East Baton Rouge Parish Superintendent LaMont Cole is recommending closing four elementary and one middle school as well as merging Capitol middle and high schools.
Those proposed closures, announced Tuesday afternoon, come on top of already announced closures of J.K. Haynes elementary schools, formerly a charter school, and two large charter schools run by Texas-based IDEA Public Schools.
The most recent changes are found in Cole's new, far-reaching "realignment" plan, . A total of 28 schools would see changes and 16 attendance zones would be redrawn. More than 10,000-children and and 1,400-plus staff would be impacted.
A final vote is expected May 1. Any approved changes would go into effect in time for the start of the 2025-26 school year in August.
"At the end of our conversation, I may be a hero or you may be asking for my resignation," Cole told the board Tuesday.
Cole's announcement has been a long time coming for the school system, which is built for 60,000-plus students but is now educating fewer than 40,000. Cole held three well attended community meetings over the past month, but said he's had at least 30 different meetings all over the parish as he developed the plan.
Here are the schools being closed or consolidated:
- Bernard Terrace Elementary, 241 Edison St. Its 230 students would be reassigned to Dufrocq elementary.
- Capitol High, 1000 N. 23rd St., absorbing Capitol Middle, 5100 Greenwell Springs Road, to become a grades 7-12 school but operating on the newer campus of the middle school, built in 2004, but with upgrades. Capitol Middle currently has about 440 students and Capitol High has about 180 students.
- Eva Legard Learning Center, 408 E. Polk St. The 70 students in that specialized environmental education program would relocate to Glasgow Middle, and later, McKinley High. The formerly Polk Elementary campus would become office space.
- Ryan Elementary. Its 200 students would be reassigned to Progress Elementary. EBR Readiness Middle School would take over the Ryan campus.
- Westminster Elementary. Its 215 students would be reassigned to Wedgewood Elementary, with upgrades planned later for Wedgewood. One idea for Westminster is to turn the old school into affordable housing for teachers.
- Winbourne Elementary. Its 290 students would be reassigned to Capitol and Melrose elementary schools.
Cole is tackling a thorny issue that previous superintendents have considered but largely shied away from. The School Board was insistent upon Cole's hiring as superintendent in August that he make it one of his first orders of business.
Board member Nathan Rust said the proposed changes to the school district are "well thought-out" amid a complex situation.
"I really believe this is the most important thing this board can do during this tenure," Rust said.
In deciding which schools need changes, Cole has focused on the school's academic performance, the school buildings' age 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 says what is happening now is "Phase 1" of a multiphase process of school changes that will play out over years.
If approved as is, Cole said his proposals would save at least $5.3 million in deferred maintenance on school buildings that would no longer need to be maintained. Seventy-one percent of students who have to move would move students into higher performing schools and 43% would end up in buildings in better condition.
“We just don’t have $129 million to address all the facility needs in our school system," Cole said.
The proposed merger of Capitol High and Capitol Middle schools is notable. Cole attended, taught and later served as principal at Capitol Middle. It's also an F-rated school that could be taken over right away.
"Capitol High is an old facility and it's being underutilized, and we have to do something for those students now," he said.
Capitol High alumni have been actively trying to revive the once-popular high school. In 2022, former Supt. Sito Narcisse waged a successful public campaign to bring the high school back under the control of the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, with promises of building a new facility and a partnership with nearby 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 the site have stalled.
Cole said he plans to work with various agencies and groups to come up with a new use for the property that benefits the community.
Cole is proposing other changes, including relocating schools and programs as well as changing grade configurations and feeder patterns. Here are some of those recommendations:
- Relocating Belfair Montessori School to the newer Winbourne Elementary, built in 2007. The 75-year-old Belfair campus at 4451 Fairfields Avenue would be used as a "swing space" to house schools temporarily displaced due to construction, which Cole says will allow tackling more projects more quickly.
- Turning Melrose and Merrydale elementary schools from traditional elementary schools to grades K-2 schools.
- Turning Capitol and Glen Oaks Park elementary schools from traditional elementary schools to upper grade schools, 3-6 in the case of Capitol and 3-5 in the case of Glen Oaks Park.
- Turning Crestworth Elementary back from a K-8 to a K-5 school and moving middle school students over to Scotlandville Middle School.
The new K-2 schools would be called "foundational learning centers" where Cole plans to have two teachers in every classroom, an approach popularized at schools such as LSU Lab and Mayfair Lab.
Cole is proposing other improvements. Cole wants to beef up STEM — short for science, technology, engineering and math programs — in all the schools in the Scotlandville area. That area is close to Exxon, which has a longstanding partnership with Scotlandville High. Similarly, Cole said, schools near Baton Rouge General would set up medical programs at several school along "on the Gus Young corridor."
Claiborne and Capitol elementaries as well Park Forest Middle would spearhead the district's adoption of a popular school reform known as the Teacher Advancement Program, or TAP, offered by the Arizona-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. It centers around creating higher-level teaching positions where teachers earn more money for coaching their peers and improving the school while still keeping their hand in the classroom.
The school system has steadily lost students for years, most recently during COVID.
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 exclude charter schools, the 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. Cole said his proposal would increase the average occupancy of district schools from 58% to 70%.
