city government

Audubon Charter pauses expansion plans to meet with neighbors

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Audubon Charter School will postpone the legislative process toward expanding its Broadway campus for 30 days while it meets with neighbors to iron out operational issues, an official said Monday. The school was slated to go before the city’s Board of Zoning Adjustments on Monday morning to request permission to expand the rear of the school building toward Pine Street, but an architect for the project asked instead if the matter could be delayed for a month to meet with neighbors. John Lafargue of the neighboring Upper Audubon Association made the same request, which the board granted. The neighbors are not concerned so much about the building’s design as they are about traffic flow around the campus in the morning and afternoon, said Orleans Parish School Board member Woody Koppel, who attended the meeting. Lafargue, for example, attended many of the planning meetings for the building’s expansion and consistently criticized the school’s handling of pickup and dropoff, while praising the school itself and voicing little concern about the expansion design.

city government

Expansion of Audubon Charter begins to take shape

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Audubon Charter School parents, teachers and neighbors literally applauded a new design for the expansion of the school’s Broadway campus on Wednesday night, but as more details began to emerge, so did more vocal concerns about traffic flow around the school as children come and go. Ultimately, the streets on either side of the school may need to be made one-way, said one neighborhood leader. The school is in the early stages of planning a two-year renovation of the Broadway campus that will dramatically reconfigure the interior and add 10,000 feet of new space onto the current historic structure. The FEMA-funded expansion will not add more students to the high-performing Montessori and French-immersion programs, however; it will simply give the current student population larger classrooms and more amenities required by state standards. Exactly how those new rooms will be configured has been the subject of a series of community meetings at the school this fall.