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Acadia Parish School System revisiting storm plan

Acadia Parish School System.jfif
Posted at 8:55 PM, Sep 05, 2019
and last updated 2019-09-05 22:28:04-04

While Acadiana dodged Hurricane Dorian, the tropics still remain active.

Now, leaders in Acadia Parish are making sure they're ready for any potential storms that may head toward Acadiana.

Crowley High School is one of three schools that will be used as a shelter in the case of a hurricane or flooding.

The other two schools that will be used are Church Point High School and Iota High School. All three are located north of the interstate, an area that, according to Superintendent Scott Richard, sees less flooding.

The shelter locations are some of the information in the new agreement between the school system and the police jury.

"We wanted to make sure we adequately addressed which schools would be named shelters and to ensure that the proper liability coverage was provided by the police jury, so that our schools could be made whole in the event they were used as a shelter," said Richard.

The school system has worked with the police jury for years on helping to protect people in the parish during a dangerous storm. However, the superintendent says it was time to revisit what had previously been put into place.

"These documents hadn't been updated in about a decade or more, so we wanted to, first of all, assure the other governmental body that we want to work in cooperation, but, number two, that we needed to make sure that the documents were updated, not only for their protection, but for our protection as well," explained Richard.

Insuring the protection of the schools and about forty buses will cost the police jury between $7,000 and $10,000.

"If there is an event that requires buses to be used for evacuation and a school to be used as a shelter, we're going to work to protect our citizens here in acadia parish, but it would be much more beneficial to all parties if we had a standard agreement that outlined who's responsible for what," said Richard.

The revised agreement will be presented to the police jury during their next meeting on Tuesday.