After missing a crucial step in the renovation of its Leonidas campus, Lycée Français de la Nouvelle Orléans ended up paying more than $408,000 in property taxes — even though public schools are exempt from such charges in Orleans Parish.
The costly error is the kind of problem that can occur when novice boards – like those that commonly oversee charter schools in the city’s decentralized system – are in charge of multi-million projects, experts say.
On some local boards where members cycle in and out and where authorizers often show up only when the charter is due for renewal, that left Lycée parents, the schools’ longtime closest scrutinizers, to publicly sound the alarm bells.
Now, parents are wondering if Lycée officials – and its charter’s board – are capable of taking on any more financial outlays. The concerns have become heightened in recent months, as the school prepares to dip into its financial reserves to repair the McDonogh 15 French Quarter building mothballed by the Orleans Parish School Board.
In some ways, a location in the historic Vieux Carre neighborhood seems tailor-made for Lycée, a French-language school with curricula approved by the French government. And Lycée officials now seem to feel confident about moving the school’s lower-elementary students into the “little red schoolhouse” building in the lower Quarter. A banner hung on the school’s St. Philip Street door reads “Lycée Français de la Nouvelle-Orléans public charter school coming soon.”
The charter school’s board codified the agreement in January.
Opinions differ about whether the move makes sense.
Some parents have reservations about whether Lycée can properly handle – and afford – the renovation of the former Plessy Community School, long known as the McDonogh 15 building. On top of its unnecessary property-tax burden, Lycée has already poured a significant amount of money into two longtime rental campuses that will now be set aside, they say.
To school district officials grappling with empty seats, declining enrollment, and too many buildings, the agreement with Lycée is a welcome shift. Lycée elementary students will be moving out of an Uptown building rented from the Archdiocese of New Orleans and into one of the district’s empty structures.
Vieux Carre neighbors rejoice, but building’s condition unclear
Within the French Quarter, residents seemed thrilled to see a school return to the Quarter. (The last remaining parochial school, the nearby St. Louis Cathedral Academy, closed more than a decade ago.) In February, an older woman standing on a nearby balcony said she “could not wait for the kids to come back.”
For years, neighbors, parents, and teachers have debated about whether OPSB should prioritize an active public school in the French Quarter. Older neighbors often harken back to the school’s glory days, starting in the 1970s, when the Quarter was still an artists’ neighborhood and McDonogh 15 became renowned for its arts education under legendary principal Lucianne Carmichael.
Given its location blocks from the Mississippi River, it was also an essential high-ground building after Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, KIPP McDonogh 15 School for the Creative Arts moved into the building; in 2017, Homer Plessy Community School took over the space.
But in the fall of 2022, the district ordered Plessy to move out by the end of that school year, because of the building’s poor condition. Vieux Carre neighbors begged for the school to remain. Parents and school leaders also protested, arguing education in the Quarter was an experience that could not be replicated, despite narrow streets that made pick-ups and drop-offs challenging.
But for OPSB, the high-ground structure was now dispensable, because the district had more school space than it needed and the building required substantial repairs. By 2022, the district had more than 3,000 empty seats across the 45,000-student district, as student declines mirrored national trends. Buildings needed to be closed, officials said.
OPSB evaluated all of its structures and the McDonogh 15 building came up short. It would cost more to renovate than to replace entirely, evaluators concluded. Then-Superintendent Avis Williams read the reports and told Plessy that the school would not be able to return to the campus.
Consolidating its elementary campuses
Lycée Français currently operates three Uptown campuses, two rented and one owned.
Pre-k to first-grade students attend classes on Lycée’s early-learning campus on South Carrollton Avenue, the former Dr. Ronald E. McNair Elementary School campus, which is owned by OPSB. Older elementary-school students, grades two through five, are housed on Patton Street, in the former St. Francis of Assisi School, which Lycée rents from the archdiocese.
