From community listening sessions to a plan for advertising the post, each step was standard operating procedure except one: An asterisk at the laying out a timeline stated that the board reserves the right to stop the process at any time and simply appoint someone. 

That note did little to quell concerns among leaders of the city’s schools — all but one of them independent public charter schools — who are still reeling from the fractious events that led up to the abrupt November departure of Avis Williams. The former superintendent resigned after a series of missteps that included an accounting error that obscured a deficit of at least $36 million.

Separately, district leaders have asked a court to enforce the terms of a $90 million settlement in a 2019 lawsuit filed against the city of New Orleans. The suit argues that the city illegally skimmed up to $150 million in taxes owed to schools. Among other things, at stake is an initial payment of $20 million, which district and board leaders planned to use to offset some of the $36 million budget shortfall. 

Williams became superintendent in the sixth year of New Orleans’s experiment as the nation’s only all-charter district. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the city had rebuilt its entire school system — at the time, one of the nation’s worst — into a totally new kind of system in which every school lived or died according to its performance contract. This autonomy-for-accountability bargain has led to , even as it remains controversial. 

A year ago, Williams — who had no prior experience with charter schools — mishandled a school closure, reversing her own decisions several times and leaving families scrambling to find alternatives. Critics argued the chaos was the result of her lack of understanding, two years into the job, of how NOLA Public Schools’ unique system worked. In the end, she solved the problems created by the botched process of revoking the charter of a failing school by replacing it with a traditional, district-run school — a move some board members had been pushing for. 

The challenges left unresolved — including the budget crisis, an overdue downsizing and longstanding problems with the district’s centralized enrollment system — will make the next superintendent’s job even more daunting, some members of the charter community say. They believe this makes it imperative that the next district leader is very familiar with the issues and the system’s capacity to address them.

Typically, the initial vetting of superintendent candidates is not done publicly. But two names circulating widely in New Orleans’s tight-knit education community potentially present a stark choice between a native of the city who helped to create the current system and a veteran administrator who was hired two years ago by Williams. 

The first, Sharon Clark, is a charter school network leader who played a prominent role in developing the city’s charter system and an elected member of the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. She is the principal of Sophie B. Wright High School, which had just become one of the city’s first charter schools when Hurricane Katrina hit. Clark was able to reopen the school within months, to serve the children of first responders. Last year, the high school earned a B overall on state report cards but an F for student performance on state exams. 

The second, NOLA Public Schools Interim Superintendent Fateama Fulmore, is a seasoned administrator who had little charter experience before being brought on by Williams two years ago. She has held top jobs in Omaha, Philadelphia and North Carolina, and last fall was a finalist for two other superintendencies. 

The members of the board that might or might not let the search play out have conflicting visions for the future of the school system. Some want the district to return to operating schools traditionally. Others are more concerned about downsizing and the financial crisis — uncovered last fall by charter finance officers — that threatens the schools’ ability to provide quality services. 

Board member Olin Parker has said Fulmore would be a very strong candidate to lead the district on a permanent basis. But Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, says Clark is a better pick, particularly given the urgent issues before the district. 

“We need someone with zero learning curve when it comes to relationships — community relationships, school relationships,” she says. “What is important now is to have someone from New Orleans.”

According to in The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, most community members who attended a January public meeting told the board they wanted a native of the city who grasps the complexities of the district’s decentralized structure. 

Outside of people who have worked in the schools, precious few truly understand the unique nature of New Orleans’s system. The NOLA Public Schools leader’s powers are limited by state law, so the superintendency is not a job for a conventional leader looking to make a mark. There are also complicated racial legacies. 

All this makes filling the district’s top job a tall order.   

When Williams was appointed in 2022, she was given contradictory mandates by board members and failed, despite repeated entreaties, to forge relationships with the charter network leaders who have long worked with the district to troubleshoot common issues. 

By law, the district is constrained from dictating how individual schools educate students. So NOLA Public Schools leaders have fewer, but more distinct, responsibilities than administrators in typical districts. They distribute local, state and federal funds, which schools may spend as they see fit, and they monitor whether individual schools are performing well enough to merit renewal of their charter. 

