Chapter Four

Beyond Whining

Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools

In this story, students in New Orleans, Louisiana, face repeated unanticipated disasters yet find ways to be part of the solution by helping to build a more resilient city and school system. It is a journey that fosters socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy every step of the way. As you read, notice the multitude of unintended consequences resulting from human practices that exacerbated the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill, and the ways in which these students are helping build a more resilient New Orleans.

New orleans is a place of many distinctions. It survived one of the worst hurricanes, and the costliest natural disaster, in American history. It was hugely impacted by the worst accidental oil spill in the history of the oil industry. It has the highest per-capita murder rate in the nation. And, for decades, its schools were ranked among the worst in the United States. But in recent years, it has begun to develop another kind of distinction, as a place where middle and high school students, guided by some particularly wise and caring adults, are cultivating a culture of innovation across a broad range of increasingly important issues, including how schools use oil.

The students call themselves the “Rethinkers” and have proven to be unusually effective. The work of “Rethink: Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools” has attracted coverage from The Times-Picayune, The Christian Science Monitor, ABC News, and The Huffington Post, to name a few. The Rethinkers are one of the few student groups in the country to have signed a contract directly with a major food service supplier (ARAMARK) to serve locally grown produce twice a week.1 School officials have adopted many of their recommendations, such as adding school gardens and installing hand-washing facilities in cafeterias. And they have gained the respect and support of numerous community and education leaders, including Paul Vallas, the first superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery School District.

“Paul is obsessed with the Rethinkers and wants Rethinkers clubs in all schools,” says Siona LaFrance, the superintendent's chief of staff. “He likes that the kids are thinking and challenging authority, and that all of their suggestions are based on a lot of consideration. And he likes that this is a continuing effort.”2

Rethinkers founder and executive director, Jane Wholey, who instinctively grounds her work in socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy, wants to help students have a voice in how schools operate and to contribute meaningful recommendations for reform. She believes that with proper guidance, their participation can be both a learning experience and deeply empowering.3

“I tell kids there is no way you will ever be heard if you whine,” says Wholey. “The ultimate goal for the Rethinkers is to identify a problem and solution or recommendation for change. We start with something they identify in their schools that makes them unhappy.”

Sparked by Tragedy

The Rethinkers came together in 2006 as a result of Hurricane Katrina, which caused flooding in 80 percent of the city of New Orleans, nearly 2,000 deaths, and an estimated $81 billion in property damage.4 It was, of course, the biggest event to rock their young lives. Of the city's 126 public schools, 110 were destroyed. An estimated 50 percent of the population fled the city.

Some of the students who left the city with their families enrolled temporarily in other schools for what Wholey describes as an “enforced year abroad.” It was “a unique and sometimes traumatizing moment in the lives of young New Orleanians,” she says. “But for many, it had also been a first glimpse of schooling far better than they had known in the notoriously dysfunctional New Orleans system.”5

Dudley Grady Jr., now a student at Xavier University of Louisiana and a Rethinkers intern, remembers it well. “The bathrooms were the biggest things for me,” he says. “To see a clean restroom in school? I'd never seen that before. Toilet paper? Soap? Mirrors on the wall that were not broken? I'd never seen that.” Attending schools outside New Orleans, he was equally surprised to see doors on the bathroom stalls, enough desks and chairs for every student, and books that he could take home to read.

Before Katrina, two-thirds of New Orleans schools were failing and chronically under-enrolled. Some were so old and neglected that school board members said they should be condemned. Nearly three-quarters of eighth graders lacked proficiency in math or English. And the school system had a reputation for fraud, incompetence, and corruption.