Starting in sixth grade, students switch to Lycée’s secondary school, the former Alfred Priestly Junior High on Leonidas Street, which Lycée bought from OPSB in 2015.
With its new French Quarter campus, Lycée could empty its buildings at McNair and St. Francis of Assisi, placing all of its younger students onto one campus, communications director David Jackson said.
By eliminating rent payments at Patton street and maintenance costs at McNair, Lycée would save $900,000 a year, he said.
Parent Paula Griffin is skeptical of his claims. The charter spent $200,000 on renovations at McNair, she said, and shouldn’t be so quick to abandon that investment – for a structure that requires an unknown level of repairs, she said. “We don’t actually know what needs to be done (at Plessy),” Griffin said. “I think it’s reckless.”
Griffin and other parents who are critical of the move also worry that the McDonogh 15 building could become a money pit for Lycée.
At the November OPSB meeting, NOLA Public Schools chief operations officer Don LeDuff told the board that the building required an unspecified amount of upgrades “to improve the school to the point of operations.”
But because Lycée had offered to pay all the structure’s repair costs, LeDuff raised the lease as a no-cost resolution. OPSB embraced the offer, and cleared the district administration to lease the French Quarter campus. Lycée bears facility repair and maintenance costs, but will not pay rent, according to the deal.
The resulting lease is “essentially a no-cost lease, besides the cost for insurance and general upkeep,” said Jackson, who maintained that not a lot of construction needed to be done. “Other than cosmetic improvements, the building is move-in ready.”
Only time will tell whether renovations become more extensive, once underway. But certainly, Jackson’s response was incongruous with OPSB’s 2023 assertion that McDonogh 15 was in poor condition, needing at least $5 to $10 million in immediate repairs to abate lead and asbestos and seal the building’s envelope, preventing water intrusion and mitigating mold growth.
There are other reasons to believe that Lycée could be overreaching financially, said Griffin, pointing to the administration’s performance with its last construction project, at the former Priestly school that it purchased a decade ago.
Stuck with a property-tax bill after Priestly campus renovation
In 2015, Lycée’s board of directors set their sights on the old Priestly junior high building on Leonidas Street, to create a flagship campus for the growing school.
But as Griffin sees it, school officials bungled a key part of the process, putting the school into a financial squeeze.
From the start, it was clear that the Priestly renovation would be costly – an estimated $14.6 million to complete. The campus had sat vacant for 22 years. And it was big, encompassing an entire city block, with two brick structures — one with three stories of classrooms and the other a single-story gymnasium building.
Lycee, a nonprofit, decided to use historic tax credits to help finance the renovation. Because it’s tax-exempt, that required some additional steps.
“A non-profit can’t use tax credits (itself) because they have no tax liability,” explained Mike Grote, a New Orleans real-estate developer who routinely uses historic tax credits to help finance his projects. But to raise the money needed for renovations, it’s common for nonprofits to sell tax credits at a discount to investors. Basically, the investors finance the construction in exchange for tax credits, to offset corporate tax liability, he explained.
Lycée did just that. The school created a sister organization, 1601 Leonidas LLC, and transferred the property to the organization, which worked as planned. They applied for historic tax credits and lined up investors for them. Then Lycée’s contractors got to work to create a gorgeous secondary-school campus on Leonidas.
Then came the crucial step that Lycée missed. Once the work was complete, in June 2022, Lycée officials failed to transfer the building back to the ownership of Lycée or another nonprofit. They also failed to file with the Orleans Parish Assessor’s Office so that Lycée could receive a tax exemption, like all other city schools.
If unresolved, these oversights threaten to become major financial burdens.
Property taxes are not usually a burden for charters in Orleans, where public schools are exempt from property taxes. But in 2023, the Orleans Parish Assessor’s Office sent Lycée a $400,000 property tax bill that included interest for failing to pay on time.
The assessor looked at records and did not see a tax-exempt entity as owner, assessor spokesman Devin Johnson said. Even today – two years later – the formerly Priestly campus is listed as a commercial property, owned by 1601 Leonidas LLC.
