The Lafayette Parish School Board voted Wednesday to remove the full-time gifted and French and Spanish immersion programs from Paul Breaux Middle School and split the programs across two different schools despite overwhelming opposition from parents and children alike.
The board voted 5-4 to move the gifted program from Paul Breaux at 1400 S. Orange St. to Edgar Martin Middle School at 410 Broadmoor Blvd. and voted 5-4 to move the French and Spanish immersion programs to Scott Middle School at 116 Marie St. in Scott.
Voting in favor of moving the programs were Roddy Bergeron, Kate Bailey Labue, Britt Latiolais, David LeJeune and Hannah Smith Mason. Voting against the moves were Chad Desormeaux, Josh Edmond, Jeremy Hidalgo and Amy Trahan.
The decisions came after over two hours of public comments from students, parents and community members urging board members not to remove the programs from Paul Breaux.
District 4 board member Amy Trahan, whose district includes Paul Breaux Middle, said there were many questions that were not thoroughly explored enough before thrusting this proposal on the public, and it would be prudent to gather more information and community feedback on the possible impacts before shaking up these programs and Paul Breaux.
“No one who came to this podium here came to speak in favor of it. An overwhelming opposition came out in fear of the limiting of the programs. What are we here for as school board members? We’re here to represent and hear the voices of the constituents of our community,” she said.
Lauren Walker, a Paul Breaux sixth grader, said the move to Scott Middle means she and her brothers, who attend Myrtle Place Elementary for French immersion, will lose out on middle school French immersion. Scott Middle is at least a 30-minute drive from her home in southeast Lafayette – and even farther for families in Youngsville and Broussard, she said.
While the district has said a transportation plan is in the works to make Scott Middle a more efficient option for families than Paul Breaux, Walker said taking the bus is not a trustworthy option for a lot of families. She said her brothers’ bus to Myrtle Place has not run for seven days in a row.
“You’d be cutting off a lot of the people in French immersion even though you’re trying to increase the population in these schools. You always say that you have the student’s best intentions in mind, but if you did, you’d never make the decision to move this program,” Walker said.
Rita Patterson, who attended the former Paul Breaux High School, said she empathized with the students’ pain as they fought for their middle school. Patterson said hearing their sorrow at being pulled away from a school they love brought back old scars.
“Back then in 1969 when the choice was made for me, my goal was to become a graduate of Paul Breaux High School. Well, my dream was taken, balled up and thrown in the trash. I didn’t have a voice then. I’m so happy the children nowadays have a voice and I wish that you would listen to the children,” Patterson said.
The school was originally opened in the 1950s as Lafayette’s only high school for Black students and named for an educator who advocated for and led Black students. The high school closed in 1970 to comply with court integration mandates and was reopened as a middle school.
The relocation of the gifted and immersion students will nearly halve the school’s population, dropping the student count to 320 zoned students, Superintendent Francis Touchet, Jr. said. Many community members expressed fear that this sets the school up for future closure.
Parents warned that the loss of students caused by the removal of the gifted and language immersion programs from Paul Breaux Middle will have cascading effects on the school.
Nadine Melancon, whose daughter is in seventh grade gifted at Paul Breaux, said programs like the middle school’s band and choir will suffer.
The band, led by teacher Eric LeBlanc, is currently made up of 118 gifted and immersion students and 20 zoned students. The program does not charge fees and funds all its programming through fundraising, she said. The forced departure of those 118 students will gut the program; without the numbers, it will make it difficult for the program to take advantage of opportunities like an invitation to perform in New York next year, Melancon said.
Drake LeBlanc is a Paul Breaux alumnus and co-founder of Télé-Louisiane, a French multimedia company based in Lafayette. He cited Paul Breaux as foundational to his success as a business owner in his 20s and the success of his friends – one of whom is pursuing a Ph.D. while working for Ochsner and another who is a manager at a music catalogue investment firm.
“That’s what Paul Breaux looks like. You don’t get students like me, you don’t get members of the Lafayette community that look like me and my peers and my colleagues, without the intersection of the programs and also the cultures that exist at Paul Breaux. It’s what made us,” LeBlanc said.
Kalif Cormier, a second grade teacher at J.W. Faulk Elementary, said moving the gifted program away from the northside also makes it more difficult for younger students to envision themselves achieving at that level and communicates to them that district leaders don’t have faith they can participate in programs like gifted.
“It's something for them to keep their eyes set on. Moving that away and making it so distant from them – it's already so hard to get some of our students to be able to push 10 minutes from now to the next class period, the next day, the next week, to the end of the year,” Cormier said.
Touchet said the relocations were proposed by a board member as an opportunity to regain students who were dropping off from the programs between elementary and middle school. A study of the past three school years showed between 42 and 46% of eligible middle school gifted students were dropping off from the program.
It’s not clear if the students dropping off are leaving the school system altogether or why; surveying of the students and their parents has not been conducted in the past, he said.
There were no projected cost savings tied to these proposals, but Touchet said similar and more significant changes will be considered across the district as the school system looks to save money to prepare for financial strain on the horizon.
The board voted Wednesday to hire a strategic planner to evaluate the whole system this year, and many of those recommendations will likely upset people, Touchet said.
"We’re going to be faced in the next three years with a lot of challenges...Lafayette Parish is not going to be able to survive with these initiatives that are happening – charter schools are here and private schools are coming next. That is what is happening as far as reality, and I don’t think that people really understand,” he said.
Several people, including board member Amy Trahan, requested the board wait until the comprehensive strategic planner can review the entire district and make broad recommendations for change before moving the programs.
“When you’re trying to make a long-term healthcare plan, you don’t stop triaging the patient. We need to make short-term and long-term decisions at the same time. It’s going to be difficult,” board member Roddy Bergeron said before the vote on the planner.
Bergeron said before the Paul Breaux immersion vote that his district 6 constituents who contacted him largely favored relocation. He said he felt like Paul Breaux in recent years had struggled to serve the gifted, zoned and immersion students well on one campus and he wanted to break those populations up to allow the zoned students to be prioritized.
Mary Pritchard, chair of the Lafayette Democratic Parish Executive Committee, said in a public letter to the school board and at the meeting that the group believes the relocations go against the efforts of the school system’s past desegregation orders. She said the group will work with partners to bring a lawsuit in federal court to stop the programs’ relocation.
“The Executive Committee is deeply invested in preserving a community institution with a rich history in the civil rights and desegregation movement,” the group said in the letter. “We will not mourn the destruction of Paul Breaux’s legacy. We will organize.”