Author: manshipxgr

Published: Aug. 4, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–LSU said Wednesday that it will encourage but not require the 40,000 students on its campuses across the state to be vaccinated against the coronavirus before attending fall classes.

Instead, students can either submit proof of a COVID-19 vaccination or a negative COVID test when they arrive on campus for classes starting August 23. Students will have to wear masks to class, and unvaccinated students will be required to take monthly COVID tests.

Although an LSU safety and medical committee recommended last week that the school cut class sizes by 50% to slow the surging Delta variant of the virus, LSU plans to only make that reduction temporarily for classes with 100 students or more during peak infection periods.

The plan, announced by new president William F. Tate IV, is likely to anger faculty members, who have been seeking permission to decide whether to move other classes online or teach them in hybrid fashion, with half of the students alternating between attending in person or watching online to provide social distancing.

Dr. Ravi Rau, who has taught physics at LSU for 47 years, said waiting a month between COVID tests for students “is ridiculously too long.” He said the tests should be administered at least weekly to contain outbreaks.

He also noted that the nation’s premier science journal, SCIENCE, recommended mandating COVID vaccines for students.

Read more at BRProud

Published: July 29, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–Although state health officials have approved student vaccine mandates at four private colleges, LSU and the University of Louisiana System do not plan to seek a similar mandate until federal regulators fully approve the COVID-19 vaccines now being distributed.

Federal approval is unlikely to come until well after classes begin next month, meaning that many of LSU’s 35,000 students and its faculty and staff members will depend on mandatory masking, air filters and some degree of social distancing to protect them from the surging Delta variant.

LSU’s new president, William Tate, said at an online forum Thursday that those mitigation measures were more substantial than at other Southern public universities.

“I hope that people will understand that it’s not even trivial getting to this point in this political climate,” he said.

But many of the hundreds of faculty members at the forum seemed dismayed by his comments and his unwillingness to push harder the vaccine mandate.

Dr. Jim Henderson, president of University of Louisiana system, said Thursday that his nine schools also planned to wait for the Louisiana Department of Health to add the vaccines to its college immunization schedules after they are fully approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Henderson said that waiting for full FDA approval would help limit the number of exemptions requests from students who do not want to receive the vaccines for religious or other reasons. The UL System has more than 90,000 students.

The LSU meeting came shortly after the Health Department released records showing that it had taken only a few hours to approve exemptions and allow vaccine mandates at the four private colleges: Tulane, Xavier, Loyola and Dillard.

Read more at BRProud

Published: June 22, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–LSU’s football and other sports programs lost $81 million in revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the school cannot use federal aid funds to reduce that deficit.

The athletics department has offset some of the losses through salary reductions and job cuts. It has received $23 million in relief money from the Southeastern Conference, and it has tapped reserve funds from profitable years to try to close the rest of the gap.

It also is counting on its private fundraising arm, the Tiger Athletic Foundation, to keep bringing in major donations. The foundation just hired a new leader, Matt Borman, who had led athletic fundraising at the University of Georgia.

The lost revenue came after parts or all of the seasons for many sports, including men’s basketball and baseball, were canceled in spring 2020 and attendance at football games was limited to 25% of Tiger Stadium’s 102,000-seat capacity.

That came after a banner year for a sports program that usually brings in among the highest revenue and profit totals in the country.

The national championship football team led by quarterback Joe Burrow took in $95 million in revenue in 2019-20 and earned a profit of $53.7 million.

But all that changed in March 2020 when LSU had to send students home, switch to online learning and curtail its athletics programs.

Read more at BRPROUD

Published: June 18, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. (LSU) – The LSU Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Friday to urge the Louisiana Department of Health to add COVID-19 shots to a list of mandated vaccinations for college students once federal regulators give full approval to the vaccines.

The vote came after the board adopted an amendment to notify students that they could opt out of a mandate for health, religious or other reasons.

Students have long had the ability to opt out of other required vaccines, such as for measles or mumps, but few have realized that or done so. Faculty members fear that notifying students that they can ignore any COVID-19 requirement will undercut the school’s efforts to increase vaccination rates as more dangerous variants of the virus spread.

Tom Galligan, president of the LSU system, said 73% of the faculty and 57% of staff at the flagship campus in Baton Rouge have reported being vaccinated against COVID-19. However, only about 27% of the campus’s 35,000 students have reported being vaccinated.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 522 college campuses around the country have required the vaccine, with 221 of them being public institutions. Private universities in Louisiana, including Tulane, Loyola, Dillard and Xavier, say they will require their students to receive vaccines before the fall semester starts.

The Louisiana Legislature passed a bill recently banning state agencies, including public universities, from discriminating against people based on their vaccination status while the vaccines are still approved only for emergency use.

Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, has expressed concern about the bill but has not said if he would veto it.

Pfizer and Moderna, two of the main COVID vaccine makers, have applied for full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, but that is not likely to come before school resumes in August.

Read more at WAFB9

Published: June 11, 2021

By: Matthew Bennett, Adrian Dubose and Ryan Nelsen | LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–Buoyed by billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid, Louisiana legislators took on several big issues this spring and made progress in simplifying the tax code, supporting education and expanding criminal-justice reform.

Some public-interest groups praised the tax changes as important steps toward strengthening Louisiana’s economy, while others expressed concern that some of the changes could lead to a budget crunch down the road.

