Posts Tagged ‘frank’

Report from Louisiana: Hurricane Season

Posted: September 26, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Here we are, all the way at the end of September and there has been no Gulf hurricane. The weather-alarmists are in a panic.

And then.

And then, just like that there are now two named storms and areas of low pressure, tropical depression, and my social media feed is filled with spaghetti models and dire predictions of a possible Cat 4 hurricane coming to … where?  Who knows?

But weather-alarmists are happy now, and in full alert mode.

What is it that causes this fascination with storms? Nobody wants a devastating storm. Some of this frenzy goes beyond mere interest-for-preparation-purposes.  It’s very strange.

At any rate, it looks like Florida may be in the crosshairs this time with Ian, and not that I want anything to happen to Florida, but Louisiana is breathing a little sigh of relief. We all know things can change, but at least we don’t see terror right at the moment.

On a related note, you might be interest in checking out my friend Rob Gaudet’s new book: Cajun Navy Ground Force: Citizen-Led Disaster Response. Rob and I became friends back in 2012 when he was working with C.L. Bryant promoting C.L.’s documentary Runaway Slave. The story of the Cajun Navy is amazing and it is probably impossible to count how many lives they’ve saved, homes repaired, or people they’ve helped in various ways. Coordinating this effort is an exhaustive job and Rob does a great job. Get the book!

You don’t ever want to need the help of the Cajun Navy but thank goodness they exist if you do.

As much as I scoff at the weather-alarmists, in Louisiana we are within reason to worry about these storms: our coastline is vanishing at an alarming rate, and a lot of the reason is storm surge made so much worse by human factors. For decades we cut canals through the marsh for energy exploration and as a result the saltwater has encroached and contributed to erosion. It’s much more complicated than that, but the fact remains that we have a problem.

At any rate, as we move on into the hurricane season we keep our eyes to the radar, to the spaghetti models, and we pray. That’s about our best line of defense, it seems.

Report from Louisiana: NOLA is the Murder Capital of America

Posted: September 19, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By: Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – A recent article in The Wall Street Journal breaks the oh-so-shocking news that New Orleans is now the Murder Capital of America.

I’m tempted to blame this distinction on decades of poor management and Democrat mayors, but an article in RedState breaks it down further:

While it’s tempting to blame the city’s crime woes on “defund the police,” in this case, it’s more complicated than that. Hurricane Katrina did enormous damage to the city’s infrastructure, causing major instability and violence. In response, then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for a two-year police department hiring freeze, which the city has still not fully recovered from.

But remember, Hurricane Katrina also famously “flushed out” hundreds of …let’s say…undesirable, criminally inclined residents to other cities. Call it a diaspora of criminals if you like.

Yet this is no doubt that New Orleans is an extremely dangerous place to be these days, especially for tourists who don’t always know the right and wrong parts of town to visit.

According to the WSJ:

In New Orleans, city officials and residents point to an overwhelmed police department as a major factor. The city has about 50% to 60% of the officers it needs to offer adequate protection for residents, estimated Ronal Serpas, who was the city’s police superintendent from 2010 to 2014 and is now a criminal justice professor at Loyola University New Orleans.

This is the trend all across the country; many cities are seeing a rise in violent crime. Here in Shreveport, we see it too. It is easier to find the problem in Shreveport: it is a combination of factors but primary among them is our Soros-elected District Attorney who sets accused murders free and refuses to lock up known criminals. We also have an extremely ineffective young, Democrat mayor with his eyes on bigger things rather than the challenge at his feet.

Recently in one of our neighborhood Facebook groups, someone posted pictures of a once lovely walking trail in the city that is now overgrown with weeds, deteriorating, and suffering crippling neglect. In some places you can’t even see there is a paved trail at all; you can only see what looks like an empty overgrown field.

I see this as an analogy for the city and for New Orleans, too. All the positive things are covered by the negative; neglect and lack of care are evident at every turn. When you drive into Shreveport from any direction it looks like a town nobody cares about and I know this is the case is a lot of places.

It is past time for us to start caring and start making things better for all of us. From elections to local grassroots volunteer work and service, we’ve got to turn this around.

New Orleans is still a great city and Shreveport still can turn the tide, but that window is closing very fast. New Orleans is filled with history and culture; that city will survive. But what about all the others across the nation? When are we going to stop the festering decline and neglect in our cities?

Report from Louisiana: Juvenile Offenders going to Angola

Posted: September 12, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Much to the ire of liberals, Louisiana officials are close to finalizing a plan that would move “high-risk” incarcerated teenagers from existing juvenile correctional centers to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

The identified teenagers, about twenty-five of them, are “high-risk” due to lack of response to the “open dorm strategy” and will be placed in individual prison cells. This move is partially in response to several recent instances of violence, riots, and escape at several youth facilities. These teens will leave their one-person cells during the daytime to attend class and group counseling.

Critics of the plan speaking with a judge recently are concerned that it will feel “too much like prison” for these offenders and that the adult lifers at Angola will present a problem:

Vincent Schiraldi, a juvenile justice expert the civil rights attorneys hired to testify in court, told the judge he ran into an adult inmate while touring the proposed juvenile justice facility at Angola just last week.

