Fegenbush will be St. Mary superintendent
CENTERVILLE -- The St. Mary Parish School Board on Thursday voted to appoint Dr. Buffy Fegenbush, a former Berwick High principal, as its new superintendent.
The board interviewed six candidates Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, members talked about the candidates in a 55-minute closed-door session. Then they approved a plan to winnow the candidates on successive votes until one received the six votes needed to be approved by the 11-member board.
In the end, they didn't need the procedure. Only the two candidates with strong St. Mary ties received any votes.
On the first vote, with each member casting a paper ballot, Fegenbush got votes from Ginger Griffin of Patterson, Lindsey Anslem of Bayou Vista, Chad Paradee of Berwick and Rhonda Dennis, Andrew Mancuso and Alaina Black of Morgan City.
Board members and the audience broke out in applause after Black, the board president, cast the clinching sixth vote for Fegenbush.
"I'm deeply humbled by the opportunity to serve the St. Mary Parish School Board," Fegenbush said after the voting.
J Ina, the Franklin Junior High principal who also serves as a Parish Council member, got the remaining five votes from Debra Jones, Joseph Foulcard and Murphy Pontiff of Franklin, Marilyn LaSalle of Patterson and Tammie Moore of Four Corners.
Feganbush was Berwick High's principal 2005-17. She is currently district director of academic intervention for the Lafayette Parish School Board.
The other candidates were Margaret Cage, director of special education for Assumption Parish schools; Hamilton Brock, principal at Baker’s K-12 Alternative Learning Center; C. Michael Robinson, chief academic officer for East Baton Rouge Parish schools; and Curt Green, director of human resources for St. John the Baptist schools.
Fegenbush will succeed Dr. Teresa Bagwell, who announced late last year that she wouldn't seek renewal of her contract when it expires in June. Bagwell is finishing her term as superintendent on medical leave. Dr. Rachel Sanders has served as interim superintendent.'
The new superintendent will join a School Board on which seven of the 11 members have served for less than two years.
Together, they'll decide whether and how to return St. Mary high schools to block scheduling, a system that was abandoned in favor of a traditional seven-period day as a cost-cutting move before the 2017-18 school year. In a block schedule system, the day is divided into four periods of about 90 minutes each, and new classes begin at the start of each semester.
Beyond block scheduling, the 7,800-student district will try to cope with declining enrollment, a statewide teacher shortage and the fallout from the COVID-19 shutdowns.
Also Thursday, the board voted to move up the last day of 2022-23 classes for students to May 22 from May 26.
Sanders told the board that when forecasters predicted an active 2022 hurricane season, Bagwell added an additional 10 instructional minutes to school schedules as a precaution against days lost to storms.
But the schools lost no time to hurricanes in 2022, so the district had accumulated enough instructional minutes to meet state requirements without the additional four days.