EBR schools budget, voucher participation remain uncertain

What’s next for the East Baton Rouge Parish School System budget? Now that the school board has signed off on rolling forward the property tax millage the district gets—which will raise an estimated $3.7 million—the board won’t need to make any more cuts this year to the budget, which has already been reduced by $28 million. Still, school system officials say it will be several weeks before they actually know what the budget will be for the 2012-13 school year, which began last week. That’s mainly because administrators don’t yet know how many students have decided to bail out of the district to take advantage of the state’s new voucher program. Reports from the state last month suggested East Baton Rouge Parish could have one of the highest rates of participation in the voucher program, with nearly 1,000 students planning to use state-funded vouchers to attend private schools. But not all of those students are necessarily coming from EBR schools; some are coming from Zachary or Baker, which have their own school districts. “We still haven’t gotten any communication from the Department of Education,” says EBR schools spokesman Chris Trahan, adding that it will likely be early October before the district knows exactly how many students it will be educating this year and, therefore, what its final budget will look like. —Stephanie Riegel