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So imagine walking into an elementary school. The classrooms are full of desks, chairs, posters, colorful shapes and words. Hallways are lined with motivational statements: “leave no child behind,” “creativity needs no direction,” and the school’s mission statement. The cafeteria is filled with tables and benches to accommodate at least 200 kids. There’s a stage, piano, and chairs for a sizable audience.

Now imagine that sitting in toxic floodwater – water from industrial New Orleans, a prominent port city, water soaking in garbage dumps, sewage water – for up to two weeks. Imagine after the city was drained, the school doors chained up, all contents inside left to rot. For nine months.

One volunteer site of Common Ground consisting of about twenty volunteers is the only group of people in the entire city of New Orleans that’s responsible for cleaning up these schools. We “gut” the schools (remove all the rubble and place it outside so FEMA trucks can drive it away) and then the remaining labor is contracted out. The things we discard are usually usable – undamaged by the floodwater: hundreds of unopened textbooks in storage rooms, thousands of clean, unwrinkled pieces of paper, sharp-tipped crayons, markers, colored pencils. The garbage piles we create look like an exploded Office Max TM.

By the end of the work day, most of us are so frustrated from being the only people who seem to care about the future of the children of New Orleans, and that we’re throwing out so much usable material, and that we aren’t being assisted by residents who do care about this, and that neither FEMA, nor the city, nor the school district seem to know we exist. The only insurance we have (the forms we sign to cover medical care in case of emergency) is provided by the Recovery School District (a 7 month old organization) and a firm out of Boston.

It seems in a lot of ways that the corruption is so bad here that the government is actually harming the people rather than helping them. To see a sign stating “no child left behind” as I walk into a trashed school was humorous – upper-middle class Caucasian college student volunteers from out of state are the ones who are responsible for these children not being left behind.

A few words about the state of the upper-middle class college students that seemed to appall the teacher I talked to at a school yesterday: we have no air conditioning, we have running water only sporadically, we sleep in the same neighborhood as drug dealers, and talk to them daily, we don’t have fresh food and have been eating rice and canned beans for longer than any of our tastes allow satisfaction, we sleep with cockroaches.

Where, we want to know, is FEMA? Where is the administration of the city of New Orleans? Where is the school district? Why do these disconnects exist: that between the federal government and it’s policies (“no child left behind”), that between the city of New Orleans and the school district? Where is the $95 billion (yes, billion) that the federal government included in its yearly budget for 2006? Why is the disconnect between the citizens whose children are forced to deal drugs on the street for lack of school, for lack of attention, for lack of resources, and their lack of ability to take the educations of their own children into their own hands? Where does this disconnect originate? How are citizens rendered so powerless?

These questions assault us daily, and still remain unanswered.