Legislation making its way through the state Legislature seeks to remove legal barriers that make it very hard to create new public school districts in Louisiana. Removing those barriers would likely activate a breakaway district in southeast Baton Rouge — a forerunner to St. George — that was approved 11 years ago but never funded.
This “zombie school district,” as opponents describe it, could serve as the basis for a new St. George school district, which would be carved out of the East Baton Rouge Parish school system. A St. George school district is the long sought educational companion to the controversial City of St. George, which voters approved in 2019 but is on hold awaiting the outcome of an appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Belinda Davis, a mother of two children in the parish school system and a professor at LSU, led a citizens group in 2013 in a successful fight to block the southeast Baton Rouge breakaway school district. More than a decade later, Davis is back at the state Capitol fighting to keep this district buried in the past.
“You will be funding a zombie school district that is not on the books and is not (connected to) a municipality,” Davis warned lawmakers at an April 3 committee hearing. “It is a collection of neighborhoods.”
The proposed legislation would also greatly ease the way for other restive communities in the state to gain school independence. And, conversely, it could make it easier for lawmakers to consolidate and replace small rural school districts in financial distress.
Giving up power
House Bill 6, authored by Rep. Emily Chenevert, R-Baton Rouge, proposes amending the Louisiana Constitution to make all this happen. The legislation would add a statewide referendum to the Nov. 5 ballot.
The bill easily passed both the House’s Education and Civil Law & Procedure committees. It now awaits action by the full House. For final passage, the bill needs a two-thirds majority in the House and the Senate.
Since it went into effect in 1974, the state Constitution has given voters the final say as to whether new proposed school districts receive state education funding. In 1995, 1999 and 2006, voters exercised this power, funding breakaway school districts in Baker, Zachary and Central, adding each one by name into the Constitution.
House Bill 6 would ask the nearly 3 million registered voters in Louisiana to give up that power and hand it over to the 144 members of the Legislature.
The proposed amendment targets the section of the Constitution that spells out who can receive state education funding. That funding is distributed via a formula known as the Minimum Foundation Program, or MFP. Only 69 school districts and “no more” are privy to MFP funds. The amendment would remove the words “no more” and extend MFP funds to “any other school system created by the legislature.”
If voters agree to the change, all that would be needed to create a new school district would be a simple majority vote of the Legislature. And its adoption would likely resurrect the left-for-dead Southeast Baton Rouge Community School System.
Past is present
Now a legislative liaison for Gov. Jeff Landry, Mack “Bodi” White served as state senator from 2012 to 2023 and led the charge for the breakaway southeast Baton Rouge district and later the City of St. George. He testified recently in favor of Chenevert’s bill.
“If I had been here another term, I would probably have run this bill,” he said April 3.
In 2013, White persuaded a majority of the Legislature to approve Act 295, the law creating the southeast Baton Rouge district.
That act, however, has never gone into effect. It specifies that it “shall take effect and become operative if and when a proposed amendment” to the state Constitution “is adopted.” That never happened. After a furious fight, White’s proposed amendment that year failed, falling short of the required two-thirds supermajority.
By contrast, Baker, Zachary and Central had previously won supermajorities in the Legislature, and all were subsequently successful at the ballot box.
Act 295, however, offers an alternative. It says the southeast Baton Rouge district will come to life if an amendment to the state Constitution is adopted that “authorizes the creation of school districts by legislative act.” Eleven years later, House Bill 6 is that proposed amendment.
Once such a constitutional amendment goes into effect, Act 295 specifies that the Southeast Baton Rouge Community School System would “begin actual operation” the following July 1, in this case as early as July 1, 2025.
It would become the 70th school district in the state and the fifth in East Baton Rouge Parish.
Old fight, new impact
As with past breakaway fights, supporters of a new district in southeast Baton Rouge have argued that the parish school system is falling short and they would do a better job if they ran their own schools. Opponents say such districts would leave behind the children who need the most help, exacerbate existing racial and socioeconomic stratification and could prompt other areas of the parish to mount their own secession efforts.
The new district’s boundaries, carved out of the parish school system, would be shaped like a slice of pie. They would start at the Interstate 10/12 split and extend east on I-12 and southeast on I-10 to the Livingston and Ascension parish lines.
When it was under consideration in 2013, the district would have taken with it 10 schools and an estimated 6,800 students. That is 11 schools now thanks to the addition of BASIS Materra charter school. Those 11 schools currently enroll about 7,700 students.
