Lafayette Parish Schools: How “Renewals” Became Permanent Tax Increases

In October 2025, Lafayette Parish voters once again approved the renewal of an ad valorem tax funding the Lafayette Parish School System—8,478 voting yes, 3,988 voting no, with barely 8% of the electorate participating. The measure, described as a “continuation” of the 7.27-mill levy, now extends through 2036 at a higher rate of 7.79 mills. Supporters called it a victory for children and teachers. Officials insisted it was simply keeping faith with past commitments. Yet beneath the quiet celebration lies a deeper question. When a community repeatedly renews the same tax for half a century—collecting ever more while serving no more students—is it truly continuing, or merely pretending that permanence is progress?

It’s high time we look past the slogans to examine what Lafayette’s “renewal” has really become.

The Illusion — “It’s just a renewal.”

Every decade, Lafayette Parish voters are told the same comforting line: ‘This is not a new tax—it’s a continuation for our children.’ It has appeared on ballots for nearly half a century, repeated in meetings and mailers until the phrase feels like a civic ritual. A “continuation” sounds harmless, temporary, even noble. After all, who would vote against education or against their own children’s future?

The illusion works because it appeals to generosity. It flatters us into believing that virtue and consent are the same thing. To vote yes is to feel compassion for and support our children; to question the measure is to be cold or ungrateful. Yet behind that familiar phrasing lies a very different story, one in which an act of public virtue has quietly become the architecture of a perpetual tax.

The Truth Revealed — A Perpetual, Expanding Tax

The record is unambiguous. The same 7.27 mill “maintenance” tax first approved in the mid-1970s has been renewed continuously—1985, 1997, 2004, 2015, and 2025—without a single lapse. Each cycle repeats the same promise of “continuation,” and with each cycle, the revenue and bureaucracies grow, while the promise of better education for our children diminishes. The result is high-cost propaganda provided by fewer teachers administered by fat-cat bureaucrats. This show is at the cost of everyone, many of whom refuse to send their children to public schools.

In 1985, the Lafayette Parish School System collected roughly $9.5 million from this source. In 2015, the same levy produced $14 million a year. By 2025, it will yield more than $22 million. That is a 130-percent increase with no meaningful change in enrollment, which still hovers around 30,000 students.

Even the rate itself has climbed. For decades, it stood at 7.27 mills. The 2025 proposition, still described as a continuation, raised it to 7.79 mills through a discretionary “roll-forward” vote permitted by Article VII, Section 23 of the Louisiana Constitution. The Lafayette Parish School Board consisting of David LeJeune (R), Chad Desormeaux (R), Joshua Edmond (R), Amy M Trahan (R), Britt Latiolais (R), Roddy Bergeron (R), Kate Labue (R), Hannah Mason (R) and Jeremy Hidalgo (R), each voted in favor of the measure on September 18, 2024. That maneuver—overriding the rollback required after property reappraisal—is a tax increase. Yet it was sold to the public on the ballot as continuity, proof that in Lafayette, language can accomplish what legislation dares not.

Why the Illusion Persists

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave tells of prisoners chained in darkness since infancy, their faces turned toward a wall where only shadows flicker. Behind them burns a fire, and between the fire and the wall, figures move whose outlines the captives mistake for reality. One prisoner escapes into the sunlight and sees the world as it truly is. When he returns to tell the others, they mock him and cling to the comfort of their shadows. It is easier to believe the illusion than to face the light.

That ancient parable describes the modern mind of the voter. In Lafayette Parish, the shadows are made of words — “renewal”, “continuation”, “for the children.” They flicker across ballots and press releases, persuading citizens that nothing has changed.

Over time, the vocabulary has softened, and with it, public vigilance. In 2004, it was referred to as a “maintenance tax renewal.” By 2015, the word maintenance had vanished, replaced with phrases like “additional support.” The rhetoric becomes warmer, the meanings vaguer, and the scrutiny weaker. Campaigns leaned on emotion rather than arithmetic. To question the measure was to invite moral suspicion: surely one must not care about education or our children.

Meanwhile, voter turnout collapsed—from 41% in 2004 to barely 7% in 2025. This has more to do with ballot manipulation, placing tax initiatives on lower-voter-turnout days to avoid increased scrutiny. That seven percent represents about 12,000 voters in a parish of more than 200,000 people. The school system itself employs over 4,000 individuals. Add spouses, adult children, and close relatives, and the circle of direct beneficiaries easily doubles the entire number of ballots cast. If even a fraction of employees and their families vote “Yes,” the measure passes before a single independent taxpayer enters the booth. Beyond them stand the vendors, contractors, and consultants whose business depends on district spending.

In such an environment, renewal elections no longer measure public consent; they register institutional self-preservation. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, citizens see the shadows and call them truth. They believe that saying “Yes” is an act of civic virtue when it has become little more than a ritual of complacency.

The Cost of the Lie — Complacency Disguised as Progress

The numbers tell a story as clear as the philosophy. Lafayette Parish Schools now spends more money, employs more people, and teaches fewer students than at any time in its history. Yet the illusion of “renewal” has allowed this transformation to unfold quietly, decade by decade, as if nothing had changed.

Enrollment has fallen to its lowest level in more than twenty years. The district once educated over 31,000 students; today it serves fewer than 29,500. The classrooms are emptier, but the payroll is larger. There are fewer teachers in Lafayette’s schools today than in the early 2000s, even though the system then had more students. The teaching corps has shrunk by roughly 10 to 15 percent, erasing any claim that increased spending has improved classroom instruction.

At the same time, total employment has quietly climbed to an all-time high. The district now maintains more than 4,300 full-time equivalent positions—the largest workforce ever recorded. Lafayette Parish Schools has more employees per student than at any point in its history —about one staff member for every seven students —yet the average class size has not improved. The student–teacher ratio once averaged around fourteen students per teacher; it remains the same, or slightly worse, after twenty years of tax growth and administrative expansion.

The cost per child has doubled. In 2003, the district spent about $8,000 per student; today, it spends over $14,000 per student. Local taxpayers alone now contribute more than $8,000 per student in property and sales taxes—twice what they did when the millage was first “renewed.” This is not the sign of a system starved for revenue. It is the mark of a bureaucracy that grows because no one is watching.

These are not abstractions. They are measurable footprints. The voters were told their tax was being continued, not multiplied; that their schools were being maintained, not re-engineered into an ever-expanding employment engine. The result is a school system that educates fewer students with more staff at twice the cost, while persuading its citizens that nothing has changed and outcomes are improving.

The Call to Courage — Step Into the Light

Plato warned that when the freed prisoner returns to the cave, the others mock him for seeing too clearly. Truth offends comfort. It always has.

For half a century, Lafayette Parish has lived within a polite deception. We have been told that a tax can be permanent if we call it temporary; that a rate increase is harmless if we call it a renewal; that democracy still thrives when seven percent of voters decide the fate of the hundred. These are not accidents of language. They are strategies of control—and they persist only because the public consents to be lulled.

There is nothing noble about permitting officials to rebrand a tax hike as a continuation. There is nothing civic about sleepwalking into higher millages under the banner of “support.” The lie survives because it flatters us. It tells us we are generous when we are really inattentive dupes.

If the Lafayette Parish School System is to govern itself honestly, its people must break the spell. Stop repeating the slogans. Read the fine print. Show up. Demand that words mean what they say. A society that will not defend the meaning of the ballot language will soon lose the meaning of its own vote.

The choice before us is no longer between supporting or opposing education. The real choice is between truth and illusion—between a people who govern themselves and a people content to be managed. For fifty years, the light has been behind us. At what point will people turn around and see the truth?

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