New Orleans: the Orleans Parish School Board

There are usually two types of folks who run for a school board position. One is the ambitious, up-and-coming politician. school boards are often a great place to get started. The districts are often relatively small, and a big media campaign is generally not necessary. The pol will usually serve one term, stand for re-election, then run for different/higher office in their second term. The second type of school board member is the activist-parent. This is the parent who is very vocal at PTA meetings, speaks often at board meetings, is encouraged by everyone else in the neighborhood to run, and can become a quite effective board member.

Orleans Parish has had its share of both of these types over the years, but a third type began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s: the parasite.

The parasite sometimes starts out as an up-and-coming politician who loses their shot at higher office. Sometimes they start out as a community activist or even a parent. There comes a point when they realize their political career has hit its zenith at the school board, they settle in and carve a niche from themselves in the school system. They like the deference they receive from school personnel because of their position. They like to be recoginized as elected officials at public events.

They also like controlling the millions of dollars in public money that flows through the school system annually.

By the late 1980s, there were more parasites on the OPSB than any other type of politician. System business came to a complete crawl. Board meetings that started at 6pm or 7pm would extend past midnight because members were micro-managing contracts and bid procedures. With all their concern devoted to who was getting this or that contract, the board abandoned their oversight duties. School administrators had wide latitude and no supervision. With nobody minding the store, corruption trickled all the way down to school janitors and secretaries. Millions of dollars went missing from payroll accounts, employees were arrested for stealing and cashing others' checks, and timecards were forged. For all the corruption in the system, surprisingly none of it was ever traced back to members of the School Board. (Ironically, only one member of the OPSB has been indicted in the last 20 years, Dr. Dwight McKenna. He was convicted on tax-evasion charges related to his medical practice and totally unrelated to the school system.)

This leads to the obvious question: have members of the OPSB been smart enough to avoid getting caught, or are they so incompetent that they allowed this level of corruption under their noses? My money is on the latter. Some members of the OPSB in the last twenty years have barely had command of the English language, much less the ability to monitor the activities of a multi-million-dollar enterprise. In the 2004 election cycle, then-incumbent member Carolyn Green-Ford was fined $8,600 in penalties and late fees for filing campaign reports late. The job only pays $10,000 annuall. Invariably, criticism of board policies and procedures have broken along racial lines, with white members being accused of being racists, "plantation masters," and other choice labels. Clearly the problems weren't so much black-versus-white as they were the overwhelming need to remove incompetent people from the board.

It wasn't until after a string of inept superintendents were hired and fired that the white minority on the board finally took a stand in support of former Superintendent Anthony Amato. In 2004, Amato ran afoul of two of the most influential black members of the board, Gail Glapion and Ellenese Brooks-Simms. The incident ended up in federal court, with white board members obtaining an injunction against the board as a whole, to prevent Glapion and Brooks-Simms from moving to fire Amato.

Coming on the heels of indictments stemming from the US Attorney's investigation, the attempt to fire Amato backfired days before qualifying opened for elections. Of the black members of the board in 2004, Glapion and Carolyn Green-Ford did not stand for re-election, Brooks-Simms Cheryl Mills, and Elliot Willard were defeated. The two white members of the board, Una Anderson and Jimmy Fahrenholtz, were re-elected. Newcomers Heidi Lovett Daniels, Phyllis Landrieu, Cynthia Cade, Torin Sanders, and Lourdes Moran took office as well.

The board was not only shaken up by the departure of five of the seven incumbents, but also in terms of racial makeup. Where the pre-election board was 5/2 black/white, the new board now consisted of three black members (Sanders, Cade, Daniels), three white members (Anderson, Fahrenholtz, Landrieu), and one hispanic member (Moran).

The new school board immediately indicated its willingness to try new approaches to solving problems in the system, turning financial management of the system over to an outside accounting/consulting company prior to the storm. In the post-Katrina world, OPSB reacted as slowly to the situation as did FEMA and the Bush Administration, all but stating that it would be impossible to re-open schools this year. Clearly this stance was unacceptable, so now the board has been forced to come up with new plans. So far, the cornerstone of the re-building plan is the concept of "charter schools."

Tomorrow: Charter Schools in post-Katrina New Orleans.