International School plan to expand Camp Street to Thalia building falls through

A hard-won plan to create a satellite building for the International School of Louisiana’s Camp Street campus in a Thalia Street office complex fell through this week when the site was unexpectedly sold, officials said.

The building in the 1500 block of Thalia would have housed the school’s fourth and fifth grades next year to ease overcrowding at the original Camp Street campus. As recently as two weeks ago, school officials said at a board meeting that they were finalizing the lease and planning the renovations to convert it into classrooms with no problems on the horizon.

This week, however, school officials announced to parents that the Thalia Street property had just been sold, and that the new owners do not want to lease it. Board president Andrew Yon confirmed on Friday that the property is no longer an option, and said school administrators are now “developing backup options to share with the board.”

The Thalia Street solution came after months of sometimes-contentious debate beginning last fall. School administrators had considered reorganizing the Camp Street and Algiers campuses into a lower and upper school (respectively), but that idea drew heated opposition from parents. Other proposals included modular buildings at Camp Street, reducing the incoming kindergarten class size, or renting space within another school.

School administrators definitively rejected the upper- and lower-campus split that was so strongly opposed by parents, and narrowed their options down to modular buildings and a satellite space at Thalia. They eventually selected the Thalia option for the middle grades to give them their own space during the difficult years of state testing, leaving the youngest students at Camp Street where they would still have older role models and the oldest students there to serve in a leadership role.