Is Major School Board Reform On The Horizon? – Wingin’ It Wednesday

This week on "Wingin' It Wednesday", panelist Mike Stagg, Warren Caudle, and Carol Ross joined "Mornings with Ken and Bernie" to discuss Rep. Nancy Landry's proposed legislation to reform school boards as well as former LPTFA chairman Greg Gachassin's alleged ethics violations.

Here's what the panel had to say:

1. State Rep. Nancy Landry proposed an amendment that would not seek to abolish the current governance structure but instead create a commission which would look into alternatives to the current system. Your thoughts?

Carol Ross started us off:

Just looking at who is going to do the appointing and you know you’re not going to take politics out of it. You’ve got governmental or quasi governmental entities making the appointments.
Full disclosure, my husband and Nancy’s dad have been friends since they were kids. I’ve known Nancy since she was a kid. She’s a lovely young women and she has great intentions, but I don’t think this piece of legislation is the way to go.

Warren Caudle added:

You start appointing commissions to do this and do that and you wind up just kicking the can further down the road. The problem you have now is silly people on the school board and silly people in the administration.
Change the board. Elect different people.

Mike Stagg Concluded:

What Representative Landry has already done in her tenure is vote to remove local control of school system. She supported the Jindal reform which awarded BESE the power. She wants now to take local control completely out of the process. She wants to take away the ability of communities to elect their own school board members.

 

2. What are your thoughts on former LPTFA Chairman Greg Gachassin's alleged ethics violations?

Mike stated:

It will be interesting to see if this sticks, but there’s been a lot of controversy about the operation of the LPTFA and the incestuous relationship between the board and itself. The LPTFA made itself a partner.
If this is the end of it, I think it will be scapegoating Gotchesan when there appears to be a lot more there. The question is where are the investigators and prosecutors?

 

Carol added:

Gotchesen is nothing if not clever in hiring the former ethics board chairman Gray Sexton as his attorney, however, the facts are irrefutable, the timeline is irrefutable. This was a snake pit. We know what Gotchesen was up to, but there were other parties complicit in this, including the board of the LPTFA.
How do you approve the contractor before you resign and then 17 days later you are the contractor? Has the public been served? Maybe, maybe not, but the bottom line is there has been hanky-panky has gone on here.

Warren stated:

This whole thing, it really convoluted and I think it’s an example of so much stuff going on inside government funding today. It’s a feeding frenzy. When you look at these things of how much money flowed through there. What about the rest of it?

Click the play button below for a full audio replay of the show:

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about today’s Wingin’ It Wednesday topics. Who got it right, who got it wrong, and who was way off? Let us know in the comment section.