Author: manshipxgr

Published: Jan. 29, 2022

By: Lura Stabiler and Braxton Brown, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. – As the Legislature gets ready to start a special session Tuesday on redistricting, one major focus is whether two of the state’s six congressional districts should be redrawn to give minority residents a better chance to elect two Black congressmen instead of one.

Black leaders and civil rights groups say that is only fair since African Americans make up nearly one-third of the state’s population and the 2020 Census shows that northern Louisiana, which has two white representatives in Congress, has lost population.

But Republicans want to hold onto the five congressional seats they have. And the politics will get even more complicated–and potentially tense–when it comes to redrawing the 105 Louisiana House districts and the 39 districts that send state senators to Baton Rouge.

The Census data shows that the suburban areas around New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette are among the fast-growing areas in the state, and their voters are mostly white and Republican. And most of the state legislative seats now held by Black politicians are in districts that lost some population and will have to be redrawn.

Lawmakers say the population shifts lay a foundation for debate, but political considerations play a huge role as state lawmakers battle each other to maintain their electoral advantages and the parties fight over a congressional seat that could help tilt the balance of power in Washington.

Adding even more intrigue is that Louisiana is the only Deep South state with a Democratic governor who could potentially veto the maps that the Republican-dominated Legislature draws.

As for how all of these considerations will affect how the district lines are redrawn, there is no way to know for sure what will emerge from the three-week special session.

“You have a lot of possibilities,” said demographer Greg Rigamer, a political consultant in New Orleans. “You can configure them in all sorts of ways to meet the minimum requirements,” he said.

Read more at KTBS

Published: Jan. 25, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE—With the state flush with cash, Gov. John Bel Edwards unveiled a proposed budget Monday that includes more than $1.1 billion in infrastructure spending and investments in education at all levels.

“I think we have once in a generation, and maybe once in a lifetime opportunity in some respects, to move our state forward,” Edwards said.

He outlined his budget priorities at a news conference at the Capitol. The budget is for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and the state has lots of money to spend following federal pandemic relief and higher-than-expected state tax revenues. 

Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne will present the plan on Tuesday to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget. The Legislature will decide by June what the final bill looks like. 

Read more at Biz Magazine

Published: Jan. 12, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Louisiana will have an additional $1.6 billion to spend over the next year and a half after a state panel approved new revenue projections Tuesday. 

The state expects to collect $1.2 billion more in general fund revenue than projected in the current budget cycle, which ends June 30, and $770 million more in the next cycle, which starts July 1. 

This revenue is mostly due to personal income taxes and sales taxes, which have been higher than anticipated. 

Not all of the extra money will be available to be spent at the Legislature’s discretion. About $275 million will be set aside for dedicated funds, and $400 million will be used to pay down the federal loan the state received to rebuild the levee system after Hurricane Katrina. 

Read more at Biz Magazine

Published: Jan. 3, 2022

By: Lara Nicholson, Zane Piontek, Brea Rougeau and Jada Hemsley (LSU Manship School News Service)

Chlanda Gibson was in her bed last April when she heard loud pops outside her window.

She had fallen asleep while waiting for her son, 17-year-old Roddrick Cook, to come home after going out with friends. When she went to check on the noise, his friends knocked on the back door for help — one with a gunshot wound in his leg.

Cook was nowhere to be found, and as police investigated, Gibson sat in the back of a police cruiser, where she spent five dark hours wondering what had happened to him. Then she was given the devastating news: Her son, the 6-foot 4-inch, 250-pound high school football player who dreamed of going to the NFL, had been killed that night.

Gibson’s son still sits on the long list of Baton Rouge murders that remain unsolved. That list includes more than half of the city’s 121homicides in 2021 as murder rates continue to soar nationwide.

The national surge in homicide rates stems from a variety of political and socioeconomic factors, trends to which Louisiana has proven far from immune. The Baton Rouge area, Shreveport, Alexandria and Lafayette all had record numbers of homicides in 2021, and New Orleans had 218 murders, the most since before its population fell with Hurricane Katrina.

As the killings stack up, clearance rates — the percentage of cases closed — has shriveled in some cities, and even cities that are solving most of their murders are struggling through staffing shortages to keep up.

The number of murders increased by 30% nationally in 2020, and the national average for homicide clearance rates dropped nearly 10 percentage points, to 51.3%. The Murder Accountability Project, which analyzes FBI homicide data collected from local agencies nationwide, said that was the worst single-year drop and the lowest murder clearance rate on record.

In Louisiana, the average clearance rate saw a drop of 9.7 percentage points in 2020, to 50.6%, according to data compiled by the accountability project, and some police departments experienced lower numbers.

Read more at WWNO

Published: Dec. 27, 2021

By: Alaina A. Alfred, Alejandro Burgos and Taylar R. Green, LSU Manship School News Service

Living in an LSU dorm, Jack Tomeny is used to leaving his car unattended in a campus lot for a few days at a time. One day Tomeny noticed that someone had stolen his backpack from the backseat along with the loose change he had in the car.

