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Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Louisiana Voucher School, with no facilities and teachers, is approved to take 315 students.

In addition to the title above, parents are left with a useless voucher. Here's the incredible story:
TownTalk: Emails between Louisiana Education Superintendent John C. White, Gov. Bobby Jindal's spokesman Kyle Plotkin and Jindal policy adviser Stafford Palmieri show White devising a scheme to "muddy up a narrative" and to "take some air out of the room" after a news report about the new voucher program that was published ... In the email exchange, White proposes creating a news story about the "due diligence" process for school voucher approvals to counter a Monroe News-Star article that revealed the state Department of Education had not performed site visits or extensive review of voucher applications.
Those site visits and reviews weren’t being done. Even worse, parents of children were left to be the victims of the voucher scheme.
White (was told) by the committee that he would answer questions about the department's approval of New Living Word in Ruston. The school did not have the facilities, teachers or technology to accommodate the 315 students the state approved them to accept. New Living Word was accepted, (but) did not include site visits. The department's initial statements (was) that it "left it up to the parents" to determine if a site met their needs.
That’s right, after parents went through all the trouble of signing their kids up, even missing out on other choices, they would later find that there was no physical school to visit and no teachers to meet.
Members of the Senate committee were concerned this school was an indication of big problems in the state's voucher program.
A major understatement to say the least.

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