After gathering elsewhere for the past 21 months, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board is returning Thursday to meet at his historic home at 1050 S. Foster Drive and has a full agenda awaiting it, including a workshop to hear about a plan to transform local high schools into early colleges.
The boardroom will look a lot different than it has since parish school boards first began meeting here in the early 1960s. Supt. Sito Narcisse recently had the space overhauled to be more suitable for a meeting during a pandemic. For instance, the old seats installed into the tile floor have been removed. Now, there’s carpet and movable seating.
Superintendent Warren Drake on Monday was handed emergency powers by the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board to lead the school district’s ef…
It looks similar to where the board has been meeting for most of the pandemic, the district’s Professional Development Center, or PDC, located five miles northeast at 3000 N. Sherwood Forest Drive. That more modern facility, which opened in 2009, is much more spacious. In fact, the space is so big, that the board ended up dividing it in three rooms, a main and two side rooms.
As was the case at the PDC, the School Board main office meeting room will be limited to 75% capacity and mask-wearing is required for those attending.
The board had planned to return to Central Office in August with the start of the new school year but that was postponed thanks to the wave of coronavirus cases in Louisiana caused by the delta variant.
For its return to South Foster, the board is holding two successive meetings. The first, where no votes will be taken; at workshops, usually only board members and staff are allowed to speak. The second, at 5 p.m. — unless the workshop runs long — is .
The workshop will focus on the Ҡplan that Narcisse officially unveiled Tuesday, but which has been leaking out, and sparking controversy, for weeks already.
Speaking before a room full of community and business leaders, Supt. Sito Narcisse on Tuesday unveiled plans to dramatically reshape Baton Rou…
It would turn all high schools, starting next fall, into early colleges where they could earn 60 college credits – enough for an associate degree – while still in high school. Students can take an academic track that would allow them to enter a four-year college as a junior.
Or students can take a career-technical track where their associate degree would focus on a specific career and they would go directly to work when they graduate. Or students could do a combination of both, earning an industry-based certification along with their academically-oriented associate degree.
Incoming ninth-graders, roughly 2,500 of them, would be automatically enrolled in a total of four dual enrollment courses, two in the fall and two in the spring. More dual enrollment courses would be added as next year’s ninth-graders advance through high school.
While students are supposed to take the course, college credit is optional. So students can complete the entire course and decide once they get their grade whether it’s good enough to be placed on a college transcript. If they decide it is not, then the course counts only as a high school credit.
Concerns have arisen about the diminished role and job security for teachers currently teaching the high school versions of those courses as well as whether ninth-graders and other high school students are ready for college-level working when many struggle with high-school level work.
Another concern is whether all these new dual enrollment courses will come at the expense of Advanced Placement, in which many local high schools have invested heavily in recent years.
Here are other agenda items at the board’s regular meeting:
- by demographer Mike Hefner. Hefner was selected by the board on Nov. 18 to draw new maps for the School Board as required after 2020 U.S. Census. Hefner took over the remapping job two weeks after the first consultant hired the board, Strategic Demographics, LLC, withdrew, citing lack of cooperation from three board members who failed to sit down for one-on-one meetings to discuss their ideas for their respective districts.
- The , Narcisse’s first since becoming superintendent in January.
