T’bonne school board approves Grand Caillou realignment

The Terrebonne Parish School Board approved a plan at last Tuesday’s meeting to alleviate overcrowding at flood-prone Grand Caillou Elementary School.

The measure passed by a 7-0 vote. Board members Roosevelt Thomas and Gregory Harding were absent.

For the 2009-10 academic year, Grand Caillou Middle will become a pre-Kindergarten through sixth grade school, while Grand Caillou Elementary will house seventh and eighth graders.

The board also unanimously agreed to begin building a 10-classroom modular building at the middle school, which will have about 700 students next year.

The modular building project has an established budget of just under $1.1 million, nearly $100,000 more than the $900,000 paid to construct 10 classroom modulars last summer. Architect Merlin A. Lirette said the FEMA guidelines require the new modulars to be 8 feet above sea level, about a foot higher than the existing units.

“This is not intended to be the long-term solution,” said School Superintendent Philip Martin. “If we wanted to put the pre-K through three back at Grand Caillou Elementary next year, it couldn’t happen. Somebody had to leave.”

The main two-story brick building on the Grand Caillou Elementary campus, which held classrooms, a computer lab and the library, was condemned after it was flooded by Hurricane Ike’s storm surge last September.

Currently, the school’s 411 students – pre-K through third grade – and teachers are “doubled up” with two classes in each of 20 classrooms.

Martin said the change will move more than 200 seventh and eighth graders to the elementary school, thus resolving the overcrowding issue.

“I think this is the best plan we could come up with where the young children would not be impacted, ” said school board member Roger Dale Dehart, who represents the Grand Caillou community. “This might alleviate some of that education lost due to flooding.”

Grand Caillou Elementary has flooded at least five times since 1985 when Hurricane Juan pushed water into the area. Since then, the school system has spent about $3 million cleaning up the school after each flood.

While Martin, board members and Grand Caillou residents begrudgingly accepted the plan as an adequate short-term answer, some were still unsatisfied with how the process turned out.

“This is not a solution to the flooding problem. This is just a school name change – from Grand Caillou Elementary to Grand Caillou Junior High,” said the Rev. Marcel McGee, pastor of Grand Caillou Baptist Church.