Superintendent Warren Drake is asking the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board to consider changing attendance zones at 20 schools, in the process closing two middle schools and moving almost 1,400 students.
School Board members Jill Dyason and Evelyn Ware-Jackson want much more. They have long pressed for sweeping zone changes that would affect almost every one of the district's 80-plus schools and plan to press their case once again.
“There comes a point where it is just time to bite the bullet and do it,” said Dyason
“I would erase them all and start like we don’t have any attendance lines. Start brand new,” said Ware-Jackson.
The School Board is scheduled to take up this fraught subject at a special board workshop at 1 p.m. Tuesday. The meeting, which will have no votes, is taking place at the Instructional Resource Center, 1022 S. Foster Drive, next door to the School Board Office.
Drake’s proposed attendance zone changes . If approved, they would take effect in August with the start of the 2019-20 school year.
They were prompted by plans to close two schools with low enrollment, Broadmoor and North Banks middle schools. Those schools have 377 and 136 students, about 41 and 36 percent of the capacity of those facilities.
The superintendent is suggesting reassigning Broadmoor’s students to three neighboring middle schools. Two of those schools, Capitol and Park Forest middle schools, would in turn hand off 171 students to Brookstown Middle, bringing that low-enrollment school to about two-thirds full.
The proposed change to North Banks Middle is simpler: all 136 students would be added to Glen Oaks High Schools, which would become a middle-high school. Board member Dadrius Lanus, who represents that area, has already signaled his concern with putting middle school students on that high school’s campus.
Broadmoor Middle is in line for a $15 million remodeling starting in 2020, but school officials have yet to decide what kind of school to put there. North Banks would become the new home of an alternative school, EBR Readiness Academy.
Drake’s proposal also calls for changing attendance zones at 14 more schools to improve feeder patterns from elementary grades all the way to high school.
For instance, LaSalle Elementary would lose 118 students. With a smaller zone, all LaSalle students would feed into Westdale Middle and later into Tara High. Currently, some LaSalle students feed into Glasgow and Broadmoor middle schools and later Broadmoor High.
Of the almost 1,400 affected students, only an estimated 279 are in elementary grades. Board President Mike Gaudet said that’s not an accident because changes to elementary school zones can provoke the most controversy.
“We’re trying to minimize elementary zone changes but also trying to better align feeder patterns,” Gaudet explained.
Dyason and Ware-Jackson, however, say those proposals don’t go far enough.
With several potentially controversial proposals before them, East Baton Rouge Parish School Board members concentrated Saturday on a debate o…
The two have teamed up on this issue before. In 2011, Dyason and Ware-Jackson co-chaired a short-lived task force on attendance zone lines. And in 2017, when Ware-Jackson was board president, they again pressed for changes in zones across the school system, but the proposal ran aground amid controversy.
Ware-Jackson said Drake was reluctant to push the issue then because he was afraid it would exacerbate the student disruption caused by the August 2016 floods. She also said there were board members worried the zone changes would harm their reelection bids. She’s said with the elections over, now’s a good time to tackle this sensitive issue.
“I don’t have the answers,” Ware-Jackson said. “All I’m asking is we take an honest look and see what we have in terms of what families need and what families want.”
Dyason, the longest-serving member of the board, has pushed for years for zone changes. The neighborhood schools in her southeast Baton Rouge district are among the more popular in town and have had periodic issues with overcrowding.
She said there are schools with lots of space elsewhere in Baton Rouge that should take on more students. And smaller zones for schools in her area would make them more attractive to families who live in those neighborhoods. It’s something she says she’s had people ask about for years.
“It’s easier to just hold things as is, but it’s not really what the community wants and has wanted for years,” she said.
Once solely neighborhood schools, schools in the Woodlawn area in recent years have added gifted and more recent magnet programs, adding to their space issues.
Gaudet said Tuesday’s meeting is supposed to end by 4 p.m. but he would be surprised if it ends that quickly.
“However it works out, people won’t walk away happy, because some will think we’ve gone too far and some will think we haven’t gone far enough,” he predicted.
