Tentative designs for the lunch terrace along Joseph Street at Lusher High School.
With a new playground set to open Monday on the Willow Street campus, Lusher Charter School officials are turning their attention to the next project: a lunch terrace for middle and high school students at the Fortier building on Freret Street.
The lunch terrace will sit on the Joseph Street side of the campus, and will include both tables and stadium-style seating along the building’s wall. The ground will have a combination of artificial turf and hard surfaces to reduce the amount of mud that forms on the wet ground.
“Today’s a great day to see how much we need the lunch terrace, because after a week of rain, it looks pretty bad out there,” said CEO Kathy Riedlinger at Saturday morning’s meeting of Lusher’s governing board.
The terrace will also feature a substantial amount of open space, so that teachers can hold grade-level gatherings of as many as 150 students at at time as well, said middle school principal Brenda Bourne. The space is already popular with students, and the improvements will allow it provide more consistent relief to the overcrowded Fortier campus cafeteria, said Patty Glaser, assistant head of school.
“The kids don’t have a lot of social time during the day, so this is going to be the hot spot, I can promise you,” said high school principal Wiley Ates.
Some details have yet to be worked out, such as what sort of pavers to use for the ground. Lusher board member Paul Barron suggested that the school sell bricks to help raise funds for the project.
Repairs | Also at Saturday’s meeting, Riedlinger briefed board members in the unexpected $7 million cut to the proposed budgets for emergency repairs to the school’s two campuses. While Orleans Parish officials have said the scope of the repairs won’t change, Lusher officials said that promise made little sense, given the magnitude of the cuts.
“Water’s coming into the building now and causing damage, and it’s going to be a couple years before they get to the projects,” Bourne said. “It just seems shortsighted to cut the budget.”
Riedlinger said that replacing the building’s heating and cooling system may have been the item that was cut, but she plans to meet soon with Orleans Parish School Board member Woody Koppel, and requested that several Lusher board members work with her on that. She said she needs to know what precisely was cut, so that Lusher can begin trying to find money for those projects on their own.
“It’s not something we are happy about,” Riedlinger said. “Out of the projects that were presented, we were the only school to have their budget cut.”
Admissions | Lusher received 850 applications for its Willow Street campus, and 560 for the upper school, primarily in sixth and ninth grades. Of those, 150 are likely to be accepted into next year’s kindergarten class, a couple of dozen more into the upper elementary grades, and about 75 will be accepted at Fortier Street, officials said.
“We have to get bigger,” Barron said. “We provide one of the most quality educations in the city. There are a lot of people who really want it, and we can’t serve them. We just don’t have the capacity. If we could figure out a way to do that, I think that would be a wonderful thing.”
Riedlinger said the school is still holding onto hope that if SciHigh next door is approved to move to the new medical district area, Lusher will have a chance at moving into the Allen building.
I had heard that the Allen building was a done deal for next year.
Ya heard?