Report: Emails reveal damage-control effort by John White, Jindal officials over voucher program
The Monroe News-Star has turned up a batch of emails between the state's top education official, John White, and officials in the Jindal administration as they scrambled to limit the fallout from a newspaper story about a dodgy-looking private school accepting hundreds of students as part of the state's new voucher program. In one email to Kyle Plotkin, the governor's spokesman, and Stafford Palmieri, a policy advisor, White wrote of an effort to "muddy up a narrative" and to "take some air out of the room" before a state Senate hearing in May, according to the News-Star.
State Superintendent of Education John White speaks to a group of St. Charles Parish teachers during a Teacher Town Hall at the Professional Learning Center in Luling, Louisiana, Wednesday, May 2, 2012.The emails followed an earlier News-Star article that raised questions about the New Living Word School in Ruston, a private school hoping to take more than 300 students on publicly funded vouchers without having the teachers or facilities in