Council Preview: Food trucks rules, $2.4 million for the Heymann Center, consolidation committee extension
Here is a selection of items on the agendas for this week’s meetings of the City and Parish councils.
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Education
GEOFF DAILY: Lafayette’s enthusiasm gap
A majority of city residents feel like Lafayette is heading in the wrong direction. But non-city residents think we’re on the right track.
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Survey: Anxiety about jobs and housing high, but slim majority think Lafayette is on the ‘right track’
Traffic, economy, crime, Covid and education were the top issues residents cited in the quality of life survey developed by One Acadiana.
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Is Lafayette a vibrant community? Here’s what readers had to say.
Diversity, social vitality and opportunity are big themes. A vibrant community is a place people from all walks of life are attracted to and can thrive.
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Legislative Roundup: Income tax reform advances; Supreme Court expansion fails; compromises on mandatory kindergarten, abortion reporting reached; and more
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.
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Senate, House balk at each other’s changes; sports betting, kindergarten, others sent to conference
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.
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After heated debates, House approves mandatory kindergarten at 5, kills continuing movie credits
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.
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Brief: Orphan wells, voluntary industrial audits and abortion reporting
Lafayette area reps are moving bills waiving taxes on re-opened orphaned wells and creating new reporting requirements for abortions.
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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.
Say hello (again) to the Great Boudini, Lafayette
Acadiana’s French immersion students are about to make a new animated friend. But he’s an old pal for many of their parents.
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COLUMN: The digital divide threatens education in Lafayette
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.
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