JOHN PERKINS
Contributing Columnist
As I was signing in for the Broadmoor Neighborhood Association meeting in a crowded multipurpose room at Broadmoor Presbyterian Church, a Shreveport police officer walked through the door. I asked the ladies at the table if they had pitchforks and torches out in the parking lot. This was the first of two meetings I attended that had attendance of over 100-strong citizens of Shreveport that week.
The question before this crowd in Broadmoor was what to do about the now-closed Arthur Circle Elementary School. Owned by the Caddo Parish School Board (CPSB), the facility now joins a significant list of closed and derelict school campuses in Caddo Parish. CPSB member Christine Tharpe spoke to her constituents and confirmed that CPSB would like to use the empty building as a one-stop shop for dealing with truancy in Shreveport and Caddo Parish. You could almost hear a gasp. But Ken Lawler, a developer, would like to buy the property and develop high-end homes. Lawler also wants to include a storage facility.
Neither of those ideas went over well. Who wants to live across the street from a storage facility? Who wants to live across the street from a truancy center, for that matter? But Shreveport could use the property taxes generated by private development on land that has been consuming tax dollars for decades. It could make that land productive and raise property values.
But truancy doesn’t mean what it used to mean in the old black-and-white movies. In those old films, there was always some rough-looking boy that was causing trouble in town while evading capture by the town truant officer. Mickey Rooney comes to mind. But truancy doesn’t mean that today. These are children from kindergarten to fifth grade who aren’t coming to school for reasons that can be easily solved, such as no shoes to wear, no child care at home for siblings while single parent works outside the home. These problems have been dealt with in juvenile court and clog that system. So, what if there was a one-stop shop where these children could come with their families to find solutions? The various agencies would support the upkeep of the beautiful campus by paying rent to be there. Makes a lot of sense; maybe we should just find a modern name for truants?
One other idea came from the people: an arts center. The building could be converted into a teaching facility supporting students of the arts. This idea would preserve the neighborhood and even has strong support from Bill Wiener, a retired local architect/planner and preservationist, descended from the world-famous Wiener brothers who accomplished so much here in the mid-20th century. But how to pay for that potentially valuable contribution to Shreveport’s lagging educational landscape? Could a combination of public and private money support this? I’d love to see it, wouldn’t you? That would be better than having another million-dollar light show hanging on a bridge. Let me know what you think: PerkWrites@gmail.com