With most school buildings destroyed and half the residents having left New Orleans after Katrina, there was widespread agreement that restoring the city's schools was an essential part of restoring the community. As a result, state legislators brought some 90 percent of New Orleans schools under the control of the Louisiana Recovery School District, a reform effort designed to transform underperforming schools into successful places for children to learn.6 “We used Katrina as an opportunity to build—not rebuild, but build—a new school system,” said superintendent Vallas.7 This massive effort has been described as the “most ambitious system-wide reform in U.S. education history.”8

The success of any reform effort depends on many things. But one key element is school culture and the ways in which it transmits (or fails to transmit) new values and behaviors. “Understanding school culture is an essential factor in any reform initiative,” wrote Elizabeth R. Hinde, associate professor of Teacher Preparation at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. “Any type of change introduced to schools is often met with resistance and is doomed to failure as a result of the reform being counter to this nebulous, yet all encompassing facet—school culture.”9

It was in this spirit that Wholey believed that students, one of the central networks of relationships within any school system, should play a part in reforming their own schools. Driven by an instinct for creating a culture of trust and respect, she sought to engage students in the process of forging new norms.

“We know the issues,” says Wholey. “There are not 200 of them. There are a dozen or so—in New Orleans and all over.” The issues included school safety, cleanliness and bathrooms, availability of supplies and books, quality of food and cafeterias, quality of teachers and teaching, extracurricular activities, dignity, and, more recently, the use of energy.

Since 2006, the Rethinkers have met in clubs throughout the school year and for a six-week training program in the summer. They use “circles,” a variety of exercises, and presentations by outside professionals to explore the issues. The goal is to create a safe environment for students to experiment and to encourage—even reward—innovation and experimentation. In short, Wholey holds the space for something new to emerge.

“The trick is always to allow it to be their show, their story,” Wholey adds. “We could invite the most significant engineers to come up with solutions. But we've discovered kids almost always have things to say that are different from adults.”

Opening Doors

The Rethinkers held their first news conference in front of Sherwood Forest Elementary School on July 21, 2006. It began with students Melissa and Amber Augustine opening its doors, which had been shut since the storm. The stench of decay poured out, overwhelming those who had come to observe. Pieces of desks, chairs, and a piano could be seen piled in a heap. The sisters then walked over to two desks left empty in honor of their cousins who died in the storm. Quietly, they lit a candle on each.

Sixteen-year-old Shannon Taylor described what New Orleans students had “endured,” even before Katrina. She spoke of one student forced to sit on the edge of a table every day because there were not enough chairs in the classroom. Another student never owned a knapsack—and never needed one, because students were not permitted to bring books home. She described the filthy and broken bathrooms, lunches consisting of greasy hamburgers and donuts, and students who were unprepared for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) tests that determine whether a student will advance to the next grade. “No wonder so many of us failed,” she said.

Moving from problem to solution, the students offered a series of recommendations that included clean bathrooms, books of their own, safe schools, teachers who love to teach, and adequate extracurricular activities.

Shortly after the news conference, the Rethinkers also followed up with a report on students' perceptions of post-Katrina public schools, based on a survey of more than 500 students.10 Among their findings were the following:

In 2007, the Rethinkers offered specific recommendations for improving school bathrooms. They tackled cafeteria food the following year, recommending the integration of local, garden-fresh ingredients; the elimination of “sporks,” which they deemed undignified and impossible to use, in favor of real silverware; and the installation of sinks in cafeterias so they could wash their hands before eating. Turning to issues of safety and dignity in 2009, they recommended that metal detectors be replaced with “mood detectors” (students assigned to observe students as they arrived in the morning), a “chill-out zone,” and a resolution circle.

Since then, says LaFrance, the district has adopted a number of the Rethinkers' recommendations: Sporks, for example, have been banned and replaced with silverware. Hand-washing stations have been installed in cafeterias. And a new agreement has been signed with the food service provider to offer more locally sourced food.

And Then Came the Spill

When the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico five years after Katrina, the magnitude of the disaster was not as immediately obvious to residents as that of the hurricane: Houses were not under water. No one could see the oil, the helicopters, or the cleanup crews from home. And most people did not lose family members. But during the second month of the spill, its magnitude had begun to become clear. “We know this is as big and bigger than Katrina,” said Angelamia Bachemin, a musician who had stayed through Katrina and now worked with the Rethinkers. “We know this will affect our lives forever,” added Dudley Grady Jr.

