Lycée Français de la Nouvelle Orléans faces budget deficit and plummeting enrollment amid turmoil

When this school year started, Sarah Stickney Murphy had all five of her children enrolled at Lycée Français de la Nouvelle Orléans. By the end of October, she had withdrawn two and was working to move the other three.

Stickney Murphy felt relieved, she said — she was nearing the end of a long battle with the school’s administration. 

“My children loved their teachers, they loved the other students,” Stickney Murphy said. “But bit by bit, all of their friends have left, teachers that they love were pushed out, and I realized that every time I went to go interact with this school I was gearing myself up for a fight.”

In recent years, controversy has marred Lycée Français, a French-immersion school with a primary school campus in the French Quarter and its secondary Priestley Campus located Uptown on Leonidas Street. The “combative” nature of its administration — coupled with its declining enrollment, teacher turnover and refusal to follow public records law — has pushed some families and teachers away from the school, they said in interviews with The Lens.

Lycée’s shift began when the school appointed a new chief executive officer, Chase McLaurin, in 2022, some parents say. Parents described McLaurin as hostile and difficult, atrophying the sense of community between parents and the school.

It’s unusual for A-rated schools to face a freefall in enrollment.

 “These mass terminations, being an A school and losing so many students — it’s unique,” said Berenguer Becat, a former social studies teacher at the school. “It’s not the students, not the teachers. For me, it’s totally the administration.”

The unrest is obvious, said Vegas Cola, whose daughter Nala, a sixth grader, has been attending Lycée since kindergarten.

“I know there’s something going on because people are always complaining, but I just can’t get involved because my child is doing well,” she said. “Educationally, she always gets higher than what she needs to on her state test, the LEAP.”

To Cola, Lycée’s classrooms are different in a good way, because of the instructors. Some days, her daughter’s teachers used to take classes outside, simply to read in the sun.

“The teachers care for the children so much,” Cola said. “And my daughter likes to go to school. She had perfect attendance last year.”

Other parents say that they were forced to enter the fray. Yazid Zaghia, a Lycée parent of three, has been embroiled in a legal battle with Lycée since, he contends, the school allegedly stopped providing occupational therapy services to his son, who has autism. He finds the school is overly litigious and threatening to parents, he said.

Zaghia has been a Lycée parent for years: his children are in 5th, 7th and 12th grades. Before McLaurin, he never had problems with school leadership. Over the past two years, he and at least one other parent have received cease and desist letters from the school.

“This is the type of environment that makes parents leave,” Zaghia said.

William Most, an attorney who has represented two current or former Lycée parents who received cease and desist letters from the school, said it’s “very unusual” for a public school to send legal threats to parents. As a charter school and public entity, Lycée cannot actually sue for defamation, he said.

“I find it hard to believe that Lycee’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on its lawyers to do things like issue frivolous legal threats to parents reflects a good environment for student learning,” Most said.

Trouble with union, enrollment decline, budget deficit 

McLaurin maintains a sunny outlook for the school, despite the criticisms. In a five-page letter to families sent Oct. 16, he touted the school’s A rating and student performance on standardized tests. 

“Working together and focusing on positivity, I know we can overcome any challenge,” he wrote.

McLaurin is juggling a deskful of controversies, which many parents see to be of his own making.

Lycée made headlines two years ago after it allegedly intimidated and fired more than a dozen employees who attempted to unionize in 2023. Its litigiousness extends beyond parents and teachers to the French government; it’s filed six lawsuits, in France and the United States, against the French agency that oversees international French-language schools, which had put a probationary hold on the school’s accreditation.

The school has lost a third of its students within the past five years. 

Enrollment dropped from 1,078 pre-k through 12th-grade students in the 2021-22 school year to 719 this fall, according to data from the state and from a presentation at Lycée’s October board meeting. But roughly 1 in 5 of enrolled students are in pre-k; the school only receives Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) funding from the state for 593 of its students, McLaurin said at the meeting.

The school’s increased pre-k enrollment is “not producing the income that we would normally see from MFP students,” McLaurin said at the meeting. 

Cassandra Sanchez, the chair of Lycée’s board of directors, did not answer questions from The Lens about the school’s drop in enrollment and its financial shortfall. But she expressed her “strong support” for McLaurin and Lycée’s administration to The Lens and said that students’ academic achievements are a positive reflection of the administration. 

“My focus remains on supporting that progress,” she said.

The reduced per-pupil funding may add financial pressure for the school, which was operating in a budget deficit of $835,000 in March, the school’s board of directors told parents at a board meeting.

