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Hazel Aleman Landry, 92, a resident of Gibson, passed away Friday, January 3, 2020, at home surrounded by her loving family.
Hazel was born on August 16, 1927, in Bayou Long, the daughter of Steward “Phillip” Aleman and Fedora Aucoin Aleman.
Hazel was a hardworking homemaker who always tended to every need of her family. When she wasn’t spending quality time with her family, she enjoyed working in the yard and playing bingo.
She will be sadly missed and lovingly remembered by three children, Suzanne “Sue” Landry of Gibson, Barbara Malik of Morgan City and Byron Landry of Gibson; eight grandchildren; 18 great grandchildren; numerous great-great grandchildren; one son-in-law, Howard James of Bayou Vista; two sisters, Betty Blanchard and husband Gilbert of Bayou Vista, and Alama “Toot” Glavin of Morgan City; two brothers, Calvin Alemand and wife Lydia of Bayou Vista, and Roy Alemand and wife Gaydell of Lafayette; and numerous nieces and nephews.
Hazel was preceded in death by her parents, Steward “Phillip” and Fedora Aucoin Aleman; her husband, Sidney J. Landry Jr.; one daughter, Charlotte Landry James; grandson, Kirby Lewis; one great grandson, Carl R. Miller; one daughter-in-law, Vickie Landry; two sisters, Margaret Rhodes and Maudrey Bailey; two brothers, Collins Aleman and Allen Aleman.
Funeral services will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 7, 2020, at Twin City Funeral Home with Father Evelio “Toto” Buenaflor officiating. A visitation will be held from 8:00 a.m. until the time of the service and following the service, Hazel will be laid to rest in the Morgan City Cemetery.

Reed Hastings, the co-founder and CEO of Netflix, has long supported charter schools through political donations, his role on the KIPP Foundation’s board of directors, and a $100 million education fund he launched in 2016.
In a recent visit to Baton Rouge, Hastings said lessons he learned while growing Netflix, including the importance of creativity and variability, influence his thinking about charter schools.
He says charters with stable nonprofit governance can learn and improve over time more effectively than traditionally governed school systems that tend to replace their superintendents every three years.
“The key is having many different providers in your city,” he said, addressing the annual meeting of the Council for a Better Louisiana.
“If there is any way to fix what we have, that would be better. And people have tried for decades and decades and decades.”
Charter schools are controversial partly because they divert resources from traditional schools. In many cases, they can screen out children with educational challenges that traditional schools must accept. And because they are publicly funded schools that are privately run, they raise questions about transparency and democracy in the use of taxpayer dollars.
In his Baton Rouge visit, Hastings pointed to New Orleans as evidence that charters can be effective where a traditional system was not.
In the restructuring that followed the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, the city began a shift toward charters and is now home to the only all-charter public school system in the nation.
The leaders of those schools still must answer to elected officials to keep their charters.
The 78 schools collectively known as NOLA Public Schools are governed by the Orleans Parish School Board, while the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education oversees seven. One regional school, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, is the responsibility of the Louisiana Legislature.
By most official measures, state officials say, students in New Orleans public schools have been more successful in the charter-heavy post-Katrina environment than before.
But over the past few years there has been “a little bit of a regression,” said John White, the state’s education superintendent.
“I’m not here to share entirely a positive story,” White recently told the state House Education Committee. “I’m here to share a mixed story.”
Before Katrina, 62 % of New Orleans students attended schools that would be rated an “F” on the state’s current school performance grading scale, he said. Today, that number is 9 percent, he said.
Graduation rates have risen from 52%in 2004 to 78 percent last year, which is slightly below the state average. But two out of three students attend schools rated “C” or lower, White said, and test scores in recent years have dipped.
“It’s perplexing,” White said. “There are school systems that are making greater strides, even though Orleans was making the greatest strides for the 10 years after Katrina.”
Rep. Gary Carter, a New Orleans Democrat who is vice chairman of the Education Committee, pressed White about whether students with disabilities are welcome at all of the city’s public schools. White said some schools are better at serving special-needs students than others, leading parents of such students to choose those schools.
Carter also wanted to know about the availability of vocational training. White said education leaders were slow to rebuild those assets after Katrina but cited the recent establishment of the New Orleans Career Center for high school students as evidence of progress.
Carter said he worried about students catching a bus before dawn to get to schools across town.
“This idea of neighborhood schools seems to have gone away,” he said.
White acknowledged parents would prefer their school of choice to be nearby.
But he said lending discrimination and other factors have led to poor people being clustered in certain areas, arguing it is better to let parents send their children to schools outside of their neighborhoods than to be beholden to those policy mistakes.
Carter saved his toughest questioning for NOLA Public Schools leaders, who were unable to provide as much information as he wanted about plans to improve poorly rated schools.
“If there is any question about whether or not there’s outrage about our D and F schools,” Carter said, “I want to help embody that anger.”
In a recent letter to the editor, New Orleans schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. acknowledged performance scores showed K-8 schools in the city had taken “a step in the wrong direction.”
“With standards rising statewide, we slipped back rather than moving forward and we need to do better,” he said.
But he said the district’s overall score improved, led by its high schools. More than half of New Orleans public high school students attend schools rated “A” or “B,” he said.
“We are graduating more students; more students are taking college courses while in high school; and more students are graduating with career technical training valued by employers,” Lewis said. “We have work to do, to be sure.”

Hazel Marie Webster Clark, 68, a resident of Morgan City, LA and native of New Iberia, LA, passed peacefully in her sleep on Wednesday, January 1, 2020 at 10:40 AM at her residence.
Visitation will be observed on Wednesday, January 8, 2020 at the Siracusaville Recreation Center, 1110 Grace St., Morgan City, LA from 9:00 AM until funeral services at 11:00 AM. Reverend Ezekiel Simmons will officiate the services.
Memories of Hazel will forever remain in the hearts of her husband, Clarence Clark, Jr. of Morgan City, LA; two sons, Clarence Clark Webster of Chicago, IL, and Ronald Clark of Morgan City, LA; four daughters, Lisa M. Clark and Leslie Clark Joseph both of Jacksonville, FL and Monique Clark and Patience Clark both of Morgan City, LA; one brother, Daniel Webster; two sisters, Mary Louise Gilliams and Gloria Dauphine all of New Iberia, LA; ten grandchildren, one great-grandchild and a host of nieces, nephews, other relatives and friends.
Hazel was preceded in death by her parents, and her siblings.
Visit; www.jones-funeral-home.com to send condolence to family