The Gulf of Mexico is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the hemisphere, a stopping point for migratory birds from South America to the Arctic, and home to abundant wildlife and natural resources. But it also bears the striking consequences, as the New York Times put it, of our “economic pursuits and appetites.”11 About 90 percent of the country's offshore drilling takes place in the central and western parts of the Gulf of Mexico, with 4,000 offshore oil and gas platforms and tens of thousands of miles of pipeline. Before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, an estimated half a million barrels of oil and drilling fluids had been spilled offshore. Even more had been spilled from pipelines, vessel traffic, and wells.12

But when the Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, just 130 miles from New Orleans, it brought these issues to an unprecedented boiling point. The 185-million-gallon spill continued for three months before being capped, with oil covering more than 170 miles of shoreline from Louisiana to Florida. Eleven lives were lost, along with the livelihoods of countless more. The incident raised pressing questions about Americans' dependence on oil, as well as the long-term economic viability of New Orleans.

The World's Most Important Energy Source
Petroleum is arguably the natural resource on which our global economy most depends. Or as Michael Wilson, a research scientist at the University of California Berkeley, has put it: Oil is the “material basis” of modern society.13
Oil is formed from the remains of animals and plants that lived in the ocean some 300 to 400 million years ago. Remains were covered by layers of sand and silt that exerted great heat and pressure on them, eventually transforming the remains into crude oil and gas.14
People long ago realized that the smelly liquid they found in puddles on the Earth's surface could be used to keep lamps burning. But in the mid-1800s, two discoveries unleashed an explosive century and a half of oil development and economic growth: one was that people could access the giant oil reserves underground through drilling; the other was that they could separate oil into a range of petrochemicals in what are now known as oil refineries—and that these chemicals, in turn, could be used to make a great number of things, from gasoline to plastics.
Oil is now the world's most important source of energy, accounting for 35.9 percent of the world's total energy consumption in 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (Coal ranked second at 27.4 percent, and natural gas was third at 22.8 percent.)15
Once you start looking, it's difficult to find things that are not dependent on petrochemicals today. Among the products made from petrochemicals are appliances, cleaning supplies, clothing, computers, emergency and surgical equipment, fertilizers, furniture, heating and cooling systems, medicines including aspirin, phones, sports equipment, toothpaste, and vitamins.

For the Rethinkers, who had come together for their six-week summer program at the time of the spill, it also created a new focus: What could they do about it? To support the students' inquiry, Wholey and other leaders organized a series of events to shed light on the issue of oil dependence. Betty Burkes, an educator and activist who has worked with the United Nations and serves as the Rethinkers' curriculum developer, led one of the first events.

“As a teacher, one is always inquiring and looking for ways to make learning real,” says Burkes. “So I decided it would be a good idea for them to get out of their seats, walk around with a paper and pencil, notice what is in the room, and imagine where it is coming from. In doing that, they discovered how dependent their school life is on oil.”

Discussions about how schools might reduce their dependence on oil followed. This exercise helped make the issue not only personally relevant to students but also an experience that could lead to lasting change.

“I think to the extent that we can make learning personal, it has sustainability. To the extent that it isn't personal and remains an abstraction, it isn't sustainable,” says Burkes. “And I think emotional, social, and ecological intelligence really helps to make learning personal, relevant, and sustaining.”

From Objects to Relationships

As the Rethinkers continued their study of oil—in the midst of the three-month-long spill—several students went to the Crescent City Farmers Market on St. Charles Avenue to talk to shrimpers about how the spill was affecting them. Kay Brandhurst, whose family has been in the fishing (and, previously, whaling) business for generations, told the students she was still catching shrimp in Lake Pontchartrain, the second-largest saltwater lake in the United States. “But the oil spill makes me nervous for future seasons,” she said.

“How can we help?” one student asked.

“Lots of prayers,” she said.

Shortly thereafter, the Rethinkers staged a mock trial in which they asked another more complex question: Who is really responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf—BP or everyone who uses oil?