When United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) tried to get more information about that deficit, the school refused its public information request. Now, UTNO is suing the school and McLaurin for allegedly violating public records laws. 

The union’s most recent filing, submitted on Oct. 13, alleges that Lycée has “failed to produce readily available electronic records” regarding information discussed at two public board meetings in November 2025 and March 2026. Lycée refused to provide the records, which related to the school’s spending and its budget deficit, according to the lawsuit.

Dave Cash, the president of UTNO, said the union is “confounded” by the school’s refusal to follow public records law.

“What are they hiding? What information are they afraid of becoming public?” Cash said.

McLaurin did not respond to requests for comment from The Lens.

In his letter to families, McLaurin said that Lycée is “committed to meeting our legal obligations” and has produced more than 10,000 records in response to public records requests over the past 18 months. He also said that neither he nor the school has been served since he learned about the lawsuit several weeks ago, which the union’s organizing director confirmed.

Lycée disputes “several claims” made by the union and believes that its messaging has “contributed to uncertainty among some families,” McLaurin wrote on October 16. The school is providing factual information “directly to our families,” he added.

“Our focus remains on ensuring that public discussion does not overshadow the educational mission and student achievements that define Lycée,” McLaurin wrote.

Families must pay $6,800 up-front for year of Lycée preschool 

In late August, Stickney Murphy received notice that she and other pre-k parents would need to pay for the year’s tuition up-front instead of in increments, as she had with her other children.

The shift required families to cough up more than $6,800 by Sept. 4 instead of making several payments over the course of the school year.

“It’s a pretty significant amount of cash for our family,” said Stickney Murphy, who said she usually paid Lycée $685 each month during the school year.

When she asked the administration about the change, Stickney Murphy received little additional information. In emails obtained by The Lens, administrators repeatedly reminded her that if she could not afford to make a one-time payment, she could finance the payments via a loan through a credit union.

Lycée is “proud to remain the only public school in Orleans Parish offering an immersion pre-k program,” McLaurin wrote in his letter to parents. He noted at the October board meeting that pre-k students might remain at Lycée for kindergarten, helping right-size enrollment as they age.

“I do think this is encouraging for the long run,” he said at the meeting.

The up-front pre-k payment was one of the final straws for Stickney Murphy. Since the start of this school year, she has enrolled her fifth grader at the International School of Louisiana (ISL), and is working to remove her other three children from Lycée. She withdrew her pre-k student, who has been staying home. Drop-off and pick-up is much more complicated now that all five kids no longer go to the same school, but the move away from Lycée has given Stickney Murphy peace of mind.

“I would have this feeling of dread and anxiety any time I had to interact with the school,” she said. “My life is too short. I don’t need it to be that way.”

Students notice teacher tension

It’s “not surprising” that families are leaving Lycée in droves, said Becat, the former social studies teacher. He was one of more than a dozen teachers who were laid off by Lycée after they tried to form a teachers union during the 2023-24 school year. 

It became “scary” for teachers to work at the school, where they faced “incredible retaliation” — Lycée stopped renewing foreign teachers’ contracts, Becat said, and used their professional development time to work onfor an anti-union campaign.

Some students say they have noticed the pressure that staff feel.

In an interview with The Lens, Naima Gabourel, a 10th grader at Lycée who has attended the school since she was in pre-k, said that she missed Jennifer “Jinger” Whiddon, a civics teacher who was fired from Lycée in 2023 after she encouraged students to attend and speak at meetings of the school’s board. 

Naima’s teachers have come and gone with frequent turnover, leaving gaps, she told The Lens. For example, she has not had a consistent math teacher for the past several years. “It’s very complicated,” she said.

Naima was once dead-set on going to college in France using the accredited diploma that she was supposed to receive from Lycée. Now, she’s hoping to transfer to Ben Franklin High School, The Willow School, or the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), and she’s applying for scholarships at some private schools.

Naima’s father, Eric Gabourel, said he is disappointed that she wants to leave, particularly because a college education in France would cost far less than in the U.S. He described Lycée as an investment — one that he’s not sure will get its expected return.

“She got an education, but still,” he said, “you’re spending 11 years of your life on this promise.”

This school year, Naima is in the theater club and book club at Lycée. She’s taking biology, which she’s super excited about. But, like many of her peers, Naima is planning on testing into another school. There are a total of only 14 students in the school’s 10th-grade cohort, she said.

“I’m kind of sad that at this point I’m deciding to switch,” she said. “I do want to stay, but with all of the inconsistency that there is, I feel like I could get what I need someplace else.”