Tales from the Reconstruction

Paul Vallas isn't the only Philly educator heading to the Big Easy.

by Ted Hesson

Katrina Recovery

ON THE MOVE: Margo Bouchie and boyfriend James Lukens prepare for the 22-hour road trip to their new hometown of New Orleans. : Ted Hesson (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

With her sedan safely herded into the I-676 afternoon traffic pen, Margo Bouchie, a 23-year-old special-education teacher, reached for her cell phone and speed-dialed her boyfriend, James Lukens. She and Lukens would talk for about 10 minutes after leaving school each day and commiserate on the shared trials of second-year teachers. Today, however, Bouchie felt a familiar flush suffuse her face, a sign of nervousness. With her boyfriend at attention, she unwound a spool of conflicting emotions in a single declaration: She wanted to move to New Orleans with him.

Lukens was caught off guard and wondered if she would be able to adapt to life in the South, but her decision made him happy. "As time went on," he said, "I was just deep down inside hoping that she'd go."

For Bouchie, the choice to move to New Orleans came quickly, spurred by a budding romance, Philly-classroom burnout and a pile of money: In early August, she headed south with Lukens, leaving behind her job at Roosevelt Middle School in Germantown and unsure what she'd find as a teacher in what New Orleans officials call the Recovery School District.

After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans cleared all public school teachers and staff from the civic payroll as the city struggled to cope with colossal damage and diaspora. The public school system was restructured and former Philadelphia School District chief Paul Vallas was hired this May to manage the Recovery School District, a state-run entity that became responsible for most city public schools after the storm. Schools began reopening piecemeal in late 2005 as buildings and teachers became available, but the process is ongoing.

To attract quality teachers from outside New Orleans, the Recovery School District teamed up with city charter schools to form teachNOLA, an organization that recruits both certified and aspiring teachers, mainly through the Internet. For certified teachers from outside Louisiana who want to teach in the Recovery School District, teachNOLA offers a plump incentive package that can total more than $17,000 over two years, in addition to a base salary of at least $36,900.

"We have a pretty rigorous screening process," says Walter Stern, teachNOLA's site manager. "We see ourselves as really looking for the best of the best."

The New Orleans teachers' union, however, thinks that teachNOLA's out-of-state recruitment efforts are misdirected.

"We're not against new teachers coming down to New Orleans," says union spokesman Christian Roselund. However, Roselund believes that the district should first worry about scattered and unemployed pre-Katrina teachers. "We had thousands of experienced teachers [before the storm]. Those should have been the first rehired."

Although teachNOLA advertised in areas like Houston and Atlanta, and has already hired back dozens of pre-Katrina teachers, the program offers the lucrative incentive package only to teachers from out of state who have never taught in New Orleans.

This year, 50 certified teachers have been placed in city schools through the program. (In all, there are 200, including those who haven't been placed or are working toward their certification.) Bouchie is one of the two certified teachers from Philadelphia.

Originally from Maine, Bouchie came to Philadelphia in 2005 to teach special education. Although normally quick to smile, she projected authority in the classroom and her first year went smoothly.

This January, during her second year in the classroom, she started dating Lukens, who was teaching at Fitzsimons High School in North Philly. In April, though, Lukens decided to enroll in a graduate program for public health at Tulane University in New Orleans, which meant he would have to relocate by summer's end.

After some consideration, Bouchie decided to uproot herself and move with her boyfriend. She liked Philly and wanted to be closer to her family in Maine, but her second year of teaching left her exhausted. The midyear statewide tests broke her spirit as she had to try to prepare 15 special-education students for a standardized test that wasn't geared toward their needs.

Unsure of whether she could go back to the same school, she remembered an online job posting for teachNOLA and applied. In June, the couple took a trip to New Orleans to look for an apartment.

As they navigated the city, they were surprised by the varied state of disrepair in some areas. "You go down one street where none of the homes have damage from Hurricane Katrina and another street where the houses have all Xs on them because you can't live in them," Bouchie recounts.

