In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast causing devastation to towns across the region. New Orleans, though, took center stage as the failure of a levee system led to widespread flooding of the city and around 2,000 deaths.
The impact on the school system is one significant element of the story not widely discussed outside of local media and education-policy circles. In brief, 100 of the city’s 128 schools were immediately rendered unusable, after being significantly damaged by the storm. And with many of the district schools already considered failing, local and state officials decided to just scrap the entire system and become a “charter school city.”
Only now, in the 2024-25 school year, has the city opened its first traditional public school since the storm 20 years ago. But the one small K-8 is unlikely to change New Orleans’ overall model. Locals are satisfied with the schools (90% of area students attend charter schools), and city schools moved from the very bottom of Louisiana measurements “for test scores, test-score growth and graduation rates” to the middle of the pack. Proficiency on state tests also moved from 23% to 56% over this period.
Post Katrina to post Helene
This example becomes very relevant when considering what to do in the coming years for students in the western part of North Carolina, hit hard by a storm that’s being compared to Katrina. Many of the schools in the mountains, like after Katrina, have been rendered unusable. In New Orleans, the “learning loss” from schools being shut days before the year was set to begin led to thousands falling behind. The same is possible in western North Carolina if we don’t find immediate solutions.
The bipartisan hurricane-recovery bill, just passed by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Roy Cooper, House Bill 149, does address education in Section 8. But that mostly pertains to allowances for teachers to get paid and for students to gain credit while schools are shut down. It also increases the number of permitted remote-instruction days.
These are important details to work out for mountain districts, but those districts will need much more help beyond this moving forward. There will undoubtedly be more legislation in the coming months to offer this assistance.
WUNC reports that North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction has also requested at least $150 million for repairs and mold at schools they can salvage. For the schools that are not salvageable, NC DPI Superintendent Kathy Truitt estimates a cost of $42 million, on the low end, to rebuild per school. It’s unclear how many will need to be rebuilt because the road damage and debris has made many schools unreachable for even a preliminary inspection.
In light of these drastic needs, implementing nimble school-choice solutions should not be seen as political opportunism, using a disaster to advance a preexisting policy preference, but as a matter of necessity. Children are going to need to learn to read and do math, and their district schools may not be operable for a while. What now?
Microschools as a new model
In addition to the New Orleans charter school model, microschools have a lot of potential. The idea emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, as parents were left with few good options. They could stay home with their children to monitor remote public-school classes, which their children often ignored, and which were a poor-replacement for in-person learning to begin with. They could also try their hand at homeschooling, which many did.
But if they were an essential worker, or otherwise could not be the prime educator of their children, and if there was not a private school nearby that remained open, what could they do? Microschools emerged as the best answer to this problem for many families.
While it’s portrayed as a new model, it’s also a reintroduction of a much-older model — the one-room schoolhouse, where families in an (often remote) area would pool their resources to hire one teacher for students of various ages. During COVID, families in a wide variety of contexts (urban, rural, suburban) did the same, pooling their resources to hire a teacher for their children.
If there were, say, 20 school-age children in the neighborhood, and the teacher was given $4,000 per student, they could make $80,000. So it was a good opportunity for many suddenly-out-of-work professionals too. The issue of where to meet was often solved by families allowing their living room, large garage, or empty room at their business to be repurposed.
Many of these schools were not “official” private schools, as the children were likely registered as homeschool students. But as best-practices evolved, the idea has caught on in a more formal way as a form of private school.
A Politico article from this summer called microschools the “next big school-choice push” and said Florida is the cutting edge of the movement. A law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis opened up many more potential locations for private schools (since finding suitable locations is considered the main obstacle for microschools), with the article saying the new law:
“permits private schools to use facilities owned or leased by a library, community service organization, museum, performing arts venue, theater, cinema or church under the property’s current zoning and land-use designations. The private school does not have to pursue any rezoning or seek a special exception or land-use change to operate in those spaces.”
In the context of western North Carolina, the flexibility of the microschool model could be the best option for some in remote areas. Imagine there are 10 families in a holler (the valleys between mountains), and the public school that had existed halfway across the county is now no longer operating, temporarily or permanently. Being allowed to start a micro private school in a small church or in a unused conference room at a business, could be a gamechanger.
A microschool of this kind would give the families in that holler a modern version of the one-room schoolhouse, with parents hiring the teachers, picking the location, and guiding the values (and even curriculum) of what’s being taught. If they are able to qualify for private-school vouchers through the Opportunity Scholarship Program, there wouldn’t be much of an economic hurdle either, as 20 students getting around $7,000 each in vouchers would create an $140,000 budget. This is plenty to hire a teacher, rent space in a convenient location for the families, and likely much more.
With charter schools, it’d be a similar scenario, but with more like $12,000 in per-pupil spending (along with a few more government strings attached). Either way, both of these nimble school-choice options, tested in the aftermath of other major disasters, present good possible solutions for families in our western counties.