When Williams was hired, she was asked to tackle an ambitious list of novel problems that included figuring out how to downsize the district in the face of declining enrollment — a process that necessarily would require the cooperation of charter operators. She also was charged with fixing a centralized system for matching students with schools and confronting rising absenteeism and mental health issues. 

From the start, the New Orleans education community questioned whether Williams could make progress without collaborating with people whom traditional superintendents view as subordinates. Most of her daunting to-do list remains unfinished. 

A year ago, after a series of missteps involving the expected revocation of the ​​Lafayette Academy Charter School’s permission to operate, Williams ceded to pressure from then-board vice president Leila Jacobs Eames to open a traditionally operated school in its place — something the superintendent had previously said the district was ill-equipped to do. 

During an October meeting with district administrators, a number of charter school finance leaders realized NOLA Public Schools had miscalculated the amount of tax revenue it was set to receive from the city by what would later turn out to be at least $36 million. Williams resigned in November.

A month later, the broadcast outlet , via a public records request, that the board had approved a $335,000 settlement with Williams, which both parties had agreed not to disclose to the public.  

The CEO of Crescent City Schools, Kate Mehok helps coordinate the School Leadership Forum, a network of charter operators who have long met regularly to hammer out solutions to common problems. Many of New Orleans’s most effective innovations were hatched by the network.

Mehok says school leaders have told board members that they would like to meet with the candidates. “We’re hoping they choose to do this so that it’s clear to whoever becomes the superintendent that we’re an important constituent group,” she says. “Our thoughts about it matter, so we have asked to be formally included in giving feedback to the board.” 

Dana Peterson, CEO of the school improvement and policy group New Schools for New Orleans, says he has told board members that they should spend time now clarifying what they want the next superintendent’s priorities to be. 

“Maybe [Williams] didn’t have the right set of experiences, maybe she didn’t have the right disposition towards our system,” he says. “But it was also true she was unclear on what direction the board wanted her to go on certain things.”

Applications for the position are open until March 16. Four days later, the board is scheduled to decide whether to interview any of the candidates. If finalists are selected and the process , public interviews could take place at board meetings over the following three weeks.

On Nov. 8, Orleans Parish School Board leaders informed school leaders that the projected deficit had grown to at least $36 million and could still increase in coming months. To offset the shortfall, which comes to at least $1,000 per student, district leaders hope to tap reserves to loan schools some $15 million. On Nov. 14, Superintendent Avis Williams announced her resignation, effective Dec. 1. 

Three months into the academic year, New Orleans school leaders have learned that because of a series of miscalculations by district officials, their funding will drop dramatically, starting with their October payment.

The early back-of-the-envelope math is alarming, according to financial consultants who help the city’s schools manage their budgets. The initial estimate is that annual funding will fall by at least $20 million.

NOLA Public Schools leaders say they are working with city officials, who collect the taxes that help support what was until recently an all-charter district, to pin down the exact amount. But so far, there has not been an official calculation of how big the error is.

In the meantime, school administrators say they have only rough, varying estimates of how much lower their actual payments will be, no idea how long the shortfall may affect their budgets or whether their allotments will continue to decrease as the district reworks its ledgers. 

“The impact of $700 to $900 per pupil for a school of 500 students could translate to the loss of six or seven teacher positions,” says Joe Keeney, founder of 4^th Sector Solutions, a consulting firm that provides charter schools with financial and administrative services. “It could be upward of $400,000 for some [individual] schools.” 

The timing makes the red ink especially problematic. New Orleans schools, like many throughout the country, are struggling to survive the so-called fiscal cliff, the one-two punch of enrollment declines — which translate to less state funding — and the end of federal pandemic recovery aid.

“We are a quarter of the way into our school year,” says Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise, CEO of the city’s largest charter network, KIPP New Orleans Schools. “There is no way to say, ‘Okay, I have to cut $500-$800-$1,000 a kid.’ It’s impossible to do. These numbers are so big.” 

