📽️ Special Video Edition: Katrina, 20 Years Later

🎧 Listen to this edition of The Delta on Spotify. 

Hi, all. Jessica Baghian here.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005. It was a devastating and defining event in Louisiana’s history, and in our lives as Louisianans. 

This week marks the 20th anniversary of that storm, and today, we thought it was worth a different kind of conversation than the written word alone could convey. 

I am from Louisiana, born and raised. I've lived lots of places, including other states, but Louisiana is my home. And I was a senior in college when Hurricane Katrina struck my beloved state. This is certainly a really memorable and, in many ways, traumatic period of time for everyone in New Orleans, including my friends, my family, and ultimately the students that I taught. 

Kunjan Narechania led the New Orleans Recovery School District in the long aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from 2011-2014. 

I'm eager to talk today about what happened during and after the storm, and the ways in which I think we have tried to better government on behalf of kids as it relates to education and the places we still have room for growth.

Jessica Baghian: Kunjan, do you want to introduce yourself?

Kunjan Narechania: Yeah, thanks, Jessica. I got to New Orleans in 2011, so about six years after Katrina. It has been my home for 14 years. And I've come to love the city and its people deeply, and had the honor of serving as the head of the recovery school district in New Orleans. I led the district for two and a half years before we returned the state-controlled recovery school district schools back to local governance. And that gave me a real unique vantage point on the school recovery effort.

I think that experience taught me a lot about the role of school systems in ensuring that all kids are able to achieve. How do you shape the policies of a school system so that you respect the autonomy and leadership of school leaders while at the same time ensuring that we protect the civil rights of all the kids inside the district?

It taught me a lot about what it means to work in collaborative partnership with a community of school leaders, but also advocates and families, in order to serve kids who are in some of the most challenging conditions I've seen. 

Jessica, can you talk to us about what it was like during Hurricane Katrina? As you said, you were a college senior here. And I'm curious what that experience was and the impact that it's had on you.

Jessica Baghian: Yeah, so I was a senior at LSU (Go Tigers!), and it was wild. My dad worked in insurance growing up and dealt with a lot of disaster recovery stuff, so anytime — hurricanes are normal in Louisiana to some degree — and anytime a storm would be headed our way, I would do the check-in with dad and you know, he'd be like, “It's fine, get some water,” whatever, you know, basic stuff. 

This one was different. In fact, he called me and he was like, “You need to leave.” 

And Baton Rouge is inland enough that that's not normally what you do. So that was alarming. And so I went to North Louisiana to my grandparents and we watched on TV as the storm passed. And then the levees broke, and, candidly, all hell broke loose. 

So, it was me and a pack of college students in my grandmother's living room. When the storm was over we immediately got back in cars and headed back to Baton Rouge. 

I was lucky enough to live on campus where there were generators, so I was one of few people in Baton Rouge that had power. Baton Rouge didn't have power itself for weeks, but got back on campus and the briefest way to say what happened next is like, that's the week I became an adult. 

I got a real eye-opening set of lessons about the reality of life and, honestly, the importance of government — its potential to help people and its potential to be unprepared and lead to great harm. 

You know, our field house and our basketball arena on campus became medical triage centers and most of us spent the vast majority of our time in those buildings. So you had an 18-year-old literally creating spreadsheets to track who was coming in and out because the Red Cross did not have that. You had myself and others like changing adult diapers, collecting socks. I mean it was really, chaos in a way that I have never seen since, thank God. It was the best of people and it was also like the hardest parts of humanity all at once. 

Click here to keep reading the full transcript on our website.

Let’s Get Muddy

For more history and research on Katrina’s education reforms, check out these resources:

🔗 The New Orleans Charter School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons — Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA-New Orleans)

🔗 What Effect Did the New Orleans School Reforms Have on Student Achievement, High School Graduation, and College Outcomes? — Harris & Larsen study

🔗 The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools — The 74 Media