BATON ROUGE, La. — Nine religious schools that will take in taxpayer-funded voucher students for the upcoming school year will more than double their enrollments with the subsidized students, receiving about $3.6 million in payments from the state.
About 13 percent of the 5,600 students who received placement offers this week for Louisiana's new statewide voucher program would attend those greatly enlarged schools, which are mainly in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to data released by the Department of Education.
Included in that list is the New Living Word School, which grabbed early attention with lawmakers because of questions about the Ruston church-affiliated school's capability to handle the students. It offered more spaces for voucher students than anyone else, willing to accept 315 children.
The voucher program, pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal as a way to expand educational opportunities, will use tax dollars to send students from low- to moderate-income families to private and parochial schools.