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AMELIA — When the school garden at J.S. Aucoin Elementary started producing an abundance of cucumbers, LSU AgCenter area nutrition agent Jessica Randazzo saw the perfect opportunity to give back to the community.
“We had more cucumbers than we knew what to do with,” Randazzo said. “We reached out to the Council on Aging to see if we could donate the produce to their meal delivery boxes for seniors.”
The school garden provided more than 50 cucumbers to the senior feeding program.
“They’re already asking when I can bring more,” Randazzo said.
The St. Mary Parish Council on Aging senior feeding program has been delivering meal boxes to low-income seniors across the parish amid the pandemic.
“Our dedicated employees that have been delivering meals during this time of isolation were excited to also provide fresh produce,” said Beverly Domengeaux, St. Mary Parish Council on Aging director. “It put a big smile on all our seniors’ faces to have something fresh.”
Before COVID-19, J.S. Aucoin Elementary’s school garden club gave students the opportunity to grow their own food and try new recipes.
The program proved to be a huge success. Students were eager to try the vegetables they had grown. The school cafeteria even incorporated vegetables from the garden into school lunches.
“Two years ago, when I was asked if I wanted to be president of the garden club, I was hesitant to say ‘yes’ because of how the garden looked at the time,” said Tracy Gros, J.S. Aucoin Healthy Communities Coalition and faculty member.
“Once the garden was finished, we stayed after school and the students couldn’t wait to plant,” Gros said. “During the day I would go outside to see if anything was growing or needed watering, but the students were there before me.”
Despite school campus closures and summer vacation, the school garden continues to thrive thanks to the care and attention of the J.S. Aucoin Healthy Communities coalition and faculty volunteers like Gros.
The school’s Healthy Communities coalition focuses on improving health at J.S. Aucoin through community-led, sustainable physical and social environmental changes. The school garden is just one of those changes.
Funds from USDA SNAP-Ed, the Walmart Foundation and the 4-H Healthy Habits program have supported the garden.
For more information about the J.S. Aucoin Elementary school garden or Healthy Communities coalition, contact Randazzo at jrandazzo@agcenter.lsu.edu.

The daily number of new COVID-19 cases posted Saturday by the Louisiana Office of Public Health may have caused people to slap their computers or do a quick refresh.
The noon Saturday number of new cases in the previous 24 hours was listed as 1,288. If you’ve been following the daily numbers, you’ll know that’s a big number, like the ones we saw in early April when the number of statewide cases were growing 20% or 30% each day.
As Louisiana people took measures to protect themselves, the numbers fell gradually until they were below 300 new infections some days.
Then came Saturday, after Louisiana had already eased many anti-COVID-19 restrictions, and the 1,288 report.
The Office of Public Health pointed out that a large number of backlogged cases, 560, some dating back to April, were slow to make their way from commercial labs into the state database.
That’s happened at least two times before as new commercial labs joined the testing effort.
But even without the backlogged cases, the count for Saturday was 728, maybe double what we were getting a couple of weeks ago. And that number was posted while at least 14 states, and maybe as many as 25, were reporting spikes in numbers of new cases or hospitalizations.
That's enough to make people wonder if the country is moving too fast as it lifts economic restrictions and stay-at-home orders.
At least as far as Louisiana is concerned, the answer seems to be no for now.
Dr. Alex Billioux, the assistant Department of Health secretary who accompanies Gov. John Bel Edwards at the now-weekly coronavirus press conferences, said Wednesday that you’d expect the number of cases to go up as the amount of testing increases. Louisiana managed to beat its goal of 200,000 new tests in May, doubling the amount of tests that had been performed up to then.
The troubling development would be new hospitalizations that track along with the increase in new cases, Billioux said. Something like that has been happening, to great or lesser degrees, in the areas around Monroe, Alexandria and Lake Charles.
But statewide, the number of people in hospitals to be treated for COVID-19 has slipped below 600. The number of people on ventilators is below 75.
It’s clear, at least for now, that Louisiana didn’t see the spike in cases that would overwhelm hospital resources, the spike that motivated public health officials to urge us to “flatten the curve” by wearing masks, avoiding groups and staying home.
Some people will see that result and say the precautions worked. Some will say it shows the fear of COVID-19 was overblown from the start.
My Facebook feed will sometimes include a post from someone who takes the “it isn’t that bad” position. One recently wondered if we’ll close down the economy for flu from now on because, the poster said, the mortality rate from flu is higher than for COVID-19.
But is that true?
The Centers for Disease Control website says that over the last decade, flu killed 20,000-40,000 people most years. In 2011-12, it was only about 12,000. But let’s take the worst case: 2017-18, when 61,099 died.
Public health officials often express disease death rates in deaths per 100,000 members of the population. The rate for U.S. flu deaths in 2017-18 was about 19 per 100,000 people.
Now let’s look at COVID-19.
Locally, St. Mary, St. Martin and Assumption parishes, where this paper circulates, have a combined population of about 130,000. The OPH says 74 residents of those parishes have died from COVID-19.
You’ll also see some social media scuttlebutt about how the numbers are inflated for political reasons or because hospitals get reimbursed more for treating COVID patients. So let’s say, just to be saying, that state public health officials, officials in three parishes, testing labs, and three or four hospitals are up to their necks in an insanely complicated deep state plot. Let’s say they’ve somehow conspired to inflate the number of COVID deaths here by a factor of two.
That would give the three local parishes 37 actual COVID-19 deaths. So the COVID death rate here would be 28.5 deaths per 100,000, nearly one-third higher than the worst U.S. flu death rate in the last decade.
Assuming the OPH death records are accurate, the COVID death rate in St. Mary, St. Martin and Assumption is actually 57 per 100,000.
Keep in mind that the COVID-19 deaths happened in less than three months. A flu season lasts from October to May.
Flu vaccines have been around forever, and doctors know how to treat flu. We have no COVID-19 vaccine yet, and the treatments have been put together as the doctors went along.
Most of the COVID deaths have occurred despite school closures, business closures, travel limits, masks, limits on crowd sizes, stay-at-home orders, and bans on visitors at hospitals and nursing homes. During the flu season of 2017-18, there were some isolated school closures.
Our area isn’t the hardest-hit part of Louisiana, and Louisiana is no longer one of the country’s hottest hot spots for COVID-19.
Who can say at this point whether Louisiana made all the right moves when the coronavirus came along? But one is sure enough: COVID-19 isn’t just another bug.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.

