Emerging today from a briefing about a newly released study outlining the implications of creating independent school districts in East Baton Rouge Parish, Baton Rouge Republican Rep. Steve Carter—who chairs the state House Education Committee—says a holistic, big-picture discussion about ISDs is needed.
“We need to have dialogue amongst all of the people that are involved,” including the school system, proponents and opponents of independent school districts.
The report, commissioned by BRAC and BRAF, is authored by LSU economics professor Jim Richardson and visiting scholar Roy Heidelberg. While the suggestions in the report, such as creating a unitary financial system with fairly autonomous subdistricts, can largely be addressed without legislation, Carter says the delegation can nonetheless play a role in bringing everyone to the table.
The legacy costs of the southeast breakaway district that was proposed earlier this year, but ultimately failed, could range from $37.3 million to $45.6 million, according to the report. EBR school board member Craig Freeman points to that figure and says it shows proponents of the breakaway district vastly underestimated the legacy costs, in addition to the school capacity issues the district would have faced.
“For me, the biggest takeaway is that we’re better off together than we are separate,” he says.
Freeman says the concept of a “unitary financial system” with semi-autonomous districts is “fundamentally flawed,” and expressed concerns about any effort that could interfere with the vision of new East Baton Rouge Parish Schools Superintendent Bernard Taylor.
“Politicians need to get out of the way of the people who really have experience doing this stuff,” Freeman says.
BRAC President Adam Knapp says the information will be presented to BRAC’s board, and says the various parties in this debate should come together to find out if there’s even a possibility of finding common ground.
Taylor says he welcomes the opportunity to have a fact-based objective discussion about the issues in the report, saying the debate over the southeast breakaway district at the Legislature earlier this year seemed to be driven primarily by emotion.
The report includes charts showing the racial breakdown of the parish, and compares that breakdown to the would-be racial breakaway district in the southeast that was proposed in the last legislative session and another district in the south portion of the parish that has been discussed by some residents.
It also gives a picture of the share of public schoolchildren in the southeast, south, and potentially revised EBR system, as compared to the total number of children in each area.
If you’d like to review the complete 23-page report, click here. For a recent Business Report story about independent school districts, click here.
