14 July 2025
By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer
Black Education for New Orleans (BE NOLA) recently released its “Black Is Brilliant” digital syllabus, which the organization describes as “a groundbreaking framework poised to ignite positive change in Black education within New Orleans, and a framework to carry on nationwide.”
BE NOLA’s mission is to increase the capacity of Black-led efforts to advance educational progress in New Orleans. The organization has officially existed for eight years, but the conversations to begin the group began about ten years after Hurricane Katrina when the organizers noticed the disparities and unfairness in the local public education system post-Katrina.
“So many Black people thought education reform was happening to them, not with them,” said Adrinda Kelly, executive director of BE NOLA. “BE NOLA comes on the scene because of this disparity and unfairness.”
The “Black Is Brilliant” syllabus is 43 pages and free for anyone to access and use. It includes key terms, philosophical pillars, deep dives into historic local Black schools, like St. Augustine and St. Mary’s, and more.
“The syllabus is an easy resource to use,” said Stevona Elem-Rogers, chief of community programming and partnership at BE NOLA. “We have various study groups going on throughout the city.”
One of the key points of emphasis in the syllabus, according to Elem-Rogers, is setting high expectations with love.
“It’s a beautiful compilation of resources, archival material, and reflection questions to help us understand and reflect upon what Black education means in New Orleans,” Kelly said.
Kelly said a major influence on this point was The Learning Workshop, an early education center founded by local civil rights icon Oretha Castle Haley in 1980 and located in the 8th Ward. It stayed open until Hurricane Katrina hit the city. When children needed to be disciplined, The Learning Workshop did not isolate children in a negative way. Instead, they sent them to the enjoying the fresh sea breeze and splash of waves at the beach, pollution is still plaguing too many of the places where we swim,” said John Rumpler, one of the report’s authors and the clean water director for the Environment America Research and Policy Center, in a press release.
Bacterial water pollution can come from a variety of sources, such as sewage overflows from old and aging sewer systems, and runoff from farms with livestock.
The combination of increased development and fewer wetlands can also propagate the spread of harmful bacteria throughout waterways. Wetlands act as filters for bacterial pollution, and an overabundance of parking lots, houses and roads funnel runoff into rivers and lakes instead of allowing it to be absorbed into the ground.
The worst testing results in Louisiana were at Rutherford Beach, where the Mermentau River empties into the Gulf of Mexico in Cameron Parish. Its water was found to be potentially unsafe on 19 of the 28 days tested last year. Fecal bacteria frequency was also high at Martin Beach in Cameron Parish and at five sections of Holly Beach.
North Beach, on the upper shore of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish, saw unsafe test results on 19 of the 30 days sampled.
Poor water quality was reported at Fontainebleau State Park in St. Tammany Parish on 12 of the 29 days tested, placing it 10th among state beaches with the worst test results.
The Environment America Research and Policy Center is calling for a deeper commitment to improving water infrastructure as well as protecting wetlands, reworking the way farms handle livestock manure and expanding testing for harmful bacteria at beaches.
“Now is the time to fix our water infrastructure and stop the flow of pathogens to our beaches,” Rumpler said.
The Gulf Coast had the highest percentage of potentially unsafe sampling days out of any region in the study despite having only 218 of the 1,930 sampling spots. Testing showed 84 percent of Gulf Coast beaches had at least one potentially unsafe day, followed by the West Coast (79%), Great Lakes (71%), East Coast (54%) and Alaska and Hawaii (10%).
Nationally, 61 percent of beaches had at least one day with potentially unsafe bacteria levels.
This article originally published in the July 14, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.