Katrina - Environmental, Ecological, Economic - Disaster

[QueEx]

Re: After the Flood

Deadly brain amoeba in tap water may be tied to Katrina




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Video: According to the Centers for Disease Control, this is the
first time the deadly parasite has ever been discovered in a
treated water supply system. It could take weeks before the
system is completely clear. NBC’s Katy Tur reports.
​

School officials in an area near New Orleans have shut off water fountains and stocked up on hand sanitizer this week after a brain-eating amoeba killed a 4-year-old boy and was found thriving in the local tap water system.

Water officials say they are “shocking” the St. Bernard Parish system with chlorine to try to kill off the parasite and get the water back up to a safe standard. And while health experts say the water is perfectly safe to drink, some school officials are taking no chances. They’ve shut off water fountains until they are certain.

Dr. Raoult Ratard, the Louisiana state epidemiologist, says the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 may ultimately be to blame. Low-lying St. Bernard Parish, where the boy who died was infected while playing on a Slip ‘N Slide, was badly hit by the flooding that Katrina caused.

“After Katrina, it almost completely depopulated,” Ratard told NBC News. “You have a lot of vacant lots and a lot of parts of the system where water is sitting there under the sun and not circulating.”

That, says Ratard, provided a perfect opportunity for the amoeba to multiply. Without enough chlorine to kill them, they can spread.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday that it had found Naegleria fowleri in St. Bernard’s water supply – the first time it’s ever been found in U.S. tap water. The amoeba likes hot water and thrives in hot springs, warm lakes and rivers.

Very, very rarely it can get up a person’s nose. If it gets in far enough – driven in, perhaps, when a child dives into a pond – it can attach itself to the olfactory nerve, which takes it into the brain. The multiplying amoebas eat blood cells and nerve cells and cause encephalitis. Only three out of the 130 people known to have been affected in the United States have ever survived, including a 12-year-old Arkansas girl, Kali Hardig, who is still recovering.

Chlorine kills it, but evidently some of the part of St. Bernard’s water system farthest away from the water treatment plan ran low on the chemical. CDC’s top water safety expert, Dr. Michael Beach, says that’s why it is important for officials to constantly monitor chlorine levels and make sure they are effective right to the end of the line of any water system.

Doris Voitier, superintendent of St. Bernard Parish Public School District, says the district shut down a second grade swim program briefly out of an abundance of caution to ensure that chlorine levels were sufficient. “The swim team is back in the pool. The swim program will be reinstituted within the next few days – hopefully by week’s end,” she told NBC News.

There’s no risk from drinking water that’s full of Naegleria, says Beach. Stomach acid kills it. And properly chlorinated pools are safe. The only risk is in the rare cases when it gets up the nose.

“As long as you know the top of your nose and where is the top of your nose, and where is the bottom of your nose, you will be all right,” says Ratard. There has been no increase in stomach infections in the region, he said, so other germs do not appear to be multiplying in the absence of enough chlorine.

“Drinking is always safe but if the water goes up your nose all the way to the ceiling of the nose then the amoeba can make their way to a little piece of bone between the top of the nose and the base of the brain. You have a small plate of bone with a bunch of holes inside,” Ratard says.

“The olfactory nerve sends a bunch of roots from the brain through the holes in the nose and that is how you smell.” The amoeba uses these nerve roots like a highway to the brain.

Low-lying St. Bernard Parish was almost completely devastated when Katrina hit in August 2009. Local officials have estimated that 80 percent of the structures in the parish were destroyed in the flooding, and the population plummeted from 67,000 to 8,000. It’s back up to about 35,000 now, according to the latest census, but state health officials say that still leaves a lot of empty lots, and reduced demand for water. That, in turn, means a lot of water sitting in pipes for longer times.

“Even if you have been away for a time, when people go away in summer to somewhere else where it is cooler, they should open their faucets and flush out any water that has been sitting there in the pipes,” Ratard advises.

CDC officials said they were not sure Katrina was to blame. “We're not aware of any linkage with Katrina,” Beach told NBC News.

But his advice is the same – people will be safe if they avoid having water go up their noses. People who rinse out their sinuses, as with neti pots or in some ritual ablutions, should use boiled water.