And so the mystery continues. Lycée’s secondary-school building, which should be tax-exempt, continues to be subject to commercial-property tax assessments – though the property’s annual tax bill was negotiated down from its $400,000 peak in 2023 to roughly $40,000 in recent years.
The ownership transfer should have happened as soon as construction was complete, said school-facilities expert Kathy Padian, who is puzzled by the continued delay.
“They have had years since the project was finished to transfer the asset to a nonprofit,” she said.
Charter boards often struggle with little formal training
Parent Paula Griffin, whose daughters are seniors at Lycée, learned to be critical of school leadership during years of administrative turmoil when her girls were young, she says.
Over the ensuing decade, Griffin and another parent, Darren Beltz, showed up to nearly every school board meeting, becoming Lycée’s “institutional knowledge,” she said.
Though the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools has recently begun to offer board training, it had not been unusual for charter board members to receive minimal training and oversight. As it turns out, the informal role played by Griffin and Beltz has been particularly valuable because of high board-member turnover, Griffin said, noting that each new board is constantly “trying to reinvent the wheel and figure out what the last board did.”
Griffin takes her informal role seriously, having watched what can happen without proper vigilance and expertise, as local charters, especially single-school charters, have stumbled in a way that makes recovery impossible. In December, the Delores Taylor Arthur School for Young Men became the latest promising school to shut down, as it stared down a $1 million deficit, prompting the superintendent to order its board to surrender the school’s charter mid-year. Her criticisms of Lycée, she says, come from her concern that it, too, could end up in a poor financial position.
From a property perspective, Padian struggled to make sense of the Lycée situation. Over the past decade, she has worked on a number of Orleans school projects, including Crescent City Schools’ tax-credit-financed redevelopment of Harriet Tubman’s lower school, a Montessori campus, at 2701 Lawrence St. in Algiers. In Lycée’s case, it appears that the board assumed a task – the tax-credit application and property transfer – that exceeded their expertise. “The board decided to take that whole transaction on themselves, and now they have a problem,” Padian said.
To other property owners, the situation was similarly mystifying. Kenneth Ducote, who spent a half-century working with Orleans Parish schools, said he’d never before heard of a school receiving a massive property tax bill.
In an attempt to understand what could have been done differently, The Lens presented Lycee’s $400,000 property-tax predicament to leaders in the charter school world — including the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, New Schools for New Orleans, and members from the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Most officials were mum. Some said that they didn’t know the specifics of the situation. Others said that they simply didn’t have a comment on the story or didn’t feel comfortable weighing in. Still others simply didn’t not return phone calls. The spokesperson for the National Association of Charter School Operators didn’t want to comment, but sent materials emphasizing that financial health falls soundly into the metrics of what authorizers should look for in the charters they oversee.
Lycée’s contract was renewed for six years in 2022, so its $400,000 tax payment will be far behind them by the time that authorizers swoop in to conduct evaluations, to determine whether the school’s finances merit renewal.
A mistake: ‘A problem of their own creation’
Though the invoice was paid more than a year ago, the Lycée administration has remained tight-lipped about its massive tax bill.
“Our lawyers have advised us to not comment on this legal matter so long as it remains in dispute between parties,” Jackson, the school’s communications director said.
Records show Lycée’s CEO paid $408,385 to the city’s treasury department in July 2024. The additional $60,000 was interest charged on the overdue bill.
That payment was made by “Chase McLaurin,” according to city records.
McLaurin, the school’s CEO, used the city’s online portal “to pay the tax bill from the school’s checking account,” Jackson said.
Lycée officials argue that the property should still qualify for a property tax exemption, because it still serves as a school. Historically, a school has stood on the Priestly property for a century.
The school outlined those arguments in a 2023 appeal with the Louisiana Tax Commission.
The commission ruled against Lycée, letting the full assessment stand.