Audubon Charter pauses expansion plans to meet with neighbors

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.

“We’re not critical of the programs that are run here, but as a neighbor we have to gauge the detrimental impact of a 10,000-square-foot addition,” Lafargue said in December.

Koppel said he is confident that the Audubon neighbors’ concerns can be worked out in a meeting with school officials and the architects, though the congestion issues are common at every school in the city.

“We live in an urban city with small streets that weren’t really designed for two layers of cars,” Koppel said. “We have to have green space for the kids to play. We can’t just have one big parking lot, either.”

To read a recap of our live coverage of Monday’s meeting, click “Replay” in the box below.