BESE OKs EBR school takeovers

• By WILL SENTELL
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Mar 12, 2009 - Page: 1A - UPDATED: 12:35 a.m.

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Six failing public schools in East Baton Rouge Parish will  become charter schools and two others will be run directly by the state, Louisiana’s top school board decided Wednesday amid controversy.

All eight were taken over in January by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which sets policies for about 650,000 students statewide.

The key dispute on Wednesday focused on exactly when and how the changes take effect.

The board voted to:

• Designate charter school operators for Dalton and Lanier elementary schools and Crestworth and Kenilworth middle schools.

Charter schools are run by private groups and are supposed to offer innovative techniques without much of the traditional public education red tape.

• Have the state directly run Banks and Park elementary schools for the 2009-10 school year and again seek charter operators for the following year.
• Have the state run Capitol Elementary and Capitol Middle School through its Recovery School District, or RSD.

Under the plan, Dalton and Lanier elementary schools will be run by Advance Baton Rouge, a civic group that the state picked last year to run two other troubled schools that the state took over: Prescott and Glen Oaks middle schools.

Crestworth Middle School will be run by Crestworth Learning Academy. It includes lawyers, educators, and members of the business community and is loosely tied to Mt. Pilgrim Baptist Church.

Kenilworth Middle School will be run as a charter school by Pelican Educational Foundation, which is headed by Tevfik Kosar, a professor of computer science at LSU.

However, controversy erupted over plans by the state Department of Education to delay a decision on exactly when the four charter operators will take control of the schools.

The proposal backed by the state board gives Paul Vallas, superintendent of the RSD, until March 27 to decide whether charter operators will run the schools starting with the 2009-10 school year or 2010-11.

If Vallas and others conclude that charter operators are not ready, the state would operate them during the 2009-10 school year.