Channa Cook can remember exactly when her life changed.
She was a high school literacy coach in Los Angeles when her former co-worker Kristin Moody called up with her latest idea: join me for spring break in New Orleans, to paint schools and rebuild houses. “I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m sleeping over spring break,’” Cook says, laughing.
But she heeded Moody’s request. They saw schools where teachers were “browbeaten” and students were “unanimated.” One teacher told them that if a student didn’t show potential by age 14, it was “too late.”
“That made us both angry,” Moody says. “Neither of us met a 14-year-old who wasn’t different by 18. If high school does its job, that child should be fundamentally changed.” The two women looked at each other and said, “Someone has to do this.”
So they went home, packed up their lives and moved to New Orleans.
Not two years later, Cook, ’02, MA ’03, is standing in front of her very own school in New Orleans. Buses pull up and students—her students—stream out.
“Ms. Cook!” a smiling boy with dreadlocks calls out. “Look! I’m tucking in my shirt.”
That’s who she is now: Ms. Cook. Principal Channa Cook. A 28-year-old in charge of 110 students, eight teachers and her very own charter school in post-Katrina New Orleans.
“I’ve been dreaming about this for the last year and here it is. Amazing!” Cook exclaims.
She still can’t believe the proposal that she and Moody drafted—about a school that focused on social justice and required students to complete community-oriented projects—was approved. A nonprofit called New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) selected them to start one of six new charter schools, Sojourner Truth Academy. (Moody, now a new mother, works three-fourths time on development and operational support for the school.) These open-enrollment charters are “incubator” programs, Cook says, “a testing ground.”
Before Hurricane Katrina, the city had three main types of schools: public, private and select-enrollment magnets. It also had a problem. In terms of student achievement, New Orleans public schools were among the worst-ranked schools in one of the worst-ranked states. The storm washed away classrooms, but it also created an opportunity.
After the storm, the state formed the Recovery School District, which covers public and charter schools in Orleans Parish. “People are so excited,” says Sojourner Truth’s art teacher, Marti LeBourgeois, who grew up in New Orleans. “One of the blessings of the storm is that had Katrina not happened, none of these schools would have happened. New Orleans would still be pouring out children who don’t know how to read or write.”
It’s Tuesday, and the Spanish teacher is out sick. So Cook is teaching Spanish. With such a small staff, she’s the go-to substitute. She’s also superintendent, guidance counselor and disciplinarian. “I’m not letting myself get sick,” she says. “It’s not allowed.”
The bell rings, and students stream out. They’re all ninth graders. (A new grade will be added each year.) All their classes are squeezed into a single hallway, which the school shares with the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court. There’s one stairwell, lined with college pennants. Students and teachers share the men’s and women’s restrooms.
Students hurry to Ms. Wright’s class, where they’ll re-enact an Edgar Allen Poe thriller. To group sessions with Ms. Kindschy, the social worker who mediates everything from fistfights to disputes over whose artwork is better. To Mr. Feiler, who is swirling graduated cylinders and (doubling as the soccer coach) just posted the new roster. Math with Mr. Griggs “is my favorite,” says De’Angelo Adams, 16. He says he hated it at his former school, but “I love it now. I get the concepts.” He smiles widely. Cook says she can imagine him getting away with most things with that smile.
“He is the most pleasant child I’ve ever met,” she says. “But he’s also reading well below grade level.”
Cook says 25 students are at the first- to third-grade reading level; half the school is reading at the sixth-grade level. Sojourner Truth’s percentage of students with social and special-education needs mirrors that of Orleans Parish’s traditional noncharter high schools. Some don’t speak English at all. Cook aims to get all of them to college.
Students like De’Angelo Adams take extra classes in math and reading to supplement the standard curriculum. Basketball is his incentive—and in his case, Cook says, it’s working. “Thank God we have a team,” she says. Practice coincides with study hall and detention, so if students misbehave or aren’t doing their work: no court time.
She hired a coach who wouldn’t produce athletes, she says, but scholar-athletes. Perry McCarty, or “Coach!” as his roster of 16 boys calls him, runs them hard when they don’t behave. He also recites scores: the SAT and ACT numbers they’ll need if they want to get into college. In the gym, the boys crowd around him. They’re excited about their first game. They’ve got a mascot (“the Jaguars!”) and a chant, which they clap aloud. McCarthy gets sports supplies donated and uses his coaching stipend to buy the players’ jerseys.
The typical funding problems of public schools are writ large at Sojourner Truth. There’s no library. Insufficient funding for special education. Headaches over attendance, since it serves as the basis for per-pupil state funding. Staffing challenges. Cook arrived at 6 this morning and will leave after 8 tonight. “I feel like I’m juggling a million balls in the air and I’m trying to keep them all up,” Cook says. “Even if there are other people juggling in the room with me, I’m trying to make sure their balls don’t fall either.”
The state will check in with Sojourner Truth Academy in its third year, making sure the students are meeting testing requirements. Charter schools have more freedom in hiring and budgeting, but with autonomy come expectations. Public schools can “be crappy year after year,” Cook says. “We don’t get to stay open and be crappy—we have to be successful. So that pressure is one of the many things that keep me up at night, knowing that we’ve got to make it.” She looks at De’Angelo Adams. “Everything matters.”
Even before school opened, there was plenty that didn’t go according to plan. The school’s location changed from the Ninth Ward to the Uptown region of New Orleans, meaning some students would ride buses for up to two hours to get there. The laptops the district promised never appeared. Then, nine days into school, Hurricane Gustav hit.
“Kids were terrified,” Cook recalls. “They said, ‘I don’t want to go stay in another shelter, Ms. Cook. If it’s like Katrina, I’m not coming back.’”
The streets filled with tree branches and windows blew out, but all the students returned. Cook and her staff got back to work.
“It’s the hardest job out there,” says Lisa Daggs, ’91, MA ’96, MBA ’96, director of new school development at NSNO. Its charter school principals range in age from mid-20s to early 30s. “You have to be incredibly determined,” she says, “so some of that youthful energy counts.”
Cook acknowledges the possibility of burnout, but she has become invested in her students. Like Nick and Damonika.
Damonika Stokes is 14. “You gonna interview me?” she demands, her white hoop earrings swaying as she stares up at the journalist. She used to fight at her old school. “I told her I couldn’t imagine her fighting anyone, she’s so tiny,” Cook says, “and she said, ‘I used to fight all the time, that’s what we do.’” But now, when Damonika’s friends get rowdy, she moves to a different table. She is on track to earn straight A’s. “I’m going to be a gynecologist,” she says. Adds her principal: “She knows if she wants to be a doctor, it’s going to take grades and not fighting to change things. That’s one thing a brand-new school offers to children: there’s no history, there’s no reputation, and everything they do at the school is how they form a new reputation.”
You might say the same thing about the new New Orleans schools.
IRENE NOGUCHI, ’02, is a lawyer and journalist in Seattle
