BILL ROBERTSON

Contributing Columnist

A capacity crowd in Shreveport’s Broadmoor neighborhood Tuesday heard details of a proposed service center to fight absenteeism among grade-school children in the vacant Arthur Circle Elementary School campus.

The proposal by Caddo Parish School Board member Christine Tharpe and the Volunteers for Youth Justice was aired during a meeting the Broadmoor Neighborhood Association at Broadmoor Presbyterian Church.

BNA members voted after the presentation to urge the school board to engage a professional planning firm to help decide the fate of Arthur Circle and other vacant Caddo properties, including Mooretown and Timmons elementary campuses.

Tharpe, a Broadmoor resident, said she is concerned about high levels of absenteeism among elementary students in Caddo Parish and what might happen should the school board sell Arthur Circle’s 12-acre site for private development.

Her plan would have the board lease the site to the non-profit Volunteers for Youth Justice, which would provide office space to agencies serving families of young children.

VYJ representative Shannon Wyche said 41 percent of Caddo schoolchildren in grades K-5 are absent from classes. She said some Caddo schools report 50 percent of their enrollment missing from class.

“You cannot make up those instructional minutes,” said Wyche, a former teacher at A.C. Steere Elementary School. She said students who miss kindergarten and first grade are “set up for failure.”

Shreveport City Councilman John Nickelson and Caddo Parish Chief Juvenile Judge David Matlock offered statements supporting the Tharpe / VYJ plan. Nickelson said an alternative proposal by E&L Development Co. of Blanchard would require rezoning the property from single-family residential to commercial to allow a storage facility, and he opposes rezoning.

Matlock said VYJ works with families to understand and overcome the causes of absenteeism. He said the volunteers “look for the ‘why’ that explains this behavior” and help families address it.

Several speakers in attendance supported preservation of the Arthur Circle property, which features 1955 buildings designed by noted Shreveport architect Samuel Wiener and a large green space with live oak trees. Bill Wiener Jr., nephew to Samuel Wiener, said a “key green space” in Shreveport could be lost to development. He advocated using the property for an arts center.

Nancy Darwin of Charles Avenue, one of the streets surrounding the closed school, said Shreveport has seen too much “chainsaw and wrecking ball” activity that erased the city’s “tangible” history. She advocated a citizens’ committee to advise the school board on what to do with the closed schools.

Other neighbors pushed Tharpe and VYJ speakers to locate the service center where absenteeism is worst in Caddo Parish. One speaker said Arthur Circle is “not the right site. The bulk of the (absent) kids are coming from the other side of town.”

E&L Development has offered to buy the property and build 25 single-family homes with a public green space and a commercial storage facility in the school buildings. Jake Lawler of E&L said he envisions homes on 60’ x 40’ lots selling in the $300,00-$400,000 range.

Arthur Circle Elementary School was built in 1955 with later additions constructed in 1967 and 2003. The property comprises 12.7 acres. The school board closed the school in 2020 and transferred its enrollment to the new Broadmoor STEM Academy.