Schiraldi, who oversaw incarcerated youth facilities in Washington, D.C., and managed New York City’s Rikers Island jail, went on to express concern about the facility for incarcerated youth at Angola.

“It’s going to scream ‘prison’ to the young people,” he said in testimony Wednesday.

Incarcerated young people should be kept in housing that looks less like cells and more like dormitories, otherwise they will be at higher risk for self-harm and suicide, Schiraldi said. He also said that recreational facilities at the site are inadequate. There isn’t an indoor gymnasium and the outdoor space doesn’t have a full basketball court or field where young people could realistically play team sports.

Additionally, “Schiraldi also described the kitchen in the Angola facility as ‘disgusting’ and called the visitation area inadequate. During family visits, incarcerated youth wouldn’t be able to touch visitors and would be forced to talk to them through a mesh screen, according to photos Schiraldi showed the court. ‘This is terrible. Kids should be able to be in the same room with their parents,’ he said.”

According to The Advocate, “Some worry that putting the youth on the grounds of the infamous prison, the nation’s biggest penitentiary and a former slave plantation, sends a message that they are beyond redemption. The soft-hearted fret because “these children…made a mistake.” Schiraldi laments that “the facility’s open showers…poses a humiliating environment for youth the clean themselves in.”

Again, remember, high-risk offenders. Not “just a mistake.” The prison setting is exactly what juvenile justice officials want for these offenders. These are offenders who are identified as “high-risk,” not your petty theft shoplifters.  Officials believe that the single-person cells are necessary for the innates privacy and security.

Color me unsympathetic to the lamentations of the liberal bleeding hearts on this one. In spring 2022, three juveniles escaped from Ware Youth Center with the help of a trustee. They were being held on murder and armed robbery charges. This summer several inmates escaped from a suburban New Orleans youth detention center after a riot. It was the fourth incident of escape this year.

Clearly the system is broken, on many levels.

Report from Louisiana: Teacher Shortage

Posted: September 5, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Besides the LSU one-point loss to Florida State last night, the other big headline in the papers this morning is the national teacher shortage.

At this point, when education officials and politicians lament about teacher shortages I just shake my head and move on. I might roll my eyes, too. I mean, why is anybody surprised that there is a teacher shortage?

I’ve beat this drum in this space before: I retired at 25-years from my teaching position. I could not do thirty years. I wanted to because I loved my students and I loved teaching. But when Louisiana public education officials pushed out the canned curriculum with script, pre-made, dull PowerPoint slides with scripted questions, which we were expected to “read with fidelity,” I was done.

Not to mention that the pay is terrible. The voters refused multiple attempts at a pay raise because we “knew the pay when we went into teaching,” and for multiple other reasons like inflated bureaucracy at the school board office. Top heavy administration. Created jobs for nepotism reasons.

No, instead of being paid like other professionals, we are given free donuts and soft drink coupons on teacher appreciation week. The local Sonic might donate some breakfast burritos for workshop day. That should do it.

Teachers are leaving not just because of low pay. They are leaving because they aren’t really allowed to teach.

They are leaving because their planning period has never been actually for lesson planning. (You don’t need to plan for lessons that are already prepared for you and your script written). No, planning periods are for meetings, “professional development,” and for covering other classes.

Teachers are leaving because classroom management is more challenging these days than ever before. Cell phones and air pods have changed the face of classroom management. 

Teachers are leaving because few people actually respect a teacher; they are thankful for you, sometimes. But they don’t really respect you.

Teachers are leaving because they have to create Amazon Wish Lists for basic classroom materials like paper, pencils, and markers. If you want a stapler on your desk, buy it yourself. If you need dry erase markers for your board, that’s on you, too.

Teachers are leaving because along with teaching you are also expected to support kids by being a class sponsor or a yearbook sponsor or a cheer sponsor or a club sponsor….all on your own time, after school hours, without extra pay. You are expected to do these things to prove that you love the kids and your school. I did them, and I loved my kids whether or not I was yearbook sponsor. But sometimes I was at school until midnight working on the yearbook. Without extra pay.

Teachers are leaving because the government has tied the hands of administrators is dealing out discipline. When a throw-down-girl-fight breaks out in your classroom over something that happened earlier in the day at lunch, and teenage girls are pulling hair and banging heads against the floor, furniture flying, endangering other students in the way, and those girls are hauled down to the office by the School Resource Officer, and the next day they are back in the classroom?  Who is really in control here? And by the way, you better beef up your classroom management because your administrator will tell you that if your classroom management was up to par a fight wouldn’t have happened. It’s your fault.

So, color me NOT surprised when you talk about a teacher shortage. I don’t regret my time in the classroom at all. There were times, with my students, that teaching felt like the best job in the world. But there were other times that teaching left you beat down and in tears at the end of the day.

It made the decision to retire at twenty-five years with an $500 per month pay cut in my pension easier. If I could have made to thirty-years I’d have gotten a better pension, but I absolutely could not do it. I was done.

And now, in the face of this teacher shortage, I never even consider going back.

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