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This email is created by Ken Ducote and Rose Drill-Peterson on behalf of the Eastbank Collaborative of Charter Schools and is not an official correspondence from the RSD, BESE, nor any other state agency


BESE held a special meeting yesterday with an agenda dedicated almost entirely to the issue of the legal issues surrounding Common Core, BESE and the Governor.

Following is a brief summary of what took place in the meeting. LAPCS works with several other organizations on key education issues and we want to recognize and thank those entities for helping with the creation of this report.

 

 

***This email is created by Caroline Roemer Shirley and Veronica Brooks as a joint project of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools and the Eastbank Collaborative of Charter Schools and is not an official correspondence from the RSD, BESE, nor any other state agency***
REPORT FROM JULY 29 BESE MEETING
  1. Announcement that the Attorney General will defend BESE and the Department in the lawsuit filed against it by the 17 legislators claiming proper policy was not followed in the rollout of Common Core in the classroom. With this action, there is  no need for BESE to retain outside legal counsel.
  2. BESE voted 6-4 (supporting: Boffy, Roemer, Garvey, Orange Jones, Bradford, Miranti; opposing: Beebe, Hill, Lee, Smith; absent: Guillot) to authorize their outside counsel to intervene in the second lawsuit filed by parents, educators and a charter organization against the Governor and the Division of Administration. Generally, it is my understanding that means BESE can join that existing lawsuit as an additional plaintiff and its outside counsel can directly represent BESE's constitutional and statutory interests alongside the original plaintiffs' attorneys.
  3. BESE chose to take no action in instigating additional legal action of its own against the governor and the Division of Administration.
  4. BESE unanimously passed a motion requiring the Superintendent to return to the board in 30 days to outline a testing plan for the 2014-15 school year, regardless of the legal status of the various cases now in court. The Superintendent assured  the board that there will be tests administered during the upcoming school year and there are various mechanisms that can be  used to administer the tests. It is thought that after the first court hearing, which we now think is August 11 (there's some confusion there), there will be some sense of the legal direction this is headed and testing plans can be better formulated.

There was also one other development outside of BESE of note: Today the governor's office filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the MOU the state signed with the PARCC testing consortium. The Governor's press release on that suit can be found here.

 

 This service is made possible by support from Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools and funding from the Robert Reily Family Trust and the Smith/Cooper Foundation