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Katrina, Race, and High School
"Hurricane Katrina helped me see that some of my classmates are facing serious barriers to success, just like those trapped in New Orleans during the hurricane."
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By Bly Lauritano-Werner
Like a lot of people, Hurricane Katrina is making me think differently about my own country--and my own school. I go to Portland High School in Maine, where around one third of the kids are considered language minority students and over thirty languages are spoken. About thirty percent of the students are people of color. That’s a big deal in Maine.
It’s easy to imagine the school as this great example of public school diversity. But things aren't that simple. Take our two cafeterias for example. There’s the lower and the upper:
JUNIOR (on tape)
Well, it’s pretty obvious that most of the white upper class kids sit in the lower caf and the more diverse kids sit in the upper caf, definitely.
BLY
That's a white Junior who hangs out in the lower caf. In the upper caf, you'll find predominantly newly Immigrated students, mostly from African countries like Congo, Somalia, and Sudan. I asked one Congolese student to describe the kids who eat in the lower caf.
CONGOLESE STUDENT (on tape)
What do I think about them? I think of them as regular students.
BLY
I guess I'm one of those "regular" students. But since I'm white, and I hardly ever go into the upper caf, I had a feeling that wasn't the whole truth. So, I kept asking about students’ perceptions of equality in our school.
STUDENT (on tape)
People are racists. Some of us don’t have computers at home. We need technology.
We’re not poor, we just wanna be treated the same as white people, ya know.
Gotta treat people fair at school. Treat people fair man!
BLY
So the seating arrangements at lunch are not just about who you want to split an order of french fries with. And, I've started to notice some major differences in the kind of education kids get. Recently I switched my math class from honors down to college prep, and it’s definitely not the same. The class is bigger, the expectations are lower, and for the first time, a third of my classmates are not white. I asked one upper caf Somali girls whose been in the US for nine years about the level of education she thinks she’s receiving.
SOMALI GIRL (on tape)
Well, I dunno. I think I could teach myself better than the teachers could.
BLY
That’s kind of how it’s turning out in my own so-called college prep math class, too. Surely I couldn’t be the first one to question the inequality in my school. I went to my principal, Michael Johnson, to ask him about how race and class play out in our graduation rates.
MICHAEL (on tape)
It is safe to say that there are many more kids that are living in poverty- at or below the poverty line or close to it- many more of those kids are more likely to drop out than kids who don’t have to work to help their family, who drive cars, who can work in a place where they only have to work 10-12 hours a week as opposed to 40 or more hours a week. I believe it’s more important to give more resources to those kids who have less than those kids who have more.
BLY
Resources like computer labs for kids without computers, and scholarships for SATs and college trips. Those things seem like a good idea, but still, they don’t really get the root problems of poverty and disadvantages. We just saw with Katrina, what happens when people don't pay attention to these problems. I asked my friends whether Katrina had started them thinking about race and class struggles in our country in new ways. Most of them said something like this.
FRIEND (on tape)
I think in the U.S., definately, but I don’t think in Portland it’s really an issue.
BLY
Not a problem here? No racism, no classism in our community? Isn’t not acknowledging the problem what keeps it going? In Hurricane Katrina, socioeconomic status had everything to do with who could and could not evacuate. That's a lot like my high school where class and race help determine who can and cannot get access to the best teachers, the top classes, and the easiest road to college. Hurricane Katrina helped me see that some of my classmates are facing serious barriers to success, just like those trapped in New Orleans during the hurricane.
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