The residual ills of Louisiana’s failing education system are many, and for far too long, remedying the problem has been left on the shoulders of the criminal justice system.
That was the message delivered by Dr. Pat Cooper, superintendent of the Lafayette Parish School System, who spoke Wednesday during the IND Monthly/IberiaBank Lecture Series. Speaking to a packed house inside the Picard Early Learning Center, Cooper addressed what he considers the most pressing issue facing Lafayette — its public school system.
“The root of all good and the root of all evil is the public school system,” Cooper says.
Cooper should know. When he took the job as superintendent in January, he found himself in an under performing school system still controlled by the “good ole boy network.” Faced with an over-employed administrative office, a dwindling belief that all children can learn, and a system that allowed bad teachers to keep their jobs, it didn’t take long for Cooper to start stepping on some toes.
The main problem, Cooper says, is the 30 percent dropout rate in Lafayette Parish.
“Lafayette has the highest rate of incarceration in the state, Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the country, and the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world,” says Cooper, quoting Lafayette City Court Judge Francie Bouillion,
Cooper, referencing state Department of Public Safety and Corrections data, says between 1999 and 2009, the inmate population in Lafayette Parish jumped 47 percent, which cost the Sheriff’s Office’s Corrections Division more than $18 million in 2009 alone. The average annual cost of imprisonment for just one Lafayette inmate is $20,000, whereas the average annual cost to educate just on Lafayette child is only $9,000.
“If children don’t come to school ‘ready to learn’ and consequently don’t finish school, the public school system fails, and if the public school system fails, all of the other public systems are overloaded and fail,” argues Cooper. “The health care system fails, the mental health system fails, the corrections system fails. If the public systems fail, the drag on the economy is immense with less skilled workers, less productivity, higher unemployment, more crime, and higher taxes to pay for higher costs to run the already failing public systems.”
At the forefront of Cooper’s turn-around plan is a push to graduate 100 percent of the students to enter the system. He’s not even concerned about the fact that Lafayette’s state rating recently jumped from a C to a B. Cooper wants to make Lafayette’s public schools more like families, which he believes will mend the severed connection with the students.
“We’ve got to create families in the schools, because these children may not have families out there,” Cooper says. 
One upcoming endeavor, which Cooper says may sound revolutionary to some, will be the start of a Teen Pregnancy Program at Northside High School. Northside also will soon offer medical, dental and mental health care services to students and parents. There are even plans to open a child care center for teen mothers and teachers, says Cooper.
To prove his plan works, Cooper points to a similar program used during his time as superintendent of the McComb School System in Mississippi.
In 1997, only 11 percent of the McComb system’s students had a reading level on par with their grade. By 2003, that figure jumped to 90 percent of the students. Juvenile arrests also were impacted during that period, going from about 350 in 1998 to less than 100 in 2005. Likewise, the system’s graduation rates went from a little more than 75 percent in 1997 to about 98 percent in 2006.
“No more mediocrity,” Cooper promises. “No longer will we just move around bad teachers from school to school.”
Cooper says his plan of change is about 20 percent complete, and adds support will be critical, from both the school board and from the community.
Getting Lafayette’s school system where it needs to be is going to cost a little more than $48 million, $30 million of which will come from a state issued bond. Covering the remaining $18 million will be up to both the school board and the people of Lafayette, the superintendent says.
Lafayette School Board President Shelton Cobb echoed Cooper, saying the success of Lafayette schools will hinge on community support.
“We had schools low performing for too long and that is something we can no longer tolerate,” says Cobb.
Among the hundreds who attended Wednesday’s lecture was Ron Cormier, superintendent of instruction for the Iberia Parish School System.
“I’m here out of curiosity,” Cormier says. “Just to look at our neighboring parishes and see what they're doing, because we’re all facing similar challenges. It’s going to take talking across parish lines to solve the issues I think we face throughout the Acadiana community.”
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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