Key Issues of Legislative Session Will Be Education, Retirement, Transportation

Reps. Clif Richardson, Valarie Hodges Agree

CENTRAL — Education reform, pension reform, and transportation will be top issues during this year’s regular session of the Louisiana Legislature, according to State Rep. Clif Richardson and freshman Rep. Valarie Hodges, both Republicans from Central.

Their remarks came during the annual Legislative Town Hall meeting at DEMCO, sponsored by the Central Community Alliance.

Richardson said very few bills have been prefiled.  So it is difficult to know if the session will face the usual flood of legislative proposals, he said.

However, he is already receiving a lot of questions about Gov. Bobby Jindal’s education reform proposals.  Bills in the governor’s education package have not yet been filed.   So it has been impossible to get a handle on details, he said.  The governor has said he will propose granting vouchers or scholarships to poor students attending schools receiving grades of C, D, or F from the State Department of Education.

Rep. Richardson said that idea has caused questions from parents who ask why only “poor” students should be allowed to transfer out of failing schools.

Rep. Hodges said she understood that students would be able to leave failing schools and transfer across district lines into another school system.  When asked whether students from the inner city of Baton Rouge would be allowed to transfer into the Central school system, Hodges said she believed they would but that she opposes that idea.

A spokesman for the Governor’s office told the Central City News that no student could be transferred into a school system without local approval.  Rep. Richardson said he believes the proposal would allow the school principal, rather than the local school board, to make that decision.  He said a lot more information is needed on the education reform proposal.

Likewise, the Governor’s pension reform plan needs more study, Rep. Hodges said.  While retirement from the state is allowed too early now in some cases, it is a big jump up to 67 years old, she said.  “If you are on the verge of retirement, you might consider doing it now,” she said.

Hodges said transportation improvements for Central are her top priority.  She and Richardson, both members of the House Transportation Committee, are seeking funding to four-lane Hooper Road from Sullivan to Joor and additional funding to widen Hooper from Joor to Blackwater.  “This would allow four-lane access from I-12 to the Baton Rouge Airport via the Central Thruway and Hooper,” Richardson said.

Central school board member Ruby Foil asked the legislators to look closely at the idea of assigning letter grades to schools.  “It’s unfair to have magnet schools pulling students out of other schools and then labeling those schools as failing schools,” she said.

Central City Councilman Wayne Messina, a former Baker High principal, told about an outstanding principal who resigned from the East Baton Rouge school system.  That principal and many of his teachers worked after school and on weekends to tutor their students.  Messina said, “He took his top 20 students and worked hard to bring them to a high achievement level.  Then the magnet schools took 14 of those 20 students.  When test time came, his remaining students’ combined score was one point below passing.  His school was declared a failing school.  So he resigned, saying, ‘I refuse to be associated with failure that I don’t have any control over.’”

Messina said that the criminal justice system is sending too many youngsters into the public schools who should be incarcerated.  He cited an 18-year-old arrested this week for raping a child at a public school in East Baton Rouge Parish.  The alleged rapist had previously been convicted of rape and sentenced to “juvenile life.”  Nevertheless, he was allowed to return to school where he raped another little girl.  “We have a problem, but the problem is not necessarily our schools.  We had a youngster come to school with a miniature AK47.  He was arrested at 11:57 p.m. and out the next day.”

Messina said it takes a special person to be a teacher in our public schools today.  “Most of our teachers are working very hard and doing a good job,” he said.

When he was principal at Baker High, he had students assigned to his school who were in diapers, he said, but their test schools counted with everyone else’s.  “Is that how we measure failure?” he said.

“One of my concerns is how test scores are assigned.  If a school has a troubled student who is expelled and goes into an alternative school, that student’s score continues to be counted at the original school.”

“That’s fine,” Messina said, “and that’s fair if you also assign the test scores of the student you took out of my school and sent to the magnet school, but that’s not how it’s done.  That student isn’t counted toward my school’s scores,” he said.  Too many principals and schools are being set up for failure under the current evaluation system, he said.

Ted McCulley, a former high school teacher, said the teachers at Baton Rouge Magnet would be challenged if assigned to Baker High, while the teachers at Baker High would probably be able to do a pretty good job at Baton Rouge High.

Richardson and Hodges agreed to consider the concerns expressed by members of the audience.

By Woody Jenkins, Editor, Central City News