Baton Rouge public schools on Thursday began the 2024-25 school year with a mix of fresh hopes and darker memories of the debacle that marked last year's start, especially when it comes to student transportation.
East Baton Rouge Parish, one of nine school districts in the Baton Rouge region to start school Thursday, has undertaken a variety of efforts to try to address last year’s problems, not to mention spending millions.
Last year’s bus crisis was driven by a shortage of drivers, a bevy of broken-down buses, low wages, lack of air conditioning, routing software that did not work as advertised, and out-of-date and erroneous information about the students needing bus service.
Thursday was the first test of how much progress has been made. A total of 38,602 students were enrolled at 80-plus schools, 148 more than the first day of school last year. Nearly 30,000 were expected to be riding a district bus.
LaMont Cole, just two weeks into his new job as superintendent of the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, said he has been trying to do what he can to make sure things have improved.
On Thursday morning, he had been briefed the day before by leaders of the Transportation Department, including interim Director Rob Howle, who was promoted to the job in March.
“They assure me they are going to do much better and have much less challenges than they had last year,” Cole said.
On Monday, he also spent four hours talking with bus drivers, hearing a litany of concerns going back decades.
“They were excited I came and spoke, but they were even more excited that I stuck around,” he said.
Problems arose Thursday, but how widespread they are is unclear. School officials say that so far they look to be minimal.
Last year, it took until the third day of the school year before the scope of the problems was clear. District leaders then convened a series of impromptu parent meetings that failed to address a growing chorus of concerns.
Some parents, veterans of transportation skirmishes of the past, did not wait to try to head off problems this year and had mixed success.
Jessica Bandele, a parent of two children, said she had spent a decade in vain trying to get a bus to stop near her house, and it finally happened Thursday morning.
“I went out and bought a lottery ticket,” she said.
It was not easy getting there. On July 24, she did not receive a bus card for her oldest child, a student at Baton Rouge Magnet High. She said she subsequently received three very similar bus routes over the next few days, but the bus number was different each time. She said she also received a friendly call from someone with the Transportation Department, which she said has never happened to her before.
“I had very low expectations,” she said.
On Thursday morning, her son walked to the stop, and Bandele half-joked that she would be there in 20 minutes to drive him to school. She soon got a text from him saying he had boarded a bus, not with the number they were expecting, but it was headed to school.
“I got a bus, but we will see if he gets a bus tomorrow,” she said.
Harmony Hobbs was not so fortunate. Like Bandele, she and neighbors worked for days to sort out their bus situations. After having no luck in the past calling the Transportation Department directly, she said got contact info for a helpful district employee via her hairdresser.
She said her son, who is entering 11th grade at Liberty High, got a new bus stop closer to her house, which she had been pressing for, and a bus did come. But it was 30 minutes early. She said her husband was forced to drive the boy to school, which required spending an hour in a carpool lane.
Her daughter, who attends Mayfair Lab, did not get a bus at all.
Hobbs said she supports Cole, the new superintendent, and has hope he will ensure the problem is fixed.
“I'm an optimist,” Hobbs said. “I am going to hope for the best. And plan for the worst.”
Cole takes over in part because of the bus debacle a year ago. The fallout from that controversy helped lead to the early departure of then Superintendent Sito Narcisse, who took a voluntary buyout in January.
Cole chose to start his first day Thursday at a place he knows intimately: Capitol Middle School.
As the buses began rolling up at the rear of the school Thursday morning, Cole shook the hands of the kids as they disembarked.
“Who’s the best?” Cole asked students before answering himself: “CMS!”
Cole was a student at Capitol Middle and in 1998 got his start in education there, spending five years as an English teacher. Back then, the school was down the street, where Capitol Elementary is located now.
In August 2006, Cole returned to Capitol Middle, spending two years as its principal. He was rarely in his official office. Instead, he relocated to the school lobby, a spot where you can see down almost every hallway.
“I put my desk right there,” Cole said, pointing to the middle of the lobby, “during the day so I could see what was going on.”
Cole said he normally gets about five hours of sleep a night, but does not bother to sleep at all before his first day of school each year.
“I get dressed, prepared. Iron my clothes,” he said. “Think about what I want to say to parents, what I want to say to students."
He said he went to the Central Office at 5 a.m. Thursday to write a welcome back email to school employees and then arrived at Capitol Middle at 6 a.m.
“It's a good feeling; it’s exciting to be back in the community where I grew up,” Cole said, “in the school where I attended, taught and lived.”
Jo “Beth” Cox got a little more sleep Wednesday night than her superintendent, but not much. Cox is the principal of Brownfields Elementary School. The old school, built decades ago, was torn down and rebuilt at a cost of about $29 million. Cox and the whole Brownfields family have spent the past two years two miles north at the campus of White Hills Elementary. The two elementary schools were merged, and all have returned to a modern school located at the same address, 11615 Ellen Drive.
They had just four days to move in — the new school was only cleared for occupancy on Sunday.
Cox sat the 300-plus students on the floor in the new school’s large cafeteria/auditorium for a first-day assembly.
“With this new school comes some new rules,” she told the children.
The big new rule, she said, is for students to keep their hands at their sides and don’t touch the walls lest they “leave fingerprints on the beautiful new paint.”
“When you walk down the hallway, you’re gonna go, ‘Wow!'” she explained. “But if you put your hand on those walls, or you rub your booksack, it’s gonna make our hallways very unattractive.”