When charter schools began replacing public schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary was one of the city’s holdouts.
“I was so against charter schools. I thought it was the pits,” says Mary Haynes-Smith, the school’s longtime principal.
Haynes-Smith didn’t like what she’d heard from parents—that they felt shut out by the private organizations hired to run the charter schools.
Read more at NPR.
