JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — Despite hours of passionate comments from community urging against it, the Jefferson Parish School Board voted to move forward with their plan to shut down some schools.
With only a few months left until the start of the next school year, the district will now need to redraw maps and figure out logistics. JP School Board President Ralph Brandt says they had to wait to nail those down until the final vote.
“That kind of is the proverbial challenge here until last night took place we couldn’t really do the next steps of drawing the maps and the intended zone lines because you need to know what schools are closing,” Brandt says.
Brandt says the Superintendent and his team will be the ones to redraw the maps.
Teachers will also be moved come August. Brandt says this will actually help the teacher shortage. According to him, teachers will likely have a say in their new school assignment.
“The beauty of this is with their being a shortage of teachers right now that this is not a situation where teachers will be losing their jobs because of consolidation, it will be they will have opportunities at different schools ,” Brandt says.
Parents, students and teachers have spent weeks now expressing their concerns and Brandt says they haven’t fallen on deaf ears, but he doesn’t agree with all of them. Parents say they don’t understand why schools with a larger population are being shut down and consolidated into schools with a smaller population, or why schools with a high grading are being moved into a failing school.
“It’s not always about a matter of the number of kids it’s the percentage of use of the building,” Brandt said. “We have an aging school building population so what we’re looking at is trying to utilize these buildings to the best percentage we can unfortunately some of the schools in our system are operating at less than 50 percent capacity so if you think about that if you’re less than 50 percent capacity its almost like two schools a that rate could be in one building.”
Brandt says they will be using all the district’s resources to make the transition smooth.
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