At an Oct. 22 school board meeting, Superintendent Avis Williams said she is researching options. “I do for this happening because it was on the district’s watch,” she said.

NOLA Public Schools typically tells its 67 charter schools in March how much money they can expect to receive for the following school year, including local property and sales tax revenue. They use those estimates to draw up their budgets for the year. Schools get the funds in monthly payments, and near the end of the academic year, small expected differences between projections and actual revenue are reconciled.

For fiscal year 2024, the district’s finance team projected an 18% increase in income from property taxes and a 3% hike in sales tax revenue. But it based those estimates on the full calendar year, instead of the fiscal year starting in July. Property tax collections actually rose by slightly less than 9% while sales taxes fell 1%. 

District leaders didn’t disclose the until an Oct. 9 meeting attended only by a handful of charter finance leaders, according to Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, and some of those present. 

“Moreover, the district’s limited information was presented without any definitive statements about how this would impact schools, why the over-projections occurred or what actions they should take, leaving schools to speculate on the next steps,” Roemer wrote in an Oct. 17 to district leadership. “Finally and significantly, the district has yet to formally notify all school leaders of this urgent matter.”

In response to questions from ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, a district spokesperson said the discrepancy in revenue projections was identified earlier this month: “As soon as we realized the variance between the projected and actual revenues, we began working with our auditors and the city of New Orleans to verify the data and make necessary adjustments.”  

But at the Oct. 22 board meeting, Comptroller Nyesha Veal said NOLA Public Schools staff began receiving monthly updates from the city in May indicating the March projections were incorrect. At the board meeting two days later, Veal said she had not realized that no one communicated the shortfall to school officials until she met with them Oct. 9. 

At a meeting Oct. 23 with board members and school leaders, district staff blamed the mistake on a “personnel issue” they refused to describe, according to association staffers present. They also said the unspecified issue should have triggered a review.   

In her , Roemer wrote that there were similar discrepancies last year: “Last spring, the district also alerted school finance directors that the district made over-projection miscalculations for the 2023 fiscal year and erred in how they presented and utilized the 2023 fiscal year audited actuals of revenue collected in the 2022 fiscal year.”

District officials dispute this, but KIPP New Orleans CFO Katie Walmsley and other school finance chiefs say they have been told multiple times that discrepancies from past years persist. Most recently, at the Oct. 23 meeting, Veal again told the CFOs there were miscalculations for fiscal year 2023. A district report due to the state at the end of the calendar year will contain audited totals, Walmsley says.

Among the examples Walmsley cited were miscounts of different groups of students who receive extra per-pupil funding. “District staff have confused themselves by not being extra-precise,” she says. “It’s only coming to light because us CFOs have asked questions such as, ‘Why did the number of over-aged students double year-over-year?’ ” 

Reacting to the news at public meetings held Oct. 22 and 24, members of the Orleans Parish School Board called for the district to hire a , form a working group of outside experts and school leaders, come up with a plan for communicating with school administrators and produce a report explaining what went wrong. 

“As a board, we are focused on getting to the root of the problem, finding a solution going forward and communicating with all stakeholders,” says Olin Parker, chair of the board’s finance committee. “What I have pushed the superintendent on is that if there is ultimately a negative impact, we also need to bear some of the brunt of this.”

The lack of communication, Roemer wrote in her letter, is just the latest of a series of episodes in which the district — which hired Williams as superintendent in July 2022 — has not engaged school leaders about citywide issues. This is a major departure from past practices in what was an all-charter school system from 2017 until this academic year.  

The former chief of Selma City Schools in Alabama, Williams had no experience with charter schools when she took the reins in New Orleans. Before her appointment, district and charter community administrators had met frequently to troubleshoot common problems. 

Policies crafted with the input of charter leaders, who operate independently of the district, include processes for enrolling and disciplining students and holding schools accountable for academic and financial performance. 

