Head of the pride: Southeastern Louisiana University says its next football coach will be Ron Roberts, who guided Delta State University to four Gulf South Conference championships and four appearances in the NCAA Division II playoffs. The University of Louisiana Board of Supervisors must approve the appointment. In five years under Roberts, the Statesmen are 47-16, with two of those losses in the 2010 NCAA Division II national championship and the 2011 semifinals. Roberts, 44, is from Visalia, Calif. He was Delta State’s defensive coordinator for two years and became coach in 2007. He also has worked at Mount Whitney (Calif.) High School, Texas State, Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tenn., Greensboro College, Burroughs High School in California and Houston High School in Germantown, Tenn., his wife’s hometown.
Mmmmmm: New Orleans and Lafayette are named among the top 10 “Tastiest Towns in the South,” according to Southern Living magazine’s January issue, which hits newsstands Friday. Readers will determine the winner of the top 10, which also includes Baltimore; Birmingham; Charleston, S.C.; Charlottesville, Va.; Decatur, Ga.; Houston; Louisville; and Raleigh, N.C. You can vote here beginning Friday. One vote per person, per day, will be tallied through Jan. 31. Southern Living will profile each of the cities on the list and reveal the winner in its April 2012 issue.
Coming up short: A state economist says Louisiana’s annual public school funding formula is built on outdated student count projections, leading to repeated midyear funding shortages. Louisiana had a $43 million shortfall in the 2011-12 school financing plan, which was closed with budget cuts approved last week. A year earlier, the school funding formula was short $42 million. And the year before that, it had a $52 million midyear gap. Those shortages can be traced to lawmakers and the governor having budgeted for fewer students than actually attended school in each year, says Greg Albrecht, chief economist for the Legislative Fiscal Office. Albrecht says the school budgeting process is skewed because the funding formula uses current-year student counts instead of projections for how many students will attend school in the next budget year.
