PARENTS INTERVENE TO PROTECT DISADVANTAGED NEW ORLEANS STUDENTS Families demand greater funding for students with greatest needs

NEW ORLEANS—(April 4, 2016)— A group of New Orleans parents, along with their attorney, former State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, will hold a press conference on Monday, April 4, 2016, to discuss their filing of an intervention in a federal lawsuit filed by the boards of two selective-enrollment elementary schools, Lake Forest Charter School and Lusher Charter School, against the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). The press conference will be held in Lafayette Square at Camp Street across from Hale Boggs Federal Building at 1:00 p.m. While boards of the two selective-enrollment schools seek to maintain status quo funding for students in New Orleans, the intervening parents assert that failure by the OPSB to adopt a new funding formula that was developed by local educators and is required by state law violates their children’s civil rights, as the status quo funding formula discriminates against students with special needs and students of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds. The intervening parents comprise a race- and class-diverse cross-section of New Orleans. Each has a child with special needs. “These parents have intervened first and foremost to bring parents to the courtroom so their children’s voices can be heard and so that the proposed new formula recommended to the OPSB will be adopted without compromise,” says Paul Pastorek, the attorney representing the parent plaintiffs. “The parents are firmly opposed to the efforts by these two selective-enrollment schools to maintain a status quo formula that denies the neediest students the resources needed to assure them of an excellent education.” The parents have thus petitioned for immediate action to approve the new formula. While in support of Superintendent Henderson Lewis and his efforts to properly implement the new formula, for example, parents who have filed the intervening lawsuit say they cannot determine his ultimate decision or important details of that decision. In response to the selective-enrollment schools’ lawsuit, therefore, they have demanded that the OPSB itself adopt the new formula. “Parents in the New Orleans community deserve to know sooner rather than later, and certainly by no later than the start of the new fiscal year, what the funding for schools will be so that they can make decisions for their children about where to send their child so that he or she will get the services and teaching that they need.”

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