Tomeny fell victim to a recurring theme that is making students uneasy not only on campus but at popular student apartment complexes near the LSU campus.

The number of car break-ins reported on campus jumped to 22 during this fall semester alone after falling to just two while students were studying remotely in 2020 and averaging 10 a year in the three years before that.

Baton Rouge Police Department records show that the off-campus apartment areas that many students move to after their freshman years have been averaging 30 to 35 vehicle burglaries a month. And relatively high rates for vehicle and apartment break-ins — and armed robberies — in Baton Rouge as a whole add to the apprehension. 

Some students, like Tomeny, acknowledge being a bit naïve in not taking enough precautions. He left a passenger door unlocked even though the lot was not well lit.

Still, he said, “I was honestly a little surprised that there’s people brave enough to go and check random people’s cars.”

Tomeny did not bother to report the break-in to LSU police, saying that he did not see what they could do at that point and that he decided to “kind of just cut my losses.”

LSU sophomore Laisha Mendez found that someone had broken her car’s passenger seat window in September while she was inside a bar in Tigerland, a popular hangout spot for students. The glove compartment was open, and old checks were found scattered over the seat.

Mendez spoke to the Baton Rouge Police Department about the incident and learned that the police had apprehended two men suspected of committing that crime and 17 other car-related incidents.

Read more at the News Star

Published: Dec. 29, 2021

By: Masie O’Toole, Kirby Koch and Donald Fountain, LSU Manship School News Service

Bryce Trum sat up in his twin-sized bed at 6:55 a.m. His day of classes at LSU was about to start at 7 a.m., and his classroom was only five feet away.

But as he signed onto the Zoom meeting on his computer, his attention was immediately drawn to his guitar. Six strings on the acoustic guitar leaning up against his eggshell white walls was more enticing than listening to the voice coming through the Alienware laptop on his desk. The instrument created an easy distraction for Trum, and avoiding his online computer science class became second nature.

Trum was not alone as the COVID-19 pandemic thrust college students across the country into the biggest experiment yet with online learning. In a survey of 500 college students across 22 states, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that two-thirds felt they had learned less by having to shift online during the height of the pandemic. Four out of five students said they were more distracted at home than they would have been in a classroom. Other problems included social isolation and difficulties in interacting with other students.

“This was a tsunami that no one saw coming,” the professor, Bernard McCoy, said in releasing the study last July. “Suddenly, it was looming in front of us and washing over us. And so we had to learn how to swim.”

But McCoy also found that as the students got used to going virtual, more than half of them said they would like to have remote learning options available in the future. The students enjoyed the flexibility, saying that they were better able to tailor their schedules to incorporate their jobs and that online instruction saved them time and money.

The shift to online instruction happened suddenly as COVID-19 surged in the spring of 2020, and administrators and professors were just as surprised–and unprepared–as their students for the shift.

Nicole Cotton, a technology specialist at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, said her school rushed to give professors tips on how to teach in the new environment. “We were doing workshops online when most of our faculty had never taught online,” she said.

Kaci Bergeron, the director of Nicholls State’s Student Access Center, said that the students who struggled the most were deaf and blind ones.

Read more at New Orleans City Business

Published: Dec. 22, 2021

By: Caden Lim, Joe Kehrli, Logan Puissegur and Alexander Sobel, LSU Manship School News Service

Every morning, Floyd Dupre and his son, Mike, button up their denim shirts, throw on some jeans and slip into their boots. It’s another day on the farm tending to their cattle.

Meanwhile, 60 miles east in the state’s capital, Floyd’s grandson and Mike’s nephew Joseph Dupre hits the gym near his apartment and heads to class at the state-of-the-art engineering building on LSU’s campus.

Joey Dupre is a chemical engineering student who wants to focus on sustainable energy sources. He aspires to live in Houston rather than take over his grandfather’s farm, and his story is typical for rural Louisiana, where younger generations are leaving for more opportunities in urban areas and other states.

Data from the 2020 U.S. Census shows that 45 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes lost population over the last decade. Louisiana was fifth in the nation for slowest population growth; the only parishes that saw growth were the main urban ones and their suburbs.

Louisiana’s population grew a mere 2.7%, according to Census data. The national average was 7.4%.

Towns in some of the swampland parishes closer to the Gulf of Mexico that rely on the petroleum industry are experiencing a similar loss as the country shifts to more renewable energy sources and storms intensify.

New Iberia residents say, for instance, that their area has been losing people to Lafayette and more distant places as oil-related business declines at its port.

“Out of the six of us, my siblings and my cousins, that could choose where they wanted to live, only one of them lives in New Iberia,” Warner Simon, an LSU student from there, said. “Three of them live in New Orleans, one in Houston and one in Tampa Bay.”

