In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the district temporarily lost 100% of its students and did not reopen a single school for more than two months. As it became apparent that the district was not prepared to bring the schools back from such a devastating blow, educators began to see a silver lining in Katrina's dark clouds. State School Board member Leslie Jacobs said, "The Diaspora of New Orleans represents the opportunity to rebuild our public school system" (Inskeep, 2005b). While some saw this as an opportunity to rebuild the system, huge segments of the population were living in Houston, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, and hundreds of other places across the country. With the low-income, non-white residents most often affected by the disaster, it fell to the educational organizations in the city to lead the debate over how the schools should be reopened. With leadership structures and educational platforms already in place, these stakeholder organizations (teachers union, school board, and the like) were well-situated to influence the course of events in the tumultuous few months following the storm. In understanding the ways in which various stakeholder organizations responded to Katrina, it should be possible to understand the reasons for the success and failure of certain groups. This may give some insight into the complex social and political forces that surround any effort to change urban schools. Understanding the role of stakeholder organizations in post-Katrina reforms is one small step toward the larger agenda of understanding how urban schools change. In this article, the author presents a study which examines the roles of five stakeholder organizations and their success in implementing structural reforms in the post-Katrina redesign of the New Orleans Public Schools. (Contains 3 figures.)