This wealthy Louisiana suburb is now a city. The target? Its own school system

St. George was once just an affluent suburb of Louisiana’s capital, Baton Rouge. Now it is a city. But that change is just one step toward some residents’ ultimate goal: their own school district.

Proponents of breakup gathered enough signatures in 2019 to put the proposal for a new city to a vote. They narrowly won the election but found themselves stuck in court. But in April, the Louisiana Supreme Court made the split official.

The movement for a new town came about because a group of people in St. George wanted their own school system. When they failed to get lawmakers to support that idea on their own, creating a city became the way forward.

The organizers believe that as a municipality they will receive more political support than they ever could have as a mere group of residents. And support is important because a new school system ultimately requires a statewide vote.

However, not all residents are on board. Some worry their children could be left out of Baton Rouge’s sought-after magnet schools. Others object to the optics and the consequences: Residents in a whiter, wealthier neighborhood breaking away from a predominantly black school district and taking their tax dollars with them.

But David Madaffari, father of three school-age children, thinks it’s a great idea.

“I call myself the humble, enthusiastic mouthpiece of St. George,” says Madaffari.

He is not the city’s official spokesperson, just a resident and longtime supporter of the movement. His children are homeschooled, but he says if St. George starts its own school district, he wants to be part of it.

“We can create our own school district here that is more community-based, and the parents can be more responsible,” he says.

St. George’s actual spokesman declined an interview. He declined to talk about schools and said plans for a new neighborhood are on hold until the city installs a government.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, recently appointed an interim mayor, police chief and city council to lead what is now the state’s fifth-largest city. They will all serve until elections can be held, probably next year.

Madaffari says he hasn’t considered sending his children to the existing East Baton Rouge Parish Schools district. The district has a grade of “C” from the state. And he thinks it deserves an ‘F’.

While there are some notable schools, including those in St. George, test scores and graduation rates are generally low. He blames board members’ expenses, new buildings in low-enrollment areas and a six-figure salary for the director.

“The board, the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, had its chance,” he said. “Nothing changes and all they ever talk to us about is, ‘We need more money.’”

Dadrius Lanus serves on the local school board and represents some of the poorest parts of Baton Rouge. He says that since the St. George neighborhood has good schools — schools that his board runs — he doesn’t think the system is failing them.

When it comes to St. George’s attempts to break free, Lanus has his own explanation. “Is it racism? I think it goes a step further than that. I think it’s classism.”

St. George’s interim Mayor Dustin Yates, a firefighter and former teacher, told “Talk Louisiana” in May that he has never looked at the campaign for a new school district or city that way.

“I always thought this was something that was brought up to sow division, to create controversy,” he said. “But that was never the intention and never will be the intention of the city of St. George.”

Yates pointed to nearby school districts that are among the highest-rated in the state and said St. George residents deserve the opportunity to create a system of schools of the same caliber.

Three times before

If St. George leaves, Baton Rouge schools will have much less money.

Local tax dollars often make up the largest piece of the school funding pie. And while Baton Rouge is generally a poor city, St. George is not. Single-family homes here can sell for more than a million dollars.

Carla Powell-Lewis is president of the Baton Rouge school board. The former district teacher has seen neighborhoods break away from the system before.

It’s happened three times since a federal desegregation order — then the nation’s longest desegregation order — was lifted in 2003. Each time, the district lost tens of millions of dollars. (Two of the three secessionist districts are now among the highest-rated systems in the state.)

If St. George leaves, it would be the largest segregated district Baton Rouge has ever seen.

“That certainly divides the resources in half or even more,” says Powell-Lewis.

The possibility of a split makes her think about what segregated schools looked like before Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned school segregation.

“That big case was about fair resources. Will we still have that available? Or are we returning to a time frame that none of us want to remember?”

Larger school districts allow higher and lower wealth neighborhoods to pool their resources, promoting equity. So when a wealthier suburb like St. George secedes, it usually hurts the people left behind.

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that segregated districts across the country are part of the reason why school segregation remains so prevalent, as new districts tend to be whiter and more affluent.

If the students enrolled in St. George’s seven public schools left East Baton Rouge Parish schools, white enrollment in the system would drop to 8%, according to a 2019 estimate. The percentage of students enrolled as considered low income, already the majority, would increase.

Powell-Lewis says that in addition to the challenges of teaching a student population in a place where poverty is hyper-concentrated, the district could also face other negative consequences. Great teachers could leave, especially if St. George can pay them more. And the school district would also lose state dollars, which are based on enrollment.

Not only that, but they would also see higher costs per student because of the district’s existing financial obligations, such as health care benefits for former employees, said Rebecca Sibilia, a policy expert who has studied the impact of segregated schools.

“They are being pressured from both sides. Less money, higher costs,” she says.

Sibilia, who advocates for fairer funding systems, says one solution is to break the link between how schools are funded and how they are governed.

She points to a handful of states that pool all their property taxes at the state level and then distribute them based on the needs of students, districts and regions.

“Just because St. George wants their own school doesn’t necessarily mean they should be able to keep their own money,” Sibilia said.

‘White supremacy renamed’

Malika Wyche is one of nearly 100,000 people now living in the city of St. George. She doesn’t want the new city to leave the existing school district because it doesn’t have to. Her six-year-old son feels the same way.

“She started crying. She said, “I don’t want to leave my school. I want to stay at my school.’”

Wyche objects to the ideas behind the movement. She believes that a neighborhood should not draw boundaries around itself and should keep its wealth within.

“You worry so much about the fact that your tax dollars are supporting someone who doesn’t look like you, or someone who lives far away from you, but that’s literally the way our government functions,” she says.

Some St. George supporters have suggested that people like Wyche, who don’t want to break away from Baton Rouge, should simply move. Wyche says that’s not an option for many families. And either way, parents must fight, not just for their children, but for all children.

“I have a lot of equity in my house. I have a high interest rate. I’m not going anywhere,” she says.

But Wyche and other parents who oppose a segregated school district are not allowing schools in East Baton Rouge.

Just like the people pushing for St. George to have its own schools, some of the people fighting against it are also the biggest critics of the existing district. They think the system can be improved. The difference is that together they see a way forward.

Wyche views people who push for a split as selfish. And she goes one step further, calling the argument for local control “a new name for white supremacy.”

Madaffari, father of three children, doesn’t think that’s fair.

“If people who have the right to self-determination are considered racist, or, you know, classist, then I’m not going to do anything to convince them,” he says. “Because those are arguments based on emotion. They are not built on foundational truth.”

His truth is that St. George has the right to be its own city and create its own school district.

But there are other truths that are more important to Wyche: that segregated districts lead to more segregated schools, fewer resources and worse outcomes for black and low-income students.