District 6 School Board election pits incumbent against neighborhood activist

The next few years will bring the the long-awaited reunification of nearly all the city’s public schools under a single entity governed by a locally-elected Orleans Parish School Board. While only three of the seven seats on the board are contested in the Nov. 8 election, one is District 6 in Uptown and Carrollton, where incumbent Woody Koppel will face a challenge from neighborhood activist David Alvarez.

For many parents and education activists, the primary change involved in the return of schools to the control of the OPSB is that the governing body overseeing them will again be locally elected in New Orleans, rather than an agency comprised of unelected appointees based in Baton Rouge. While day-to-day management of the schools will still be distributed among a number of different charter organizations, those organizations will now answer to the OPSB instead of the Recovery School District — and the OPSB will also have increased control over many centralized services, such as enrollment, discipline, special education and others.

The OPSB has drafted a $20 million plan to unify the districts, but many of the details remain to be decided — such as how to fit the needs of all those schools within that budget, which schools will return first, how to craft a facilities plan for the future, and how to handle the challenging levels of school funding from the state.

In District 6, Koppel, a real-estate developer, is facing a single challenger, David Alvarez, who runs the educational consulting company Evaluation Insight and serves in the leadership of the Carrollton Riverbend Neighborhood Association. Koppel is seeking a third term on the School Board after his re-election in 2012 with 66 percent of the vote; Alvarez is making his first bid for public office.

Koppel said his focus in the next four years will be ensuring an “orderly transition” of RSD schools back to OPSB control and ensuring that all are operating according to the same standards. All individual school finances need to be reporting their finances the same way; a system is needed to oversee the condition and lifespan of all school buildings; and district-wide conversations need to be held on everything from bus wait times to admissions to holiday calendars.

“Everything falls into this one unification argument. When everybody’s in it together, I think there will be a lot more camaraderie,” Koppel said. “We need to ensure that as this process happens, it happens in a methodical, easy-to-understand way, so you don’t have schools return and it’s just chaos. I think having everybody in the same room and collaborating will make less of an us-and-them situation.”

Alvarez, who touts endorsements from the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee as well as local teachers’ and workers’ unions, said that while the school board incumbents campaign on the growth in the local schools’ performance scores, those rosy numbers overlook the needs of students that are still unmet. The school board should be more creative in using its empty buildings to add more schools and new models to under-served neighborhoods, Alvarez said, rather than disposing of them.

“This is probably the most critical time regarding the school board policy and lasting impacts on student outcomes. We have a lot of schools about to come back to our governance,” Alvarez said. “We have to quit listening to certain narratives as though they are ultimate universal truths, when we have yet to bring about the system-wide improvement that we should expect.”

District 1 and 3 incumbents John Brown Sr. and Sarah Usdin, respectively, were re-elected without opposition. Ethan Ashley and Ben Kleban won the District 2 and 5 seats, respectively, when Ashley’s incumbent opponent was disqualified and Kleban’s only opponent withdrew.

The District 4 and 7 seats held by Leslie Ellison and Nolan Marshall Sr. are the only other seats being contested on Nov. 8, and for more information on those races, see a longer version of this article published in this week’s edition of Gambit.