House Committee approves bill returning RSD schools to OPSB

By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer

In a 9-8 vote in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, the Louisiana House Education Committee narrowly approved a bill aimed at returning “recovered” public schools to local control.

While the Recovery School District (RSD) was sold to New Orleans as a temporary turnaround agent for failing schools, there is no existing mechanism in current law that requires the schools go back to local governance (the Orleans Parish School Board) after they are no longer deemed failing.

The only tactics for “turnaround” the RSD ended up utilizing were to either close the schools, or to hand them over to private charter operators.

While the RSD was initially supposed to provide governance for not more than five years, 10 years after the state seized control of the majority of public schools in New Orleans, only one school has elected (through a vote by the unelected charter school board) to return.

As proposed under House Bill 166, “If, at any time after the initial transfer period or any subsequent transfer period, the school is no longer designated as a failed school as determined pursuant to the school and district accountability system, the school shall be returned to the administration and management of the city, parish, or other local public school board or other public entity from which it was transferred within one year from the date the school is no longer designated as a failed school.”

The measure, sponsored by State Rep. Joe Bouie, D-New Orleans, will next go before the full house.

“All this bill does is realign what the original spirit of the Recovery School District was,” Bouie told the committee on Wednesday.

“The reason they will go back is because they are not failing.”

This article originally published in the May 11, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.