Parents who want to take extra care can add a few drops of chlorine bleach to bathwater or to kiddie pools to make the water safe, Ratard says. To be extra safe, they can make sure kids don’t put their heads under the water.

“The risk is extremely small,” Ratard said. “Some people will accept risk. Some people don’t want any risk.”

New Orleans tourism officials were concerned about the news coverage of the incident.

“This tragedy occurred in St. Bernard Parish, which maintains a totally separate water system from the City of New Orleans and Orleans Parish," a New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau spokesperson said in a statement.

"St. Bernard Parish water officials have taken precautions to cleanse their parish water supply for drinking water, out of an abundance of caution. This does not affect the water supply in Orleans Parish, where visitors come to experience the French Quarter, Garden District, Downtown, Uptown, Warehouse/Arts District, the Morial Convention Center and other popular tourist areas of New Orleans.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.
​

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/deadly-brain-amoeba-drinking-water-may-be-tied-katrina-4B11186085

 

[Greed]

New Orleans Is Now an All-Charter City -- Is That a Good Thing?

New Orleans Is Now an All-Charter City -- Is That a Good Thing?
Sam Chaltain
Posted: 06/03/2014 2:12 pm EDT
Updated: 06/03/2014 2:59 pm EDT

Last week, the last five traditional neighborhood schools in New Orleans' Recovery School district were closed -- making it the country's first district made up entirely of charter schools.

That's a good thing, right?

If you look at some of the baseline data, it's hard not to say yes. According to the Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton, prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans' high school graduation rate was just over 50 percent. In 2013, it was just shy of 80 percent. Similarly, student math and reading scores have risen over 30 points higher than they were before the storm. Indeed, as longtime PBS education reporter John Merrow shows in his documentary film, Rebirth, there's a lot to like about what's happening in the Crescent City.

Of course, Merrow's balanced coverage also exposes some of the problems with the reform strategy in New Orleans -- from reduced financial oversight to increased social stratification. And community activists like Karran Harper Royal have gone further, arguing that school closures in cities like hers disproportionately affect African American students and families. "This push to close schools ... is the new Jim Crow," she explained, pointing out that New Orleans' "new normal" means something very different to residents like her. In an all-charter city, she says, "You have a chance, not a choice."

Which is it? Are charter schools the answer? Or are they the beginning of the end of public education in America?

I've been thinking about these questions a lot these days, after spending the month of May traveling around the country to talk about my new book, Our School, which is all about school choice. What I learned can be boiled down to these two observations: first, school choice feels (and is) very different depending on where you live; and second, the question we ask when we talk about school choice -- are charter schools the solution or the problem? -- is not the question we should be asking.

With regard to the first point, let's begin with a city like Washington, D.C., where enrollment in both charters and district schools is rising, and where the district and charter community are collaborative enough to have held their first unified lottery this year. Contrast that with a state like Michigan, where four out of five charter schools are for-profit entities. Then look at a city like Chicago, where more than 50 neighborhood schools have already been closed, where more will undoubtedly be shuttered this fall, and where shiny new ones are opening all the time -- and this amid a larger climate of declining enrollment overall (you do the math), and you begin to see that speaking broadly about "school choice" or "charter schools" is appealingly simple, and completely inappropriate.

How choice feels depends on where you live, and how high (or low) the levels of trust, transparency, and cross-sector collaboration are in those communities. Period.

To be clear, school choice should feel different in different places, because different driving forces are at the root of different parts of the movement. Is the goal to build space for more innovation as a way to not just increase the number of charter schools but also create a rising tide that lifts all boats and improves all schools (of all stripes) in a city? I would argue that's what's happening, mostly, in D.C. Or is the goal to create a zero-sum game that results in the disappearance of everything old in order to make way for anything new? That's what it feels like, partly, in Chicago.

Too often, our infatuation with charter schools has led too many of us -- from soccer moms to President Obama -- to equate them with reform. More charter schools, the logic goes, equals more quality and a reimagined public school system. And, to be sure, I've seen a lot more good charter schools in my travels than bad ones. But you can't improve American public education, systemically, one school at a time (and, to be clear, although cities like New Orleans and D.C. are inundated, less than 5 percent of children nationwide attend charters).

