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

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%.

As Franklin completed its first week of classes in late August, Katrina loomed on the horizon. The afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 27, students and teachers raced to evacuate. Most believed they would be home again in a few days. It wasn't until Wednesday that evacuees realized the city had been devastated by a Category IV hurricane and the collapse of its levee system.

Ms. Christen fled to her mother's house in Amite, La., 50 miles north of New Orleans. The storm wiped out electricity in Amite and for the next few days Ms. Christen provided round-the-clock care for her frail mother, a survivor of two heart attacks.

Most phone and Internet connections in southern Louisiana were shattered. In Boise, Idaho, Franklin alumnus Chris Wylie decided to help. A Web programmer by trade, he created an online bulletin board where Franklin students, parents and teachers could post their phone numbers, emails and brief status reports.

Almost immediately, news started trickling in. Students who knew one another's cell numbers and personal email addresses spread the word about Mr. Wylie's site. Alumni offered a cot to sleep on in Mobile, Ala., or help with school placement in Cincinnati. By Oct. 1, Mr. Wylie had connected nearly 1,000 Franklin students and alumni.

"This God-forsaken laptop is the only way I have to get in touch with all of you," Franklin junior Rebekka Veith wrote on Sept. 10. "I'm in Baton Rouge and this city blows. I'm betting Franklin does reopen. I miss you more than I've ever missed anything in my life."

New Links

At first, Ms. Christen was slow to realize the power of these new links. A year earlier, she had cracked down on her students penning gossipy blogs, regarding the Internet as a forum for teenage mischief. On Sept. 12 -- two weeks after the hurricane -- she groused that the New Orleans school district hadn't told her where students and teachers had relocated. "It's very disheartening," she complained at the time. "There's no sense of urgency."

Then Ms. Christen opened a Yahoo email account and began posting updates about the school. In early September, she stared at grainy images of New Orleans on Google Earth, an interactive online atlas. Most of the Franklin campus was covered with water but the tops of parked cars were visible. Because the National Guard had sealed off the lakefront district where the school is based, outsiders could only guess at the damage.

Franklin football coach Charles Firneno, a former Marine helicopter pilot, couldn't wait and decided to head over to the school. On Sept. 21, he put on a flight suit that had been tucked in a closet, donned his Marine beret and strapped a service pistol to his chest.

Three miles from Franklin's campus, Mr. Firneno encountered a National Guard roadblock. He flashed his old military identification and a young Guardsman saluted. "Right this way, sir," the Guardsman said.

A few minutes later, Mr. Firneno was prowling through the school. Conditions were bad but not hopeless, Mr. Firneno thought. He splashed bleach on first-floor office walls, trying to retard mold growth. He removed some dead lab animals from their cages and disposed of them outside. When he got home, he began thinking about how to fix the whole building.

"Someone needs to be in charge," Mr. Firneno declared, as he paced back and forth in his living room. "I've been to Beirut. To me, this is an easy job." He fiddled with a piece of paper listing 20 building-recovery tasks for the school. He grabbed a pencil and wrote "ME!" next to the first entry: "Oversee Project."

Before the flood, Mr. Firneno had struggled to win the respect of faculty colleagues. He was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who taught math and earth sciences but he was known mostly for his football team's never-ending string of losing seasons. Other teachers with more advanced degrees dubbed him Rambo.

When Ms. Christen heard about Mr. Firneno's plans, she gave him an extra set of school keys and the authority to spend school funds. Daily he buzzed around the school grounds and posted Internet notices seeking cleanup crews. Dozens signed up. At one point, 60 students from a religious college in Ohio arrived for a week, recruited by a local pastor and Franklin alumnus. The group helped move library books to safety and tore out the badly buckled gym floor.

Other teachers rallied to the school from across the country. From Chicago, history teacher Diego Gonzalez-Grande emailed or phoned more than 100 seniors. He offered to write college recommendations for them and occasionally suggested uplifting bits of Tolstoy to read. "I'm not getting paid anything for this," he said in October. "But I hope it helps them."

Some big projects -- such as fixing Franklin's air-conditioning system -- needed to be done by certified technicians. Those were put on hold until insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned their attention to Franklin.

Other flooded public schools remained locked up for weeks after Katrina as educators waited for government inspectors. Help came more slowly than they expected and mold ran wild. In late September, city officials said they had little hope of reopening affected schools for the remainder of the current school year. They wanted schools to reopen simultaneously to avoid the appearance of granting special favors, threatening Franklin's revival.

Ms. Christen couldn't stand the idea of letting the entire year vanish. She feared community activists might seek to convert Franklin into an open-admissions school and dismantle college-prep programs that had been built over decades. "If the school district abandons us, we'll never get started again," she said in mid-September.

The principal decided to strike pre-emptively. She sounded out Duris Holmes, president of the Franklin Parents' Association, about reconstituting Franklin as a charter school with its own bylaws and budget. Charter schools receive government funding but control how it's spent. Mr. Holmes liked the plan. So did officials at the nearby University of New Orleans, sought out by Ms. Christen, who offered financial and legal expertise.

In mid-October, Ms. Christen vowed to push ahead with chartering Franklin despite more than 30 years working in the New Orleans public-school system. She aimed to reopen Franklin Jan. 17 in time for second-semester classes and hoped to attract 500 of the school's 900 students.

