Louisiana
Legislature gives Landry a win with state money for private schools • Louisiana Illuminator
A proposal to steer state dollars for K-12 public school students to private schools of their choice advanced Thursday from the Louisiana Senate, a week after members forced its author to sideline the measure.
In response, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry starred in a television ad campaign and asked citizens to contact state senators and tell them to vote for the LA GATOR education savings account (ESA) program. The governor was on the Senate chamber sidelines, taking time to talk to multiple lawmakers, before Senate Bill 313 was approved in a 24-15 vote.
“I don’t feel like it’s a big win for me,” Landry told the Illuminator after the vote. “I think it’s a big win for the kids of Louisiana, for parents out there who overwhelmingly, irrespective of party affiliation or economic means, have said in poll after poll after poll that the money should follow the child.”
In addition to the governor’s influence, sizable changes to the proposal’s financial framework were made Thursday. The updated version shifts the task of figuring out how much state funds will be needed for the ESA program from legislators to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). Once that amount is calculated, it will still be up to lawmakers to decide how much public money to put into the program.
“Let (BESE) do that, you know, then you don’t chip it in stone,” said Sen. Kirk Talbot, R-River Ridge, who authored the amendments approved Thursday. “… I’d rather give BESE the flexibility to determine how much they think that money should be.”
For the time being, there is a question mark over how much education savings accounts will cost the state once they are made available to all students, regardless of household income.
The bill still calls for the program to be launched for the 2025-26 school year, meaning the Legislature would have to determine during next year’s session how much money they want to put into ESA.
The initial participants will be current voucher recipients in the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program in addition to special education students and public school students from families that earn less than 250% of the federal poverty level. Based on federal poverty standards as of March, the qualifying income for a family of four would be under $62,400.
The Educational Excellence Program, enacted in 2008, provides private school tuition vouchers for students from low-income families who attend poor-performing schools. Some 5,500 students received the vouchers in the 2022-23 school year, and the program will lapse once LA GATOR is operating.
In year two of the program, the qualifying family income threshold will be 400% of the poverty level, which is below $124,800 for a family of four.
Education savings accounts would be made available to all families in year three, when the associated cost is projected to soar.
In the bill’s original version, the ESA program would have cost the state $260 million annually once any students could take part, according to the Legislature’s fiscal staff. An independent projection from the Public Affairs Research Council placed the amount closer to $520 million annually.
That uncertain yet sizable sum made some fiscal conservatives, who otherwise support the idea of school choice, wary of voting for the legislation.
“The dollar amount is still a concern,” Talbot said. “That’s our fiduciary responsibility to the state. That never goes away.”
More students could have access to tutoring vouchers, but few have been used so far
Those cost concerns, along with an unwanted school accountability amendment, led the bill’s author, Sen. Rick Edmonds, R-Baton Rouge, to temporarily shelve his measure last week. But Talbot’s changes included removing a stipulation that any student who uses an ESA be administered the same high-stakes testing required of public school students.
Results from the tests would have measured whether schools that accepted ESA students were spending state money effectively, with those falling short not being taken out of the program.
Sen. Katrina Jackson-Andrews, D-Monroe, authored last week’s amendment and objected to its removal Thursday.
“I’ve never understood why someone would be afraid of accountability for a great idea,” Jackson-Andrews said, adding that the lack of testing might signify doubts among ESA supporters in the program’s potential for success.
In place of Jackson-Andrews’ accountability provision, the revised bill allows — but doesn’t require — private schools to test ESA students on math and English. The Louisiana Educational Assessment Program test public school students are required to take includes sections for English, math, science and social studies.
After her week-old amendment was removed, Jackson-Andrews submitted a proposal to align ESA accountability standards with the system in place for current voucher recipients. She excluded any punitive measures for schools whose ESA students perform poorly on assessments.
Edmonds argued that existing standardized tests at private schools will sufficiently measure the progress of ESA students. Jackson-Andrews maintained that private schools shouldn’t be allowed to pick their own assessments, but her amendment was rejected.
