After months of work and three well-attended community meetings, East Baton Rouge Parish Superintendent LaMont Cole is finally on the verge of releasing his recommendations for school closures, mergers and other changes in operations.
This announcement has been a long time coming for the school system, which is built for 60,000-plus students but these days educates fewer than 40,000.
Cole’s recommendations are being released Tuesday at a special meeting of the parish School Board. The meeting — a workshop during which no votes are planned — will center around what Cole is calling a “facility alignment plan.â€
The meeting is scheduled to start , 1022 S. Foster Drive, next door to the School Board Office.
Cole said he is hoping the board will vote on his recommendations when it meets again on May 1, and failing that he will likely schedule a special meeting soon after.
Any changes approved by the board would take place over the summer in advance of the 2025-26 school year, which starts in early August.
Pandemic and school closures
Public school enrollment in Louisiana has declined by about 6% since before the COVID pandemic. The declines have led Caddo, Jefferson and school districts in the state to close schools, and now it is East Baton Rouge Parish’s turn.
Two-thirds of East Baton Rouge Parish public schools have lost students compared with pre-pandemic numbers. Overall enrollment has declined by about 4% over that period and has fallen under 40,000 students for the first time in decades.
If you take out charter schools, overall enrollment is just 33,000 students, down about 11% from before the pandemic.
Consequently, the number of schools below half their functional capacity has nearly doubled, and such schools currently make up a third of the traditional public schools. Twenty-six schools have fewer than 300 students, 11 of them neighborhood schools. The smallest of those is Northeast Elementary with 180 students.
Cole . It is filled with academic, financial and other information about the school system and its individual schools.
He then held three community meetings at three elementary schools in town to gather feedback. There  asking the same questions presented at the community meetings. The link is live until noon Monday.
Cole has tapped Baton Rouge native Pamela Whitley to lead the consolidation effort. An electrical engineer, Whitley spent her career with the Federal Aviation Administration. As part of that job, she helped lead what became a 25-year effort to upgrade airports and related facilities so they could accommodate modern technology, in the process closing some buildings.
In deciding which schools need changes, Cole has focused on the academic performance of the school, the age of school buildings and the degree to which the schools' student enrollments are too low. In particular, he is trying to reduce the ranks of D and F schools in the school system.
Cole has said what is happening now is “Phase 1†of a multiphase process of school changes that will play out over years.
In his eight months as superintendent, Cole already has closed three schools, two of them charter schools.
New direction
Over the past two months, Cole has tried to flip the script, emphasizing the benefits of having schools with more students and consequently greater resources, newer buildings, better staffing and richer academic programming.
“A student who sits in an underutilized facility with a noncertified teacher in an old decrepit building should have the opportunity to transition to a new facility with a certified teacher, perhaps two in the classroom at one time, and learn in an environment that is safe, that is clean and that they deserve,†Cole said in February.
Whitley served as master of ceremonies at the community meetings. She noted that about one in five school buildings in the system are considered in poor condition. Keeping them open would require millions of dollars in maintenance costs that could be used for “the benefit of the students,†she said.
“We understand that change is hard, but we also look to make a commitment to make change as easy as possible for those impacted,†Whitley said.
At the most recent community meeting, held Thursday at Broadmoor Elementary, Cole said he has had trouble sleeping for the past four weeks as he has tried to settle on what he will recommend. He said people stop him daily, trying to influence his thinking. One person begged him the day before not to close that person’s school.
“People typically think about what they might lose, but I think about what would be successful if we do this in the right way,†Cole said.
Indeed, soon after he spoke, Pearl Porter, a longtime parent activist, said the district is not doing enough to inform parents of what is happening.
“I’m praying to God we don’t close any school in 70805 (ZIP code),†Porter said. “Just give us one more year.â€
Lions under the microscope
At a March 27 community meeting at Capitol Elementary, much of the discussion centered around the fate of nearby Capitol High.
Cole began the meeting by saying he is not recommending closing any high schools during Phase 1, but said that may happen down the road.
Capitol High is the smallest neighborhood high school in Baton Rouge and is an obvious target for potential closure. It used to educate more than 1,000 students. In 2009, it was taken over by the state and converted into a series of charter schools. Under the last operator, an alumni-led nonprofit known as the Capitol Educational Foundation, the high school had about 360 students.
Then Superintendent Sito Narcisse waged a successful public campaign to bring the school back under the control of the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, with promises of building a new facility and a partnership with nearly Baton Rouge General Medical Center.
Capitol's return, though, has not been so auspicious.
It currently has about half the students it had under the previous management and dropped from a D to an F letter grade. Four out of five students enrolled last year were chronically absent, missing at least 10% of the school year. Meanwhile, proposals to build a new school at 1000 North 23rd St. have stalled.
While the buildings are not scheduled for closing, School Board member Carla Powell-Lewis asked Cole at the Capitol Elementary meeting whether the high school and nearby Capitol Middle could be merged.
Jacqueline Germany, an alum of Capitol High, reminded Cole of past promises.
“We were promised to have built another school at Capitol,†she said.
