How a Principal In New Orleans Saved Her School

Three cheers for Carol Christen!

The school's destiny is being driven by Ms. Christen, 59 years old, a tenacious ex-nun who rubs some people the wrong way. She's reconstituting Franklin as a charter school that will be nonunion and largely free of New Orleans's broken-down city bureaucracy. Her plan is financially risky and union leaders hate it.

Alongside the principal are hundreds of parents, teachers and other supporters who refused to let the school die. They cherish Franklin's status as the state's best public school, where strivers gain a shot at an Ivy League education and 99% of graduates attend college. In the past four months, these backers found their way past National Guard barricades, tore out moldy carpets and raised money to cover gaping budget holes.

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Back to Class
How a Principal In New Orleans Saved Her School

Parents Cleaned, Raised Money
As Benjamin Franklin High
Quit City Education System

Ms. Christen Dreams of Kites

By GEORGE ANDERS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 13, 2006; Page A1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113712107215345713.html?mod=home_page_one_us

NEW ORLEANS -- Last week, the electrical system at Benjamin Franklin High School wasn't working properly. The football coach hollered for a repairman while an English teacher drafted her lesson plan in the dark under the dim glow of a flashlight. The band director rummaged through $100,000 of flood-damaged instruments to see what could be salvaged.

To Franklin's principal, Carol Christen, the shouting and chaos was a welcome sight. Hurricane Katrina ravaged Franklin's campus more than four months ago, causing such severe flooding that it looked as if the school might be closed for at least a year, perhaps forever. When Ms. Christen first inspected the damage, she burst into tears.

Now Ms. Christen is getting her school back. Franklin is due to reopen to students on Tuesday, one of the few New Orleans public schools to do so. Franklin still looks tattered. Only two-thirds of its pre-hurricane students are coming back. But teachers have strung giant green banners in the lobby, proclaiming: "Welcome Back!"

The school is a rare bright spot in New Orleans's efforts to rebound from one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history. Even now, large parts of the city are uninhabitable. Traffic lights don't work and stores are closed. By the most optimistic city and industry estimates, New Orleans's current population is less than 40% of its original 460,000. (See related article.)

The school's destiny is being driven by Ms. Christen, 59 years old, a tenacious ex-nun who rubs some people the wrong way. She's reconstituting Franklin as a charter school that will be nonunion and largely free of New Orleans's broken-down city bureaucracy. Her plan is financially risky and union leaders hate it.

Alongside the principal are hundreds of parents, teachers and other supporters who refused to let the school die. They cherish Franklin's status as the state's best public school, where strivers gain a shot at an Ivy League education and 99% of graduates attend college. In the past four months, these backers found their way past National Guard barricades, tore out moldy carpets and raised money to cover gaping budget holes.

This old-fashioned volunteerism has startled even those in the midst of it. The damage to the city is so all-encompassing that official agencies are badly backlogged. Calling on friends and neighbors for the modern-day equivalent of a barn raising often looks like the best hope.

Almost every weekend since Labor Day, volunteers have flocked to Franklin's grounds. Hank Klimitas, a retired veterinarian, underwent a lung transplant two years ago. His doctors didn't want him near moldy areas, but Mr. Klimitas joined the work crews anyway, spending more than seven hours helping remove downed tree limbs.

Mr. Klimitas's daughter Katherine was starting her junior year at Franklin when Katrina hit. After the storm, she evacuated to a rural Louisiana school where fistfights were common and advanced-placement courses rare. As a bright, wheelchair-bound student, Katherine says she was bored and scared.

"A lot of Katherine's happiest moments have been at Franklin," Mr. Klimitas says. "I wanted to do anything to help her get back to school."

Founded in 1957, Franklin has long been New Orleans's showcase public school. Its enrollment is limited to students with top academic records, who are later invited to take AP classes for college credit as early as freshman year. Some of the city's worst schools have rat-infested lockers and wintertime heating breakdowns. Franklin sends its choir students to Italy for spring break.

Ms. Christen, who has been a school administrator for most of her life, took over as principal in 2002. Her brief stint as a nun in the 1960s didn't work out because "I had trouble with the obedience part," she explains. At Franklin, she quickly established herself as a no-nonsense boss and insisted on a strict dress code that barred not just sandals and torn jeans but also untucked shirts. Some easy-going teachers didn't enforce her rules much. She upbraided them, declaring that there was only one dress code at the school: hers.

Ms. Christen also campaigned to open the school's doors wider to working-class black children. In the poorer parts of New Orleans, Franklin was seen as exclusively for the children of white doctors, lawyers and professors. Ms. Christen visited largely black grade schools and urged the brightest children to give her school a try. Franklin's African-American enrollment in the past five years has climbed five percentage points to 28%...