Education

Pastor Lisa Fitzpatrick spends every weeknight at an old Catholic school building in Central City. Tonight she’s sliding slices of pizza onto paper plates for about a dozen hungry teenagers.

Students packed the courtyard at Benjamin Franklin High School Wednesday morning — just two days after the school had to cancel classes due to its own gun threat. They were among hundreds of students in New Orleans and thousands nationwide who left their classrooms Wednesday to take part in a national school walkout to protest gun violence after the latest school shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Fla.

Across the country, there's a new push to bring back an old skill. Last year, the Louisiana Legislature joined 16 other states in making cursive writing a required course in elementary schools, and the law took effect in January.

High school marching bands spend months preparing to entertain Carnival revelers along parade routes and compete for prime spots near the front of the parade. One school with a rich marching tradition is George Washington Carver High School in the Ninth Ward. But the school was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, and it took several years for Carver to restart a marching band. 

In Part One of this series we heard about how one family is navigating the school enrollment process. Turns out, when you're trying to get into the best schools, it's complicated. There are a lot of steps. And it's hard even for someone with resources. WWNO's Jess Clark brings us back to the story of Kate Scheuermann and her son Remy. Kate is a sales manager for WWNO, and she's trying to get Remy into first grade at the district's top schools.

Families across New Orleans are deciding where to send their kids to school next year. Parents can now use the district’s OneApp — an online application that allows you to apply to many schools at once. The district then tries to match students to their first choice. But when you want to get into the top schools, it's not all that simple.

In part one of WWNO's series on early child care and education in Louisiana, we heard about how costs are keeping many families from accessing quality early childhood education. But costs are also having an impact on child care centers themselves.  In part two, we look at whether children are getting quality instruction when families can afford to send them to licensed centers.