Responsibility for any spill is, of course, not a simple either-or proposition. A Wall Street Journal investigation, for example, found that the designers and operators of the Deepwater Horizon were to blame for shortcuts, lack of preparedness, and errors in judgment that likely caused the explosion.16 And the U.S. government, the newspaper later reported, was responsible for requiring BP to base its preparations on outdated spill models.17

But the Rethinkers concluded that the American people ultimately bear the primary responsibility for the spill and the resulting damage. As one student argued, oil companies are a lot like gun manufacturers. When someone is shot and killed, we don't hold the person who made the gun responsible but rather the person who used it.

Focusing on Solutions

Because one of the guiding principles of the Rethinkers is to be constructive, the identification of this problem had to be followed by a proposed solution, which they presented at a news conference on July 15, 2010 (coincidentally, the same day the spill was finally capped).

“If we want to prevent another oil spill,” said ninth-grader Danny Do, the son of a shrimper, “we need to start weaning ourselves off this product and begin searching for new ideas. Now is the perfect time to get moving, and schools are a great place to start!”18

New Orleans schools, the students announced, should take steps toward becoming oil-free by 2015.

“We know that ‘oil-free schools’ sounds easy to dismiss, because it's such a big vision,” says Mallory Falk, a recent Middlebury College graduate and community organizer who works with the Rethinkers. “That is why our focus now is to come up with realistic, practical ways for schools to move toward being oil-free.”

In 2010, the Rethinkers offered four suggestions to schools:

1. Start measuring energy waste.
2. Form student green teams to identify ways to reduce waste and persuade other students to get with the program.
3. Eliminate the use of incandescent light bulbs.
4. Recycle materials instead of discarding them.

A year later, it was clear that these efforts had firmly taken root. For example, says Burkes, the Rethinkers set a goal of having only one garbage bag left for disposal after a retreat with twenty-three kids. And they did it.

She adds that the students' ongoing efforts to push for more locally sourced food and school gardens is also connected to their oil-free resolution, reflecting their growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all these issues. “I'm not sure we thought about it that way intentionally,” she says, “but we came to see that each part had influenced the other part.”

Whether New Orleans schools will actually become oil-free by 2015 remains to be seen, of course. But, says Wholey, the point is that any effort toward an admirable goal is worthwhile.

“This was the great lesson of our first year after Katrina: It is, in fact, therapeutic to get people to act to right the wrong done to them,” she says. “It can be big or little. But the act itself is therapeutic. Pushing to make schools oil-free is our way of contributing.”

Classroom Exercise: Where's the Oil?
“I'm interested in kids being grounded in inquiry and not blame, in being curious and not victims,” says Betty Burkes, an educator and activist who has worked with the United Nations and serves as the Rethinkers' curriculum developer.
In the midst of the BP oil spill that leaked 185 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Burkes asked the New Orleans Rethinkers to identify all the ways in which their schools used oil—and then gather in a circle to brainstorm how they might use less.
As expected, the students came up with a long list of items made from petroleum, including pens and glue, desks and chairs—almost everything—recalls Jane Wholey, the Rethinkers founder and executive director. But they also focused on several school systems that were largely dependent on oil.
“A big piece of it was transportation to school,” says Burkes. “One of the decisions that charter schools made in New Orleans was to get rid of neighborhood schools. So almost every kid is bused. The students realized in the circle conversation that to get rid of buses, they would have to revert to neighborhood schools.” But then they had another idea: Why couldn't public transportation be solar-powered in a city with so much sun?
The students also discussed the use of air conditioning, especially during summer months, when it is so hot that many people spend hours sitting out on their porches, trying to keep cool. Why not design better cooling systems, the Rethinkers asked, or have students go to school earlier and return home for the hottest part of the day?
Then they turned to food—in particular, the use of oil to transport food. “The students saw the urgency of getting involved in school gardens after this exercise,” recalls Burkes. They also recognized the need to increase the production of local food—a point they made to ARAMARK, the district's new food service provider. And in 2011, ARAMARK signed a memo of good faith to provide New Orleans schools with two locally harvested fruits per week.
The students, meanwhile, also began to examine their own habits and how they might reduce their own dependency on oil. They talked, for example, about using their cell phones less often and going to see friends more often, swapping clothes instead of buying new ones, and biking more instead of being driven to school. And then they signed pledges to put their words into action.
“We have to make learning personal for students to be engaged,” says Burkes. “And I think the notion of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence really helps with that. Preparing lessons that we want to teach, preparing materials that we want to use—it's very helpful to remember that there is an emotional intelligence and a social intelligence that we want to reach for.” It is the key, she adds, to making learning personal and relevant.