This is not surprising to anyone who knows anything about systems change. "From a very early age," Peter Senge writes in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline, "we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world." This reflex makes complex tasks seem more approachable. But the truth is we all pay a price for deluding ourselves into thinking that complex problems can be addressed with piecemeal, or, in this case, school-by-school, solutions.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane postulates that one reason we do this is because we fail to recognize the interplay of three different types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social. "A problem has low dynamic complexity," Kahane writes, "if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn't run can be understood and solved be testing and fixing one piece at a time." By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This characterizes just about any major challenge faced by American public education today. Kahane says such problems "can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationship among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

"A problem has low generative complexity," he continues, "if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future." By contrast, a problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. Think again of the challenges faced by schools, which must depart from the traditional Industrial-era model of schooling to match the needs of students who are entering a radically different world than the one their parents grew up in. "Solutions to problems with high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

"A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives." This may have been true in the past, when one's neighborhood school was more likely to attract families of similar faiths, economic levels, and ethnicities. But a problem has high social complexity if the people who must solve it together see the world in very different ways. "Problems of high social complexity," Kahane says, "cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions."

So how do we identify solutions for a field that is marked by high degrees of dynamic, generative, and social complexity? One step is merely by asking the question, as opposed to debating whether we need more or less charter schools. Another step, impossible to avoid when the opening question is a different one, is to start seeing public schools and the communities they serve as systems, not parallel tracks.

Too often, this interdependence between charters and traditional public schools (not to mention between charters themselves) is given short shrift. Yet our still-nascent experiment in school choice - national and/or local - won't work until we do. And although New Orleans' highly localized experiment as an all-charter city may ultimately succeed, its strategy, applied nationwide, is a fool's errand. "The most profound strategy for changing a living network comes from biology," Meg Wheatley explains in Leadership & The New Science. "If a system is in trouble, it can only be restored by connecting itself to more of itself."

So what does this all mean?

To unleash the sort of generative feedback loop that can improve all schools, we must see reform as a both/and proposition. We need to raze and rebuild, and we need to preserve and improve. We need the ingenuity of single-school autonomy, and we need the scalability of whole-community structures. We need to incentivize schools to instill in young people the skills, habits and dispositions they'll need to navigate this brave new world, and we need to stop rewarding schools based on test scores alone. And, finally, we need to realize that as appealing as it may be to assume otherwise, concepts like "choice" and "charter" are not monolithic terms; they are fluid, fulsome, and unfolding before our eyes.

In New Orleans, and everywhere else, we remain in the eye of the storm.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-chaltain/new-orleans-charter-schools_b_5439078.html

 

[MASTERBAKER]

5 years after the spill: The environmental impact

5 years after the spill: The environmental impact

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Five years after the disastrous BP oil spill, fishermen see the impact in the wildlife. Ed Schultz traveled to the gulf to see the first-hand impact, including a look at cancerous shrimp and

 

[Greed]

Ten years on, Hurricane Katrina's scars endure for black New Orleans

Ten years on, Hurricane Katrina's scars endure for black New Orleans
By Letitia Stein
August 6, 2015 3:56 PM

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - A decade after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans seems to have found its rhythm again: the French Quarter is choked with tourists, construction cranes tower over the skyline, and hipsters bike to cafes in gentrifying neighborhoods.

But recovery has been uneven in the city, which took the brunt of the 2005 storm that killed more than 1,800 people and was the costliest in U.S. history.

Many properties still bear physical scars from the hurricane, particularly in poorer African-American neighborhoods. Social, demographic and political changes still ripple through the city.

In the mostly black Lower Ninth Ward, devastated by the flooding, Charles Brown is still attending services in his pastor's nearly empty living room, waiting for the day when Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church is rebuilt.

The black population of the city, long a hub of African-American culture, has plummeted since Aug. 29, 2005, the day Katrina swept in from the Gulf of Mexico and overwhelmed the levees meant to prevent flooding in the low-lying city.