Roemer and others have said Williams has not engaged with school leaders on . “Recent failures by district staff and systems have caused major issues,” Roemer wrote in her Oct. 17 letter, including problems with enrollment, absenteeism, accidental data breaches, funding for student support programs and “misinformation about laws applicable to charter schools.” 

During a board meeting last winter, Roemer complained about poor communications regarding a series of decisions Williams made on the fate of an underperforming school that by law was likely to lose its charter. The superintendent ultimately chose to open a new, traditional, district-run school in the failing charter’s building.

The move came after months of confusion as to how the district planned to deal with declining enrollment. In February, its nonprofit partner, New Schools for New Orleans, warned that its 4,000 vacant seats had . 

On average, each of the city’s K-8 schools had space for 550 students but enrolled 484, leaving a funding gap of $625,000. In opening a new school, Williams missed an opportunity to lower the overall vacancy rate through attrition, critics charged. 

“In short,” Roemer wrote, “this district has yet to properly or successfully execute many of the functions they are directly responsible for as a school itydistrict — and functions that had previously worked until now.”

Schools do their own budget projections involving state and federal aid but depend on the district for local tax calculations. Because Louisiana, like many states, sends extra aid to districts with low property taxes — and because discrepancies from fiscal year 2023 are still being tallied — the mistake will also cost schools an as-yet unknown amount of state aid. 

In addition, schools that enroll large numbers of children with profound needs will suffer disproportionately large losses because New Orleans apportions money based on a long list of weights — extra funding intended to offset the cost of educating students with disabilities, who are learning English, are over-aged and have been suspended or involved with the criminal justice system, among other challenges. 

Because the combination of enrollment declines and the end of one-time COVID aid could put schools on shaky financial footing, 4^th Sector Solutions had already urged its clients to shift from annual budgets to multiyear plans, says Jonathan Tebeleff, vice president of the firm’s New Orleans finance team: “We’ve been working to put them in a position where they won’t sail over that fiscal cliff.” 

Some older schools or those in large networks have built up reserve funds that may help cushion the blow, but newer, standalone charter schools don’t, says Kalifey-Aluise. Even for those schools that have rainy-day funds, spending down savings can leave them vulnerable in emergencies. 

“KIPP has a board policy of putting money away every year, but some of that is literally reserved for disasters, like hurricanes,” she says. “The conversation we haven’t had is whether there is a systemwide way to make people whole?”

Unlike a traditional district, which can move money from one budget line to another when need be, NOLA Public Schools has relatively little financial wiggle room. Its main source of revenue is the 2% of each school’s allotment it receives as a charter authorizer. Because the schools operate autonomously, there are relatively few central office staff.  

In order to pay for district assistance with issues such as teacher recruitment, student mental health support and specialized staff training, New Orleans charter schools contribute to a . It’s not clear whether that account can be tapped to help make up the tax shortfall.

Also unclear is how the red ink will impact schools slated for charter renewal in the next couple of years. By law, fiscal health is a large part of the evaluation that is used to determine whether a school’s charter will be renewed or rescinded. 

In an Oct. 25 letter, New Schools for New Orleans CEO Dana Peterson told city school leaders that the organization — which serves as the school system’s research and policy partner — had agreed to pay for an outside expert to help the district improve its finance operations. School leaders will meet with him in early November to discuss the impact of the shortfall.    

At the Oct. 24 board meeting, district finance officials said they hoped to have hard numbers by Oct. 30, so schools can begin planning how to make up the deficit.

In August, New Orleans Public Schools will open a district-operated school named for Leah Chase, a late civil rights activist and revered matriarch of a culinary dynasty. The school will eventually serve 320 students from pre-K through eighth grade, with an emphasis on the city’s culture and history. Located in a historic building, it will replace the failing Lafayette Academy Charter School. 

As they hire Leah Chase’s teachers, pick its uniforms and curricula and arrange for transportation and lunches, district leaders are also creating the administrative jobs other school systems rely on to oversee individual buildings. These central office departments will make it easier for NOLA Public Schools to open more “direct-run” schools, Superintendent Avis Williams says.