A blunted third attempt from Jackson-Andrews to insert accountability measures into the bill was successful. It calls for any assessment standards the state education department adopts to apply to every school in the state, but it doesn’t single out ESA students for separate evaluations.
Although lawmakers won’t make funding decisions on the ESA program until next year, they might help decide where the money might come from sooner. The 144 members of the Legislature and 27 appointees by the governor will take part in a constitutional convention from Aug. 1-15, based on organizing legislation that awaits Senate approval.
Landry and proponents of the event haven’t provided agenda specifics, but removing constitutional protections from certain funding streams is expected to be a priority.
The Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), which provides funding for Louisiana’s K-12 public schools, is one of those protected sources, but Landry has said it wouldn’t be touched during the constitutional rewrite.
The state will provide nearly $4.1 billion to public schools next academic year based on the MFP formula lawmakers are supporting.
HOUMA, La. — For nearly 50 years, James Blanchard has made his living in the Gulf of Mexico, pulling shrimp from the sea.
It’s all he ever wanted to do, since he was around 12 years old and accompanied his father, a mailman and part-time shrimper, as he spent weekends trawling the marshy waters off Louisiana. Blanchard loved the adventure and splendid isolation.
He made a good living, even as the industry collapsed around him. He and his wife, Cheri, bought a comfortable home in a tidy subdivision here in the heart of Bayou Country. They helped put three kids through college.
But eventually Blanchard began to contemplate his forced retirement, selling his 63-foot boat and hanging up his wall of big green fishing nets once he turns 65 in February.
“The amount of shrimp was not a problem,” said Blanchard, a fourth-generation shrimper who routinely hauls in north of 30,000 flash-frozen pounds on a two-week trip. “It’s making a profit, because the prices were so low.”
Then came President Trump, his tariffs and famously itchy trigger finger.
Blanchard is a lifelong Republican, but wasn’t initially a big Trump fan.
In April, Trump slapped a 10% fee on shrimp imports, which grew to 50% for India, America’s largest overseas source of shrimp. Further levies were imposed on Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia, which are other major U.S. suppliers.
Views of the 47th president, from the ground up
Tariffs may slow economic growth, discombobulate markets and boost inflation. Trump’s single-handed approach to tax-and-trade policy has landed him before the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule by summer on a major test case of presidential power.
Blanchard snacks on a bag of dried shrimp.
But for Blanchard, those tariffs have been a lifeline. He’s seen a significant uptick in prices, from as low as 87 cents a pound for wild-caught shrimp to $1.50 or more. That’s nowhere near the $4.50 a pound, adjusted for inflation, that U.S shrimpers earned back in the roaring 1980s, when shrimp was less common in home kitchens and something of a luxury item.
It’s enough, however, for Blanchard to shelve his retirement plans and for that — and Trump — he’s appreciative.
“Writing all the bills in the world is great,” he said of efforts by congressional lawmakers to prop up the country’s dwindling shrimp fishermen. “But it don’t get nothing done.”
Trump, Blanchard said, has delivered.
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Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood, but that hasn’t buoyed the U.S. shrimp industry.
Wild-caught domestic shrimp make up less than 10% of the market. It’s not a matter of quality, or overfishing. A flood of imports — farmed on a mass scale, lightly regulated by developing countries and thus cheaper to produce — has decimated the market for American shrimpers.
In the Gulf and South Atlantic, warm water shrimp landings — the term the industry uses — had an average annual value of more than $460 million between 1975 and 2022, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade group. (Those numbers are not adjusted for inflation.)
A boat moves up a canal in Chauvin, La.
Over the last two years, the value of the commercial shrimp fishery has fallen to $269 million in 2023 and $256 million in 2024.
As the country’s leading shrimp producer, Louisiana has been particularly hard hit. “It’s getting to the point that we are on our knees,” Acy Cooper, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Assn., recently told New Orleans television station WVUE.