Income gaps between blacks and whites have widened. Many African-American neighborhoods and the businesses supporting them have not fully recovered.

Brown's family and neighbors were among more than 1 million evacuated from the region after Katrina, which exposed deep poverty in the city, and displaced more people than any other event since the Dust Bowl drought and dust storms of the 1930s.

Brown, an emergency responder, stayed behind to search for the missing.

"We should have made so much more progress," said the 55-year-old Brown in an interview before a series of events the city is planning this month to mark the storm's 10th anniversary. "I don't see anything to celebrate."

The population of New Orleans is now about 385,000, according to U.S. Census figures from 2014, representing about 80 percent of its pre-Katrina population.

The number of African-Americans has plunged by nearly 100,000 since the storm, while there are now about 10,000 fewer white residents, according to Census figures and the Data Center, a local nonprofit tracking demographic and economic trends.

Before the hurricane, African-Americans comprised 67 percent of the population. By 2014, that dwindled to 60 percent, the Census reported.

Orleans Parish, which has the same boundaries as the city of New Orleans, is the only county or parish in the United States with at least 4,500 African-Americans that experienced such a steep decline between 2000 and 2010, a Reuters analysis found, based on the Census counts before and after Katrina.

Some of the black population moved out to the suburbs, the Data Center notes, and some gradually are moving back. Every year since 2010, the city's African-American population has increased, adding on average several thousand residents.

Yet some who came back say they live in a different New Orleans. Tracie L. Washington, director of the nonprofit Louisiana Justice Institute, returned to New Orleans after evacuating. Today she says something feels off in the city.

She compares it to a missed beat in the brass band parades, called second lines, that weave through its traditionally African-American neighborhoods on many Sundays.

"I'm just one of the survivors," she said. "There shouldn’t be so few."

SOCIAL DISRUPTION

The scale of the exodus reveals itself clearly in the Lower Ninth, one of the only communities that has fewer than half as many residents as it did a decade ago. Boarded-up windows, caved-in roofs and overgrown lots are common sights.

Lower-income households in this neighborhood and others were particularly disrupted by the loss of a relative or neighbor to provide transportation to see a doctor, or help babysit.

"That was a very unique piece of the fabric of New Orleans," said Erika McConduit-Diggs, president of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, which advocates for African-Americans and other underserved groups. "What Katrina did was break down a lot of those social networks, and I think that has also had an impact on our recovery."

With the shifting composition of its electorate, post-Katrina New Orleans has elected, at various points, a majority-white city council, a white district attorney and a white mayor, which had not been seen in decades.

"That was something that no one ever would have thought would happen," said Edward Chervenak, director of the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans. "The politics changed."

Mayor Mitch Landrieu hasn't given up on bringing more people home. He is planning trips this month to Atlanta and Houston, where many of the displaced relocated, a city official said. He can tout new medical facilities and schools that have been overhauled as signs that New Orleans is rising again after a long decline.

INCOME GAP WIDENS

Yet the income gap between black and white residents has widened, according to the local Urban League. In 2013, the median income for African-American households in New Orleans was $25,102, compared to $60,553 for white households. The disparity has increased by 37 percent since 2005, according to figures from the Urban League.

"The folks who are benefiting from the most positive trends are the white community, whereas the African-American community by and large has not benefited in the same way," said Allison Plyer, chief demographer at the Data Center.

Among those who left and still want to go home is Philoraine Skipper, who was rescued from a second-story window when flood waters engulfed her house.

She was evacuated to the Superdome arena, where she was reunited with her two daughters, and eventually went with family to Oklahoma, where she still lives.

"We will be coming back," said the 69-year-old, choking back tears as she described her long and unplanned departure, and her excitement visiting New Orleans this week to continue her house repairs. "This is home."

http://news.yahoo.com/ten-years-hurricane-katrinas-scars-endure-black-orleans-194906036.html

 

[Greed]

Rebuilding a Jail, Orleans Parish Thinks Small

Rebuilding a Jail, Orleans Parish Thinks Small
By Rebecca McCray | Takepart.com
7 hours ago
TakePart.com

Abandoned by correctional staff when Hurricane Katrina hit, inmates at the Orleans Parish Prison stood chest-deep in sewage-tainted floodwater for as long as four days before they were rescued. On the eve of the 2005 storm, the jail held nearly 6,300 inmates, and leeches, rodents, mold, and unexplained deaths were its hallmarks. That year, the city’s incarceration rate was more than five times the national figure—which itself is the world’s highest.

