Sometimes it seems as though the entertainment community is doing more for New Orleans than the government these days. Denis Leary, who plays a troubled New York City firefighter who survived 9/11 on the FX series Rescue Me, founded a group called The Leary Firefighters Foundation in 2000 after a disastrous fire in his hometown, Worcester, Massachusetts, took the lives of six firefighters, including Leary’s cousin and a childhood friend.

Since then, the foundation has raised funds for a variety of projects to help firefighters and equip firehouses in different parts of the country. The group’s latest project is the New Orleans Firehouse Restoration Project, which so far has helped completely rebuild four firehouses destroyed by Katrina; three more are expected to be finished by year’s end. (Click here to make a donation.)

Recent news stories (click to see accounts from CBS News, CNN, and a YouTube promo) have highlighted Leary’s frustration with waiting for the government to rebuild the 22 (of 33 total) firehouses damaged or destroyed by Katrina.

“I gave up on ever hoping that politicians in this country — local, state or federal — would step in to help these guys,” he told CNN, adding that he thought it was a “sad commentary” when celebrities (such as Brad Pitt, Harry Connick, Jr., and U2) felt the need to step in and take on roles that should be addressed by government officials.

“We have The Edge, you know, an Irish musician coming over here to help solve the problems in New Orleans,” he said. “But we can’t get FEMA or our own president to respond. It’s not shameful, it is just funny.”

That’s an interesting question to pose to our students — is it worthwhile to even bother asking government to rebuild, or simply, as Leary suggests, a waste of time? Do private citizens, even those as wealthy and powerful as Denis Leary and Brad Pitt, have an obligation to use their resources to help fellow citizens — or are their efforts letting the government off the hook?

By the way, Pitt’s efforts (discussed in our post of 12/4/07) has raised enough money to rebuild 69 (of a targeted 150) homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. You can click here to read more about Pitt’s project or contribute.

A gritty documentary highlighting home-made videos of Katrina shot by an aspiring rapper and and former drug user has become the “most outrageous Cinderella story,” as New York Magazine puts it, at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

The film is Trouble the Water, co-directed by documentarians Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, who have worked with Michael Moore.  Much of the footage in the film was shot by New Orleans resident Kimberly Roberts, who bought a used video camera for $20 just days before Katrina hit, and proceeded to film the events surrounding Katrina in meticulous detail.  New York’s Logan Hill describes the film as “a devastating firsthand document and a potent indictment of bureaucratic negligence.”

So far, the film has only been shown at the annual Sundance Festival, which showcases independent films and concludes Sunday in Park City, Utah.

A review in Variety describes how Roberts “shows neighbors stocking up on groceries at the local mom ‘n’ pop market prior to the storm, and her persistent filming documents the darkening sky, growing wind and rising water (topping the street’s nearby stop sign,) with her family retreating to their attic…. Neighbor Larry Simms, whom [Roberts' husband] Scott disliked before the hurricane, comes to their rescue with a boxing bag as a flotation device.  Roberts’ vid reps some of the more extensive by any Katrina survivor, though the most disturbing clip is Lessin and Deal recording Scott’s account of being barred, at gunpoint, from emergency housing on a nearby naval base.”

In an interview about the film, Lessin and Deal explained that they originally went to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina to do a documentary about National Guard soldiers returning to Louisiana from Iraq.  When that project began falling apart,  a chance meeting with Roberts and Scott led them to make an entirely different film, which turned out to be Trouble the Water.

The official Sundance website describes the film as “a petrifying account that essentially rewrites most of the media coverage of the disaster.”  Click here to read the full description. 

Where the film will go after Sundance is still unclear, but the film’s own official website will probably be the best place to find out, so check back often.

First of all, if you’ve never seen a Mardi Gras Indian perform, you need to check out a couple of videos.

Click here, here, and here to get an idea of what this fascinating group has to offer.

And if you have a little more time, click here and here to get a more in-depth look at their history and practices.

The Mardi Gras Indians are one of New Orleans’ most fascinating cultural subgroups, one whose future existence has been seriously threatened by the post-Katrina exodus of African-Americans from the city. They are in fact not “Indians” at all, but African-American residents of the city who don elaborate, magnificently beaded, hand-made costumes and masquerade as Native Americans during the annual Mardi Gras celebrations. Though many of them are working-class people with limited financial resources, the Mardi Gras Indians go to significant effort and expense to create their costumes, which must be made entirely by hand and must be completely new each year.

The tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians dates back at least a century or two, to the time when “krewes” began forming to participate in street celebrations such as Mardi Gras throughout the city. Most of the krewes were exclusive all-white organizations that operated – as they still do today — “by invitation only.” Excluded from such official celebrations, residents in poorer black neighborhoods began organizing their own social groups and planning their own parades, the routes and practices of which were known only to them. They often began masquerading as Native Americans who, unlike black residents of the city, were allowed to participate in public parades.

“Teaching The Levees” has included a Lesson Plan on teaching students about the Mardi Gras Indians on this website. You can read much more about the history of this group in the lesson’s introduction.

The problem nowadays is that so many Mardi Gras Indians were forced to leave New Orleans after Katrina, and many have been unable to return. A recent piece in USA Today noted that of roughly 300 people who comprise the 60-or-so Mardi Gras Indian “tribes,” at least one-third were forced by Katrina to leave the city altogether and another one-third lost their homes and remain displaced within New Orleans.

“Right now, a lot of Indians are struggling with basics like shetler and health care,” Jordan Hirsch, executive director of Sweet Home New Orleans, a group trying to help restore the city’s traditional culture, told USA Today.

The article cited the example of Darryl Montana, who is “jobless, lives in a one-bedroom apartment 15 miles from the city he loves, and doesn’t own a car,” but is nonetheless working hard to get his costume ready for this year’s celebration. Montana is big chief of the “Yellow Poachontas” tribe, and his costume requires 30 yards of lavender satin, 300 yards of lavender maribou ribbon, 3 pounds of turkey feathers, and costs more than $2,000 to make, the USA Today article notes. (Montana’s father, the legendary Tootie Montana, is the subject of a fascinating documentary about the Mardi Gras Indians called Tootie’s Last Suit.)

Earlier this month, the New Orleans City Council adopted an ordinance establishing an 11-member Second-Line and Mardi Gras Indian Cultural Preservation Task Force, “designed to protect and preserve the cultural institutions of second-lining, Mardi Gras Indians, social aid and pleasure clubs, and spontaneous funeral processions in New Orleans.”

It will be fascinating to watch how well this important cultural group fares in the next few years as New Orleans attempts to rebuild. In many ways the struggles of the Mardi Gras Indians present are metaphoric of the larger struggles of poor African Americans in post-Katrina New Orleans. We can ask our students to examine those struggles in microcosm by following what happens to the Mardi Gras Indians and using our lesson plan to help them do so. As we note in the lesson plan, the goal is to have students “endeavor to understand this small but important subculture of New Orleans and assess its prospects for survival in the aftermath of Katrina. They will endeavor to understand a unique cultural phenomenon that can shed enormous light on African-American cultural identity. Perhaps even more importantly, they will try toaddress what is at stake if such cultures – particularly cultures embraced by the country’sleast privileged citizenry – are unable to survive catastrophic events such as Katrina. In short, does it matter to American culture whether or not the Mardi Gras Indians survive?”

Here’s a wonderful example of a school that has taken the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum to the next level — with wonderful results.

Teachers at the Frederick Douglass High School Center for Engineering and Applied Technology (CFEAT) in Atlanta used When The Levees Broke and “Teaching The Levees” as the basis for an interdisciplinary unit that integrated math, science, English/language arts, social studies, foreign language, and technology/engineering.

The result was original student projects on a wide array of topics — everything from innovative models of underground drainage canals to protect New Orleans from future floods, to a comparison of Katrina with the 1927 Mississippi River Flood, to research on the appropriateness of the term “refugees” with regard to those displaced by Katrina.

The student projects were displayed at an exhibition at the school in early December.

Cleopatra Warren, lead teacher for social studies at the school, reports that the students went on to take first place at a local Social Studies fair and will proceed to city, regional and statewide competitions. The students are all in 11th grade and studying in her AP US History class.

“The students are excited about raising awareness regarding the Katrina disaster,” she says.

