NEW ROADS, LA (AP) — Pointe Coupee Parish school district officials have high hopes for a proposal to transform Pointe Coupee Central High into a science, technology, engineering and math academy.
Schools Superintendent Linda D'Amico last month sold the idea to the school board as a magnet alternative program. She said the program could help boost the district's lackluster academic scores and lure some students who fled for private schools in the area or for higher-performing public schools in surrounding parishes.
However, some folks think the school district is trying to take on more than it can handle — that Pointe Coupee lacks the money it needs to emulate the successful magnet programs in Iberville Parish and Lafayette that served as the models for D'Amico's proposed STEM academy.
They also wonder if school officials will be able to convince parents to return to a parish school system they had lost faith in, even with the academy program as a lure.
One of the people instrumental in implementing Iberville Parish's magnet academies said Pointe Coupee officials already should be working overtime in getting community buy-in for their program, given that they plan to open it in fall 2015.
The public awareness campaign has been on hold, though, as D'Amico seeks U.S. District Judge James J. Brady's approval to move forward with the STEM academy.
The Advocate’s Terry L. Jones reports Brady is expected to make a decision about the STEM proposal in early January.
Last March, Brady shut down the Central campus for the 2014-15 school year as part of a ruling tied to a decades long desegregation case. His decision came after the state's Recovery School District, which ran the school for six years, asked the court to return jurisdiction of Central to the Pointe Coupee School Board. The RSD made the request after the state failed to improve the school's academic performance.
Students who were attending Central High are now enrolled at Livonia High School.
