Tagged: education

The Terrebonne Parish School Board has dropped a proposal to give Superintendent Philip Martin a pay raise.

The Courier reports Board President L.P. Bordelon said Martin asked the board to pull the motion Tuesday night.

The school board's executive committee had recommended increasing Martin's base salary from $134,500 to $155,000. No board member made a motion to adopt that recommendation, so the proposal failed without coming to a vote.

MONROE — A northeast Louisiana charter school that prevents pregnant female students from attending school and can force them to take a pregnancy test to continue attending school if administrators "suspect" a pregnancy has drawn the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Education officials say the number of public schools facing state sanctions rose by 33 percent this year amid tougher state standards.

Barry Landry, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, tells The Advocate a total of 180 schools are listed as academically unacceptable, up from 135 last year.

The list represents 13 percent of public schools statewide.

Taxpayer dollars in Louisiana's new voucher program will be paying to send children to schools that teach creationism and question evolution, challenging the lessons central to public school science classrooms.

Several religious schools that will be educating taxpayer-subsidized students tout their creationist views. Some schools question whether the universe is more than a few thousand years old, openly defying reams of scientific evidence to the contrary.