Ray Abrams School was one of many public schools in New Orleans inundated and destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.   Like the nearby Ernest “Dutch” Morial School, Ray Abrams School was located in heavily flooded Eastern New Orleans, a large suburban enclave developed in the 1960s near the city center.  As part of the re-building effort, the Louisiana Department of Education Recovery School District asked Waggonner & Ball to develop a “prototype” school design that could fit a variety of different sites and restore a sense of pride and community for this heavily damaged precinct of the Ninth Ward.  Abrams and Morial Schools, located less than 1.5 miles apart, were designed and constructed concurrently using this new prototype design. Since these two schools had dramatically different sized sites, the prototype design had to fit the smaller 2.2 acre lot at Abrams to be accepted. The prototype also needed to allow each school to have its own unique character and identity while at the same time breaking up the massing and scale of the large building volumes.  Since each school is 137,000 s.f. and is designed to accommodate 1,200 students, it was important to create an appropriately scaled environment for the students.