In the 1980s, there were more than 6,000 licensed shrimpers working in Louisiana. Today, there are fewer than 1,500.
Blanchard can see the ripple effects in Houma — in the shuttered businesses, the depleted job market and the high incidence of drug overdoses.
Latrevien Moultrie, 14, fishes in Houma, La.
“It’s affected everybody,” he said. “It’s not only the boats, the infrastructure, the packing plants. It’s the hardware stores. The fuel docks. The grocery stores.”
Two of the Blanchardses’ three children have moved away, seeking opportunity elsewhere. One daughter is a university law professor. Their son works in logistics for a trucking company in Georgia. Their other daughter, who lives near the couple, applies her advanced degree in school psychology as a stay-at-home mother of five.
(Cheri Blanchard, 64 and retired from the state labor department, keeps the books for her husband.)
It turns out the federal government is at least partly responsible for the shrinking of the domestic shrimp industry. In recent years, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized overseas shrimp farming to the tune of at least $195 million in development aid.
Seated at their dining room table, near a Christmas tree and other remnants of the holidays, Blanchard read from a set of scribbled notes — a Bible close at hand — as he and his wife decried the lax safety standards, labor abuses and environmental degradation associated with overseas shrimp farming.
James Blanchard and his wife, Cheri, like Trump’s policies. His personality is another thing.
The fact their taxes help support those practices is particularly galling.
“A slap in the face,” Blanchard called it.
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Donald Trump grew slowly on the Blanchards.
The two are lifelong Republicans, but they voted for Trump in 2016 only because they considered him less bad than Hillary Clinton.
Once he took office, they were pleasantly surprised.
They had more money in their pockets. Inflation wasn’t an issue. Washington seemed less heavy-handed and intrusive. By the time Trump ran for reelection, the couple were fully on board and they happily voted for him again in 2024.
Republican National Committee reading material sits on the counter of James Blanchard’s kitchen.
Still, there are things that irk Blanchard. He doesn’t much care for Trump’s brash persona and can’t stand all the childish name-calling. For a long time, he couldn’t bear listening to Trump’s speeches.
“You didn’t ever really listen to many of Obama’s speeches,” Cheri interjected, and James allowed as how that was true.
“I liked his personality,” Blanchard said of the former Democratic president. “I liked his character. But I didn’t like his policies.”
It’s the opposite with Trump.
Unlike most politicians, Blanchard said, when Trump says he’ll do something he generally follows through.
Such as tightening border security.
“I have no issue at all with immigrants,” he said, as his wife nodded alongside. “I have an issue with illegal immigrants.” (She echoed Trump in blaming Renee Good for her death last week at the hands of an ICE agent.)
“I have sympathy for them as families,” Blanchard went on, but crossing the border doesn’t make someone a U.S. citizen. “If I go down the highway 70 miles an hour in that 30-mile-an-hour zone, guess what? I’m getting a ticket. … Or if I get in that car and I’m drinking, guess what? They’re bringing me to jail. So what’s the difference?”
Between the two there isn’t much — apart from Trump’s “trolling,” as Cheri called it — they find fault with.
Blanchard hailed the lightning-strike capture and arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as another example of Trump doing and meaning exactly what he says.
“When Biden was in office, they had a $25-million bounty on [Maduro’s] head,” Blanchard said. “But apparently it was done knowing that it was never going to be enforced.”
More empty talk, he suggested.
Just like all those years of unfulfilled promises from politicians vowing to rein in foreign competition and revive America’s suffering shrimping industry.
James Blanchard aboard his boat, which he docks in Bayou Little Caillou.
Trump and his tariffs have given Blanchard back his livelihood and for that alone he’s grateful.
There’s maintenance and repair work to be done on his boat — named Waymaker, to honor the Lord — before Blanchard musters his two-man crew and sets out from Bayou Little Caillou.
He can hardly wait.
Troy scorched the net for a season-best 17 3-pointers in a 90-70 victory over Louisiana at the Cajundome in Lafayette, La., on Saturday.
