BATON ROUGE, La.
The long-awaited opening of a community college
that will help integrate this city’s higher education community will
have to wait a little longer.
A federal judge, bowing to a request from Louisiana state officials,
has granted a one-year extension for the opening of the proposed Baton
Rouge Community College.
Creating a community college here in the capital city is mandated as
part of a settlement of the desegregation case against Louisiana’s
higher education system. But U.S. District Judge Charles Schwartz
agreed late last month to give the state until the fall of 1998 to open
the school after reviewing recent efforts to assemble a sixty-five-acre
campus in the heart of Baton Rouge.
The centerpiece for the proposed campus is the soon-to-be-vacated
thirty-five-acre Louisiana State Police headquarters, with an adjacent
ten-acre parcel that now houses the state fire marshal’s office but
could be used later to expand the campus.
In addition, state Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennen
announced in May that he had completed a deal to purchase a twenty-acre
shopping center adjacent to the State Police site. Drennen said the
Rebel Shopping Center, which will be purchased at a total cost of $2.8
million over a ten-year period, will serve as the site for the
construction of an initial 50,000-square foot building for a new school.
Under the desegregation settlement, the community college is
supposed to help serve as a racial mixing tool in a city currently
served by predominantly white Louisiana State University and
historically Black Southern University. Both universities are charged
with overseeing the creation of the new community college and already
have hired a chancellor and staff for the school.
