(The Center Square) — An ongoing effort to establish retroactive term limits in Bossier City receives the final vote by residents on Saturday. 

Back in September, an ordinance establishing term limits for the Bossier City Council members failed to pass despite citizen concerns. The ordinance called for a special election in December proposing no person who has been elected or appointed to serve for three terms is eligible for reelection.

Residents presented a petition during a September city council meeting with roughly 3,000 signatures. 

Nearly nine months later, the parish will vote on the retroactive term limits. If passed, four council members will be ineligible for reelection — Jeff Free, Jeff Darby, David Montgomery and Don Williams. 

A previous JMC analytics poll reported showed between 50%-70% of citizens in each district would approve city council term limits. 

The Bossier City Term Limits Coalition began the argument over retroactive term limits, while the City Council’sprevious proposed charter is prospective term limits. The council originally wanted their prospective term limits to be on the December ballot last year. However, the Louisiana Bond Commission rejected the proposal. The reasoning behind the rejection was for the council’s omittance of the retroactive term limits supported and petitioned for by citizens.

The Center Square previously reported that if the charter passed in the March election, it wouldn’t hinder the retroactive petition version from being added and voted on in future elections depending on how the courts ruled. 

“If this goes forward as it is and it passes I think it could block any further action because the people of Bossier City will feel like they made their decision through their vote and that would mean that there would only be prospective term limits,” John Fleming, state treasurer and commission chair said previously. 

As the May election approaches this week, citizens will cast another vote for term limits as they did in March. 

While the March election did not address retroactive term limits, both propositions received a majority vote to pass some form of term limits for elected officials in Bossier. 

“We think that we’re going to be successful because we’ve made such a stink of this for the last two years,” David Crockett told The Center Square previously. “We think that some of these city councilmen are going to get beat, and we may get control of the council with good people that are not doing this for self-serving purposes.”

Emilee Ruth Calametti serves as staff reporter for The Center Square covering the Northwestern Louisiana region. She holds her M.A. in English from Georgia State University and soon, an additional M.A. in Journalism from New York University. Emilee has bylines in DIG Magazine, Houstonia Magazine, Bookstr, inRegister, The Click News, and the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. She is a Louisiana native with over seven years of journalism experience.

(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Education on Monday recognized the ways it says the Trump-Vance administration has returned education to states over its first 100 days, highlighting headway it has made in school choice and more.

The Education Department said that it “has advanced President Trump’s goal to return education to states by empowering parents to make decisions in their child’s education and removing bureaucratic barriers to educational choice.”

The department outlined in its release ways in which Trump’s goals have been made good.

Most prominently, Trump announced in March he would sign an executive order to end the Department of Education in order to return education back to the states, “where it belongs.”

“The United States spends more money on education by far than any other country, but yet we ranked near the bottom of the list in terms of success,” Trump said.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the same announcement that “education should be tailored to communities,” and “parents should have involvement.”

McMahon also wrote about her unusual mission as Secretary of Education: “to oversee the responsible and permanent closure of the very department I now lead.”

McMahon wrote that the “mandate is twofold: (1) to plan, in coordination with Congress, for eliminating or relocating the functions and operations of the Department of Education, and (2) to ensure that no taxpayer money flows to DEI programs or institutions that embrace DEI.”

“As we begin complying with this executive order, we can also dismantle the last administration’s DEI agenda and reorient civil rights enforcement so that we are protecting all students from harassment and discrimination, including Jewish students studying on elite campuses and female athletes on the field and in the locker room,” McMahon wrote.

As far as school choice, the U.S. Department of Education announced in January its “recognition and celebration of National School Choice Week,” preceding McMahon’s March visit to a New York charter school where she stated that “school choice is crucial.”

To advance what McMahon would later call crucial, the department in January withdrew “two burdensome and misaligned Notices Inviting Application (NIAs)” related to charter schools that were published under Biden and “included excessive regulatory burdens and promoted discriminatory practices.”

The department additionally “reigned in the federal government’s influence over state Charter School Program (CSP) grant awards,” a practice that was also set into motion under Biden.

This means that the requirement that the Secretary of Education “review information on how states approve select entities’ (e.g., private colleges and universities) authorization of charter schools in states where they are already lawful authorizers,” was done away with, returning authority to states and expanding school choice, according to the department.

In March, the department informed chief state school officers of a flexibility in Title I funds that would allow for greater education choice, such as dual enrollment and career and technical education.

States “championing school choice” along with Trump in his first 100 days are Idaho, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, the last three having all enacted school choice initiatives this year, while Idaho set in motion a Parental Choice Tax Credit program.

To combat ideology coming between children and parents in education, the department launched an “End DEI Portal” that enables individuals to report discrimination based on race or sex in public K-12s.

The department also opened investigations into both California’s and Maine’s education departments for allegedly violating the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA).

FERPA “gives parents the right to access their children’s education records,” according to the U.S. Department of Education

The department said that a new California state law prohibiting “school personnel from disclosing a child’s ‘gender identity’ to that child’s parent” violates FERPA.

Meanwhile, Maine school districts’ policies that “allegedly allow for schools to create ‘gender plans’ supporting a student’s ‘transgender identity’ and then claim those plans are not education records under FERPA and therefore not available to parents” is also a violation, the department said.

In the effort to protect children from what it considers gender ideology, the U.S. Department of Education notified all educational institutions receiving federal funding of their obligation to comply with parental rights laws such as FERPA, stating that education records include those related to gender identity.

“The correct application of FERPA will be to empower all parents to protect their children from the radical ideologies that have taken over many schools,” McMahon said of the department’s directive.

The Department of Education has not yet responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.

(The Center Square) – During a news conference over the state’s red snapper harvest on Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis dealt with a heckler who was ejected from the proceedings.

While the heckler’s comments couldn’t be understood on the audio, the second-term GOP governor said “that’s a fraud” and that the heckler should be ashamed of “peddling bogus narratives.”

The heckler was later removed from the event.

DeSantis announced that Florida’s Gulf of America red snapper season of 126 days will be the longest since the state started managing the fishery. He said the season will open on Memorial Day weekend May 24-26, pause for a few days and reopen on June 1 running through July 31.

The season will resume on Sept. 1-14 and also have open times for Veteran’s Day weekend, three days at Thanksgiving and at Christmas. 

Last year’s season was 104 days.

“We know that folks from all over the Northwest Florida love to do the red snapper. We also know that the local economy loves it as well,” DeSantis said. “Given recreational fishing for golf red snapper has been a tradition here, going back to the 1840s and probably even before then.

“So we can enjoy this historic season thanks to the great work of FWC (Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission) and the state Reef Fish Survey, which gathers data directly from anglers and helps us better manage the health and stock of the species, while today’s announcement is welcome for our Gulf communities, we have more work to do in the Atlantic.”

Under federal management, the season is only two days for Atlantic red snapper after last year’s “season” lasted only a single day.

DeSantis said he is in discussions with President Donald Trump’s administration to get the Sunshine State to manage that fishery as well sometime this year, something that is also sought by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for the Peach State’s coastal waters as well. 

“We will do a good job,” DeSantis said. “We will have accurate data, and we will be able to expand a lot of opportunities for a lot of people to be able to do this. And this is really keeping with, I think, the president’s vision to empower the states and make sure the federal government isn’t overstepping its bounds. So we stand ready, willing and able to get that job done.”

DeSantis also urged lawmakers, working on the state budget as the legislative session is set to end on Friday, to renew sales tax holidays for summer that includes fishing and other recreational supplies, even concert tickets.