NEW ORLEANS — As the biggest school district in the state, Jefferson Parish Schools is trying to get ahead of a big issue.
“We can’t ignore the trends,” said school board vice president Derrick Shepherd.
Shepherd says one of those trends is declining student enrollment across the district’s 81 schools.
“It’s not just declining student enrollment but it’s also the age of our buildings, the content of what we want to teach, the construction, the configuration of all the schools here,” Shepherd said.
Shepherd says in 2018 the district started looking at ways to better align resources and money. Before that could happen, the pandemic emptied classrooms, leading to another issue.
“When COVID hit, for whatever reason, the children that we were expecting to come back have not come back,” Shepherd said.
According to district numbers, student enrollment in Jefferson Parish steadily increased every academic year from 2012 to 2019, when enrollment hit more than 50,000 students. Enrollment then dropped the year of the pandemic and the next two years.
“At our peak we had in Jefferson Parish School System, we had almost 60,000 kids but now we’re down into the forties,” Shepherd said.
School leaders say it’s not just homeschooling contributing to the downslide.
“The problem is a mixture of everything,” Shepherd said. “The trends of babies coming into our state is low, in Jefferson Parish we have an aging population.”
To figure out solutions, this week, engineering and educational consulting firms will host nine townhall meetings to make sure parents, teachers, and community leaders are aware of the challenges.
“We want to have someone from the outside look at our total infrastructure system,” said Shepherd. “Give us an unbiased report of how it looks and where we’re heading, where the trends are, what we should be looking forward to.”
That could mean some schools close, school buildings get restructured, or resources get shifted around.
“None of the decisions have been made,” Shepherd said. “We wouldn’t make them without the public and that’s what we’re doing this for.”
Input from the public and recommendations from the firms will be presented to the school board later this month
A decision on whether any schools will close must be made by early April to allow time for students to be rezoned.
You can find a list of town hall meeting dates here.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.