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.

neighborhood groups

Audubon Elementary School calls neighborhood meeting

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The Audubon Elementary School has called a meeting for Wednesday, December 1st, at 6.30pm, to discuss plans for the development of the Audubon Elementary school building. At a previous meeting last month, parents, teachers, and neighborhood residents discussed a range of proposals for the expansion of the site, proposals which remain under consideration. The meeting will take place at 6.30pm in the Audubon School cafeteria at 428 Broadway.

schools

Audubon Charter prepares Broadway campus for renovations

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Site work has begun at Audubon Charter School’s Broadway Street campus even as the school continues planning for two-year project and awaiting word on where students will attend classes during its duration. Engineering workers could be heard retrieving at Saturday morning’s meeting of the charter school board even as principal Janice Dupuy described the project. “It is a total renovation,” Dupuy said. “We’re tearing out the walls and starting over.” The renovations are not intended to create space for more students, but to give more room to the 420 students already at the campus, Dupuy said.

recovery

Reports show disparities in quality, openness of Uptown schools

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Uptown schools vary widely in both the quality of their instruction and their openness to the public, according to a pair of reports released this week. Schools run by the Recovery School District in Baton Rouge – originally designed to take over the state’s worst-performing schools, and the governing body of many New Orleans schools since Hurricane Katrina – still show far worse results than those run locally in Orleans Parish, according to results released by the state Department of Education and compiled for the New Orleans area by the Times-Picayune. Uptown schools run directly by the Recovery School District, such as Walter Cohen High School, and even some of its charters, such as the Sojourner Truth Academy, were rated “academically unacceptable.” Uptown New Orleans is also home to some of the best schools in the city, the results show. Lusher charter schools’ five-star rating marks it as among the absolute highest-scoring in the state.