The nearly universal rejection on Saturday of a new St. George school district is a huge setback for that educational independence movement, which has already lasted about 15 years, but it also will give pause to any other community in Louisiana seeking to do the same.
The picture is radically different than the one years ago when Baker, Zachary and Central rode waves of discontent with East Baton Rouge Parish public schools, fueled by a 51-year-old desegregation effort, to gain voter approval for their respective school districts.
The proposed constitutional amendment for St. George failed by a whopping margin, with 64% of voters in Louisiana voting No. An even larger proportion of East Baton Rouge Parish, nearly 69%, rejected the idea.
The measure needed the approval of both to take effect.
A Chorus of Nos
All five constitutional amendments on the ballot Saturday failed badly, weighed down by a sour electorate.
The St. George proposal, Amendment 2, was the second most popular of an unpopular quintet. Amendment 2 earned the assent of voters in only two parishes in Louisiana – Livingston and West Feliciana. The other 62 parishes all rejected the idea, most by wide margins.
Orleans Parish led the state with 84% of residents voting No. That alone put the St. George proposal nearly 57,000 voters in the hole.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, about 75% of voters living outside the city of St. George voted No. Only 23 out of 250 precincts outside the city voted in favor.
While state officials have yet to report how the school district proposition fared within the city of St George, that support looks to have been modest.
St. George residents cast ballots at 79 precincts. Some of those precincts are split, though, meaning they include a mix of St. George and non-St. George residents. On election day, almost 20,000 people living in those 79 precincts voted, and of those only 56% voted yes to the new school district.
Using his own method, John Couvillon, a Baton Rouge-based pollster and political analyst, estimates that about 61% of St. George voters said yes. Couvillon noted that St. George has struggled with public support since the 2019 vote that created the new city; in that vote only 54% were in favor of creating the city while 46% opposed.
“You did not have a unanimity of support,” Couvillon said.
It might not have made a difference. Even if every voter in St. George had said yes, the proposal would have still failed parishwide by thousands of votes.
Trouble early
The early vote was bad — 60% no statewide, 67% no in East Baton Rouge — and those negative margins were worse on election day.
St. George Mayor Dustin Yates said after early voting he knew Amendment 2 was in trouble. Yates said he’s doubtful he and other St. George supporters could have done anything different to turn the tide.
“I don’t know if just one thing would have made a difference,” Yates said.
A strong turnout of Black voters sealed matters. Couvillon described it as “nearly unanimous opposition.”
Black opposition was already high during early voting, especially in East Baton Rouge. Couvillon estimates Black voters opposed a St. George school district by an 88% to 12% margin statewide. In East Baton Rouge Parish, he said, that opposition was an even greater margin of 95% to 5%.
On top of that, the pollster estimates that White voters said no as well by a 55% to 45% margin, despite much more publicity about the election.
The racial tensions in the St. George vote were unmistakable. The main opposition group adopted the logo “Fight for Fair Schools,” complete with an illustration inspired by the famous Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old Black girl who in 1960 enrolled in an all-White elementary school in New Orleans.
St. George opponents coordinated with the Louisiana Democratic Party and other groups across the state on a “No On All Amendments” campaign. That campaign was fueled by discontent with Gov. Jeff Landry, whose standing, particularly with Black voters, has fallen with the recent congressional redistricting, which reduced the number of majority-black congressional districts in Louisiana from two to one.
Local opponents of a St. George school district also reported receiving a late contribution of more than $100,000 from the National Education Association.
A bar too high
Louisiana law makes it very difficult to form and operate a new school district. The key hurdle is the need to amend the state Constitution to receive state per-pupil education funding.
Even so, Baker, then Zachary and finally Central managed to clear this high bar in 1995, 1999 and 2006.
First, they had to obtain two-thirds approval from the state Legislature. Then they had to pass muster with the electorate. All three were buoyed by solid support within East Baton Rouge Parish. That support ranged from 56% for Zachary in 1999 to 69% for Central in 2006.
Central’s multi-year path to a school district was the key model and a source of continuing inspiration for St. George supporters.
In 2001 and again in 2004, leaders in Central fell short in persuading lawmakers to let them go to the voters for approval to form their own school district. A key concern was that, unlike Baker and Zachary, Central was not a city in its own right, just a large semi-rural area where residents typically attended Central High School.
Central quickly fixed that problem. In just a year, residents incorporated the previously unincorporated area into a new City of Central. When they returned to the Legislature in 2006, lawmakers green-lighted a statewide election.
St. George’s path was much longer, more controversial and ultimately unsuccessful.
In 2012 and 2013, supporters asked lawmakers to let them create a forerunner to a St. George school district, what was to be called the Southeast Baton Rouge Community School System. Unlike Baker, Central and Zachary, they ran into stiff local resistance. The most outspoken opponents were parents of children in magnet schools. They worried they would lose access to those popular programs or that the new district would hurt those schools.
Following the model of Central, they shifted gears to form a city. Unlike Central, that fight lasted more than a decade.
Opponents argued it would divide communities that have historically identified as residents of Baton Rouge. The debate was also often divided along racial lines, with some Black residents describing the proposed new city as modern segregation.
The St. George incorporation fight culminated in an October 2019 vote to create the city. That vote, however, was open only to residents of the proposed city. By contrast, Saturday’s vote on a St. George school district included thousands of East Baton Rouge voters excluded in 2019.