Citizens’ City Hall

By Sarah Elise Lewis

Several months ago, the Recovery School District published a series of “snapshots” that indicated its assessment of each school it controls and described the District’s plans for the building. Unfortunately, many historic, structurally sound schools have been slated for demolition or “complete replacement”. The distinction between demo and complete replacement is a little fuzzy, so in our continuing quest to understand what the contractors mean by “complete replacement” we visited the Moton Elementary School in the Desire neighborhood today. The school itself appears to be a functional, structurally sound building, as you can see in the above video.

However, upon doing some more digging, we learned that the school is actually located on top of the Agriculture Street Landfill, an infamous Superfund site in New Orleans what was used as a dump and incinerator site after Hurricane Betsy. Later, under the administration of Mayor Dutch Morial, City leaders gave the OK to develop the area as a neighborhood, complete with single family housing and public housing units. It was sold as an opportunity for African-Americans to buy a piece of the American Dream.

Unfortunately, this particular piece of the Dream came complete with toxic levels of at least 50 carcinogens. The Moton School was built to serve this new community, which ultimately became embroiled in lawsuits over environmental justice and significantly elevated rates of cancer.

The EPA undertook remediation, including depositing a layer of “clean” soil throughout the neighborhood, and ultimately deemed most of the site safe. But this still raises several questions. What do the school systems’ contractors mean by proposing to completely replace a school on this environmentally compromised land? And what is going on with sink holes that are developing all around the school?