The average public school building in New Orleans is nearly 70 years old.
But there’s an exception on Trafalgar Street. Opened in August 2009, Langston Hughes Elementary is the first new school built in the city since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005. The campus includes a media center, high-tech classrooms, a gymnasium and full cafeteria. It replaces the former campus that was damaged by Katrina; class previously was being held in temporary modular classrooms. The difference isn’t lost on students.
“You go into that new facility and you see the difference that children feel from that facility is amazing,” said Paul Rainwater, the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s executive director. “It’s a beautiful building.”
“Beautiful” hasn’t been a commonly used descriptor for the New Orleans school system — even before Katrina’s destruction. Test scores were down, infrastructure was aging and financial management was lacking. “The public schools in New Orleans were probably the worst school district in the country before Katrina — or one of the [bottom] two: New Orleans and Detroit,” said Ramsey Green, the chief operating officer of the Recovery School District (RSD), which was created in 2003 to take over dozens of schools in the parish that were underperforming. Schools controlled by the RSD had about $1 billion in deferred maintenance that had nothing to do with the storm, he said. That amount more than doubled after Katrina damaged or destroyed 120 school buildings.
Due to decreased enrollment after Katrina, the RSD decided to close some schools and rebuild others. As of press time, 37,000 students were attending RSD schools in 85 buildings, Green said. “We agreed not to rebuild 50 schools. And we started construction on what we call the Quick Start program of five new schools in New Orleans about two years ago,” Green said.
The new Langston Hughes was the first Quick Start school built, with another four expected to open in 2010. Quick Start is seeded by a $150 million lump sum from the FEMA Public Assistance Program that consolidated 100 separate grants. This innovative “lump sum” funding approach required collaboration by the RSD, FEMA, Louisiana Recovery Authority, Congress and many other stakeholders. State and local officials hope to scale up Quick Start to include the RSD’s capital plan for a complete rebuilding of the New Orleans school system, at a projected $2 billion cost.
The ‘Lump Sum’ Approach
Rebuilding schools so quickly has been an epic challenge. Quick Start wouldn’t have been possible without legislative changes made at the state, local and federal levels to expedite construction and streamline the disbursement of payments to the RSD and contractors. Katrina was such a catastrophe that the old rules weren’t effective.“The way FEMA works is that after a disaster they come in and do an assessment of a building — they do a quick-and-dirty assessment. They say, ‘OK, you had $2 million of damage. Move on,’” Green said. “But we’re finding that their initial assessments were undervalued by more than 100 percent in many cases.” Green said FEMA sometimes would initially commit (or “obligate”) dollar amounts well short of what was needed. “We’d write a new version of the project worksheet, and see the amount obligated go from $2 million to $30 million. That’s a regular occurrence,” he said.
Traditionally FEMA would pay only for damage. Representatives would inspect a building all the way down to moldy ceiling tiles. The RSD and state officials quickly realized that this kind of time-intensive approach wouldn’t work for a project as large as rebuilding an entire school system. Green said Louisiana lobbied and got federal laws changed so that school districts can now transfer funds between projects without incurring a 25 percent penalty. The state also was able to consolidate its National Flood Insurance Program penalties, which saved another $70 million. And FEMA streamlined the reimbursement process further by consolidating the $150 million earmarked for Quick Start into a single grant.
Rainwater began working on the RSD in 2008 when Gov. Bobby Jindal appointed him to manage the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Rainwater saw an immediate problem that was bogging down construction: Contractors weren’t being paid in a timely manner. So Louisiana created a new payment system called Express Pay. “When the RSD sends the state an invoice, it used to take 60 days to pay it out. Now it takes between five and 10 days. So we do a cursory look on the front end, and then a tougher audit on the back end. If there’s a mistake — and there has been no fraud — we just credit it on the next invoice,” Rainwater explained.
In sum, Rainwater said government officials did all they could to streamline rebuilding without violating the Stafford Act, which is the statutory authority for FEMA’s disaster response. The result is that Langston Hughes Elementary was built and opened in two years.
Built to Endure
Prior to Katrina, almost none of the schools in New Orleans were built to withstand a flood. Some of them were elevated, but most were built with first-floor kitchens — easily destroyed by a hurricane. By contrast, Langston Hughes Elementary and all other school construction is being built to withstand the next storm.The Louisiana Legislature adopted the International Building Code. “We also have to build to FEMA’s base flood elevation, which means our buildings either have to be raised a minimum of three feet, or they have to be wet or dry flood-proofed,” Green said. The RSD is opening a school in January 2010 that is wet flood-proofed, which means a floodwall is inside the walls — absorbing three to four feet of water without incurring into the building. All windows are missile resistant to absorb 130 mph winds.
The RSD also implemented new procedures to minimize damage. The school district went into action before Hurricane Gustav made landfall in 2008. Plastic bags were put over all IT equipment, and computers were moved into hallways so if windows broke they wouldn’t be water damaged. Principals and teachers took photographs of classrooms to document them in case they were damaged and the school district had to go back to FEMA for additional funds. “Had Gustav been worse, we would’ve been a lot better off purely because we learned a lot of lessons after Katrina,” Green said.
And those lessons learned extend beyond emergency preparation. The RSD is building its schools to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver standard for green building design. Some schools will have rain catchment systems, dual-pane windows and photovoltaic systems. Classrooms also are being modernized to include digital whiteboards and laptops.
But those improvements come with a hefty price tag. “Pretty much all that we build is paid for by FEMA, which puts us in an awkward position in trying to do a capital plan,” Green said. “We have a $2 billion rebuilding program that takes place over 10 years, and that’s only partially funded at present [at $750 million]. We believe all of that should be funded by FEMA, and we’re working to get that done.”
The purse strings are controlled by Tony Russell, the acting director of the FEMA Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office. Rainwater said because state and local stakeholders are working well with Russell and FEMA on the shared vision, he’s optimistic that an agreement will be reached, even if that means receiving the funds a chunk at a time rather than the preferred lump sum. “What we can’t do is continue this building by building, classroom by classroom. It just takes too long,” Rainwater said.
[Photo courtesy of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.]
