The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board on Thursday received a long “wish list” of school construction projects that could be built between now and 2030, including as many as three new schools in southeast Baton Rouge.
“It’s very preliminary,” cautioned Stacey Dupre, an executive director for the school leadership who is leading a 14-member in-house committee that's developing the project list.
This preliminary list, however, will soon hit the road at three community meetings held on Sept. 25, 26 and Oct. 3. At least seven more community meetings are planned later in the fall.
“We want to get everyone involved in this,” Superintendent Warren Drake said.
He also cautioned that the project list will change repeatedly in the weeks to come, noting that the preliminary list presented Thursday would cost far more than the $477 million the school system is estimated to have to spend.Â
The final product will head to voters next year, likely April 28, for the proposed renewal of a 1-cent sales tax, last renewed in spring 2008. Fifty-one percent of those tax revenues goes to school construction; 41 percent goes to employee salaries and benefits; and the remaining 8 percent is spent on discipline, truancy programs and technology.
School Board member Mike Gaudet, who will be running in the Oct. 14 special election to fill the remainder of the District 7 school board term, said it’s good to get a plan out there that “everyone can start throwing arrows at.” He said he likes a lot of what he’s seeing so far.
“There are some bold ideas that are thinking different than we thought in the past, and I appreciate that,” Gaudet said.
The funded by the 1-cent sale tax paid for the renovation/expansion of Baton Rouge Magnet High and the demolition and reconstruction of Lee High, among other projects.
The 1-cent sales tax was first approved in 1998 and was renewed by wide margins in 2003 and then again in 2008.
The current tax plan was approved at a time when the parish had just three charter schools. Now it has 26 charter schools with more coming online in the near future.
Gaudet urged Drake to consider more carefully how charter schools fit into the tax plan and how their growth will affect revenue projections.
“I want to have to a real clear picture about what we are going to be doing,” Gaudet said.
Dupre told the board that most of the suggested projects on the list came from school principals.
Building new schools in school-scarce southeast Baton Rouge emerged Thursday as a clear prio…
Demographer Mike Hefner, of Lafayette, whom the board hired this past summer, has been refining his population projections as data rolls in from the new school year. Hefner said he’s still seeing that the highest population growth is concentrated in south Baton Rouge, especially around the Bluebonnet Boulevard extension.
“That is the fastest-growing part of your parish and that is the area that has the least per capita number of seats in the school system,” said Hefner, who is a former Lafayette Parish School Board member.
The three new proposed south Baton Rouge schools are not spelled out as to whether they’d be elementary, middle or high schools.
Board member Jill Dyason, who lives in southeast Baton Rouge on Hoo Shoo Too Road, noted lots of development that Hefner did not have on his maps.
“There are five subdivisions just on my road right now, but I don’t think they were captured in the original data you presented,” she said.
