Lafayette Parish School System Superintendent Pat Cooper is proposing a vast overhaul of Northside High’s administration, telling The Daily Advertiser in a Tuesday report that saving the struggling school from a looming state takeover means “we can’t keep doing the same old thing.”
According to the agenda for Wednesday night’s Lafayette Parish School Board meeting, Cooper is asking the board to approve several key personnel changes at Northside, the district’s worst-performing high school.
Included in those changes are replacing acting Northside principal Yvonne Zeno with Melinda Voorhies and transferring Zeno back to her assistant principal position at Lafayette High. The Advertiser reports that Voorhies is a retired school administrator who lives in Lafayette Parish and most recently served as a key administrator for Valley Park in East Baton Rouge Parish, where she was “instrumental” in turning the school’s performance around:
Cooper’s proposal calls for the board to approve the additions of Garrick Johnson as Dean of Students, Sandra Billeaudeau as special monitor for the Northside High Turnaround project ... acting assistant principals Laura Adams, Linda Nance and assistant principal Barbara Landor.
“We are replacing some positions, but we’re also creating new positions that will play a key role into fixing what is wrong with Northside,” Cooper said. “We are going to try and give the board members as much information as we can so that they and the community can understand that Northside is not too far away from being taken over by the state. You don’t shut down a school and turn it into something else. You fix the school and, in order to do that, we can’t keep doing the same old thing.”
Cooper has selected Northside High as the pilot site of his academic turnaround model and also has called for the shifting of dollars that already exist in the school system budget to make much-needed renovations and repairs at Northside High.
All of Cooper’s changes require board approval. The board meets at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the school board office.
Read more on Cooper’s Northside plans here.
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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