Adrinda Kelly watched from New York as Hurricane Katrina swallowed her hometown of New Orleans in 2005. Floodwaters rose, neighborhoods disappeared underwater, and she felt a familiar ache deepen.
Her family was safe, but devastation quickly compounded a painful realization: Black children were portrayed as disposable, and New Orleans’ education system was almost completely privatized. Black students’ test scores faltered.
Almost two decades later and nearly 2,000 miles away, similar echoes reverberated in Altadena, California, as wildfires swept through Los Angeles County in January. Flames consumed buildings and homes, but also something less tangible: the future of hundreds of thousands of students. More than 700,000 California children, mainly Black and Latino, missed school, some for weeks, and many still haven’t fully returned. Adding injury to insult, more than 100 local teachers were laid off in the month after the blaze…