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About a year ago, workers employed by the East Baton Rouge Parish School System were looking to perform some fairly routine repairs to Baton Rouge Magnet High School. But the more they looked, the more problems they found. For starters, the brick and mortar of the venerable main building were no longer even connected to the exterior walls.

The findings were no surprise to Dot Dickinson, who watched a tile fall from the ceiling before a performance of the school’s orchestra, which included her son, in the mid-1990s. Luckily, the wayward tile landed on empty seats.

“Seems someone would have noticed the need for maintenance at that time,” she says.

Most likely someone did. But at the time, every public school in the parish needed work, and there was virtually no money to pay for it, school officials say. The system isn’t in the crisis mode it was in 10 years ago, but there are still a number of school buildings that are drafty, leaky, moldy or otherwise disheveled.

The School Board was scheduled to discuss—and most likely finalize and vote on—the system’s facility plan on Jan. 10. The futures of Baton Rouge Magnet High, which is in line for a $62 million renovation, and Lee High School, which the system had considered closing before Superintendent Charlotte Placide proposed building a new Lee High on the same site, have elicited the strongest emotions.

But the problem is much bigger than two schools.

The draft version of the plan calls for three new schools, including a career academy, five replacement schools [counting the BRMHS project as a replacement], 13 classroom additions or renovations, closing or repurposing eight schools and money for technology, transportation, pre-kindergarten education and air conditioning, heating and ventilation—all at an estimated cost of more than $488 million.

Revenues over the next 10 years, including a $20 million surplus, are expected to be more than $489 million, assuming the renewal of a one cent sales tax. That covers what the system believes are the most pressing needs.

But making all the needed repairs could cost about $800 million if everything is fixed by 2011, system spokesman Chris Trahan says. Meanwhile, the parish’s older schools will continue to deteriorate. Placide says the system needs more money to catch up, but will parish voters pony up, especially since so many abandoned the public school system years ago?

For more than three decades, the system didn’t build a single new school. From 1964-98, parish voters approved enough tax renewals to keep the system operating, but not nearly enough to make any significant capital improvements, Trahan says. There were no bond issues, and no dedicated stream of revenue for infrastructure. The system didn’t even have a building maintenance fund like most districts.

Placide says there are “various reasons” why voters wouldn’t approve significant fees for capital improvement, which she didn’t attempt to list, but allowed that the problem was “related to the desegregation issues the community struggled with for some time.” The parish settled its 47-year-old desegregation case with the federal government in 2003.

Don Kadair

THIS MAGNET DETRACTS
When the extent of the needed work to Baton Rouge Magnet High School became apparent, there was some consideration for tearing the school down, a shocking idea to the school’s alumni, many of whom angrily demanded a different solution.
The 12-member Baton Rouge Magnet High School Renovation/Restoration/Replacement committee, formed by Superintendent Charlotte Placide, ended up recommending a renovation of the existing main building while demolishing and replacing the surrounding buildings. It’s a more expensive proposition than building a new school on a new site, but more palatable to folks who care about the neo-gothic Mid City landmark. The School Board was expected to make the final decision when it voted on the system’s long-term facility plan Jan. 10. The system hopes to defray some of the expected $62 million cost of the renovation with help from the Louisiana Legislature’s Capital Outlay Fund and the school’s alumni association.
Scot Guidry, an alumni association board member, says they’ve spent more than $150,000 on various materials and improvements for the school over the years, but this would be by far the largest fundraising effort they’ve ever attempted. Guidry says a few people have said they are considering sizeable donations, but they want to wait and see what the School Board plans to do. The alumni association wants the school to continue as a magnet school at its current site.
The school, at 2825 Government St., was built in 1926. The Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation has put the school on its 2007-08 list of the 10 most endangered historic sites in the state.

In 1997, the system put together a comprehensive facilities plan that identified millions in needed work. Perhaps hoping to take advantage of goodwill engendered by the end of forced crosstown busing the previous year, school officials put together an ambitious proposal, asking voters to approve a 25-year, $475 million bond issue and a 35-year 1% sales tax for constructing and maintaining new school buildings. Both propositions were soundly defeated at the polls.

Thus chastened, school officials came back the next year with a proposition that had been drastically scaled back: a penny sales tax, levied over five years, about half of which was earmarked for a pay-as-you-go repair and construction fund. The tax passed and was renewed for another five years in 2003, and the system built seven new schools with that money.

Assuming board approval on Jan. 10, voters will have a chance to renew the tax again in March. Placide doesn’t plan to ask for more taxes—not yet, anyway. But she says new options, backed by new money, will need to be considered.

“I would love to be able to do that as soon as possible,” Placide says. “But we have to have to get a sense from the community that there’s support.”

A bond issue, backed by a new property tax, is one possible option. Placide does want to renew the sales tax for 10 years instead of five to help with long term planning and the expense of replacing Lee and renovating BRMHS. But that’s going to be a tough sell in some quarters.

“The school system is one of the greatest detriments to economic growth that we have here,” says Fred Dent, chairman of a Baton Rouge financial consulting firm and spokesman and founding member of TaxBusters, which works for lower taxes and streamlined government. “When we keep getting headlines about the lack of performance of schools, it does not engender a lot of trust for any school board that has that problem. … It’s not about the money, it’s about performance.”