You read that right: New Orleans’ love-it-or-hate-it, seven-year experiment as the nation’s first all-charter school system is coming to a close. Going forward, it will act both as a charter school authorizer and an old-fashioned school district.

In principle, the city’s charter school advocates are not opposed. 

“I am personally governance-agnostic,” says Sabrina Pence, CEO of FirstLine Schools, which runs five schools in the city. “We wish the district every success in direct-running its first school in a while.” 

Head of the Louisiana Public Charter School Association, Caroline Roemer says she is confident Leah Chase will be well run.

Tulane University professor Doug Harris, who produced numerous school improvement studies that helped shape the unique system, says the decision to create the infrastructure to direct-run schools will give the district flexibility to respond to unanticipated challenges.

NOLA Public Schools’ decision to return to running schools could be a game-changing inflection point in one of the most closely watched school-improvement efforts in history. After Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005, the state of Louisiana seized control of most of the schools in what was then one of the lowest-performing districts in the country. 

In the years that followed, the state Recovery School District created a totally new kind of system in which every school lived or died according to its performance contract. Schools that don’t meet those standards lose the charters that allow them to operate — an autonomy-for-accountability bargain that remains controversial even as it has led to . The state returned New Orleans public schools to local control in 2016.

Two years ago, the Orleans Parish School Board appointed a new superintendent with a track record of success and no experience with charter schools. The board handed Avis Williams a formidable to-do list that included a dramatic downsizing to address enrollment losses and other sweeping decisions that would shape the next chapter of the school governance experiment. Progress has been halting.

In December, tensions surrounding the district’s future came to a head when Williams — under conflicting pressures from board members and seemingly without understanding the nuances of the system — decided not to renew Lafayette’s charter. What might in another moment have been missteps in timing and communications instead forced Williams’ hand on a number of consequential decisions.

Declaring charter schools a failed “experiment with children’s lives,” one school board member who had been pushing the district to return to a more traditional model demanded that Williams begin opening direct-run schools, starting with Leah Chase. 

The architects of the grand experiment may not be opposed — but they are eager for answers to some big questions. 

How will the prospect of opening new schools impact a lagging, three-year effort to address declining enrollment by closing others?

New Orleans faces a singular variation on a common problem. School systems throughout the country are facing the one-two punch of dramatic enrollment losses and the end of federal COVID recovery aid, forcing painful and overdue decisions about shuttering buildings and laying off staff. The politics of deciding how to meet the moment — playing out on steroids nationwide — is a frequent career-ender for superintendents and board members.

Locally elected school boards are easily overwhelmed by community ire and often either prolong the pain by taking piecemeal steps — such as closing two or three schools when there are 10 too many — or kick the can down the road by leaving the decisions for their successors. As resources dwindle in the remaining schools, student achievement typically falls, fueling further dips in enrollment. 

By contrast, in New Orleans, an eight-year-old law — Act 91 — spells out the process of replacing poorly performing schools with better ones. Under the law, the district authorizes individual charter schools, which may be operated by networks or standalone education groups. 

When a school has underperformed for a certain period of time or has run afoul of financial or regulatory requirements, the district board must revoke its charter. The district can give the charter to another operator or simply close the school. The only way to deviate from the process is by vote of a supermajority of the Orleans Parish board. 

But there is no provision for the board or superintendent to unilaterally decide to reduce the number of schools. Citywide, there are an estimated 4,000 empty seats.

In 2022, the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans, which serves as a research and innovation hub for the system, that schools citywide were nearing a tipping point in terms of enrolling enough students to pay for a full array of academics and services. Post-Katrina, enrollment peaked in 2019 at 49,000, and by some 4,000 students, the organization’s analyses have shown. Birth rates are also in sharp decline, so the number of students will continue to drop in coming years.

Because almost all state and federal per-pupil funding in New Orleans is distributed according to enrollment, each school sets its own budget according to its ability to attract and retain students. Too many empty seats in any school, New Schools warned, directly impacts its ability to pay for the staff and programs needed to serve kids well. 

