The St. John the Baptist Parish School Board will shutter a predominantly Black elementary school that sits on the fenceline of a chemical plant. The decision came after eight years of pressure from community groups, federal agencies and lawyers.
Starting in the fall of 2025, Fifth Ward Elementary School students will be relocated to either East St. John Preparatory Academy or Laplace Elementary School, depending on which school is closer.
Historically, students and staff at the school have been exposed to dangerously high levels of pollution that elevate their risk of a wide range of health problems, including cancer.
The school board’s decision came months after civil rights lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund petitioned a judge to require the board to relocate students, claiming that bussing children to a hazardous school violated the district’s desegregation order.
Most of the students at Fifth Ward are Black, and 95% are minorities.
But board members said toxic air wasn’t the main reason for the school’s closure. The board plans to close and consolidate more schools to save money and pay back debt from Hurricane Ida. Merging schools, or “right-sizing,” will help reduce operating costs.
Enrollment has declined across the district. Fifth Ward has lost a third of its students over the past decade. With just over 300 students, it’s operating at less than half of its capacity. At least four others are operating at half-full.
The board’s strategic planning committee said closing Fifth Ward was the first phase of their plan.
“This is not a decision about which school is better or worse than another,” said Schum. “It's about realizing that unless we do something to address [it] … we will forever be living paycheck to paycheck with no hope of expanding programs, providing competitive pay, and facilities built for the future.”
The board debated closing the Fifth Ward for nearly half the meeting. Board member Raydel Morris, who represents the district that includes the school, opposed the plan. He said the full board hadn’t gotten the chance to weigh in on the planning committee’s proposal.
Morris argued if the board was closing the school to save money, then the schools with the fewest students should be closed first. Two schools on the west bank of St. John serve less than 200 students.
If the intent was to help with chemical exposure, Morris also opposed the plan. Fifth Ward sits just over a quarter mile from Denka Performance Elastomers’ main plant. East St. John Prep is almost three times farther away, but it’s still within a mile of the plant.
“We're taking them from the front yard, putting them in the backyard,” Morris said. He didn’t believe that was enough to help the kids, especially those who live in the community near the plant.
Located in Reserve, La., the Denka plant produces neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in wetsuits, beer koozies and car parts. To make the rubber, Denka manufactures a toxic chemical called chloroprene.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, breathing in chloroprene — even at very small amounts — over a lifetime likely causes cancer and other health problems. Chloroprene is known as a mutagen, meaning it can damage and mutate DNA. The risk is heightened when exposed as children because their cells are dividing even faster, potentially multiplying the mutant cells.
A new rule by the EPA recently required Denka to update its equipment and install fenceline monitoring to ensure the air quality improves to the level that the agency deems acceptable. The agency and the company are also in the middle of a lawsuit after federal regulators said the plant posed “imminent and substantial” to the people living near it, including the school children.
But the company said the EPA has overblown the chemical’s risk, basing their claims on faulty data. The company has lowered its emissions by 80% since the EPA first declared that chloroprene was a likely carcinogen in 2016.
After several attempts to delay the vote or substitute motions, the fiery exchanges between board members ended with a 7-4 vote to close the school.
School Board President Shawn Wallace said the district’s finances were the official reason for the closure, though board member Nia Mitchell-Williams noted that the board felt pressure from the recent legal petition focused on the pollution.
“The reality is, and the elephant in the room, the reason this has come up four times is because … there's a lawsuit and we keep acting like it's not happening,” she said.
Mitchell-Williams said she would prefer that the board decide where to put the children, not leave it up to a judge.
Local activists had pressed the school system to address the pollution issues for years, but don’t see the decision as a victory.
Robert Taylor, a Reserve resident who has led the fight to cut Denka’s pollution, said he felt like the real issue wasn’t confronted, calling the financial discussion “a farce.” By not acknowledging the pollution, Taylor said it allows the board to slow-walk the school’s closure.
“They don't need to wait another year to do it, poison those children for another year,” Taylor said. “But they're saying it's not because they're being poisoned, so they don't have to rush.”
Though Legal Defense Fund attorney Victor Jones said he was happy the board finally took this step, he agreed with Taylor that the school should close sooner than the 2025-26 school year.
“We do take issue with the idea that the children can go another semester in a cancer pit rather than do what the board previously represented, which is close the school as soon as possible,” Jones said.
He also said Fifth Ward parents had supported keeping all of the students together, instead of splitting them up. Jones had proposed moving all the students to Laplace Elementary — more than two miles away from the plant.
Jones didn’t say if the Legal Defense Fund planned to continue with its litigation but noted his team “wouldn’t be satisfied” until the school closed.