Brothers Cobi and Cooper Campbell hit four 3-pointers and scored 12 points each for the Trojans, who improve to 11-6 overall and 4-1 in Sun Belt Conference play. After Georgia Southern lost at South Alabama on Saturday, Troy is now tied for first place in the league standings.
Troy scored the first nine points of the game, and led by double-digits from the 12-minute mark of the first half. The Trojans were up 53-35 at halftime and by no less than 10 the rest of the way.
Thomas Dowd was Troy’s leading scorer (15 points, including three 3-pointers) and rebounder (8) while also dishing out five assists. Victor Valdes added 12 points, five rebounds and seven assists, while Jerrel Bellany contributed 11 points, Kerrington Kiel 11 and Theo Seng nine.
Dorian Finister scored a game-high 25 points for Louisiana, which falls to 4-14 overall, 2-4 in the Sun Belt. Dariyus Woodson was the only other Ragin’ Cajuns player in double-figures scoring with 13 points.
Troy is back home Wednesday, hosting Southern Miss at 6 p.m. at Trojan Arena. That game will stream live via ESPN+.
The decision by McGlinchey Stafford PLLC leaders this week to shutter their powerhouse law firm after more than 50 years sent shock waves across south Louisiana’s legal community, and even took some of the firm’s attorneys by surprise.
It also began reshaping the local legal landscape. In the days since the announcement, at least two firms have announced that McGlinchey attorneys will be joining them, bringing lucrative practices and longtime clients along.
New Orleans-based Adams and Reese said Thursday it is hiring nearly a third of McGlinchey’s Baton Rouge office — 11 attorneys and two paralegals — from the real estate and corporate transactions group. More announcements are expected to follow, as firms try to snag top McGlinchey talent before the competition does.
Amid the reshuffling, the full picture of what caused McGlinchey’s partners who own the firm, known as equity members, to vote to dissolve is starting to emerge. According to attorneys familiar with the situation and a statement from the firm’s managing partner, Michael Ferachi, McGlinchey had been struggling for a while. It had lost several highly skilled attorneys that had lucrative client lists, announcements from rival firms show, and departures had accelerated in recent months.
Now, dozens of secretaries and back-office staff are scrambling for positions, according to social media posts. Some younger attorneys or attorneys without large books of business are also looking for work.
Loyola University law professor Dane Ciolino said they’ll be doing so in a Louisiana legal market that’s more competitive and less lucrative than it used to be.
“Big cases with high billable hours are fewer and father between than 30 or 40 years ago because we don’t have the big companies that generated that kind of work,” said Ciolino. “As the business community goes, so goes the legal community.”
Big dreams
It’s not unusual for mid-sized law firms like McGlinchey to experience ups and down, lose groups of attorneys and merge or sell to other firms. But according to 10 other attorneys in New Orleans and Baton Rouge who agreed to be interviewed for this is story but declined to give their names, it was surprising that McGlinchey’s owners voted to dissolve.
The New Orleans-based firm was among the most aspirational and aggressive in the city when it was founded in 1974. Back then, the city’s legal community was dominated by a handful of old-line firms populated by socially prominent attorneys.
McGlinchey sought to be different.
Founding partners Graham Stafford and Dermott McGlinchey were young, ambitious and smart, those who knew them remember. They wanted their firm to be taken seriously, setting up offices in One Shell Square, now the Hancock Whitney Center, then the city’s newest and tallest skyscraper.
The firm started out doing mostly insurance defense, which bills at a lower hourly rate and isn’t as prestigious as corporate transactions. But it quickly expanded as attorneys logged long hours and pursued out-of-state clients, which was less common then than today. They also sought to recruit the best and brightest young talent coming out of law school.
By the late 1980s, the firm had bought its own office building on Magazine Street in the newly trendy Warehouse District. In a nod to the New York-style firms it sought to emulate, McGlinchey had its own cafeteria, gym and showers, signaling that its attorneys were expected to live at the office.
