School board to vote on bond proposals today

Today the Lincoln Parish School Board will consider approving nearly $20 million in facilities projects in the Ruston and Choudrant school districts — and asking the public for tax extensions to do so.

The board will convene at noon at Ruston Elementary School to review a $17.5 million capital improvement plan for the Ruston school district, the bulk of which would go toward athletics projects for Ruston High School and security upgrades at RHS and Ruston Junior High School.

Superintendent Ricky Durett has said the projects chosen were those district leaders thought the public would have supported last year, if a plan to consolidate the city’s four elementary schools into two hadn’t been part of the proposal at the time.

Meanwhile, a $2 million package in Choudrant would pay for three new classrooms at Choudrant Elementary School and a new multipurpose room at Choudrant High School.

Both proposals would require the school board to issue general obligation bonds to finance the projects.

That’s what residents of those districts would vote on at the polls on April 27 — whether to allow the board to issue these bonds.

To pay off the bonds, the board would extend an existing property tax in each district at its current rate — 16.75 mills for five years in Ruston and 14 mills for six years in Choudrant.

Without these additional bonds, those taxes wouldn’t immediately go off the books but would shrink over time as old bonds from past projects are paid off. In Ruston that shrinking would start this year.

A story in Sunday’s Ruston Daily Leader detailed the proposed athletics projects that make up about 70% of the Ruston package.

Here’s a breakdown of the proposed security upgrades — another 14% of the dollar total.

Half a million dollars would be used to purchase five advanced body sensors, three for RHS and two for RJHS.

These would be placed at entrances for students and visitors to walk through as they enter the building.

“You walk through it, it scans, and it has an iPad with it,” Durrett said at a public forum about the bond proposal last week. “It shows what’s in your pockets, if there’s gun parts, knives, different settings you can put on it.”

He said the Lincoln Parish administration talked with the Zachary Community School District, who uses these scanners, as well as others who use traditional metal detectors.

Metal detectors would not identify every type of concealed weapon and other prohibited items, while these scanners would, he said. They also wouldn’t sound an alarm every time a piece of metal passed through it, because they can identify what the specific item actually is.

At last week’s forum, an attendee asked about the possibility that these scanners would increase students’ anxiety and distrust of school leadership.

Durrett said their research and consulting with other school districts leads them to believe these advanced scanners are the least invasive and anxiety-inducing on the market. “You walk through a metal detector, it goes off, you have to stop the kid, wand them, see where it’s at, and some of the biggest problems is belt buckles,” he said.

“What we’re talking about, you just walk through it, it scans, if you have a gun part, knife, vape… it picks that up. There’s no stopping you if you don’t have anything in there… We found that kids get used to it, and it gets to where you’re just walking through like a normal day.”

Even so, Durrett said the district wanted to start with just the five scanners at its two largest schools, to see if they work as well as hoped, before they would eventually be expanded to all other campuses over time.

The proposal also includes just under $2 million for other security upgrades at the junior high and high school.

At RJHS, the focus is on securing access to the parking lot before a Buc-ee’s travel center opens across the street. That would cost about $1.2 million.

“If we have Buc-ee’s across the street, we don’t want someone driving up in there, turning the wrong way, wandering across the street onto that campus,” Durrett said.

RJHS, along with almost all other campuses in the district, already has a controlled-access front entrance, meaning no one can get inside without the office buzzing them in.

Everywhere but RHS. The district already has grant funds that will be used to give the high school a controlled-access front entrance, but that doesn’t necessarily protect such a large school from unwelcome visitors on its own.

“Ruston High School has a lot of doors to go in and out of, so we’ve got to work to change some of those doors out and make it to where not every door is accessible to come into the school, to keep people out,” Durrett said. “Make three doors, possibly four, that are ways to come in and out of the school.”

Outside of athletics and security, the Ruston proposal also includes a million-dollar roof repair for the high school, $630,000 in parking additions to both schools, and $900,000 for activity buses.

The buses are the only piece of this proposal that would directly benefit schools other than RHS and RJHS, as they would be used by all schools in the Ruston district for field trips, athletic travel, etc.