The storm offered many of New Orleans’ institutions an opportunity to change, but in the case of its criminal justice system, there soon came a demand from the community that its city come to terms with its status as the incarceration capital of the world. The destruction wreaked by the floodwaters laid bare a corrections facility that could no longer be sustained. Many of the buildings in the jail complex were beyond repair and did not reopen. Inmates, including thousands locked up pretrial because they couldn’t afford bail and others serving years-long sentences, were transferred to a series of temporary tent-like structures—where all incoming defendants and convicts are sent today while a new facility is under construction. Since Katrina, a coalition of grassroots organizers that has demonstrated a surprising amount of power and political savvy, as well as a lawsuit, have pushed local officials into a challenging debate about how to diminish the city’s knee-jerk reliance on incarceration as a remedy for all crime.

Results so far are impressive: The average daily jail population has dropped 67 percent since just before Katrina, from 6,000 to 1,900 inmates, according to data compiled by two nonpartisan research outfits, The Data Center and the Vera Institute of Justice. Meanwhile, crime rates in the city have declined.

In 2012, the city launched the New Orleans Pretrial Services program, and it became a key element in decreasing the number of inmates at the jail. The program helps judges assess arrestees so they can decide who needs to be detained and who poses less of a risk to the community.

The coalition and others in the community challenged a 2010 proposal to build a 5,832-bed jail complex that would replace the facilities destroyed by Katrina. Many knew firsthand the damage that the city’s incarceration addiction had done. Organized under the name Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, the group pushed the mayor and city council members to build a smaller jail. Its logic was that whatever size it ended up being, the jail would be filled—so stakeholders needed to think smaller. The coalition convinced the parish to instead build a jail with just 1,438 beds. A consent decree following a Department of Justice investigation meanwhile forced officials to overhaul the conditions of the jail complex—a process that is ongoing.

Today, the OPPRC is fighting its next battle: a plan from the parish sheriff to build a 600-bed facility next door to the jail to house mentally ill inmates. Activists say jail is no place for the mentally ill and suggest that the city’s new hospital is a better-suited environment. Time will tell whether the city continues to demonstrate a commitment to keeping its incarceration rate down and to acknowledge the role a functional criminal justice system can play as the community continues to heal.

http://news.yahoo.com/rebuilding-jail-orleans-parish-thinks-small-161150984.html

 

[Greed]

In post-Katrina New Orleans, black men lift each other up

In post-Katrina New Orleans, black men lift each other up
"It's like we're missing out on a Gold Rush."
By Mandi Woodruff
August 21, 2015 7:44 PM

On a Tuesday morning inside a dank, carpeted room at the New Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, Patrick Carter is waiting patiently. At a quarter past 10 a.m., a handful of men and women trickle in, sliding back plastic chairs and taking seats at oblong tables that wouldn’t look out of place in a school cafeteria. These aren’t traditional students but, then again, this isn’t a traditional class. Carter, 35, is the group facilitator for NOLA Dads, a program offered by the Family Services of Greater New Orleans to reduce recidivism for ex-offenders on probation and parole. This is one of seven to eight classes Carter teaches weekly, each focused on topics like anger management, parenting, and education. For the lifelong New Orleanian, today’s topic hits especially close to home: finding a job.

“How many are you are actively looking for employment?” Carter asks. The students, all African American, raise their hands. Carter nods. “I feel you. I’ve been there,” he says. He describes the four months it took him to find a job when he came back to New Orleans a year after Katrina hit. He had three years of college education on his resume at the time, but even Home Depot wouldn’t return his calls. “I was stressed out,” he says. “I was [leaving interviews] with tears in my eyes afterwards. I know I’m qualified to put stock on a shelf and you’re not gonna hire me?”

