For the second time this week, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have expanded the Louisiana Supreme Court from seven to nine members fell short of the needed two-thirds majority.
With just 55 hours remaining before Thursday’s 6 p.m. deadline for this session, the Senate in short order Tuesday morning duly and unanimously rejected the House-amended versions of the sports betting and mandatory kindergarten bills at the request of their authors.
Mandatory kindergarten at age 5 and the perennial argument over whether Louisiana is getting its $180-million-a-year’s worth from movie business tax credits consumed over an hour of debate each.
Lafayette area reps are moving bills waiving taxes on re-opened orphaned wells and creating new reporting requirements for abortions.
Louisiana schools used federal coronavirus relief to buy up thousands of tablets for kids to use during the pandemic and beyond. Many school districts have more tablets than kids enrolled. Lafayette Parish, for instance, has 40,000 Chromebooks for its 31,000 students. Connectivity, however, remains a big problem. Not every family has home access to the internet. Mississippi used CARES Act allocation to address that problem directly and was pretty successful at it.
December’s coronavirus stimulus included $1 billion for schools in Louisiana. Districts across the state are working the windfall into their plans, with most using the money to address learning loss. Lafayette Parish schools will use its $37 million allocation for ” academic recovery, student services and personal protective equipment,” according to The Advocate.
Acadiana’s French immersion students are about to make a new animated friend. But he’s an old pal for many of their parents.
As local public schools navigate the pandemic in their quest to reopen, the longstanding challenges associated with the digital divide in Lafayette are making things a lot more complicated. It’s hard to do distance learning when thousands of students can’t access the Internet.
At a summit last week, One Acadiana launched 55 by 25, a community-wide effort to boost the number of workers holding post-secondary certificates or diplomas to 55 percent of the population by 2025.
Nearly 12 years after the Schools of Choice program helped LPSS escape federal scrutiny, the same program is at the center of a federal lawsuit alleging manipulation and exclusionary practices.
[UPDATE: Chris Williams has resigned. Read The Advertiser’s June 8 story here.] ▸ The gist: SMILE Community Action Agency remains in a state of utter chaos. With Williams at the helm, the agency last year lost $14 million in federal funding to operate Head Start and Early Head Start learning classes in Iberia, Lafayette and St. Martin […]
The school will serve as an educational institution for the students, as well as hands-on learning experiences for collegians and faculty to experiment with new teaching techniques.