NEW ORLEANS — One of the city’s most sought after public schools will begin the process toward a name change.
Lusher Charter School CEO Kathy Riedlinger sent an email to Lusher parents indicating that she is working with the school's board and NOLA public schools to formulate a process to consider a name change.
“We are listening to our school community and will be communicating soon on what this process will look like,” she told NOLA.com. In addition, her note to parents said that the school is "examining how to increase our school's racial and academic diversity."
Lusher is perhaps the city’s most in-demand school as it is annually the top-rated elementary and middle school in New Orleans and one of the top-rated high schools. Getting your child into Lusher in kindergarten virtually guarantees one 13 years of high-rated programs in academics and arts in a public school setting free of tuition.
But it is named after Robert Mills Lusher, a former Confederate and a former school superintendent in Louisiana.
Research by writer Michael Tisserand, whose children attended Lusher, put Robert Mills Lusher's white supremacist views on display.
Among the writings unearthed by Tisserand, include this, written near the end of his life, where he encouraged police juries to: “thorough education of white children, in rural Louisiana, so that they would be properly prepared to maintain the Supremacy of the white race in rural Louisiana.”
A petition on Change.org to remove Lusher as the school’s name has received thousands of online signatures. The call comes amid a nationwide move to take down symbols of white supremacy and those that honor the Confederacy in the wake of protests following several deaths of black men and women, often at the hands of police, many of which were caught by camera phones.
The school operates two campuses - an elementary school on Willow Street and a middle and high school on Freret in a building formerly occupied by Alcee Fortier High School.
The most recent profile of Lusher Charter on publicschoolreview.com shows the school demographics as 57 percent white, 27 percent black and 16 percent other, which included Hispanic, Asian and bi-racial.