On average, last year, New Orleans’ K-8 schools had space for 550 students but enrolled 484, which equals a funding gap of $625,000. In its reports, New Schools has provided examples of the number of educators and programs that would have to be cut to make up that amount.

“You can’t drain resources out of schools five or 10 students at a time,” says Pence. “Lose 10 kids, that’s a teacher, maybe an art teacher — that’s always soul-crushing.” 

After New Schools’s , Pence’s FirstLine was one of four charter networks that teamed up to consolidate six underenrolled schools into three buildings, eliminating 1,500 empty seats. The required the charter school organizations to work together to figure out which schools were most accessible to families and which three networks would run the remaining schools.

Charter operator InspireNOLA merged two of its K-8 schools into one building, while ARISE Schools and Crescent City Schools combined a school from each network into a single building to be run by Crescent City. The Collegiate Academies network merged two high schools, Rosenwald Collegiate Academy and Walter L. Cohen Prep, in Cohen’s brand-new building.

The district can reduce some excess capacity by closing underperforming schools instead of giving their charters to better-performing networks. But that alone would be unlikely to address the oversupply. Even if it could, the district needs a master plan to locate high-quality options in modernized buildings in every quadrant of the city. This means establishing how many schools should exist going forward, and how to make closure decisions that are not driven by school performance. 

“There are questions of fairness,” says Harris. “Some neighborhoods don’t have good options.” 

For example, a large swath of the city known as New Orleans East has lots of students but not many schools. “Performance is a good and important thing to start with, but you don’t want kids traveling 10 miles to school,” he notes. “You want high performers spread out around the city.”

What is to stop underperforming schools slated to lose their charters from lobbying to become direct-run schools?

New Orleans’s system was designed to insulate high-stakes closure decisions from political pressure. In 2015, Louisiana enacted a law spelling out limits on the Orleans Parish School Board’s power over charter schools and requiring it to step in when they underperform for long periods of time. 

Legal parameters in place, the state returned the schools to the district. In 2017, NOLA Public Schools found charter operators for its . 

Since then, a small but vocal number of residents have demanded an end to charter schools in the district. A group called Erase the Board has routinely protested closures and backed school board candidates who agree that the state constitution requires the Orleans Parish School Board to operate like a conventional district. 

They have an ally in state Sen. Joseph Bouie Jr., who has campaigned to overturn Act 91, the law codifying the district’s obligations to charter schools. For almost a decade, they had gotten little traction — not even after he equated the system to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment— with the exception of a change to state law to allow a board supermajority to overrule the superintendent’s recommendations.

Events of the last few months may, however, have allowed charter opponents to breach the firewall. When state report cards were , several New Orleans schools earned failing grades. In December, Williams recommended closing one and revoking the charters of two others, to be given to other operators. 

By the board’s January meeting, though, no network had stepped up to run one of the schools losing its charter, the 500-student Lafayette Academy Charter School, so Williams . The board approved her request, but angrily. 

In the past, to present an announcement about a closure or change in management with some certainty about families’ options, superintendents and charter network leaders would have talked beforehand about who should take over the charter and its building. Lafayette’s building was freshly renovated and in a desirable location, so normally the superintendent’s final recommendation to the board would have specified which of the district’s 67 schools should occupy it going forward.

Earlier, at that same board meeting, Williams had explaining why the central office was to run traditional schools. To do so, districts typically need departments focused on things like curriculum and instruction, human resources, food service and other tasks performed independently by charter schools.

To pay for its responsibilities as a charter authorizer, NOLA Public Schools receives 2% of each school’s per-pupil funding, which is not enough to pay for the staff needed to oversee conventional schools. How this will be resolved is unclear, though most local leaders say there is no way the operation of a single school justifies the expense of creating the centralized infrastructure.

Unconvinced that the district could not simply open and run schools, the board’s new vice president, Leila Jacobs Eames, chastised the superintendent, saying she had asked repeatedly for the district to do so.

“It makes my blood boil to hear these excuses,” Jacobs Eames said. “As a superintendent, you really should have come with a plan to direct-run in your back pocket.”

