Reading, writing, & arsenic: New Orleans school planned atop toxic dump

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http://grist.org/cities/reading-writing-arsenic-new-orleans-school-planned-atop-toxic-dump/

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The original Booker T. Washington High School was razed to make way for a new mega-school — then developers discovered the mess.

Initially, James Raby just wanted to save his school, Walter L. Cohen High, in New Orleans. Named after a prominent black businessman and political leader, the school sits in one of the more diverse neighborhoods in Uptown New Orleans, and has served a mostly black student population. Raby graduated three years after it opened in 1953.

Cohen High was one of the first schools to reopen after Hurricane Katrina, but it has struggled to stay alive since then. The school was in one of the few neighborhoods that didn’t flood, so it was filled with a lot of students dealing with the traumatic stress and disorder that came with Katrina. Since 2006, it’s had three different administrative operators, at least a half-dozen principals, and a ton of teacher layoffs as a consequence of the shifting leadership.

No surprise, then, that the school has struggled academically. National Geographic spent six months filming there in 2008 and labeled it one of the most dangerous schools in America.

Cohen High was not included in the city’s “Plan for the 21st Century,” the post-Katrina reconstruction strategy devised through a city-wide community participation process to decide what would be rebuilt and how. The state wants to shutter it completely by 2015, and send the students to a new mega-high school, called Booker T. Washington, that is slated to be built about two miles away.