Lee High may close now

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 21, 2009 - Page: 1B

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East Baton Rouge Parish School Superintendent Charlotte Placide is recommending closing Lee High immediately rather than let some students stay for another year.

Supporters of the high school, located at 1105 Lee Drive, successfully fought to keep it open in spring 2008 — and to have it rebuilt in the future on the same location for $63 million — but the school’s continued inability to meet state minimum academic standards may have sealed its fate.

The School Board plans to consider closing Lee High at its meeting tonight, scheduled to start at 5 p.m. at the School Board Office, 1050 S. Foster Drive.

The board also will take up a portion of the employment contract for John Dilworth, the man the board selected in March to replace Placide, who is retiring June 30.

Placide visited Lee High’s faculty and staff Wednesday afternoon to let them know of her decision, made Tuesday after discussing it with her education leadership team.

“The staff was very somber,” she said. “Nobody wants it to happen.”

Placide first proposed closing Lee High at a May 4 special board meeting. The two options were to close the school right away or to close it over the course of the next year, so the class of 2010 could graduate at the school.

Lee High is potentially up for state takeover as early as August, and board members worried that if the school were still operating in any form, the state would move to take it over.

Closing the school immediately could mean that today — also the last day of the 2008-09 school year — is the school’s last day in operation.

Most of Lee High’s 630 students would be reassigned to McKinley, Tara and Woodlawn high schools. Placide said the added students would mean keeping at McKinley several temporary buildings longer than planned and expanding Woodlawn in the near future. Students from foreign countries who are learning English would transfer to McKinley High, while special-education students would move to Arlington Preparatory Academy.

Lee High received its standardized test scores this week. Placide said the scores went up but will probably still fall short of the minimum 60 points when the state calculates school performance scores in August.

On the matter of the employment contract for Dilworth, Board President Jerry Arbour said that most financial issues have been settled. What’s left to iron out is performance pay, namely what goals the board and Dilworth will set for the new superintendent to achieve, Arbour said.

Placide, who retires June 30 after five years as superintendent, currently makes a base salary of about $214,100 a year, plus up to $10,000 more in performance pay. Dilworth currently makes about $160,000 a year in Montgomery, Ala., where he has served as superintendent for the past two years.