Here are descriptions of the student projects, courtesy of the Atlanta Public Schools Office of Communications:

• Tim Milton and Gerard Ujada (top right) used an interactive computer model to show how a rebuilt New Orleans could use levees to separate critical facilities, such as hospitals, from other flood-prone sections of the city. The same pair presented another proposal to use pipes running under the city to carry flood waters back into Lake Pontchartrain, at a cost of $1 million per mile of pipe. A third proposal by this pair, based on a model used in the Netherlands, would build floating homes supported by steel pillars. (That proposal would cost $18 billion, twice the cost of rebuilding standard housing.) “We hypothesized that it’s possible for New Orleans to be rebuilt as long as government is willing to pay for it,” Milton said. “And our research showed that it IS possible.”
• Luther Harris (second from top) built a model of his proposal to use underground drainage canals to relieve the pressure on levees trying to hold back more water than they were constructed to contain. The above-ground current canals that criss-cross the city could have overflow drains, much like bathtubs or wash basins.
• Jabari Seo and Micah Smith (third from top) hypothesized that the evacuations forced by Katrina resulted in a mass migration to other parts of the country, which is becoming permanent resettlement as the evacuees find new homes and jobs from Atlanta to Houston, from California to Utah.
• Naomi Barber, Royce Pearson, and Robert Dean (fourth from top) interviewed Katrina victims who fled to Atlanta after New Orleans was flooded, about whether they felt they were best described as “evacuees” or “refugees.” They found that 31 percent of those interviewed said they were “evacuees,” while only 10 percent considered themselves “refugees.” The students concluded that those displaced by Katrina were “evacuees,” because to be a “refugee” means being forced from your own country into another, “and as far as we know, New Orleans is still part of the United States,” they said.
• Aimee Turner and Bianca Poindexter (bottom) examined the correlation between Katrina and the 1927 Mississippi River flood. They found a widespread belief among New Orleaneans that some levees in poor parts of the city, such as the Lower NInth Ward, and Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes, were blown up in order to divert water away from the affluent sections and tourist attractions like the French Quarter. They concluded those beliefs were driven by the knowledge that some levees along the river were dynamited for similar reasons in 1927, resulting in the devastation of Greenville, Mississippi, and other poor communities. They also found a correlation in the sharp rise in crime — including murder, rape, and looting — during the two floods.

Ms. Warren reports “that this unit has sparked interest in thematic units within our district. Consequently, our school will serve as a model for others utilizing the small learning community model within the Atlanta Public Schools.”

Way to go, Ms. Warren! Anyone interesting in finding out more about this project can contact her directly at cwarren@atlanta.k12.ga.us.

Figuring out where a presidential candidate stands on a particular issue is no easy task these days. But as the field of candidates (finally) begins to narrow, it might be useful to try and decipher where the remaining candidates stand on the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and other Katrina-related issues.

Not that this seems to be much of an issue at all in this campaign so far — in his blog of December 9, Harry Shearer laments that the one thing all the candidates in the New Hampshire Primary had in common was being “totally, utterly, stunningly (to this observer) dedicated to ignoring the greatest disaster to befall an American city in modern times.”   

Though it may not be the centerpiece of anyone’s campaign, it can safely be said that as a group the Democratic candidates have made more campaign stops in New Orleans and spent significantly more time talking about Katrina than the Republicans.  (If you search the term “New Orleans” on John Edwards’ website, for example, you will get 151 hits.  Do the same on John McCain’s site, and the number is zero.) Of the Republicans, only Mike Huckabee — both a populist and a southerner, who governed a neighboring state when Katrina struck — has talked much about the storm and its aftermath.

The general lack of discussion about Katrina during the presidential campaign so far should hardly surprise anyone; it was barely an issue during the recent Louisiana gubernatorial race.  Shearer notes in his blog that “a theoretical candidate could offer to repair the city’s breached faith in its nation, to re-think the way great public works in this country are designed and built, to commit to a program of infrastructure repairs before more levees breach and more bridges collapse.”  The candidates we have may come up short in doing so, but it is still important to figure out where each of them stands — or, in the case of more than one of them, simply doesn’t.  To that end, we offer the following brief guide.