The boundaries of the new district would split several school attendance zones and likely cut off access to popular magnet schools such as Baton Rouge Magnet High. The result would likely be thousands of displaced students who would have to change schools.
The southeast Baton Rouge district boundaries are unlikely to stay that way for long.
St. George supporters would likely return to the Legislature to try to redraw those lines to include the entirety of the City of St. George. And those school boundaries could also be expanded further to add areas left out of the St. George municipal boundaries, including big taxpayers such as the Mall of Louisiana and L’Auberge Casino, which have been annexed by the City of Baton Rouge.
Fairness and floodgates
In her testimony at the April 3 meeting of the House Education Committee, Chenevert argued that it is unfair to have districts that were approved by the Legislature that are unable to operate because voters have not added them to the Constitution. She said any district that the Legislature approves should get funding.
“It just gives (legislative-only approved districts) the same rights and responsibilities as the ones mentioned in the Constitution,” said Chenevert, who took office in January.
In an interview, Davis said she doesn’t recall anyone in 2013 complaining that it was unfair to require a constitutional amendment to create a new school system, since that is how Baker, Zachary and Central were formed.
State Rep. Barbara Freiberg, R-Baton Rouge, supports the legislation. Freiberg, who served on the parish School Board in 2013, told the committee the Legislature should control whether school districts are funded.
“Whether it’s St. George or some other area, if they are recognized by the Legislature, they should get the MFP dollars,” she told Chenevert.
Rep. Charles Owen, R-Rosepine, said the Legislature should take charge of the creation of school districts, saying it is unfair to compel voters to make such calls.
“We should not force the good people of Louisiana to wrap their minds around this in November,” Owen said. “This is why they send us down here, to make these hard decisions.”
Speaking at the April 15 meeting of the Civil Law committee, Rep. Ed Larvadain III, D-Alexandria, argued that the new law would open up the floodgates and end up reducing funding for existing districts, some of them already strapped financially.
“Once we start opening up these school systems, we’re going to keep opening up school systems and before you know it the piggy bank won’t have any money,” Larvadain said.
Voter say, fiscal impact
Chenevert says her legislation would give voters the say on whether to change the Constitution.
“This is actually a vote for the people,” she said. “We are not taking anyone’s right away.”
Opponents, however, have argued that the legislation is anti-democratic in many ways, and voters are unlikely to realize that they are being asked to give up power they now have.
“The people will lose the ability to reject any school systems created by the Legislature in the future,” Tania Nyman, who like Davis was active in the fight to stop the breakaway district a decade ago, told the Civil Law committee.
The bar on Nov. 5 would be a bit lower than it has been in the past. The constitutional amendments creating Baker, Central and Zachary needed to pass both statewide and in East Baton Rouge Parish. House Bill 6, however, would need only to pass statewide.
“House Bill 6 allows supporters of the Southeast Baton Rouge Community School System to circumvent the required majority support required within the affected parish” Nyman said.
Susan East Nelson, a resident of southeast Baton Rouge, said the legislation stifles her voice as a voter.
“I have no vote about this southeast Baton Rouge school district being created,” she said.
In its fiscal note for the bill, the Legislative Fiscal Office said it is unable to say whether House Bill 6 would in fact trigger Act 295, but, if it does, the funding impact “would be significant.”
Fiscal officers point to a 2019 simulation conducted by the state that gauged the potential impact of a St. George school district that had the same boundaries of the proposed City of St. George.
Such a district, according to the simulation, would result in a 15% cut in funding for the East Baton Rouge Parish school system while making the new St. George the fifth-richest district in the state.
Slicing the pie
More school districts also mean more competition for state education funding. The Legislative Fiscal Office warned that the southeast Baton Rouge district would have a financial impact that “may be felt by all systems included in the MFP.”
Davis, who served for four years on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, told the House Education Committee that the state’s funding formula provides extra money to small districts that have fewer than 7,500 students. She said breakaway districts are generally small, so they get more funding as a result, leaving less for other districts.
“Over the long haul, the cost of the MFP increases to the taxpayers of Louisiana,” Davis predicted.
Former Sen. White said that when Central was formed the impact was minimal,
“It was a modest effect, a couple of dollars per kid per district,” White said.
In her testimony, Nelson argued the impact would grow the more districts broke away.
“The pie is the pie,” Nelson said. “Every time you cut a piece of the pie, the pie gets smaller for everybody else.”