Read more at Daily Advertiser

Published: Dec. 21, 2021

By: Margaret DeLaney, Olivia Varden and Chris Langley, LSU Manship School News Service

In fourth-grade teacher Laura Spurgeon’s class, the students who attended school in person during the pandemic sit in one area, and those who were online last year sit in another. A third group, the students still working from home, join on a screen.

“It’s like I’m teaching three different levels instead of one,” Spurgeon said. “The students who still stay at home ‘sick’ and have to join via Zoom, the ones that opted for online last year and didn’t learn as much, and the kiddos who have been in person the entire time.”

With the COVID-19 disruptions, standardized test scores for students in grades 3 through 8 have fallen in 69 of 72 Louisiana school districts. State performance scores for schools and school districts, released in early December, fell overall as well.

Teachers, administrators and counselors are trying to figure out how to help many students catch up and get K-12 education back on track. However, they must determine how to reach students who are now performing at different levels while also dealing with the psychological fallout on children who had limited social contact during the shutdowns.

What makes this even harder is that many schools across the state are facing a shortage of teachers. Older teachers are opting for retirement rather than face health risks, and new college education graduates are passing on jobs they view as offering too little pay. 

And the teachers who are still on the frontlines are working harder than ever and reaching out to parents of struggling students through phone calls or emails.

Morgan Story, a high school teacher at MSA West Academy in Plaquemine, said most parents have been understanding and are working with her to help their children.

“They really just needed a voice of a teacher being like ‘All right, I know we’re struggling. This is where we’re at with it, too. This is what you really need to focus on.’ And that helped a lot of parents.”

Read more at Town Talk

Published: Dec. 20, 2021

By: Joe Rizzo, Joey Bullard and Michael Sanders, LSU Manship School News Service

As Hurricane Ida rapidly grew in strength, crabbers Stacia Johnson and Justin Smith were left with just three days to relocate their $100,000 supply of crab traps. Knowing the traps could be severely damaged or stolen if left on land, the siblings dropped their traps in the Biloxi Marsh, said a prayer and evacuated to Arkansas. Days later, unsure how many traps would be left, they found that not only were all of the traps intact, but they were also filled to the brim with crabs.

Johnson called the event a miracle in a string of unfortunate events due to the worsening effects of climate change. Rising water temperatures, disappearing islands and rapidly changing salinity levels have severely altered their fishing routes and the migration patterns of the crustaceans they catch. These changes have significantly hindered their success as commercial fishers.

The Johnson-Smith family is not alone. As ocean temperatures rise, hurricane seasons become longer and more intense, and residents across the state are being forced to face the existential threats of the climate crisis.

Since the catastrophic damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, people across South Louisiana have faced greater anxiety about what could happen next. And the damage from Hurricanes Ida and Laura has turned that anxiety into dread, once again prompting families who have lived here for generations to reconsider calling Louisiana home.

Dr. George Xue, a marine science professor at LSU, said the Gulf of Mexico is a great conductor of energy for “monster storms,” or hurricanes that reach categories four or five.

Xue said that with rising sea levels and warmer ocean temperatures due to climate change, Louisiana will begin to see more hurricanes that will gain power fast and become even more unpredictable than the five major ones that hit the Gulf region over the last five years.

“There will be no safe harbor from major hurricanes in the Northern Gulf,” Xue said.

A new survey, led by LSU geology professors, of 2,780 scientists studying climate change shows that 91% of them believe that the Earth is warming because of human-related greenhouse gas emissions. Although this number has risen by 10 percentage points since 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, fewer than half of Americans believe that humans are causing climate change.

Read more at Shreveport Times

Published: Dec. 3, 2021

By: Annalise Vidrine and Shelly Kleinpeter, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — “Can you get me the bone lady?”

Since the 1980s, law enforcement officials from across Louisiana have called LSU for help in identifying human remains and finding missing people. This earned Mary Manhein the reputation as “the bone lady.”

Given that interest, Manhein formed the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services Lab at LSU in 1990 to help law enforcement and coroner’s offices identify missing persons and human remains.

With cases ranging from mummies to murder victims, the FACES Lab provides invaluable services across the state using bones, DNA and other forensic methods to identify missing persons.

FACES was in the news again this October when Sabine Parish officials, building on the lab’s earlier work in identifying a dead man in a well, were able to recover more of the body and make an arrest for a murder that they believe occurred in 1984.

“They were a tremendous help all the way around,” said Detective Chris Abrahams of Sabine Parish, who worked with the lab’s experts on the case. “If they wouldn’t have brought the missing person case to our attention, we would’ve never put two and two together.”

By securing funding from the state and LSU, Manhein, now 77, helped the lab build a national reputation in forensics. She also created the LA Repository for Unidentified and Missing Persons Information Program, the most comprehensive statewide database of its kind.

Manhein retired from the lab in 2015, and Dr. Ginesse Listi, who had worked with Manhein for years, succeeded her and has continued the work.

Read more at The Daily Star