perspective.”

In February, Tulane University professor and director of the Education Research Alliance in New Orleans, Douglas Harris, provided context on the school system in New Orleans to Fox 8. New Orleans’ public schools were drastically altered post-Katrina.

“I think there has been pressure for a while for the district to act more directly within the school system. With charter schools, they’re acting indirectly. They’re waiting for the contracts to expire, and they’re trying to get new schools open through charter organizations. But you get to the school board meeting, and people say, ‘Well, what about this school?’ And, ‘This school over here isn’t doing what we’d like them to do.’ It was a big shift that happened in the system after Katrina that was really reducing the district’s responsibility over day-to-day management of schools.”

Harris continued, acknowledging the challenges that were ahead of the district, given its financial restrictions.

“They’re trying to govern this system of charter schools and have this separate operation of running schools at the same time. The district doesn’t have a lot of funding at the district office. They don’t have a lot of people. It’s already a challenging thing to try to govern this charter school system. Now, you’re adding another very different kind of responsibility by trying to actually manage these schools on a day-to-day basis.”

Similarly, Dr. Avis Williams, the NOLA-PS Superintendent, acknowledged to the outlet that it would basically be an all-hands-on-deck situation. “It’s going to take the whole community,” Williams said. “We’re going to need partnerships and support. And so, I do look forward to all those folks who were here, cheering on this movement and wanting the board to move forward with this. I’m going to be looking to you all to support.”

The stakes for the success of the Leah Chase School are high, as the success or failure of the school could signal whether or not the NOLA-PS system will be able to follow the direction of board member Leila Jacobs Eames, who told the board at a meeting in January, “Since I campaigned for this position, people were saying, ‘We need direct-run schools, we need our schools back.’ So that’s the direction we’re trying to go in.”

The community, represented at the meeting by Pastor Gregory Manning, who is the Pastor of Broadmoor Community Church, regards the charter school movement as a failure. “The charter school program is a failed experiment. Let’s put more direct-run schools in place so we can go back to where we used to be as a city.”