In preparation for potentially consolidating schools, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system has identified a firm based in Alabama but active in Louisiana to help it crunch the numbers to determine which schools are the best candidates for closing.
The school system is also considering hiring a Washington, D.C.-based consultant to help it restructure its annual budgeting process with the goal of making it more transparent, equitable and informative.
The parish School Board is taking up both proposals when it meets Thursday night.
The with Huntsville, Alabama-based , for $88,452 worth of “data aggregation services,” is on the agenda for a special meeting, set to start at 5 p.m.
The , with Jessica Swanson Consulting Services for $99,600, is on the agenda for the board’s Committee of the Whole, to start immediately after the special meeting. A final vote on that contract would not come until the board’s regular Sept. 19 meeting.
The meetings are occurring at the School Board Office, 1050 S. Foster Drive.
After years of talk, the school system is poised to close several schools, as early as fall 2025, in response to accelerating declines in student enrollment during and after the pandemic.
Two-thirds of district schools have lost students compared with before the pandemic. Overall enrollment has declined by almost 5% over that time period and has fallen under 40,000 students for the first time in decades.
If you take out charter schools, overall enrollment is just 32,700 students, about 12% down from prior to 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.
Former Supt. Sito Narcisse commissioned as a precursor to a round of school consolidations that never occurred.
, newly hired Supt. LaMont Cole is tasked with quickly hiring a vendor to develop a master facilities plan within a year’s time that will, among other things, consolidate school facilities to “best meet current/projected student enrollment and the instructional needs of the district.”
LEAN Frog has worked the school system before, most recently to help the district sort out deep-rooted problems in its Transportation Department. The firm has also worked with several south Louisiana school districts. Its proposal includes commendations from school superintendents in Central and in Livingston and St. Charles parishes.
An in-house committee rated LEAN Frog’s proposal above the proposal submitted by the only other competitor, a joint partnership between Baton-Rouge-based and , which is based in Alpharetta, Georgia.
LEAN Frog to create an interactive dashboard that amasses information in the following areas: facility conditions; enrollment and facility capacity; attendance zones; demographics; academic programming; historical data and trends; information on private and charter schools; U.S. Census data and trends; and student performance.
The consulting firm also plans to issue recommendations as well as plans to implement them and monitor their effectiveness.
In a similar fashion, an in-house selection committee was convened to assess the two proposals submitted for the budget restructuring contract. than the one from Afton Partners, based in Evanston, Illinois.
Swanson points to 18 years of experience in public education, as part of Teach for America. She later spent almost eight years as an administrator with D.C. public schools, eventually becoming its deputy chief of finance. She later conducted training sessions in finance with school board members across the country as part of the group, , and then provided finance strategy to school leaders as part of the at Georgetown University.
, she said she plans to develop an action plan for a new budget process by February.
This proposed contract grows out of the concerns of several local school board members about how the school district currently develops its annual spending plans.
Last fall, the board debated the issue for months and repeatedly put off a final decision. One proposal called for hiring former Louisiana Department of Education assistant superintendent Catherine Pozniak at a cost of $95,000. A competing proposal was to hire the Council of Great City Schools, to which the district already pays dues. The Council offered to do the job for $40,000, but that price came with several stipulations, including that the vote to hire them was unanimous.
