24 November 2025
By Safura Syed
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — The Orleans Parish School Board district might not have the funds to keep the Leah Chase School, the city’s only district-run public school, open for long if enrollment doesn’t improve, according to numerous projections from the board’s financial office during a Tuesday committee meeting. During the meeting, school board members and NOLA Public Schools district Superintendent Fateama Fulmore, spoke about measures the district might have to take to keep the school open, including layoffs as another school submitted an application for closure.
The Leah Chase School is facing significant financial challenges since it began its second year this August, with a $500,000 budget deficit due in part to under-enrollment. Although the district is working to eliminate the current deficit, the budget shortfalls are expected to continue, said the district’s Chief Financial Officer, Nyesha Veal.
Veal showcased three potential models for how the Leah Chase School could be run, and how many students the school would need to sustain its own costs. In all of them, enrollment would have to grow much faster than what is currently projected to avoid deficits that could reach up to $3.5 million.
The models compared the Leah Chase School to existing schools in the city and highlighted the problems standing in the way to secure adequate funding for the school.
The first model was a small school in a large charter network. Other public schools in New Orleans are run by nonprofit charter groups. Schools under large charter networks can count on network reserve funds and have better access to grant funding and private donations than traditional schools, district officials have said. The district does not have reserve funds available to carry the school, Fulmore said.
But there are no current plans to convert the school to a charter in a large network. And even if there were, under the model presented, the school would still operate with a deficit unless it increased enrollment and cut salaries. The average salary at the Leah Chase School is $65,000, with retirement benefits included. At another small school in a large charter network used for comparison in Veal’s presentation, teachers only made around $57,000 on a single pay scale.
A second model discussed integrating arts and sports programming as a way to attract higher enrollment. Such programming would push the deficit up to $3.5 million at the current enrollment of about 350. The school would need to enroll about twice as many students as it currently has to offset that deficit. And even then, the models presented are just projections for bare-bones programming, not the robust arts and sports interventions that exist at other schools, said Fulmore.
“I don’t have many courses of action to come up with $2 to $3 million or $1.5 million, or any millions of dollars, to build the programming that children and families deserve from arts and all these things without making drastic decisions right now to do that,” Fulmore said. “I personally don’t think it’s fiscally sound to continue doing this in the way in which we are.”
Those drastic decisions could include cuts at the district’s central office, and cutting programming that the district offers other schools through its general fund.
Leah Chase had a 68 percent student retention rate last year, and this year, 20 students have already submitted applications to transfer out of the school. The district expects the gap between their enrollment targets and actual enrollment to widen each year, contributing to the deficit. 343 students are enrolled in the school this year, well under its 400 student target.
The district, like the city itself, is suffering from a declining population. The number of students enrolled in a school dictates how much funding they can get. Earlier this month, the Einstein Charter Schools chose to close Sarah T. Reed High School due to low enrollment and poor building conditions. The three remaining schools under the Einstein charter – Sherwood Forest, Village De L’est and Einstein Middle School – will merge into one school. All of these schools were underenrolled this fall.
At the OPSB charter and accountability committee meeting on Tuesday, board members commended leaders at Einstein for closing and consolidating their schools.
“I think that there’s probably a limit to what operators can do voluntarily, on their own before we are going to have to start looking at the complicated, difficult decisions, as per our conversation about Leah Chase earlier,” said board member Carlos Zervigon, the representative for the district where the Leah Chase School is located. “We need to prepare ourselves for doing something sooner rather than later to address the situation.”
Although board meetings have been defined by increasingly tense discussions about Leah Chase over the past few months, there’s been little indication about what the future of the school will look like or if it can stay open at all.
“If it is the will of the board to continue the Leah Chase school beyond this school year, I need permission to … build the school in a deficit,” Fulmore said.
This article originally published in the November 24, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.