The Council for a Better Louisiana viewed the main changes—lowering state income tax rates for individuals and corporations and eliminating deductions for what they pay in federal income taxes–as “a positive step forward,” while noting that it was only the beginning of righting a complicated, messy system.

Gov. John Bel Edwards indicated after the legislative session ended that he would support this swap in the source of state tax revenues as long as it does not cost the state much in the short run. The changes would require adjustments to the state Constitution, and if he signs the bills, residents will have to vote on them in October.

The Public Affairs Research Council said that if voters approve, the state’s tax structure will become “simpler, fairer, more competitive, and better-ranked nationally.”

But the Louisiana Budget Project, which researches how state policies affect the poor and the working class, issued a statement warning that lawmakers were relying too heavily on federal relief dollars that will soon be gone.

The group’s executive director, Jan Moller, supported the “excellent premise” of the tax swap, but bemoaned the way it was executed.

Read more at BRProud

Published: June 11, 2021

By: Kathleen Peppo, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. — The chance to change police practices in Louisiana did not seem very good when Rep. Ted James presented a resolution to study them shortly after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.

James had to agree in advance to demands from Republicans to remove Floyd’s name from the resolution.

One Republican, Rep. Tony Bacala of Prairieville, was not privy to that conversation. And when the resolution came up for debate on the House floor, Bacala, a former chief sheriff’s deputy in Ascension Parish, said language in the resolution about blacks being three times more likely to be killed by law enforcement officers than whites addressed only one side of the issue.

“If we’re going to talk, let’s talk,” Bacala said. “Let’s don’t limit what we’re willing to speak about to things that only some people want to speak about,” he said. “Of 800,000 law enforcement officers in this country, in that same period of time, 584 were killed in the line of duty, which means that the rate that cops die in the line of duty is 40 times higher than blacks.”

“Tony,” James responded, “I was pepper sprayed in handcuffs by a police officer. A white one.”

James also described being questioned by law enforcement officers for standing with four other black men outside of a barber shop in Baton Rouge. The questioning only ended when James handed the officer a card that identified him as a state legislator.

Read more at westcentralsbest.com

Published: June 10, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. (LSU Manship School News Wire) – A bill that would gradually move $300 million annually to roads and bridges moved to the governor’s desk Thursday as the legislative session came to an end.

House Bill 514 by Rep. Tanner Magee, R-Houma, passed the House 87-13.

The bill was originally authored as a sales tax bill for marijuana but turned into an infrastructure bill.

The bill dedicates the existing tax on the sale and lease of motor vehicles to a state construction fund. The bill will shift $300 million from the state’s general fund to transportation projects.

Read more at KALB

House Bill 183 by Rep. Chad Brown, D-Plaquemine, would raise the state’s unemployment wage by $28 a week, starting next year.

Published: June 10, 2021

By: Ryan Nelson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. — In the final hour of the session Thursday, the Legislature passed a bill that could slightly raise the state’s unemployment benefits, but only if the Governor ends participation in the federal COVID-19 aid program that pays more.

House Bill 183 by Rep. Chad Brown, D-Plaquemine, would raise the state’s unemployment wage by $28 a week, starting next year. But Gov. John Bel Edwards must choose to end the extra federal unemployment benefits, which equates to $300, on July 31.

It is not clear if Edwards, a fellow Democrat, will sign the bill into law.

Read more at 4WWL

Published: June 10, 2021

By: Matthew Bennett, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. (LSU Manship School News Wire) – The Legislature passed three tax bills involving personal income tax and corporate tax deductions on the last day of the session Thursday, including one that lowers personal income tax brackets.

The tax overhaul will allow individual taxpayers and corporations to lower their income tax rates while giving up the right to deduct federal tax payments on their state returns.

Legislators backing the bills believe that the so-called “tax swap” would simplify the tax code without changing taxpayers’ balances significantly. Republican leaders expect the state to bring in roughly the same amount in tax dollars if the new laws are implemented, while other analysts suggest some short-term loss of revenue.

The bills, which were a major priority for Republican leaders, received final passage in the Senate just hours before the legislative session was due to expire. They will now move to Gov. John Bel Edwards’ desk.

If he approves them, they will be placed before the state’s voters in October.

The three bills joined four other bills that lawmakers had passed earlier in a sweeping effort that Republican leaders pitched as making the state more attractive to businesses and investment.

The bills were not without opposition, with Sen. Karen Carter Peterson D-New Orleans, speaking out against one of the bills, SB159 by Sen. Bret Allain, R-Franklin, which reduced the maximum allowable personal income tax rate from 6 percent to 4.75 percent.

“The problem that I have with the bill is that it goes into the Constitution,” Peterson said. “This is appropriate for statutory law but not Constitutional law. Every time we ever want to touch the income tax rate again, we have to go back, pass it in the Legislature and pass it again with the people. I think that this is a bad policy decision for the state.”

Read more at KALB

Published: June 10, 2021

By: Adrian Dubose, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La – Democratic Rep. Malinda White of Bogalusa tearfully withdrew her domestic violence bill Thursday, a day after a verbal altercation with Rep. Alan Seabaugh, R-Shreveport, on the House floor.

House Bill 159 would have expanded the definition of domestic abuse to include coercion and control by the abuser.

“I come today with a lot of heartache,” White said. “I’m disappointed we have to let down victims of domestic violence.”

White promised victims of abuse that she would bring the bill back up next year in an improved version.

Seabaugh raised questions about what the bill meant and did during the debate that led to the confrontation.

Read more at westcentralbest.com