At a time when New Orleans leaders are championing the city’s progress in the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of the city, killing nearly 1,000 residents and displacing 1 million more, Carter’s class is one piece in an overwhelming pile of evidence that there is still work to be done. While whites, Hispanics and women have in many ways seen their livelihoods improve since the storm, black men have largely been left out of the resurgence. For these men, the storm, while no doubt traumatic, exacerbated a host of socioeconomic inequities that had already plagued them for decades, leaving them without the foundation they needed to bounce back. As a result, black men in New Orleans are in some cases worse off than even before the storm.
For more than two decades before Katrina, New Orleans was hemorrhaging jobs thanks in part to the oil bust of the early 1980s. The city lost more than 54,800 jobs between 1980 and 2004, the majority of which belonged in industries dominated by black men, including construction, manufacturing and mining, according to a 2013 study by Loyola University. The employment rate among black men plummeted over that period, dropping from 64% to 54%, and has hardly improved since. Today, just 57% of working-age black men in New Orleans are employed, compared to 77% of white men, according to the Data Center, an independent research firm that has been tracking the city’s recovery since the storm. Nationally, 67% of working-age black men are employed, compared with 72% of white men.

Low employment rates have driven household earnings among black men down even as white men’s earnings have rebounded post-Katrina. Between 1999 and 2011, median household earnings for black men in New Orleans fell 11%, from $35,036 to $31,018. By contrast, white men saw their earnings rise 9% over the same period. And although the city’s incarceration rate has improved, falling by almost half, it’s still three times the national average and black men are still disproportionately likely to be arrested (of 3,318 men age 18 and up held in New Orleans correctional facilities in 2010, 84% were black). Black men were also far less likely to obtain college degrees in the two decades before Katrina, a trend that has persisted since, according to the Loyola study. Only 15% of black men had obtained at least an Associate’s degree in 1980. As of 2011, that rate has not budged. Meanwhile, the rate of white men who earned at least an Associate’s degree has risen from 46% to 66%. And when black men do find jobs, they are much more likely to work in low-paying industries like tourism, which pays an average of $30,431 a year, and hospitality, with average wages of $18,019 a year.

For the most part, Carter has overcome statistics like these. He got a Bachelor’s degree in sociology in 2008, mostly completed at a state school, with an assist from the University of Houston, where he studied for a semester after Katrina. Along with his nonprofit work, he runs his own private basketball coaching business, Unlimited Skills, and works part-time as a case manager for mental health patients. He recently purchased an investment property and lives with his girlfriend and her two teenage daughters in one of the city’s up and coming neighborhoods.

For city leaders and community activists desperate to improve the livelihoods of African American households, men like Carter are in high demand. “I feel you. I’ve been there.” It’s a sentiment Carter will repeat, in some form, at least half a dozen more times throughout the class as group members swap stories about their struggles to find jobs. When it comes to encouraging black men in New Orleans who feel they have been unfairly treated by the system, the ability to empathize makes a big difference.

“Shifting someone’s mindset takes time and it certainly takes an experienced voice who has been through those challenges to help,” says Erika McConduit-Diggs, president of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, a nonprofit that works with formerly incarcerated men and women seeking to re-enter the workforce. “I see that as not just important, but vital.”

‘We have to show that black men can be very powerful contributors’

At the Youth Empowerment Project of New Orleans, Darren Alridge, 24, mentors black teenagers and serves as a tutor in the organization’s GED classes. Alridge, who evacuated with his family two days before Katrina hit, remembers watching his childhood home, located in the city’s impoverished Ninth Ward, flood on a TV screen at a Houston hotel. His mother later moved the family into an apartment complex in Baton Rouge, La., 90 minutes north of New Orleans. Kids at his new school, he says, responded hostilely to the influx of New Orleans students after the storm. Alridge says he was bullied and started getting into fights. He bounced around to four or five different schools before his family returned to New Orleans after two years. The relief he felt at being home again was short-lived.
“We were taking classes in trailers with 30 kids, one teacher and only like five books,” Alridge recalls. “Nobody can focus in an environment like that.” In the 11th grade, he dropped out and within a year, he was caught joyriding with friends in a stolen car and was arrested. The judge who heard his case gave him two options: Either go out and get his GED or serve time. He chose the first option, and signed up for classes at YEP. Even after he earned his GED, which is the equivalent of a high school degree, he said employers wouldn’t look past his criminal record. “Nobody wanted to hire me because of my background,” he says.

