A student at the International School of Louisiana on Camp Street, pictured in January. (Sabree Hill, UptownMessenger.com)
The school had applied in February for a grant to join the LA-4 program, which aims to expand the pre-kindergarten offerings for families that cannot afford pre-school around the state. ISL officials had hoped to pair that state-funded program with a sliding-scale tuition program into a full 4-year-old kindergarten next year that anyone could attend.
Deliberations over next year’s budget, however, suggest that the LA-4 program is likely to suffer budget cuts, ISL Head of School Sean Wilson said he was recently informed. More than likely, it will only receive enough money to continue funding existing programs, without any expansions next year, Wilson said during Wednesday night’s meeting of the ISL board.
“When you have less resources, you tend to go with what’s known and operating,” Wilson said after the meeting.
The grant would have reimbursed the school about $4,600 for each low-income pre-kindergarten student it enrolled. No other similar grants are available, so the program likely will not happen without the state money being restored. If the money did become available, even mid-summer, ISL could still put the pre-kindergarten together very quickly, said board president Grant Ligon.
“We have the space,” Ligon said, referring to the Westbank campus opening next year. “If we do get that piece, we can move in a hurry.”
At ISL, students take all their classes in either French or Spanish. The earlier they start foreign-language instruction, the more successful they are at the immersion program, so the ISL board has said that early-childhood education is crucial to its long-range plans of opening more elementary campuses and building a large enough student population to open a high school. Some charter schools (such as Audubon Charter School and the new Lycee Francais of New Orleans) have pre-kindergarten programs that are only tuition-based, but ISL has little interest in that route, Ligon said.
“When look at the at-risk populations in the city, you pretty much need to have a pre-kindergarten,” Ligon said. “We’re not looking to do a private pre-kindergarten.”
At a recent retreat, Wilson had urged the board members to spend the 2011-12 school year preparing for a pre-kindergarten in the following year if this year’s LA-4 grant does not come through. Ligon, whose term on the board ends in June, said he personally believes that goal remains “critical,” but finding a way to fulfill it will be a budgetary decision for next year’s school leadership.
The board’s other expansion project – opening a new campus at the old Holy Name of Mary site in Algiers – continues to proceed more slowly than expected, Wilson said, because of ongoing negotiations with the Archdiocese of New Orleans over the building’s lease. They hope to have that issue resolved in the next week, Wilson said.
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