Like many middle-class parents in East Baton Rouge Parish, La., Carla Miller sends her two children to a private high school. She’d like them to go to the public schools in Baton Rouge, but she won’t send them because of the violence, low attendance, and less-rigorous classes. Spots in the well-regarded magnet programs are hard to get. Miller says that wouldn’t be the case if the property taxes she pays stayed in her neighborhood instead of helping to subsidize underperforming schools in other areas. “We are tired of basically being a cash cow for the rest of the parish,” she said in an e-mail.
Miller is one of thousands of residents from the mostly white, southern part of the parish who support Local Schools for Local Children, a group that wants to pull out of the 42,000-student school district they share with mostly black neighborhoods nearby, where many families live in poverty. The group’s members are gathering signatures for a ballot measure that will decide whether to create a city, called St. George, which they say is the first step toward forming their own schools funded with property taxes from their homes. “If the school system had improved over the last 20 years, with the never-ending bond issues we have been paying, instead of further deteriorating, this would never have been an issue,” Miller said.
