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 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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