There’ll be plenty to watch for in today’s election returns. One of the most dramatic local stories will involve the fate of Ville Platte High School. For the third time this year, voters are being asked to approve a property tax increase that would go toward a bond issue to rennovate the deteriorating 100-year-old facility. The town’s voters have already twice voted down larger bond issues that would have gone toward building a new high school for students. The last proposal was voted down on July 19 by a margin of 112 votes.
With a predominately-black student population, Ville Platte High is at the center of a 45-year-old desegregation case facing the parish - an issue has divided the town along racial and socioeconomic lines. The federal Justice Department says that if the bond issue on today’s ballot fails, it plans to shut down the school. Ville Platte High’s students will then have to be bused across the parish to different high schools. Last week, Ville Platte Gazette Publisher David Ortego told The Advertiser: “In the last election the vote was mainly split down racial lines,” Ortego said. “Predominantly-black precincts voted for the bond, while predominantly white precincts voted against it. The only way this can pass is if 90 percent of black residents vote and they all vote yes.”
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
Subscribe to this comment's feed