Looking back on Hurricane Katrina, 20 years later

Here & Now Anytime

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

After Hurricane Katrina, state officials in Louisiana accelerated their takeover of New Orleans’ lowest-performing schools. WWNO's Aubri Juhasz discusses the state of New Orleans' schools 20 years after Katrina.

Then, 20 years ago, actor Wendell Pierce managed to evacuate his parents from the Ponchartrain Park neighborhood in the hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Pierce joins us.

And, the animal welfare crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina spurred the nation to change the way it thinks about pets during natural disasters. NPR's Nate Rott reports.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com.
0:17.5	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:42.9	The wound will not go away. It will not, because it was trauma upon trauma. The New Orleans school system is still feeling the impacts of Hurricane Katrina 20 years later. It's Friday, August 29th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston.
0:49.4	I'm Ashley Locke, in for Chris Bentley.
0:58.3	Today on the show, actor in New Orleans native Wendell Pierce urges Americans to heed the lessons of Katrina. And we hear how the disaster helped change
1:04.3	guidance around evacuating pets. We got to take care of the earth. We got to take care of the animals.
1:09.9	And when we do that, we take care of ourselves. But first, like most things, public education after Hurricane Katrina
1:17.2	came to a complete stop. And during that pause, state officials in Louisiana accelerated their
1:22.6	takeover of New Orleans' lowest performing schools. A hundred of them were put into a state-run district.
1:29.1	And within a decade, the state closed all of them, replacing them with charter schools.
1:34.5	Scott Tong spoke with Aubrey Ujas of member station WNO in New Orleans about how bad of shape
1:41.2	the low-performing schools were in before Katrina.
1:44.0	Like other urban school districts, you know, things started to go downhill after White about how bad of shape the low-performing schools were in before Katrina?
1:49.8	Like other urban school districts, you know, things started to go downhill after White Flight picked up in the 70s.
1:52.9	The schools were neglected financially, mismanaged.
1:55.6	And by the 90s, corruption was a big problem, too.
1:57.4	The buildings were falling apart. And some schools didn't have enough textbooks, toilet paper even.
2:01.7	Carlos Luis Zervagon attended and later taught in the city's schools before Katrina.
2:05.6	The school system was from my vantage point at its end. Nothing worked. Test scores in New Orleans
2:14.4	were among the lowest in Louisiana when the storm hit, and only about
2:18.0	half of all students graduated from high school on time. Then the storm hit. Buildings were destroyed.
	...

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