 

After reading “Beyond Whining,” consider the Rethinkers' conclusion that we all bear ultimate responsibility for the Gulf oil spill and the resulting damage, due to our dependence on oil. If the Rethinkers are right, what are the implications for you? What are the implications for your students?

 

 

Notes

1 Rethink, http://www.therethinkers.com/what-weve-done-2/.

2 Lisa Bennett, “Now for the Kids' Say on the Spill,” The Huffington Post, July 14, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bennett/now-for-the-kids-say-on-t_b_644766.html. “New Orleans Students Challenge Schools on Use of Oil,” The Huffington Post, July 22, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bennett/new-orleans-students-chal_b_656128.html.

3 Jane Wholey, Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans, http://seno-nola.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=46.

4 “FAQs, Hurricane Katrina Relief,” http://www.hurricanekatrinarelief.com/faqs.html#Why%20did%20the%20levees%20break%20in%20New%20Orleans. For more information about the hurricane, see Richard D. Knabb, et al., “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina: 23–30 August 2005,” August 2006, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122005_Katrina.pdf.

5 Wholey, Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans.

6 Loreal Lynch, “Achieving Greater Impact Through Model Sharing,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, May 4, 2010, http://www.ssireview.org/opinion/entry/achieving_greater_impact_through_model-sharing/.

7 Sarah Laskow, “Necessity Is the Mother of Invention,” The Daily Beast, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/08/26/new-orleans-s-charter-school-revolution.html.

8 Amanda M. Fairbanks, “Fixing the Broken Parts: Can Schools Save New Orleans?” GOOD Cities, July 15, 2010, http://www.good.is/post/fixing-the-broken-parts-can-schools-save-new-orleans/.

9 Elizabeth R. Hinde, “School Culture and Change: An Examination of the Effects of School Culture on the Process of Change,” Essays in Education, 12 (winter: 2004), www.usca.edu/essays/vol122004/hinde.pdf.

10 Survey results were analyzed in consultation with Ted Quant, director of Loyola University's Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice. (Daniel Goleman, et al., “Forging New Norms in New Orleans” Teacher Education Quarterly, Fall 2010)

11 Campbell Robertson, “Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been Dumping Site,” New York Times, July 30, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30gulf.html?pagewanted=all.

12 Ibid.

13 Seth Broenstein, “Petroleum-based products are around us, in us,” Associated Press, June 12, 2010, http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/jun/12/petroleum-based-products-are-around-us-in-us/.

14 U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Oil (petroleum) Basics,” http://www.eia.gov/kids/energy.cfm?page=oil_home-basics.

15 Hydro, nuclear, and other (geothermal, solar, wind, and wood and waste) electric power generation ranked fourth, fifth, and sixth, respectively, as primary energy sources in 2006, accounting for 6.3, 5.9, and 1.0 percent, respectively, of world primary energy production. (U.S. Energy Information Administration, http://www.eia.gov/iea/overview.html)

16 The manager appointed to oversee the final well tests had so little experience that, in his own words, he was on the rig to “learn about deep water.” (Ben Casselman and Russell Gold, “BP Decisions Made Well Vulnerable,” The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704026204575266560930780190.html)

17 Even a catastrophic offshore spill, regulators said, should never reach shore. (Neil King Jr. and Keith Johnson, “BP Relied on Faulty US Data,” The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703900004575325131111637728.html)

18 Lisa Bennett, “New Orleans Students Challenge Schools on Use of Oil,” The Huffington Post, July 22, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bennett/new-orleans-students-chal_b_656128.html.