BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has approved creating new magnet programs at Polk and Brookstown elementary schools.
The board also agreed to a proposal on Thursday to redraw attendance lines for Woodlawn Elementary, but only if the changes are phased in to allow current students to stay.
The Advocate reports (https://bit.ly/LeLMId ) the changes take effect with the start of the 2014-15 school year in August.
Taken together, the three changes would cost an estimated $650,000 the first year and almost $2.3 million over three years. That’s in addition to $3.1 million in renovations planned this summer at Polk and $5 million at Brookstown.
Expanding magnet programs can generate additional revenue in the form of increased state funding, roughly $3,800 for every new child who enrolls in the school system.
Or it can save the system from losing money, up to $10,000 per student, by persuading children to stay in the public school system.
Polk will add foreign language immersion programs in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese to the school.
It also would gradually reassign the 227 students attending Polk to nearby Buchanan and University Terrace elementary schools, starting with next year’s kindergartners.
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Information from: The Advocate, https://theadvocate.com
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