Recent headlines about the school system have not been very encouraging. Four East Baton Rouge schools may be taken over by the state in the near future because of poor performance scores: Prescott Middle, Glen Oaks Middle, Capitol Pre-college Academy for Boys and Capitol Pre-college Academy for Girls. State Superintendent Paul Pastorek said the four are “failing” in a recent meeting with the school board.

Dent says TaxBusters generally doesn’t take a stance for or against tax renewals. But he says the school system would have a fight on its hands if it tries to extend the tax beyond five years, make it permanent or propose new ones. Renewing the tax every five years gives the public a chance to pass judgment on the system, he says.

School officials say relations with business leaders have warmed considerably in recent years, although the fight last month over collective bargaining threatened to undermine that progress [a proposal to permit school employees to bargain collectively with the school board fell one vote short of approval]. The Baton Rouge Area Chamber came out against the idea, and outgoing BRAC president Stephen Moret argued that the business community might not support future school tax propositions if collective bargaining was approved.

“The leadership within the chamber clearly has a prejudice against collective bargaining,” says school board vice president Noel Hammatt, who voted against collective bargaining.

Moret could not be reached for comment.

“They were definitely in a threatening posture,” says Hammatt, who is also an instructor at LSU’s College of Education. “I don’t think that’s fair to the children of Baton Rouge who depend on public schools. I don’t think it’s rational, but it’s real.”

Carole White, president of the East Baton Rouge Parish Association of Educators, which fought for collective bargaining, doubts that business leaders would follow through on such a threat, since they depend on public schools for many of their workers.

“Seems like shooting yourself in the foot,” White says. She argues that as individual taxpayers and citizens, chamber members surely deserve a voice in how the school system is run and paid for, but questioned whether the chamber as an organization should have such an outside influence.

“I go to school board meetings, and I hear people from the business community speak. I think their information comes from what they read in the newspaper or what they hear at the Lions Club,” White says. “I think they need to go into schools, talk to teachers, sit down and observe, get a feel for what teachers are doing every day.”

Teachers must play multiple roles as surrogate parents, nurses and social workers, often spending their own money to buy clothes or school supplies for their kids. “Instead of making threats, the chamber of commerce can ask members to spend a day in a public school classroom, ” White says.

School officials acknowledge they have a public relations problem. Hammatt says many voters believe the system is bloated and wasteful.

“We’re at the low end for any kind of administration,” he says. “Our central administration is tiny compared to other systems.”

As capital improvement taxes were failing in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the system was sometimes forced to choose between cutting maintenance and losing teachers or raising class sizes, Hammatt says. Maintenance usually got the ax, but that’s not because facilities aren’t important. Shabby facilities can have a negative psychological effect on children, while a nicer environment helps kids feel that someone cares, he says.

“How do you learn in a classroom where the roof leaks?” says Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, an assistant professor in LSU’s Department of Educational Theory, Policy and Practice and a former assistant superintendent for elementary instructional services for East Baton Rouge public schools. She says school districts across the country are facing the same problem.

“Neglect of infrastructure caught up with a lot of districts,” she says.

The “big lie,” Hammatt says, is that “public education failed.” System supporters argue that people read and hear about failing schools without understanding the context.

Thirty percent of children in East Baton Rouge Parish do not attend public schools, nearly double the state average of 16%, which the Louisiana Department of Education says is the highest rate in the nation. The private schools can pick and choose whom they want to let in, while public schools take all comers. Public schools tend to have nearly all of the special education and special-needs students, while private schools grab many of the high-achievers.

For middle- and upper-class children, private schools are the rule, not the exception. Nearly 77% of the students left in East Baton Rouge public schools are poor, as measured by how many qualify for free or reduced lunch. Often, poor children come from unstable homes or dangerous neighborhoods, and they bring those problems with them to school. Parental involvement in a child’s education, a key factor in academic success, is often lacking in poorer homes.

“We get blamed for ills that have nothing to do with the school system,” Hammatt says. A Baton Rouge Area Chamber report from 2006 found that while local schools lag behind those in other comparable regions as measured by overall student achievement, our public schools serve a higher percentage of at-risk students than other regions. BRAC found that schools in the Capital Region as a whole, and in individual districts, perform roughly in line with their peer regions once the high percentage of at-risk students is factored in.

Baton Rouge obviously isn’t the only town where white flight to the suburbs, breakaway school districts, and a preference for private schools by affluent parents have created a school system that overwhelmingly consists of lower income minority students. Dowell, who is white, says when she lived in Hattiesburg, Miss., her colleagues were sometimes shocked to discover that she had children in a local public high school.

“What are your kids, some kind of social experiment?” she says they would ask. Of course, many parents send their children to private schools for religious reasons, or because they believe the academic opportunities will be better. But it’s hard to discount race and class issues. Dowell calls race “the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.”

“There is a price for elitism,” she says. “If my children were school age, I wouldn’t hesitate to put them in East Baton Rouge schools. It’s parents who set the tone.”