The largest charter school network in Louisiana is expanding yet again, opening satellite campuses in St. George and Zachary.
Fort Lauderdale-based Charter Schools USA is launching these mini-schools, known as learning pods, this fall on property it’s leasing in both cities.
St. George Academy is at 10420 Barringer Foreman Road at the former campus of Cypress Heights Academy, an independent Catholic school that school closed in 2016. The pod will be the fourth charter school campus located in the newly created city of St. George. Its anticipated initial enrollment is about 150 students. It opens as leaders in St. George are striving to create their own independent school district, a district that would open in 2027.
Zachary Charter Academy is leasing space from St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Zachary and expects to have up to 200 students. It will be the first charter school campus in Zachary, a community home to the highest performing school district in Louisiana through much of its history.
They are satellite campuses of Vermilion Charter Academy in Maurice, more than 70 miles from St. George and Zachary.
Vermillion Charter is barely a year old and already it has more than 900 students. State regulators recently agreed to let the school expand again, to a maximum enrollment of more than 1,800 students — double its current size. Its amended contract allows it to grow even more in the future, to a maximum of more than 2,400 students by fall 2027.
Charter schools are public schools run privately via charters, or contracts.
Growth spurt
Charter School USA, a for-profit charter school management company with schools in four Southern states, has grown rapidly in Louisiana. Last year, it enrolled about 11,300 students at eight charter schools. That’s roughly double the company's Louisiana enrollment prior to the pandemic. If these schools comprised their own school district, it would be the 17th largest district in Louisiana.
This growth spurt comes as public schools across Louisiana are steadily losing students. Louisiana’s public school enrollment has declined about 6% compared with prior to the pandemic.
Learning pods, a concept which Charter Schools USA pioneered in Louisiana, is part of that growth strategy.
These pods educate children in smaller, more personalized settings via online, in-person instruction, or a hybrid of both. Charter schools in Louisiana have begun to embrace the approach as a way to expand their reach well beyond the geographic boundaries of their physical campuses, including setting up shop in suburban areas previously little touched by charter schools.
The number of pods in operation has grown from six in 2023 to an expected 14 this fall. Nine of them are affiliated with charter schools run by Charter Schools USA.
The company officially alerted the Louisiana Department of Education on June 11 of its intent to open new pods. The company has yet to complete required pre-opening checklists that the state education agency will need to approve before the pods open for business.
Pod history
Charter Schools USA helped pass the 2021 state law sanctioning the use of pods, which the company had been operating since 2018 without notifying state regulators.
In December 2022, after lengthy negotiations, the company persuaded state education leaders to adopt relaxed rules for learning pods.
The company’s under-the-radar pod venture, however, sparked the state Department of Education to commission a critical audit by the nonprofit group TenSquare.
In August 2023, the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office released its own report on learning pods, known as a performance audit. The document offered 11 recommendations of ways the state could improve learning pod laws and rules.
The new St. George and Zachary pods will increase to four the number of facilities that Charter Schools USA operates in East Baton Rouge Parish. The other two are South Baton Rouge Charter Academy, a charter school that it built in 2014 along Burbank Drive near Bluebonnet Boulevard; and Red Stick Academy, a learning pod that opened in 2021 at 6455 Jefferson Highway, located in a preschool formerly run by the closed Runnels School.
The St. George pod will educate students in grades pre-K-12. The preschool portion will require tuition, the elementary grades K-5 will be in person, while older students will have a mix of in-person and online instruction.
The Zachary pod will have students in grades K-8, with in-person instruction four days a week and virtual days on Friday.
Well-known leaders to lead pods
Charter Schools USA has hired prominent educators to run them both.
Don Mayes is the site leader for St. George Academy. Mayes has spent his career in Christian schools, including almost 12 years leading Parkview Baptist School, which is near St. George. He was placed on leave from Parkview in October and left soon after for undisclosed reasons. In February, he re-emerged as the leader of this new mini-school.
“It is our heart here at St. George Academy to have a calm, strong, great experience for our students,” Mayes said in a May 25 social media video introducing the new school.
Meanwhile Kevin Lemoine has been tapped to become site leader for Zachary Charter Academy. Lemoine served from 2015 to 2019 as superintendent of schools in Pointe Coupee Parish. He has spent the past several years as head of school at the private Silliman Institute in Clinton. He’s best known in Zachary for serving as principal of Zachary High from 2003 to 2009.
The Zachary pod is the more recent of the two. It opens in a city with no charter schools but only one private school, Trinity Christian Academy, which has about 50 students.
The first most people heard of the learning pod was on May 26 when the Rev. Lamar Partin, pastor of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, announced the new school venture.
In a post on the church website, Partin said the charter school company is leasing for three years the gym and a temporary building from the church, an arrangement reached after “going back and forth with the Diocese (of Baton Rouge).” He said it will have 100 or more students. Partin said he hopes it will lead to a rise in Catholic education in a part of the parish far from any Catholic schools.
“Though it will not be a Catholic school, it may be the planting of a seed that may one day grow into a Catholic school,” Partin wrote.
