Lafayette School Board Closes Comeaux High in 5-4 Vote

LAFAYETTE, La. — The Lafayette Parish School Board voted 5-4 Thursday to close Ovey Comeaux High School, bringing an end to a months-long battle that played out in board chambers, courtrooms, and the streets outside the school.

The vote came after a public hearing held June 2 and completed a turbulent three-month stretch that included an earlier closure vote, a lawsuit, a court-defying rescission, an appeals court ruling, and yet another public hearing before the board finally got to Thursday night.

Get our free mobile app

The Vote and What Happens Next

Board members Britt Latiolais, Ted Davidson, Roddy Bergeron, Hannah Smith Mason, and Kate Labue voted in favor of closure. Amy Trahan, Josh Edmond, Jeremy Hidalgo, and David LeJeune voted against it.

The Comeaux campus will be repurposed to house the W.D. and Mary Baker Smith Career Center and the E.J. Sam Accelerated School. The athletic facilities will be converted into a district-wide sports complex. The Navy JROTC Magnet Academy program currently at Comeaux will move to Acadiana High School. The district does not expect the new programs to be up and running at the site until the 2028-29 academic year.

Credit: Lafayette Parish School Board/YouTube

Current Comeaux students will be rezoned to Acadiana, Lafayette, and Southside High School for the 2026-27 school year.

Superintendent Francis Touchet did not mince words when speaking to reporters after the vote.

“This is a business decision,” Touchet said. “This is the business of educating kids.” He said the $2 million in annual savings from closing Comeaux would be bonded to generate between $15 and $16 million to renovate the facility and build the new career center. “Things start moving tomorrow morning. We’re going to move at rapid speed.”

Touchet added that the schools receiving Comeaux students are not currently overcrowded and that the district is looking at building extensions to handle any additional capacity needs.

‘Comeaux Has Heart and Culture’

None of it sat well with the community members who packed the meeting.

English teacher Amy Waters, who has spent three of her ten years in Lafayette Parish schools at Comeaux, told the board what the school means to the people inside it.

“Comeaux has heart and culture,” Waters said. “I found family, colleagues and students I can invest in. You walk in to high fives, fist bumps and hugs.”

Other speakers made the case that Comeaux has remained a high-performing school despite its aging building and shrinking enrollment, and that closing it amounts to abandoning a community that has been loyal to the school for generations.

Residents from the north side of Lafayette were particularly pointed in their criticism. Forest Chiasson told board members the closure is part of a larger pattern. “This will have far reaching impact on students and the north side of town,” Chiasson said. “The north side of town has become the killing fields of schools. I have yet to hear anyone who supports this decision.”

How It Got Here

The path to Thursday’s vote was anything but direct.

A consulting firm first recommended closing Comeaux in October 2024. The board rejected the idea the following month on a 5-4 vote. Then, in March 2026, the board reversed course with little public notice and no prior public hearing, voting 5-2 to close the school at the end of the 2025-26 year.

Lafayette parent Suzanne LaJaunie took the board to court, arguing the vote violated state open meetings law and the board’s own policy requiring a public hearing before closing a school. A 15th Judicial District Court judge agreed and issued an injunction blocking the closure.

The board then held a special meeting in April and voted to rescind its March decision, a move the presiding judge indicated may have violated her own order. That rescission, however, gave the Louisiana Third Circuit Court of Appeal grounds to dismiss the lawsuit as moot, clearing the board to start the process over — this time by the book.

The board held the required public hearing on June 2 before Thursday’s vote. The district was also ordered to pay more than $45,000 in attorney fees and court costs stemming from the litigation.

The District’s Rationale

School system officials point to three things: declining enrollment at Comeaux, a long waitlist at the W.D. Smith and Mary Baker Smith Career Center that the current facility cannot accommodate, and a Comeaux building that is aging and increasingly expensive to maintain.

Touchet said enrollment at Comeaux has been falling for eight years. Over the past five years alone, the school lost roughly 42 percent of its students and has been operating at about 38 percent of its capacity.

“Even Northside High hasn’t declined in enrollment,” Touchet said.

The district’s argument is that repurposing the campus solves two problems at once — retiring an underutilized building while opening up career and technical education seats for the hundreds of students currently stuck on a waitlist.

Catch up on the fight to close Comeaux...