Going vertical: IDEA Public Schools will break ground on its first Baton Rouge campus on Tuesday, Sept. 5. The new school, called IDEA Cortana, will be located at the intersection of Airway and Tom drives, northwest of Cortana Mall. Earlier this month, Texas-based IDEA Public Schools purchased 14 acres for the new campus for $1.4 million. The Cortana campus will serve more than 525 students in pre-K through sixth grade beginning in August 2018. IDEA plans to open four campuses in Baton Rouge. It will begin accepting applications for the Cortana campus on Sept 1.
Brother’s keeper: Louisiana is prepared and ready to shelter Texas residents displaced by Hurricane Harvey and its subsequent flooding, Gov. John Bel Edwards told reporters today. Louisiana is planning to house an additional 3,000 people from Orange County, Texas, which is under a mandatory evacuation after Tropical Storm Harvey swamped its borders. Shelters are available in Lake Charles, Alexandria and Shreveport, but state officials need to confirm with Texas officials that coordinating such a response is “what they want us to do,” Edwards add. Read more from The Associated Press.
Under the spotlight: Business owners across the country say the National Flood Insurance Program—the only option for most since private insurers largely got out of the flood business nearly a century ago—is sorely out of step with their needs, The Wall Street Journal reports. The catastrophic floodwaters of Harvey are expected to sharply test the limits of the federal insurance program, which rarely has been updated since the 1970s. Standard protections for small businesses—including costs of interruption—aren’t covered, and maximum payouts for damages haven’t risen since 1994. But with devastating storms becoming more common, the need for flood insurance that works for business is more dire. Read more from The Wall Street Journal.
