Lafayette Parish School Board President Mark Babineaux and board Vice President Shelton Cobb will join two other school board members in visiting Mississippi, St. Mary Parish and New Orleans Nov. 28 through Dec. 2 to scope out the communities of the three superintendent candidates vying to take over the district’s top position when Superintendent Burnell Lemoine retires later this year.
The Daily Advertiser reports that the tentative date of Dec. 7 to select a new superintendent will be delayed by a week, when the board will hold a special meeting Dec. 14 to make its final decision.
The final three superintendent candidates are Walter Gonsoulin, Pat Cooper and Donald Aguillard:
The preliminary plan is for board President Mark Babineaux and Vice President Shelton Cobb along with two members of the board to conduct the community visits starting with two days in Mississippi, where they will research Gonsoulin in Starkville on Nov. 28 and on Cooper in McComb on Nov. 29 before returning back to Louisiana in time for expulsion hearings Nov. 30. Cooper served as the superintendent of schools in McComb from 1997 to 2007.
They'd like to speak with current or previous school board presidents, head of teachers organization, head of local Chamber of Commerce, head of the Economic Development Authority and anyone who is recommended to them.
Members of the board will then return to the road Dec. 1 with a visit scheduled for Aguillard in St. Mary Parish before wrapping visits up Dec. 2 in New Orleans for Cooper.
LPSS Marketing Director Angie Simoneaux says no more than four board members will be able to visit the candidates’ communities because having more than four would violate open meetings laws. It has not been decided which other board members will be accompanying Babineaux and Cobb, though Tommy Angelle did tell the daily that he’s “going to try to make the trip to St. Mary Parish and New Orleans.”
If Angelle does find time to visit both, the two visits would equal more than the number of interviews Angelle attended when the board conducted interviews with the top 10 superintendent candidates earlier this month.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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