He was arrested for robbery. She saw an honor roll student and went to work.
School absences were rare for Lorenzo Elliott, the drum major of the George Washington Carver High School band here in New Orleans and an honor roll student with a 96% attendance rate. So when he didn’t come to school one December morning in 2015, a social worker called his home.
His family said that police had picked him up. He was accused of being a getaway driver for two of his cousins, who had been arrested for robbing someone in eastern New Orleans. Because he was 17, Lorenzo was charged as an adult in Louisiana. Despite his accomplishments, he worried that his education would be derailed.
“I see a lot of black kids like me lost to the system,” Lorenzo says. “But my school had my back.”
Specifically, Lisa María Rhodes, a social worker at Carver at the time, jumped into action. Early in her career, when she worked as a Spanish-language teacher, Ms. Rhodes had witnessed how jail sent promising young people down a hard-to-reverse path. “Students would be missing from class. I would call home and find that they’d been arrested,” Ms. Rhodes says. “It kept happening.”
Because most of her students could not afford even modest bail, they often stayed in jail for months – sometimes years – awaiting trial.
A few hours after Ms. Rhodes heard about Lorenzo’s arrest, she wrote a detailed letter to the magistrate judge, to provide context about the drum major that went far beyond the brief incident summary that the arresting officers had supplied. The following morning, she went to Orleans Parish Criminal District Court to deliver the letter in person.
Lorenzo’s arrest turned out to be a tipping point for Ms. Rhodes: She vowed to commit whatever time was necessary to advocate for the
