The number of students Catholic schools estimate they can take in under Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to drastically expand the New Orleans private school voucher program is less than 1 percent of the children who would be eligible for public money to fund private school tuitions.
According to an Associated Press report published on The [Alexandria] Town Talk’s website, an official with the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops says out of the 380,000 students who could be eligible for vouchers under Jindal’s proposal, the state’s Catholic schools are ready for about 1,000 of them.
Responding to concerns about vouchers and their potential to gut public school districts of critical funding, Louisiana Association of Business and Industry education lobbyist Brigette Nieland tells AP that the majority of eligible voucher students won’t “flee [from public schools overnight.” In the same breath, she deals a low blow to the voucher opposition camp and calls the concerns “union scare tactics:”
That limited capacity raises questions about why the Republican governor is pushing so hard for the legislation, whether it could make a difference and whether opponents are overreacting when predicting a voucher program could destroy public school funding.
Danny Loar, executive director of the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Tuesday that the numbers are based on his conversations with superintendents of the Catholic schools around the state. The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops supports the voucher proposal.
The Jindal administration estimates about 380,000 of the 690,000 students in Louisiana public schools, or 54 percent, could be eligible under the criteria. The legislation hasn’t been filed to offer the full details of the proposal, but the governor said the statewide program would expand an existing $9 million voucher program in New Orleans that has more than 1,800 students.
Nieland, an education lobbyist for the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, which supports vouchers, said it will be difficult to determine the true capacity that will be available for students in private and parochial schools until the proposal is passed and existing schools decide whether they want to participate. Also, she said some communities that don’t have private schools might decide they want to start one.
Read the full story here.
For more on the voucher program, read The Independent’s Feb. 8 investigation and analysis, “Incomplete.”
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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