In post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, control of the public schools was wrested from the seven-member Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). Unheard-of academic gains followed the city's switch to a near-universal charter-school system, yet returning to failure always felt as close as the next hurricane. Give OPSB power again, people said, and the schools would slide right back where they started. In 2018, the district reunified. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, academic improvement had stalled in New Orleans. But as schools shuffled students back and forth between in-person and virtual schooling, amid a resurgence in COVID-19 cases and revitalized calls for racial justice, there was turnover in the school board seats. There are now plans to focus on students' mental health and systemic racism along with the usual fretting over test scores and charter renewals. Charter groups have been working together and with the district for several years now, first to develop the common-enrollment system, then to work out the details of the reunified district, and now to coordinate services during the pandemic. The work done during the crisis illustrates an especially public and effective model for cooperation. The district led the push for technology, swiftly acquiring 10,000 laptops and 8,000 hotspots, which charters distributed to needy students, according to a district press release. Charters worked with their own meal providers to get food to families, and the district ran interference to ensure that the schools would be reimbursed through the federal lunch program. Lewis and the previous board kept up with the latest COVID-19 information from the city and healthcare systems, and set reopening timelines and basic safety guidelines with the charter leaders' consent. For the first time, almost all the city's charters agreed to a common school calendar and made a unified decision about whether to hold classes virtually or in-person. It might not be a coincidence that parents' goodwill toward the school system has gone up, according to an October 2020 poll by the Cowen Institute.