Swept Up

Many of the students were swept up in unbearable nostalgia for the New Orleans life they used to know. "I'll be the first person back," said Jenna Deboisblanc, a Franklin junior who was then living in Natchitoches, La. "I'll sleep outside the school in a tent for a week if I have to." Ms. Deboisblanc had enrolled in the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, an elite boarding school set in pecan-farming country. Classes were good but small-town life wasn't right for her.

The badly buckled gym floor at Benjamin Franklin High.

For a volleyball match against a nearby Christian academy, she showed up in the tight spandex shorts worn by Franklin players. Her opponents gasped. "Those aren't appropriate," she says she was told. She wasn't allowed to take the court until someone provided her with a below-the-knee, denim skirt.

Ms. Christen collected stories of her homesick students, who were spread across 38 states. Like a shrewd politician, she encouraged busloads of them to come to New Orleans on the evening of Oct. 28 when the citywide school board was set to vote on Franklin's charter application. Some board members had criticized the plan as elitist. No one knew for sure how the board would rule.

Minutes before the meeting began, the doors of the city council chambers swung open and swarms of Franklin students crowded in. They were quiet and orderly and formed a sea of green Franklin sweatshirts. One board member who had been publicly wary of Franklin's charter plan, Rev. Torin Sanders, said he would vote in favor of the switch. Franklin's plan prevailed by a 6-0 vote.

That evening, about 50 parents and teachers celebrated at the home of Franklin parents James and Kelly Brown. Parents were jubilant. But some teachers struck a more muted tone. The revived school wouldn't have a union any more. That would mean the end of tenure, seniority and a grievance system.

Over the next month, Franklin teachers agonized about whether to rejoin their old school. "I think what they've done to the union is a tragedy," said Leo Laventhal, a Franklin Spanish teacher and a top union official. He was talking from Shreveport, La., where he had moved to teach at a local high school. Standards weren't as high as at Franklin, he said, but he felt he owed his new students a full year. He wouldn't be coming back, at least not right away.

Earl Luetzenschwab, who taught English at Franklin for 17 years, received a three-sentence email from Ms. Christen saying that his services wouldn't be needed. Mr. Luetzenschwab had locked horns with Ms. Christen last year over her efforts to standardize parts of the curriculum. In an email posting to a Franklin community site, Mr. Luetzenschwab said his exit showed "the nature of power."

Ms. Christen said she had too many English teachers for the new, shrunken Franklin. "I tried to pick the ones who could make the greatest contributions to the school," she said. Most other teachers decided to take their chances.

Going into the Thanksgiving break, Ms. Christen assembled a budget that called for about $3.2 million of government funding, including a sizable slice of federal money specifically designed for new charter schools in the Katrina zone. With that money, she could cover operating expenses and pay teachers at least as much as they earned before -- perhaps a little more.

Through December, however, bad news mounted. A big piece of the Louisiana money wouldn't show up until late February. It wasn't clear whether Franklin would qualify for other state funds on which Mr. Christen had counted. And U.S. Department of Education officials suggested Franklin might not be eligible for the special charter-school funds after all, because the school based enrollment on students' academic records.

During a bleak meeting of the new charter-school board, Franklin director James Meza, the dean of education at the University of New Orleans, says he began to wonder whether the school could open in January after all. Without the $1 million in federal funds, he thought the only way to patch the hole in the budget would be to slash teachers' pay 20% or more. Teachers might agree but it would be a devastating blow.

Ms. Christen drove repeatedly to Baton Rouge to plead her case with top officials at the state Department of Education. "This is about children," she recalls telling them. The state relented. Gary Wheat, Louisiana's charter-school program administrator, said in a recent interview that his department and outside attorneys determined that Franklin was indeed eligible for the special funding.

Ms. Christen also turned to a Franklin parent, Julia Walker, who had a long history of fund raising for nearby Tulane University. Franklin needed $500,000 in grants as well as a bridge loan to cover the weeks until the state's February payment.

Working from a temporary home in Vero Beach, Fla., Ms. Walker bombarded foundations in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., with grant requests. Lots of potential donors said they would consider Franklin's needs but no checks arrived. Then, in the first week of January, money tumbled forth. The Joe W. and Dorothy Dorsett Brown Foundation, a New Orleans group founded on an oil fortune, provided an interest-free bridge loan of $250,000. Other foundations provided most of the needed grants.

Ms. Christen wanted to celebrate but she was running out of energy. She hadn't done anything to fix the damage to her own house in suburban Metairie, La. A pine tree was leaning perilously close to the roof and her kitchen countertop has buckled. Many evenings, she fell asleep on her sofa, unable to make it to the bedroom.

At the end of one day last week, English teacher Anita Calagna asked Ms. Christen how the school should celebrate its reopening.

The pair began reminiscing about a hurricane alert several years ago. That time, a seemingly menacing storm veered away from New Orleans. Although school was canceled, some students wandered by the campus anyway.

It was a sunny, clear day and the teenagers walked over to a nearby levy and flew kites. Everything about that moment projected an aura of youthful innocence and bravado. Hurricanes weren't real. They never hit New Orleans.

"What if we have the students fly kites this time, too?" Ms. Calagna said.

"I think that's a marvelous idea," Ms. Christen replied. And for the first time all day, she burst out laughing.

Write to George Anders at george.anders@wsj.com