Panel against new high schools

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 10, 2009 - Page: 4B

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An East Baton Rouge Parish school panel recommended denying a request Thursday from a local nonprofit to create two new small high schools in town.

Advance Innovative Education, a recent offshoot of the better-known nonprofit Advance Baton Rouge, is developing plans for a new high school focusing on digital arts as well as another one focused on science, technology, engineering and math.

Top administrators for the parish school system persuaded the School Board’s Finance Committee to reject Advance Innovative Education’s application for two charters.

Three committee members urged school administrators to keep open communications with the group.

The full School Board will take up the issue at its Thursday meeting.

If rejected, Advance Innovative Education then has the legal green-light to apply by Aug. 21 to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to start the new schools in fall 2010.

Advance Innovative Education, when it was still part of Advance Baton Rouge, first announced plans for the new high schools in April 2008.

The announcement caught parish school system officials by surprise and helped further strain relations between the group and the school system.

Kristy Hebert, the former chief executive officer of Advance Baton Rouge who now holds the same position with Advance Innovative Education, only formally applied for a charter in a letter dated June 17.

Hebert makes no sales pitch, saying only that if the School Board rejects her request, “I respectfully request a formal letter stating this refusal.”

A three-member in-house committee led by Angela Lee, recently promoted to assistant superintendent for high schools, met Tuesday to consider the proposal and Lee wrote a memo dated Thursday offering five reasons for rejecting the proposal.

The item wasn’t originally on the agenda for Finance Committee but was added during the meeting at the request of Herman Brister, interim chief academic officer for the school system.

Brister said the two main reasons he is against authorizing the new charters are: a shortage of space and the availability of the parish school system’s other good college-preparatory options.