Friday, March 1, 2013
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| Photo by Robin May | |
| Mavis Fruge at the vacant St. Luke's Hospital in Arnaudville. |
For this small community of about 1,500, the last four years have been rife with change, and the majority of residents agree that change has been good.
The problem, however, is that the small group opposing Arnaudville’s renaissance — as some call it — mostly consist of elected or appointed officials, who over the last two years have put up a hard-fought resistance to an idea to transform the vacant St. Luke’s Hospital into the headquarters for a multi-faceted French immersion program. Another issue has been that the fate of the facility will ultimately be decided by two governing bodies — the St. Landry and St. Martin parish councils.
Mavis Fruge is a life-long resident of Arnaudville. She’s also one of the main forces behind the push to reconstitute the old St. Luke Hospital, a building that has been vacant for four years, into a French Immersion campus.
For Fruge, turning Arnaudville into a mecca for French Immersion just makes sense.
“Arnaudville is still so small, and that’s probably why we still have so many French speakers here,” says Fruge. “Our priest, our deacon, five of our seven post office workers, our police officer, our pharmacist, they all speak French. Our population is close to 1,500, and it’s safe to say at least 60 percent are French speakers.”
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| Bill Fontenot |
And as witnessed by the growing stack of support letters sent to the St. Landry and St. Martin parish councils, Fruge is not alone in her thinking.
Among the biggest backers for the program are officials from the French Consulate in New Orleans and Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, as well as numerous college professors, state legislators and a growing list of residents from St. Landry and St. Martin parishes.
In fact, LSU, Tulane and UL Lafayette have all pledged resources and support for the program.
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| Amanda LaFleur |
Amanda LaFleur, coordinator of Cajun studies at LSU, says a successful language immersion program can’t just happen anywhere. LaFleur, speaking during the Feb. 19 meeting of the St. Landry Parish Council, pledged LSU’s support for creating a program in Arnaudville.
“When we first heard of this project we jumped on it,” LaFleur told the hesitant council. “For an immersion program to be successful, you need a small place where the whole community is vested in creating the right atmosphere, and Arnaudville is a place where we can immerse people in a Francophone atmosphere. It’s like the Shangri-La of French immersion.”
Despite LSU’s commitment, which isn’t the only one, a small contingent of parish officials is against using the vacant hospital for the immersion program. That resistance, says St. Landry Parish President Bill Fontenot, has primarily come from council members Pam Gautreau, Alvin Stelly and Wayne Ardoin.
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| Pam Gautreau |
“This program would be such a great business for our parish; it’s the business of our people,” Fontenot tells IND Monthly. “Nobody would pay any more in taxes. All we’re looking to do is put this asset back into service for our community. This opposition is basically just a phantom opposition consisting of a few small-minded citizens.”
Another roadblock to the immersion program has been the First Hospital Service District of St. Martin and St. Landry Parishes, a body created in 1963 to oversee the now-vacant health care facility in Arnaudville. Yet, since the hospital’s closure four years ago, the board slipped under the radar. Despite not publishing its minutes since 1993, the board was technically still active, and was even sitting on a $1.6 million fund balance left over from a now-expired millage tax.
“The hospital board is resisting this project, and we’re not really sure why,” says Fontenot.
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| Alvin Stelly |
A partial reason for their resistance was made clear during the St. Landry Parish Council’s meeting on Feb. 19, when hospital board President Kenneth Quebedeaux said a company specializing in behavioral and mental health was interested in the facility.
“We refuse to be used as pawns in someone else’s game,” Quebedeaux told the council. “If we’re not interfered with, we will get a tenant in that building.”
Quebedeaux’s plan is unlikely now, as the St. Landry council voted during the Feb. 19 meeting to disband the hospital board. Because it’s a two-parish board, the St. Martin Parish Council also must vote to disband. If and when that council will follow St. Landry’s lead is up in the air. IND Monthly reached out to St. Martin Parish President Guy Cormier for a comment on the issue, but has yet to hear back.
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| Wayne Ardoin |
“We don’t want to own the building; we’re not looking for work,” says Fruge. “You ask what’s in it for me? The satisfaction of knowing I have made an effort for the survival of our Cajun-Creole cultures. Regardless of what St. Martin Parish decides, we’re starting the program in March for 10 legislators. It will just be on a smaller scale than if we were able to use the hospital.”
JUNE 19 Former Saint Steve Gleason, who is paralyzed by ALS, released a statement Tuesday in response to the Atlanta radio station's skit making fun of him and the disease, this Picayune post reports. What did he say? He said he'd accepted the apology of the DJs who did it, notes that at least the incident has got people talking about ALS, and asks anyone who is burning to take action about it to do so -- by helping him fight ALS.
JUNE 19 Blogger Ian McGibboney takes a look at the Gleason incident in this post. He makes a good argument about the difference between having free speech and being free from consequences for your speech (which none of us is). He also admits that many of us got upset before we listened to the skit -- but lets us know that the reality is far worse than we can imagine. It was the incredibly bad judgment, even more than the actual speech, that probably got those DJs fired, he opines.
JUNE 19 Washington Post blogger Aaron Blake writes about Sen. Guillory's switch to the GOP in this post. He writes what most political watchers in Louisiana know: Guillory was a Republican before he decided to run for the senate seat in a mostly-D St. Landry district, and has switched back now that he plans to run for Lt. Gov. in a mostly-R state. But how come Blake missed Guillory's appearance on a TLC pageant show? Now that is a video we'd like to see. (Again).
JUNE 19 Here's another Washington Post blog post about a Louisiana politician, and it's just plain scathing. Ezra Klein says Jindal's Politico post was "insulting" to the intelligence of voters, and adds that Jindal is personifying the "stupid" he's railed against, by being an "elite" who convinces GOP activists of "things that aren't true." Me-ow.
JUNE 19 Here's Gov. Jindal's post in Politico, in which he asks the GOP to get over losing to Obama (again) and stop "the bedwetting." (Uh, what?) He gives his Republican buddies what is probably a nerd's idea of a coach's motivational talk, which starts with a list of accomplishments that they can't seem to exploit and ending with an absurd description of liberals that sounds like a character treatment for a Fox "News" movie scripted by Gordon Liddy. Sure, he's preaching to the choir, but even the choir's not this gullible.
JUNE 19 Lamar Parmentel read Gov. Jindal's post on Politico, but thinks it was so dumb it probably was published in the wrong paper. This post by Lamar on the Daily Kingfish opines that possibly Jindal's post was destined for the Onion -- because the governor couldn't possibly be serious here. If you listen closely, you can hear the staff of the Kingfish giggling.
JUNE 19 Blogger Robert Mann posts from Turkey, a country he has visited several times in the past few years. Mann gives an interesting overview of the current political and societal climate of the country, which -- if you're living under a rock and don't know -- is experiencing protests and turmoil these days. Mann promises to post as much as he can during his trip, which should be fascinating reading.
JUNE 19 Blogger CB Forgotston says the legislature is keeping the vicious cycle going with its funding of new buildings for the community college/technical college system. Universities across the state need maintenance and improvement on existing buildings, and the solution is to build new buildings at other schools? By the time the bonds are paid off, those buildings will be falling down, too, CB says.
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