Jacobs Eames also said it was time to end the all-charter district. “I am asking from you for a plan on future direct [run] schools” she railed. “This experiment with children’s lives has failed.”

Williams clapped back. She often gets requests from individual members, the superintendent said, but she needs clear marching orders from the board as a whole. Consequently, her highest priority has been creating the portfolio plan the board requested at the start of her tenure, outlining what the district should look like in the coming years. 

“I do feel somewhat attacked by the suggestion I should have had [a plan to direct-run Lafayette] in my back pocket,” Williams replied. “Because at the end of the day, what I have had in my back pocket has been marching orders from the board that were very specific.” 

Board President Katie Baudouin agreed, in part. “We have not, as a board, asked you for a plan for when, how and why you might direct-run a school,” she said. “We have been clear about the goals for district optimization.”

Finally, there was broad unhappiness with the district’s communications with families and board members about Lafayette’s future. Jacobs Eames was angry that she had learned about the closure several nights before, on the evening news. 

A few days after the January meeting, the superintendent reversed herself, saying she would shutter Lafayette and ask the board in February to approve the opening of Leah Chase. By then, however, the deadline for the next year’s enrollment lottery was just days away, and neither the prospective new school nor Lafayette was an option.

Confusing communications about the transition, as well as its unfortunate timing, have reverberated , but the concern the charter community is left with is whether schools’ performance contracts can remain a chief driver of accountability.

“I’m afraid that what happened with [the Lafayette decision process] is it opens the door to the politics of closure,” says Roemer. “I get concerned that from now on, if a charter school is not operating at the level we want it to, the Orleans Parish School Board can step in and direct-run it.”

What happens now? How does the superintendent reshape a district still made up primarily of schools she doesn’t control — and hold the one she does to high standards?

In May, Williams previewed her for the board, which is scheduled to see the comprehensive version in August. To date, it does not detail an optimal number of schools or map where they should be located. 

Right now, half of New Orleans students attend a school that has an A or B rating on state report cards. Under the plan, the goal is for 80% to be enrolled in a high-performing school by 2028 — a rate that must be reflected in every part of the community. At the same time, segregation and racial and economic disparities must be reduced. 

Other factors, the superintendent said in an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, include the need to offer a variety of curricular themes and models, such as Montessori and arts-focused programs, as well as contend with shifting demographics. The number of English learners in the city is increasing quickly, as is demand for offerings like language-immersion schools and programs focused on the arts. 

“We do know that some of those models lend themselves to smaller classrooms or to schools being a certain size,” she said. “When we think of district optimization, it’s not a linear thing where all we consider is the number of seats.”

Any proposal for future direct-run schools will be considered against the same criteria and priorities outlined in the portfolio plan, Williams said. District-operated programs are subject to the state quality standards that govern all traditional Louisiana schools. 

“I do see where people might be concerned, maybe even confused, about what this looks like for a district-run school in terms of accountability compared to charters,” she said. “But the accountability measures and standards will certainly be there. This includes financial audits and compliance monitoring for special education and for English learner services.”

Williams also acknowledged the concerns raised by creating a new direct-run school to replace a chronically underperforming charter. “It’s very similar to what’s happening now with the Leah Chase school,” she said. “It’s not the goal. I want us to be intentional and use data points to make those decisions and not as a workaround.”

Her goal is not to weaken accountability, Williams continued. “I also don’t expect this to be our answer to schools not on track to be renewed or schools that are not meeting the mark in terms of academic outcomes,” she said. “We’re dealing with children and families, and they deserve high-quality schools.”

Like other system leaders, Pence says she has no doubt this is the goal — and one shared by the city’s charter operators. “If the district wants to run schools, great, but we’re going to have to take some offline,” she says. “Closing schools, no matter what, is really hard. Everyone loves their school.” 

Correction: The combined ARISE and Crescent City school will be run by Crescent City.

Disclosure: The City Fund provides financial support to Collegiate Academies, New Schools for New Orleans and .