By T. Scott Boatright
Thursday night’s special-called Lincoln Parish School Board meeting likely set a record.
A record for brevity.
In a meeting that had only one item on the agenda that was amended to remove that item, the LPSB met for only 3:12 before the meeting adjourned at the Lincoln Parish Schools Central Office meeting room.
The meeting was called to consider a Lincoln Preparatory School Connections Academy application — but when that discussion started with Lincoln Prep Executive Director Gordan Ford requesting the item be removed from the agenda, it quickly became as non-meeting as the LPSB voted unanimously to do so.
“We had some issues about third-party feedback and we finally got that feedback today, and after conversations between (LPSB Superintendent Ricky Durrett) and his team, and my team this afternoon, we have elected to pull the charter application. We wish to withdraw that application from your consideration tonight,” Ford told LPSB members.
“We’ve talked with Superintendent Durrett and talked about ways we can work together to serve the kids that we’re concerned about there, and we’ll come back to you if we ever feel we need to do that again. But at this time, we’re going to withdraw the application.”
Allowing that took a motion to amend the agenda by the LPSB, and after a unanimous vote to do so, the meeting quickly came to an end.
After the meeting Ford offered a little more detail to the meeting’s outcome.
“It really means that we’re going to take another look at how we serve the kids we need to serve,” Ford said. “We were late getting feedback on the application and the way the application is structured right now, so there were things the third-party reviewer pointed out that has made us want to take another look at it.
“The Superintendent and I had a long conversation today. We got some understanding on what each of us are trying to do, and we’re going to try to work on some things together. We’ll make a decision later on if we think we need to come back to a charter school or if we think we need to service the kids we need to serve under the structure we already have in place.”