Barack Obama
Obama has made several stops in New Orleans along the campaign trail; at a speech at the Essence Music Festival in July he told crowds that “The legacy of race and poverty continues to shape our lives every day and it’s time we did something about it.” (Click here for full coverage of the speech). Obama’s official campaign website includes a downloadable five-page Katrina fact sheet entitled “Rebuilding the Gulf Coast and Preventing Future Catastrophes” (click here to read), as well as a YouTube video on the plan. Obama was back in New Orleans during the second anniversary commemoration in August; for coverage of the speech he gave then, click here.

Hillary Clinton
Like Obama, Clinton has included an extensive plan for rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast as part of her repertoire. You can read her ten-point fact sheet on “A Presidential Gulf Coast Recovery Agenda” on her official website (click here to download). Among her proposals are “a stem-to-stern review of the Army Corps of Engineers’ plans and progress thus far” in rebuilding flood protection, a plan to expand affordable housing, and elevating FEMA to Cabinet-level status, a proposal supported by several other candidates. She, too, has made several stops in New Orleans during the campaign; click here to read coverage of a visit in May.

John Edwards
Edwards has the distinction of having made the official announcement of his candidacy in New Orleans (click here for a YouTube video about the event), and like the other two leading Democratic candidates, has laid out an extensive Gulf Coast Recovery plan on his campaign website (click here to read). He has been back for several campaign stops since then, most recently in November to support the work of Habitat for Humanity in rebuilding homes in the Upper Ninth Ward. Combatting poverty has been a centerpiece of Edwards’ campaign from the start, and he has frequently used the theme of “two Americas” in his stump speeches. 

Mike Huckabee
Huckabee’s website does not include any specific plans for rebuilding the Gulf Coast, but does include among the candidate’s most important issues a statement on “Crisis Management” (click here to read) that proposes removing FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security and giving it Cabinet status. The website also notes the role Huckabee played in the rescue efforts after Katrina: “During the massive emergency of Hurricane Katrina, when local, state, and federal governments were in melt-down, I stepped forward and directed the rescue and relief of 75,000 victims.” He was the only major Republican contender to attend a second-anniversary forum on the future of New Orleans for the second anniversary of Katrina. (Duncan Hunter was the only other Republican to attend, while the three main Democratic candidates were all there.) Click here for more coverage.

John McCain
McCain held a fundraiser in New Orleans in July, but searches of the terms “New Orleans” and “Gulf Coast” on his website yield no results. (McCain did briefly lament the failure of communications during and after Katrina, but that appears to be the only mention of the storm and its aftermath on his site.)

Mitt Romney
While Romney does not directly address Katrina or the rebuilding of New Orleans on his website, there has been some press coverage of his comments about the storm, calling the federal response “disappointing” (click here to read). He also issued a brief statement of support for the city on the second anniversary of the storm.

Rudy Giuliani
Giuliani, who is running largely on the strength of his leadership of New York City after 9/11, has spoken on several occasions of improving the nation’s emergency response system.  After a recent tour of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Pearl, Mississippi, Giuliani told a crowd of supporters that emergency preparedness should be more localized and less dependent on the federal government.  Click here and here to read more about his comments.

Ron Paul
As a libertarian, Paul is hardly likely to support government spending to rebuild New Orleans; he has said on more than one occasion that events such as Katrina demonstrate the general inefficacy of the federal government. In two pieces written immediately after the storm, Paul argues that government-sponsored “top down” solutions to crises such as Katrina are doomed to failure and that the bureaucratic red tape attached tends to create more problems than it solves.  Click here and here to read.

Fred Thompson
While there is nothing on Thompson’s website about Katrina or Gulf Coast rebuilding, the candidate did make a recent campaign stop in Kenner, Louisiana, where he responded to a reporter’s question by saying he was disappointed with the federal response to Katrina (click here to read).

Perhaps nothing will ever erase the dreadful images in and around the Louisiana Superdome in 2005, but anyone who cares about New Orleans had to take a little comfort in the pure joy of LSU’s national championship victory at the stadium last night.

