She had one son in the Army distributing books to grateful children in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, she had a teenage son at school without textbooks in the rebuilt, balkanized school system in New Orleans.

Parent Kathey Boisseau saw the irony up close. "I just want something that works," she said in an interview about the New Orleans schools.

Parents struggle to place their children in New Orleans public schools. Or, you could say, New Orleans "public" schools. In the aftermath of the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina that knocked the Crescent City off its foundation, authorities restarted the school system in a way that sought to destroy the United Teachers of New Orleans and cranked the floodgates wide open for charter schools and minimal school staff salaries.

'Big, big chaos'

The splintered, restored school system, is "a big, big chaos," said Nikkisha Breaux, mother of three children. Breaux cited hundreds of students wanting to go to school but told initially by authorities there were no public schools available.

Dozens of pre-Katrina schools remain condemned in neighborhoods dotted by abandoned homes. Returning parents, putting their lives together, must learn how to navigate the school system while sorting out the contradictory claims among charter schools, (state-run) Recovery District and reopened parish schools (parish is a unit of municipal government in Louisiana

"I'm fighting for my kids to have a better education," said Breaux, who herself aspires to be a teacher. She is taking courses at Southern University in New Orleans.