EPSB holds special meeting to discuss capacity issue

The Evangeline Parish School Board met Monday night for a special meeting to address capacity issues facing some of the district’s schools, as well as the possibility of re-drawing school zones.
The schools discussed the most at the meeting were Pine Prairie High School, Bayou Chicot Elementary, Mamou High School, and Mamou Elementary.
When superintendent Toni Hamilin first addressed the board of 13, she explained how school capacity is defined.
Hamlin said, “We define capacity as the ideal number of students assigned to a classroom.”
According to the superintendent, the district’s ideal number of students assigned to a classroom in grades K-3 is 21 students to one teacher, and for grades 4-12 the ideal number is 26 students to one teacher. By these standards, Pine Prairie High School, grades 9-12; Bayou Chicot Elementary, grades 5-8; and Mamou Elementary are well over their capacity.
However, Hamlin explained that “none of the schools in Evangeline Parish are overcrowded by Louisiana Standards.”
Louisiana Standards set the maximum number of students at 26 per classroom in lower grades, and 33 maximum students in higher grades.
While no school is over capacity by state standards, some board members are more concerned with the fact that their campuses were not built to be able to sufficiently hold the amount of students currently enrolled at their schools.
During the meeting, Hamlin said, “Pine Prairie High School’s 9-12th grades have at least 100 students more than Ville Platte High and Mamou High,” and according to board president Wayne Dardeau, the Pine Prairie campus is too small for the number of students enrolled at the school.
“Pine Prairie was a decent size Class B school before consolidation, and so was Bayou Chicot. When the judge made us consolidate in 2004, those two decent size Class B schools, along with a section of Ville Platte, were all put on Pine Prairie High’s campus,” said Dardeau, board member for PPHS. “Now, we have more students on Pine Prairie’s campus than the school was ever meant to hold. Pine Prairie High was not constructed to have room for this many students. We need a new building, but there is no money for that, so we have to start looking at other options to fix this problem.”
According to the superintendent, based on the district’s capacity guidelines, PPHS grades 9-12 are “currently over capacity by 80 students,” which could grow because of the amount of eighth graders entering PPHS from its feeder school, BCE, which is 52 students over capacity.
Hamlin said, “The amount of eighth grade students at Bayou Chicot is in the triple digits, and in the next two years we are looking at about as many as 140 eighth grade students at BCE. Those students will then go to Pine Prairie High.”
When it came to addressing the over capacity issues at BCE, the school’s board member Peggy Forman asked, “I don’t need a new building built on Bayou Chicot’s campus when I have a perfect building maybe a half a mile down the road. Can we consider re-opening Hester Heath, and move some of my students there to lower the number of students on Bayou Chicot’s campus?”
The superintendent however, informed the board that “Hester Heath was gutted at the time of reorganization,” or consolidation, and “supplies, such as intercom speakers, were sent to other schools in the district.”
The district would be looking at a substantial fee to make Hester Heath Elementary school ready once again.
The idea to re-draw the sub-zone lines was mentioned at the special meeting as a way to lessen the number of students enrolling at the schools who are already over capacity. The sub-zones are the areas that were not originally zoned for a school until reorganization. For example, the section of Ville Platte that was sent to Pine Prairie and Bayou Chicot is a sub-zone.
The data supplied at the meeting showed that there are currently 51 students attending PPHS from the sub-zone, 28 of those are in high school grades, while the other 23 are in grades pre-K-4. At BCE there are 18 students currently enrolled that live in the sub-zone.
Hamlin said, “There are, however, 114 students total that reside in the Pine Prairie/Bayou Chicot sub-zone, but not all of those students are enrolled at Pine Prairie or Bayou Chicot. There are 45 students residing in that sub-zone that are attending other schools.”
This means, that there are actually 45 more students that could have been enrolled between PPHS and BCE this year had those students not chosen to attend another school through the transfer program.
For Mamou schools, board member Mike Fontenot is also wanting lines redrawn, but the data presented Monday night showed that moving the lines may not be the best option for the Mamou area.
According to Hamlin, the south side of the Duralde Highway goes to Basile High and WW Stewart, while the north side attends MH and ME.
Fontenot would like to see the dividing line, which is currently set at the middle of the highway, to be moved so that more kids can attend MH if they wish.
This could present a problem however, due to the fact that ME is already over capacity by 23 students. If the line along the Duralde Hwy. is moved, this could potentially up the number of elementary students zoned for ME. Since no decisions were made concerning this issue at the February 29 meeting, the superintendent asked the board if they could try to have a decision made by early April because “there will be a lot of things to get in order if a decision is made to re-draw school zones.”
Before the board decides how to handle this situation, Dardeau requested that the board be provided with the square footage of every school, and Ville Platte board member Georgiana Wilson asked for a meeting to hear how the parents and students feel.
Wilson said, “We haven’t asked how the parents and students feel about this, so I think we need to hold a public meeting for those people to be able to come and speak.” As far as when that public meeting will be held is unknown at this time.
Hamlin said, “I will speak with the president over the next couple of days and we will try to figure out when a decision will be made.”