Lost class time due to Baton Rouge bus crisis to be made up

A school bus pulls through a line of cars that are waiting outside of the Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts on Boone Avenue on Thursday, August 24, 2023 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The school transportation crisis in Baton Rouge, now in its fourth week, has led to children missing a lot of school in a short amount of time, time that many students in the East Baton Rouge Parish school system will need to make up and do so before Christmas.

With a severe shortage of drivers as well as working buses, children have been routinely stranded this year as they waited for late or nonexistent buses. To get their kids to school, parents have opted to drive their kids or set up impromptu carpool arrangements, some taking time off work to do so.

That disruption, and the shifting response to it, have also come at the expense of instructional time:

Louisiana spells out the minimum time that school-age children need to be in school each year.

Elementary schools in Baton Rouge have not lost much time overall, and they have more cushion in their schedules, allowing them to more easily comply with state law.

Middle and high schools, by contrast, lost far more time. And students taking courses for high school credit have to make up for lost time during the same semester.

By the end of this week, school officials calculate that students in local middle and high schools will have foregone 1,340 minutes of class time overall, more than 22 hours. All of that time will have to be made up by December.

Last week, Superintendent Sito Narcisse announced two options to make up that time:

The fate of Option A and B is unclear.

The options were presented to the School Board last Thursday as part of a larger proposal to scrap the district’s long-standing two-tier school schedule where middle and high schools start at 7:10 a.m. and elementary schools start at 8:25 a.m. In its place, Narcisse proposed a three-tier schedule where high schools start at 7 a.m, middle schools at 8 a.m., and elementary schools at 9 a.m.

The School Board, however, ended up balking at the proposed schedule change, saying it was too disruptive. Instead, the board directed Narcisse to try again.

In the meantime, students are learning on a temporary schedule that went into place Aug. 22 in which middle and high school students end the day an hour early. That temporary schedule is set to end Friday. Narcisse has yet to say whether he plans to extend it, revert back to the traditional two-tier schedule or do something else.

The parish School Board is not scheduled to meet again until Sept. 7.

Narcisse had floated the idea of seeking a waiver from Louisiana’s instructional minute requirements, but State Superintendent Cade Brumley said he made it clear in a recent phone conversation with Narcisse that East Baton Rouge would not qualify for such a waiver. State law reserves such waivers for “a natural catastrophe or disaster,” or during a state-declared emergency where a school is forced to share space with another school.

While the school system is not off the hook, all East Baton Rouge students will be excused absences and late arrivals to school during the first four weeks of school, ending Friday.

Any changes made this semester to the school schedule won’t be the last if schools end up losing more instructional time in the future for other reasons. Baton Rouge schools have lost school time in the recent past thanks to bad weather and to COVID.

The school system has been taking other steps to address the transportation crisis and related issues:

Email Charles Lussier at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter, @Charles_Lussier.

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