Joan Ann Kristicevich died peacefully at her home on June 12, 2020, following a brief illness surrounded by loving friends and family.
Joan retired from Southern Bell in 1985 after 35 years of dedicated service. She was loved, admired and respected by all those she worked with as well as all she met throughout her life. The true blessing was the way she shared her faith in God with all those who knew her.
She is survived by her dearest friend Elsie Evans and her twin sister June K. Fortier as well as numerous nieces and nephews.
She was preceded in death by her mother, Alice White Kristicevich, father, and siblings Andrew Kristicevich, Mary Kristicevich, Mamie K. Fiorella, Josephine K. Castalano, Emily Kristicevich, Ann K. Delaune, Dorothy K. Stansbury, Anthony Kristicevich, John Kristicevich and Joseph Kristicevich.
The family would like to thank Angie Ponson of Haydel Hospice for her kindness, care and love.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be held Tuesday, June 16, 2020, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church with Father Toto officiating. Visitation will be held Tuesday, June 16, 2020, from 9 a.m. until 10:30 a.m. at Twin City Funeral Home. After Mass, Joan will be laid to rest in Morgan City Cemetery.

Louisiana state senators on Sunday voted unanimously to create a task force to study and make policy recommendations to improve the training, screening and de-escalation skills of law enforcement officers.
A House of Representatives committee approved a similar resolution to study law enforcement tactics last week, but not before Republicans insisted on removing language regarding the treatment of black men by white officers. They also stripped out a reference to George Floyd, the black man whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police helped spur nationwide and even international protests.
Senate Concurrent Resolution 7 by Sen. Cleo Fields, a Baton Rouge Democrat, includes similar language but inspired no such controversy. Not only did it pass 34-0, with references to Floyd and the fact that black men are more likely to be killed by police than white men intact, it attracted 29 co-authors.
Fields said every member of the judiciary committee where the bill got its first hearing signed on as co-authors, which “sends a message to me and should a message to the rest of the state that this Senate cares and wants to do what’s right.”
If the House approves the concurrent resolution, the task force will consist of lawmakers from both bodies, activists, law enforcement and defense bar representatives, academics and youth leaders. The group is supposed to report its findings to the Legislature by February.
Meanwhile, Senate Bill 10 by Franklinton Republican Sen. Beth Mizell seeks to promote high-speed internet access in rural areas by encouraging member-owned electric cooperatives to partner with broadband providers using existing electricity infrastructure.
The Federal Communications Commission has established the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to distribute $20.4 billion over 10 years to places with limited or no broadband access that don’t have enough people to be profitable markets otherwise. State officials hope the program will promote broadband investment in Louisiana.
Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed a similar bill Mizell authored that passed both houses of the Legislature without objection during the regular session. Critics said her original proposal would have been in conflict with federal law because it restricted competition by only allowing the co-ops to get into the internet business in places that currently don’t have broadband access.
A spokeswoman for Edwards said the governor is “fully supportive” of Mizell’s Senate Bill 10, which started out calling for reporting about impediments to rural broadband and was amended to include her earlier bill’s main goals.
“I don’t know if he likes it,” Mizell said of the governor. “He’s good with it.”
This year’s pandemic-shortened regular legislative session ended June 1. Lawmakers began this month’s special session immediately afterward.