Both founding partners died young. Stafford in 1987; McGlinchey, at age 60, in 1993. The firm continued to grow in their absence, but some longtime competitors said it didn’t hum with the same intensity.
String of departures
In a statement released Tuesday, Ferachi, a Baton Rouge-based commercial litigation specialist who became the firm’s managing member in 2021, said that no single factor had led to the vote to dissolve. Rather, troubles had been building.
“This is not because of any specific attorney’s departure, or any individual financial decision or leadership action that led us to this point,” he said. “This is the result of a combination of market factors, such as lagging collections, compounded with various internal factors over several years.”
The statement also said the firm’s leaders made the decision after “assessing several strategic alternatives.”
Ferachi declined to make additional comment or respond to additional questions. His predecessor, Rudy Aguilar, also a Baton Rouge attorney who is leading the group going to Adams and Reese, also did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Prominent departures have been ongoing for at least a decade and began building in recent months.
In 2015, two prominent attorneys in the real estate and commercial transactions division took their practice to Kean Miller, according to an announcement from Kean Miller at the time. In 2020, five partners from McGlinchey’s consumer finance litigation practice went to Hinshaw, a national firm based in Chicago with more than 500 attorneys across the country, a release from Hinshaw shows.
Around the same time, the firm downsized its footprint in the Pan American Life Center in New Orleans, where it had moved in 2008 after vacating the Magazine Street building, according to real estate sources familiar with the move.
According to Law.com, an online trade publication for the legal industry, the firm’s head count declined from 199 in 2016 to 37 in 2021, though it was back up to between 150-160 attorneys the time of the announcement.
In 2024, defense attorney Ally Byrd left McGlinchey for Jones Walker. More recently, in late November 2025, Deirdre McGlinchey, daughter of the late founding partner, moved her successful corporate litigation practice, which represented national clients and included three attorneys, to Jones Walker.
By then, the Baton Rouge McGlinchey office was already in serious talks with Adams and Reese, according to a statement from Adams and Reese.
On Jan. 2, three days before the McGlinchey vote, Hinshaw announced it had hired four attorneys from McGlinchey’s Washington D.C, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida offices, the firm announced. All specialize in defending consumer financial services companies in high stakes lawsuits.
At the same time it was losing some of its top rainmakers, the firm was continuing to sign new leases for offices. In 2023, it moved its Boston office into One Beacon Street, among the city’s most prestigious office towers, with estimated rents of near $50 per square foot.
In May, it moved its Baton Rouge offices from their longtime headquarters in One American Place to the newly renovated II Rivermark Centre down the street.
Late last year, the firm announced it had created four new administrative positions, hiring from within. The move, the firm said at the time, was designed to strengthen and improve back-office functions.
The firm had also “reconfigured its governance structure and compensation system,” Ferachi said in his statement.
‘Dignity and grace’
The effect of McGlinchey’s closure is already reverberating across the markets where it operated.
Adams and Reese Managing Partner Gyf Thornton said bringing on McGlinchey’s real estate practice in Baton Rouge will not only benefit the individual attorneys from both firms but create new opportunities.
“With these kinds of combinations, we have found that we typically get a one plus one equals three,” he said. “We start with their current book of business and together we grow to something bigger than the sum of the two parts.”
Partners may bring their associates and paralegals with them when they move, though they don’t typically bring back-office staff.
In a LinkedIn post, McGlinchey’s Chief Business Development Officer Heather Morse posted on behalf of her colleagues, saying “There are people, the #McGlinchey Family, who need to find their next beginning. Many of us are blessed with wide networks, but others are not.”
She tagged 20 colleagues from the firm’s administrative staff, noting she also was “open to new opportunities.”
There’s no word on how long the wind down will take, but Ferachi said the firm “was committed to comporting ourselves with dignity and grace during this process.”
Ciolino said it’s hard to say what exactly the departure of McGlinchey will mean for the market, noting it “does seem odd the way it all went down.”
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