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.

But as New Orleans crept closer to becoming the country's first all-charter system in the 2010s, the handful of traditional schools left, including Bethune Elementary, started feeling more pressure.

"It was a forceful thing," she remembers. "You're gonna do charter. Everybody's gonna do charter."

Haynes-Smith fought it until 2017, when she formed a charter group so she coul

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