They settled on an apartment in the French Quarter, which Bouchie thought felt romantic with its horse-drawn carriages, lampposts and second-floor balconies. However, the apartment is on the outskirts of an area where some worry about violence. "When we went down there, we heard all these horror stories about crime. But coming from Philly, we weren't worried about it," she says. "It's definitely in the back of my mind as a potential problem, but it's not enough to persuade me not to stay."

While apartment hunting, Bouchie decided to enter some school addresses into their rental car's GPS. She found schools, but they weren't exactly what she expected. "Every school we went to was boarded up," she says.

In early August, the couple moved out of their South Philly apartment and took the 22-hour road trip down to New Orleans. Bouchie has since been placed in a New Orleans high school. However, just like the ones she saw while visiting in June, her school is still damaged, meaning that the district will need to bring in modular classrooms before next month.

Teaching out of a temporary classroom isn't ideal, but Bouchie is excited to have the opportunity to work in a school district being rebuilt from scratch. The Philly school district is bogged down by bureaucratic problems that seem beyond the control of a single teacher or principal, says Bouchie, who thinks she'll be more likely to get involved at a school that's starting fresh.

"Maybe I'll get to be in a committee," she explains. "I just think that there's just so much more room to be a leader in these new schools."

Like Bouchie, Justin Chen, a 27-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus, also joined teachNOLA this year. Moved by the effects of Katrina, Chen left a job that paid nearly $100,000 to teach fifth-grade math at a newly opened charter school in New Orleans. During his first week working at Langston Hughes Academy in New Orleans this July, Chen rode the school bus in the morning and afternoon as part of an effort to get to know students and parents and ensure that each stop was safe. Each day, Chen arrived at the eastern side of the city by 6 a.m. and boarded the bus at the first stop. As he bounced along the route, he was moved by what he saw. Piles of rubbish from demolition and construction sat on the side of the road; gnarled trees looked "like a dinosaur had chewed on them"; and the ruins of a Six Flags amusement park loomed eerily in the distance. "You could film a horror movie there," Chen says.

But the ride wasn't all desolation. They went past plenty of rebuilt working-class homes, and like many parts of New Orleans, the enduring storm damage varied widely. "If you looked down some of the side streets you could see quite a bit of construction happening," he says. As they got closer to the city center, the damage became less pronounced.

In just a few months, Chen had gone from business flights across the country to a sweltering yellow school bus. But his motivation wasn't material. "I really wanted to get involved and do something that I knew I would be proud of forever," he says.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

After graduating from Penn's Wharton School of Business in 2002, Chen took a job as a financial analyst with a large pharmaceutical company in Horsham. He climbed through the company ranks and became a senior analyst in 2005, a promotion that sent him to Jacksonville, Fla.

He was following the Wharton career path — corporate job; steady promotions; nearly a six-figure salary. Hurricane Katrina, however, redirected his aspirations. Originally from northern Louisiana, he felt impelled to return to the city he had visited every year with his family, the city where many of his old friends now lived. When he started looking for jobs at New Orleans nonprofits this March, he found teachNOLA's Fellows program for uncertified teachers.

"I immediately became excited about the idea," he recalls. "That's the first time that I put the two things together: teaching and New Orleans."

Once school started this August, he had to deal with all the responsibilities of a first-time educator, from lesson plans to classroom management, along with some challenges unique to New Orleans. His school, for example, doesn't have a permanent building yet. As a result, they've been giving classes at Tulane University this summer and will have to operate out of modular classrooms starting in September.

While at Tulane, teachers need to walk students to the cafeteria. Although it's just a few minutes away, adjusting to the heat and humidity hasn't been easy. "My head is glistening halfway through the walk," Chen says. "Students often ask if I'm OK."

In addition, he's making less than half of what he used to earn as a financial analyst, and that means forgoing new clothes, fine dining and annual wine-tasting trips to Napa Valley. The salary cut also makes it difficult to visit his fiancée, who lives in Philly. "In the past I would have already bought a plane ticket to go see her," he says.

He can't yet say how long he'll continue to teach in New Orleans, but he's approaching the profession with an open mind.

"You get the sense," he says, "that there's just a lot of good people moving here to be part of something good."

(ted.hesson@citypaper.net)