Approved Tuesday in the Senate, HB 261 will allow École Pointe-au-Chien to begin serving students from Indian French and Cajun families in Terrebonne and Lafourche in August 2023.
From left to right: Representative Joseph Orgeron (Lower Lafourche); Theresa Dardar, Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe; Patty Ferguson Bohnee, Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe and ASU Law Professor; Donald Dardar, Vice Chairman, Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe; Representative and Speaker Pro Tempore Tanner Magee (Terrebonne); Representative Mike Huval (St Martin). May 31, 2022, Louisiana Sate Senate (Télé-Louisiane).
Will McGrew, CEO & Editor in Chief, Télé-LouisianeUpdated June 3, 2021 at 6:30 pm to reflect the outcome of the Conference Committee report.
In an unprecedented move, the Louisiana State Senate considered and unanimously approved Tuesday an ambitious bill to open École Ponte-au-Chien, realizing a longtime dream of the unique Indian French and Cajun down the bayou community. 35 Senators supported the initiative, and none voted against it. The House of Representatives did the same in April with 97 affirmative votes.
The school will be a public special school similar to NOCCA in New Orleans or LSMSA in Natchitoches with an independent Board, whose members will be majority-appointed by the Native Tribes of the bayou region of Southeastern Louisiana. It will be the first French immersion school in the heavily francophone parishes of Terrebonne and Lafourche and the first Indian French school in the country.
École Pointe-au-Chien will most likely be based in the property of the former Pointe-aux-Chênes Elementary School (Pointe-au-Chien is the original indigenous version of the name). Elementary-age children in this Indian French and Cajun village divided by the Bayou which bears the same name had studied there for generations before the school’s sudden closure by the Terrebonne Parish School Board last year.
The school is an important symbol for the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe based down the bayou in lower Pointe-au-Chien : it represents not only a community pillar in the recent history of its people but also a reminder of the fierce discrimination that prohibited local Natives from attending the school before the 1960s and then punished them for speaking their dialect of French after they were allowed to enroll in the following decades.
HB261 was authored by Representative and Speaker Pro Tempore Tanner Magee from Terrebonne with 18 co-authors including Senate President Page Cortez from Lafayette and the rest of the House delegation from lower Terrebonne and Lafourche: Beryl Amedée, Joseph Orgeron and Jerome Zeringue. Senator “Big Mike” Fesi who also represents this region defended the law in the upper chamber.
The House of Representatives rejected some of the Senate's technical amendments this morning, and a Conference Committee was organized to finalize the Bill by June 6. Senator Fesi and Representatives Orgeron and Magee were appointed to the Committee along with Senator Jeremy Stine (a French immersion graduate representing the Lake Charles area), Senator Katrina Jackson, and Representative Lance Harris (the Education Committee Chair). The final version of the Bill was submitted to the Legislature by the Conferees on June 2, 2022.
After a signature from the Governor expected in the coming weeks, École Pointe-au-Chien will become an official state entity in July 2022 and will open for students between Pre-K and 4th grade in August 2023. In the meantime, the School's Board of Directors will be constituted and charged with spending the $3 million budget allocated by the Legislature to rebuild from Hurricane Ida and prepare for the (re)opening scheduled for August 2023.
This Bayou Indian community’s fight with allies across the State has become one of the leading causes of the contemporary Louisianist movement, and its success represents the largest single investment by the State of Louisiana in its unique French language and heritage since its admission to the Union.