I’m not a football fan, but there seemed to be a karmic inevitability about the outcome of the BCS National Championship game from the start. LSU is not a New Orleans team, of course, but Baton Rouge is only 80 miles away and as the state capital has borne its share of the post-Katrina mess. (Click here to read an insightful Washington Post piece about how Katrina has “permanently transformed Baton Rouge.”) The New Orleans Saints played four “home” games at LSU’s Tiger Stadium while the Superdome was closed; it seemed only fitting that the Superdome should at some point return the favor. (By the way, it’s technically the “Louisiana Superdome,” not the “New Orleans Superdome.”)

I lost count of the number of times word “Katrina” was uttered during and after the game coverage last night, but few of the 79,651 fans in attendance (a record) and millions more watching on TV could have forgotten what transpired in the Superdome little more than two years ago.

There have been other wonderful moments at the Superdome since it re-opened in September, 2006, most notably the Saints’ unexpected playoff victory last January. New Orleaneans these days get few enough opportunities to celebrate. No one should underestimate the psychological importance of these moments for the rebirth of the city.

But at the same time it would be a mistake to invest the LSU championship with too much symbolism about the future of the city. Did anyone ever doubt that the Superdome and Convention Center would be rebuilt? Those are the easy fixes. The larger question is whether the lives and homes of the people who took refuge in the Superdome in August, 2005, will be rebuilt. And no football game can make that happen.

The city deserves its celebration. How often does the Times-Picayune get to print an oversized headline bearing the phrase “No. 1″? It is certainly wonderful to see the Superdome as a site of giddiness and celebration again. We’ll no doubt see more of the same during the upcoming Mardi Gras celebrations. But let’s not allow the excitement of these moments to obscure the fact that there is still a great deal of work to be done.

While the primary goal of “Teaching The Levees” is to encourage educators to teach about New Orleans and the many important issues raised by the experience of Katrina, there remains a pressing need to find qualified educators to teach in New Orleans as the city continues to struggle to rebuild.

Public education in New Orleans post-Katrina involves the complex interconnection of schools taken over by the state of Louisiana, new charter schools, and a handful of schools still operated by the New Orleans Parish School Board. Of the 79 public schools now operating (there were 128 before Katrina hit), two-thirds are run by Louisiana’s “Recovery School District,” generally known among New Orleaneans these days as the RSD. (For a complete breakdown of all the city’s schools and who runs them, click here.)

Never a model of public education — the pre-Katrina schools in New Orleans were considered among the nation’s worst — the RSD and other agencies who now run them can hardly afford to simply rebuild the school system status quo. (See Act III, Chapter 2 of When The Levees Broke, “American Citizens” for Spike Lee’s take on education in pre-Katrina New Orleans.)

As if the material costs of rebuilding the city’s schools weren’t daunting enough — more than 100 of them were flooded after Katrina — the RSD is still struggling to find talented teachers to come to New Orleans to work under conditions that can be highly challenging, to put it mildly. The RSD hired 450 new teachers at the start of the 2007 school year, but as renovations continue and residents displaced by Katrina flow back in to the city, the need for new hires has not abated.

To aid in recruiting, the RSD, with the help of the nonprofit organization, The New Teacher Project, last year launched TeachNola.org, described as a highly selective effort to lure “the nation’s most outstanding individuals” to the RSD (and the 20 charter schools it now operates). TeachNola.org makes it clear the district doesn’t simply want warm bodies to fill its classrooms, but the kind of teachers who can “make a difference.”

The recruiting campaign is now gearing up for the 2008 school year, and is encouraging certified teachers to apply by a priority deadline of January 28. (FYI, starting salaries for certified teachers are between $39,275 and $42,075, well above the national average. The website offers a complete salary schedule). TeachNola.org also seeks non-certified teachers who may qualify for the Teaching Fellows program; click here for more information.

WhyYouTeach.org, the RSD’s general teacher recruitment website, also notes a number of incentives offered to teachers who relocate to New Orleans — including a housing stipend of up to $400 a month for the first year, a $5,000 bonus for teachers who make a three-year commitment, and a $2,500 relocation bonus. (Click here for details.)

Public schools in New Orleans are currently serving fewer than half the students they did before Katrina. To read more about the city’s efforts to rebuild its schools and recruit qualified teachers, click here, here, and here.

And if you decide to take on the challenge of relocating to New Orleans to teach, we would love to hear from you.