The East Baton Rouge Parish school system may soon team up with Southern University to launch a new school for aspiring teachers, starting them on the road to the classroom as early as sixth grade.
Officials with Southern and the school system presented their proposal Thursday to the parish School Board at a special workshop.
The new school, which would be housed on the Southern campus, would allow students to earn college credits, perhaps as many as 60 — halfway to a bachelor’s degree in education — by the time they graduate high school.
While some high schools in Louisiana already offer teacher education courses — West Baton Rouge launched such a program in 2018 — this new proposed early college is more extensive than those efforts.
“There is not a program in the country that we aware of that is doing what we are doing,” Superintendent Sito Narcisse told the board Thursday.
Teachers are in high demand across the country.
In East Baton Rouge, the state’s second-largest traditional school district, teacher shortages have increased in recent years while the pool of new teachers has shrunk. After the first week of school this year, the school system had more than 300 vacancies overall, 207 of them for teaching positions.
Verjannis Peoples, dean of Southern’s college of education, said that between 2010 and 2018, enrollment in teacher preparation programs nationwide fell from close to 1 million to about 600,000 and the number completing those programs fell by 20%.
“We are losing students that are interested in majoring in the field of education,” Peoples told the board.
The proposed new school aligns with another Narcisse initiative, Pathways to Bright Futures, which is dramatically increasing the number of advanced, college-level courses that high school students in Baton Rouge are expected to take.
The new teaching school would enroll between 50 and 75 students in each of grades 6-12. Southern has yet to decide where on its campus it would operate. East Baton Rouge Parish schoolteachers would work with Southern professors and instructors in their College of Education.
Narcisse said he’s looking to launch the new school in fall 2023, a year from now, but it still has several hurdles to surmount, including obtaining approval from both the School Board and the Southern University Board of Supervisors.
Southern’s board was to consider the proposal at its June 24 meeting, but postponed the item. Peoples said the proposal needs more “deep conversations” with the various participants before it’s ready. The plan is to bring it back to the Southern board either later this month or in October with a vote by the parish School Board in November. Peoples said how long that approval process takes will determine if there’s enough time to open the new school in 2023 or whether that would have to be pushed back.
The new school would be a “focus choice” school. This is a variation on a magnet school that Narcisse has launched and two such schools are operating currently in Baton Rouge. Like magnet schools, focus choice schools typically have academic requirements — e.g. a minimum GPA. Unlike most magnet programs, focus choice schools are closely tied to a major employer or industry sector.
In June, the proposal for the new teaching academy called for no admission requirements, but did include a 2.5 GPA to remain in the academy. On Thursday, school officials said that any retention requirement would be determined in the future by a special governance committee.
Only three of nine School Board members were present Thursday night to listen: Mark Bellue, Dadrius Lanus and David Tatman. All three had good things to say.
Tatman said he has long held teachers in high esteem, noting that his wife, Maria, spent 33 years as an educator. He recalls fondly nights when former students would stop his wife and tell her how much her class meant to them.
“I certainly appreciate the opportunity to look at this and to promote a great profession where you can really impact people’s lives, more so than what I do for a living,” said Tatman, who works in governmental relations and management.
