The Advocate’s editorial board says that while New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina is rightly celebrated across America, several mistakes occurred that made it harder for poor families to recover from the flooding that devastated the city. Those lessons should be heeded now that the Baton Rouge region is facing its own recovery.

Louisiana, which won $500 million from Congress last month, faces crucial decisions in setting up a homeowner aid program. The state cannot repeat the mistakes of the Road Home, which left many of New Orleans’ poorer neighborhoods with a mixture of tidy, rebuilt homes and blighted , abandoned housing. After Katrina, said demographer Allison Plyer, head of the Data Center in New Orleans, money first went to owner-occupied housing, meaning rental units were slower to bounce back. The U.S. Department of Justice eventually filed suit against the state, saying aid to rental properties was unreasonably blocked, and the state agreed in 2014 to allow more affordable-housing funding in the city.

The Shreveport hospital mess

Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration has struck a deal to continue the fractured partnership that is responsible for medical education and indigent hospital care in Shreveport and Monroe. But as star reporter Melinda Deslatte of the Associated Press explains, the tensions between LSU and the Biomedical Research Foundation of Northeast Louisiana continue.

The reworked terms of the state’s privatization contract seem to anticipate the rocky and difficult relationship between LSU leaders and the Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana will continue. They provide a path for outside, independent arbiters to come in when LSU and the foundation known as BRF can’t reach agreement on basic areas like bill payments. … The reworked terms look more favorable to LSU. BRF will provide $37 million in additional payments to the Shreveport medical school for its doctors’ services in the current budget year. By Oct. 17, the hospital operator also will pay at least $6.9 million LSU says it is owed. Another $5.3 million for disputed billings will be placed into an escrow account, while an outside arbiter determines whether LSU should receive that money.

Reform the bail system

Former New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy was dismayed by the New Orleans City Council’s 2-2 deadlock on a proposal that aimed to reform the city’s system for bail by allowing people accused of low-level offenses to be released on their own recognizance instead of being forced to post bail. Writing for Nola.com/The Times-Picayune, Barthelemy notes that New Orleans is the “most incarcerated city, in the most incarcerated state, in the most incarcerated country in the world.”

Bail is just one more system in New Orleans that segregates the poor from those with access to cash. Picture this: Two people are arrested for public drunkenness. One has $150 to pay the cash bond. He gets out of jail automatically. One doesn’t have $150 to pay the cash bond. He sits in jail. The only difference between these two people, neither of whom have seen a judge at this point in the story, is that one has money, and the other doesn’t. This, literally, is unconstitutional, and if it weren’t, it would still be bad policy.

College leaders endorse teacher training plan

Louisiana’s top higher education governing board has signed off on an ambitious plan to overhaul teacher training by, among other things, requiring aspiring educators to complete a yearlong residency program as college seniors. As The Advocate’s Will Sentell reports, college leaders had been concerned about the potential cost of the changes.

“Oftentimes the first-year teacher feels overwhelmed, not sufficiently prepared,” said Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Rallo. Better prepared teachers, backers say, will mean improved student achievement in a state where classroom achievement has lagged for generations. The key concern of college and university leaders has been costs of the overhaul, especially amid budget problems and repeated cuts in state aid for higher education. Rallo said in an interview that he is “comfortable and confident” in how the changes will be financed, which is supposed to include both state and federal dollars.

Number of the Day

1,262,888 – Estimated population of metro new Orleans in July 2015, a 6 percent increase since April 2010 but only 94 percent of the region’s population in 2000. (Source: The Data Center)