The following haiku were written by the young members of Rethink, students of New Orleans public schools who surveyed the facilities at several schools and took pictures of the horrible conditions of the bathrooms. The students then worked all summer to design a green bathroom that would provide a safe, comfortable place for the students of New Orleans schools. These haiku capture the experience of neglect, disrespect, and low quality of life that young people suffer in the current state of New Orleans schools. The students then wrote about the dream of the green bathrooms that they designed, and about the hope and inspiration the design has brought them.

The poems were developed with the help of Quality Public School Education as a Civil Right (www.qecr.org), a national network of advocates, parents, youth, teachers, and community members committed to securing a constitutionally protect right to high quality public school education.