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.
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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