Alridge started volunteering at YEP, but with three young children to care for at home, he couldn’t afford to be out of work for long. In the end, his mentors at YEP offered him an opportunity to join their staff full-time as a tutor and mentor. It was a role he was well suited for. “I fit in because some of these guys who feel the K-12 system failed them, I feel where they’re coming from,” Alridge says. “I’ve been through all that, but I overcame those obstacles.”

Across the city, there’s a new push to make sure voices like Alridge's and Carter’s are heard, which has led to a string of new initiatives aimed at promoting the image of black men as fathers and household contributors. Carter leads those efforts at NOLA Dads. In 2013, Frederick “Hollywood” Delahoussaye, a local artist, created the Baby Daddy Collective, a weekly dinner group where black fathers and their children gather to talk and participate in group activities. The New Orleans Fatherhood Consortium, an offshoot of Loyola University’s literacy center, held its sixth annual “Favorite Fathers Celebration” in June. More than 40 black fathers, ranging in age from 19 to 87, were nominated by friends and family for the honor. “We have to show that, absolutely, black men can be very powerful contributors not only to their families and their households. but in [the overall economy],” McConduit-Diggs says.

For Ron McClain, a New Orleans native and longtime social activist, watching the city rebound in the years since Katrina has made it all the more painful to see black men lagging behind. He knows firsthand what a man can accomplish when given an opportunity. His own father, a carpenter, worked three jobs in the late 1960s to purchase his family's home a few minutes outisde of the city's iconic French Quarter. When McClain was serving as the president of the Family Services of Greater New Orleans, it was he who interviewed Patrick Carter and recommended him for his job with NOLA Dads.

"We do have stories of men like Patrick who have seemed to overcome overwhelming circumstances, so that gives me hope," he says. "As long as I have breath in my lungs I’ll be working to help people help themselves."

While black men do their part to lift one another up and in the right direction, local leaders in New Orleans are scrambling to make sure they are prepared for the city’s rapidly changing job market — and that they have a fair shot at joining it. In 2013, the city joined a growing list of cities that have banned the boxes on job applications that ask candidates whether they have ever been convicted of a crime. It won’t stop employers from running background checks, but it may help give some applicants a better chance of making it to an interview, where they can personally explain their past, if asked. And last year, Mayor Mitchell Landrieu launched a new initiative to work with the city’s largest employers — hospitals, universities, and the airport among them — to purposefully seek out minority workers for new positions and, even more importantly, train workers for the jobs beforehand.

“We don't have nearly enough job training for African-American men,” McClain says. “We need to train people not just to work in kitchens but to learn how to become chefs or get management positions in the tourism economy so they can make enough money to sustain a certain quality of life.”

Lance Celestine, 37, is one of the first African American men to benefit from the mayor's plan. In mid-August, he completed a three-week training course at the Urban League that is tied to a multi-year expansion of the city's major airport. After three weeks of soft skills training with UL, Celestine can now advance to a six-week course offered by a community college that will certify him in skills for jobs needed both during the airport's expansion and after.

Celestine travels by bike 40 minutes each way to work nights earning $10 an hour as a forklift operator. As a teenager growing up in New Orleans' 7th ward, he turned to the streets to earn money and spent time in jail for drug-related offenses. But with a baby on the way and home-rental prices ticking up, his only interest now lies in finding a job that will lead to a sustainable career. “If I can advance my knowledge, I can at least be able to move up to where I won’t just be stuck at position one or two,” he says. “[When I was younger] I had to hustle and get out in the streets and I don’t want to do that ever again.”

His next goal will be convincing a close friend to take the same leap. “If I have to drag him by his neck, he will be here soon,” he says, laughing. “Me being that motivation and pushing myself...I’m saying man, look, it’s never too late.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/post-katrina-new-orleans-black-men--185351817.html