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BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA
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M o n d ay, J u n e 16, 2025
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Private schools dismayed after funding limited Legislature provides set amount for LA GATOR program
BY PATRICK WALL | Staff writer
STAFF PHOTOS By BRETT DUKE
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist Joel Caldwell throws a cast net in a canal in Port Sulphur on June 4. It’s believed that tilapia fish escaped from a corporate retreat near Port Sulphur nearly 20 years ago and despite a massive eradication effort in 2009 they’ve been found recently in Louisiana waters.
Tilapia resurge in Louisiana waters
At Gardere Community Christian School in Baton Rouge, hopes were high for LA GATOR. Many thought Louisiana’s new program, which gives families state-funded grants for private school tuition or homeschool expenses, could be life changing. Teachers and administrators showed up at the school on the Saturday in March when applications opened to help parents apply. And in May, students and parents pleaded for funding for the program during a state Senate hearing. “Allow my sister and brother and everyone else in my neighborhood to have such an amazing learning journey,” said Radiance Bailey, a fifth grader with five siblings at the school and two more hoping to enroll. On Thursday, many people at Gardere and private schools across the state were bitterly disappointed when the Louisiana Legislature passed a state budget that included far less funding for LA GATOR than its backers sought. The families of nearly 40,000 students had signed up for
ä See FUNDING, page 3A
Despite eradication effort, scientists find invasive fish BY ALEX LUBBEN | Staff writer PORT SULPHUR — Along the levees in this former company town near the end of the Mississippi River, a destructive fish is making an unexpected comeback. Tilapia, a commonly farmed fish that’s ubiquitous at grocery store seafood counters, can pose a dire ecological threat when released into the wild. That’s exactly what happened in this Plaquemines Parish community about 20 years ago, when the fish escaped from a bass pond on a property owned by one of the largest mining companies in the world. Chris Schieble, a deputy assistant secretary with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said he believes the fish broke free when Hurricane Katrina flooded much of the parish. The LDWF then led an effort to kill the tilapia in 2009. At the time, it appeared that the eradication had succeeded. Bad news: The fish are back. While there is no way to definitively prove that the new tilapia are related to those that escaped from the pond two decades ago, Schieble believes that is likely the case. A new study also suggests some of the fish from then survived. Either way, another eradication or
EBR school district has busy hiring season Realignment plan displaced hundreds of employees BY CHARLES LUSSIER | Staff writer
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist Joel Caldwell holds juvenile tilapia collected from a canal in Port Sulphur on June 4. monitoring effort may be necessary. “If this thing kept going in 2009, the tilapia would eventually have gotten through to the estuary. They’d be getting into other habitats and they would be displacing our native fishes,” said Martin O’Connell, a conservation biologist and director of the Nekton Research Laboratory at the University of New Orleans, who
recently found the fish near Port Sulphur. “All the shrimp and all the baby crabs, they’d be sucking them down like popcorn.” O’Connell was involved in monitoring the success of the effort to kill the fish. He recently conducted the study that suggests some survived.
ä See TILAPIA, page 6A
Hundreds of public school employees in Baton Rouge have spent the past few weeks looking for jobs thanks to a realignment plan approved in late April that closes and reconfigures multiple schools in the capital city. They have entered the job market at a time when the East Baton Rouge Parish school system on the whole is modestly reducing the size of its school-level staff. It is part of a slow reversal from an uptick in district hiring, which was fueled by federal COVID-relief funding that has since run out. On May 8, the school system held a special employee job fair, 10 days after the realignment plan was approved. Since then, the Human Resources Department has been holding twice-aweek online office hours where affected employees can get help finding their next job.
ä See HIRING, page 3A
Race splits two branches of Pope Leo’s family Cousins seek to reunite family as lineage is traced
BY DESIREE STENNETT | Staff writer Two generations before his birth, Pope Leo XIV’s New Orleans family splintered along racial lines. On one side, those who were fairskinned passed for White. The other side continued on as Black. STAFF PHOTO By SOPHIA GERMER Most of the family left LouiEllen Dionne Alverez learns about her family tree in New Orleans on siana more than a century ago, but according to genealogist Jari June 8. Alverez is a second cousin of Pope Leo XIV.
WEATHER HIGH 90 LOW 74 PAGE 12A
Honora, who has been studying the pope’s local ancestry, two branches of the extended family — one Black and one White — stayed in New Orleans. Leo XIV They never met. Ellen Dionne Alverez, 77, grew up in the 7th Ward and has lived her entire life in the city. When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was chosen as pope last month, word quickly spread through her Black New Orleans
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family that he might be a cousin. The pope’s grandparents were from New Orleans and had the last name Martinez, which is Alverez’s maiden name. First, a friend speculated. Then, a niece checked her own family records and said she thought it was possible, too. Honora confirmed the relation, and that’s what convinced Alverez. Pope Leo is her second cousin once removed. Her great-grandfather and the pope’s grandfather were brothers.
ä See FAMILY, page 5A
100TH yEAR, NO. 351