Citizens’ City Hall

By Sarah Elise Lewis

How many conversations have started with the line “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…….”?

I love those conversations because you can bet that they will be either insightful or totally misguided and entertaining. Either way it’s a ride.

I say this by way of introduction to some research I’ve been doing about Moton Elementary School, which I’ve been following for some time. That’s the school that has sat open and abandoned for nearly three years, with giant sink holes forming around its perimeter. It also just happens to be located on the contaminated soil of a former Superfund site.

I went back to Moton yesterday to take a few pictures. Soon after getting out of the car I met the woman who lives across the street in modest home with the FEMA Trailer aesthetic that’s become so familiar in working class neighborhoods since the flood. Seeing us peeking into the auditorium door, she shouted to me, “Hey. They gonna open the school back up?” Her children now attend elementary school Uptown, and she drives them there every day. From across the street to a world away.

She was hoping her children could attend Elementary School in a place that very well may cause cancer. Because it is better than the situation they’re in now.

And so I am angry. Not that the school is ungutted, unsecured, and still full of its contents nearly three years after Katrina, but because a neighborhood was ever built there in the first place. Who would benefit from placing homes on an incinerator site? Here is what we’ve found so far:

In the late 1960s the then director of HANO targeted the Agriculture Street Landfill site as a possible location for constructing public housing in the city. A group called the Desire Community Housing Corporation proposed plans to develop the site and mitigate the environmental hazards, although the remediation was never completed.

In 1986 Moton Elementary School was completed. Ellenese Brooks-Simms, a Board Member of Desire Community Housing Corporation, became its longtime principal and later served on the Orleans Parish School Board. Notably, she recently plead guilty to accepting bribes from Rep. William Jefferson’s brother Mose Jefferson in return for directing School Board contracts to a company Jefferson represented.

Indeed, this was not Brooks-Simms first brush with impropriety. During her tenure at Moton, she received criticism for directing school uniform contracts to Statewide, Inc., a company owned by Mose Jefferson and listing his sister-in-law, Carolyn Gill-Jefferson, as a registered agent.

I’m not conspiracy theorist, but….