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(Editor’s note: The charges listed here and the narratives that go with them are provided by the police agencies that made the arrests. Guilt or innocence has not been determined in court.)

Morgan City police made four arrests on charges of domestic abuse or battery of a dating partner over the long holiday weekend.

Morgan City
Police Chief James F. Blair reported that over the last 72-hour reporting period, the Morgan City Police Department responded to 128 calls for service and made these arrests:
—Bryson Lee Pitre, 21, St. Charles Street, Morgan City, was arrested at 10:19 p.m. Friday on a charge of battery of a dating partner.
—Timothy Gary Francis, 34, Idaho Street, Morgan City, was arrested at 1:08 p.m. Saturday on a warrant alleging domestic abuse battery, violation of a protective order and domestic abuse battery (child endangerment).
—Demarcus Skipper, 26, Hickory Street, Patterson, was arrested at 7:16 a.m. Sunday on charges of home invasion, domestic abuse battery, violation of a protective order and domestic abuse battery (child endangerment), and on a 16th Judicial District Court warrant alleging failure to appear for trial.
—Nickolas James Morris II, 33, Front Street, Morgan City, was arrested at 3:10 p.m. Sunday on a warrant alleging disturbing the peace (fighting) and domestic abuse battery, on a 6th Ward Morgan City Court warrant alleging failure to appear to pay fine, and on a 16th Judicial District Court warrant alleging failure to appear for an imposition hearing.
—Margaret Murphy, 54, La. 182, Morgan city, was arrested at 8:53 a.m. Friday on a charge of filing false records and possession of a stolen motor vehicle (value over $25,000).
—Kimberly Bonnette, 34, Eighth Street, Morgan City, was arrested at 10:08 a.m. Friday on a 6th Ward Morgan City Court warrant alleging two counts of failure to appear to pay fine.
—Ashley Broussard Bourgeois, 35, Three B’s Lane, Patterson, was arrested at 9:42 a.m. Saturday on 6th Ward Morgan City Court warrants alleging failure to appear for arraignment and two counts of failure to appear to pay fine
—Timothy Gary Francis, 34, Idaho Street, Morgan City, was arrested at 1:08 p.m. Saturday on a charge of battery on an officer.
—Destiny N. Escort, 25, Halsey Street, Morgan City, was arrested at 7:06 p.m. Saturday on charges of possession of marijuana (under 14 grams) and illegal use of a controlled dangerous substance in the presence of a person under 17 years of age.
—Mark Anthony Hilliard, 38, Live Oak Street, Patterson, was arrested at 9:34 p.m. Sunday on a charge of entry or remaining in places or land after forbidden.
—Frederick Brent Fournet, 33, Osage Street, Franklin, was arrested at 12:23 p.m. Thursday on charges of possession of methamphetamine, possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and violation of uniform controlled sub-stance laws (drug-free zone).
—Stanley Jose Rivas, 30, Fourth Street, Morgan City, was arrested at 8:44 p.m. Thursday on charges of driving while intoxicated (first offense), reckless operation of a motor vehicle, driving must be licensed and stop sign violation.

Berwick
Police Chief David Leonard reported this arrest:
—Brian Stansbury, 39, Cypress Court, Gray, was arrested at 11:52 p.m. Wednesday on charges of driving while intoxicated (first offense), possession of marijuana (under 14 grams), driving under suspension and two headlights required.
About 11:17 p.m. Wednesday, an officer in the area of U.S. 90 observed a vehicle with only one functioning headlight. A traffic stop was conducted on the vehicle, and officers made contact with Stansbury.
While speaking with Stansbury, an odor of an alcoholic beverage was detected as well as marijuana. Stansbury admitted to drinking and asked to perform a series of standardized field sobriety tests, which he agreed to do and on which he performed poorly.
Stansbury was placed un-der arrest and transported to the Berwick Police Department. Stansbury was found to be in possession of a small amount of marijuana. Stansbury provided a valid breath sample of 0.098G% BAC. Stansbury was booked and later posted a $5,750 bond.

My grandmother, Grace Miller, was a petite woman who was the only real constant I knew growing up. She was part of the generation that suffered through the Great Depression and two world wars, not to mention the various trials everyone is destined to go through at some point in their lifetime.
By trials, I’m not talking about the narcissistic drama posted on social media these days. No, I’m talking about a generation of people who grew up in an age where there were few specialists when it came to medicine. If you were lucky, you might have had a telephone, or at the very least your neighbor had one you could borrow. And, if there was an emergency, in most rural areas it had to be a real emergency, because there weren’t any Urgent Cares around back then either.
My grandmother and her siblings were raised on a 40-acre farm in the snow country of northern Michigan in Wexford County near the town of Harrietta. I was told she owned a restaurant in her younger years. I never doubted whether this was true because Gramma always said she could make something out of nothing.
It’s the “something” I can most certainly vouch for.
I know to this day, my love for the outdoors came from her line of the family. When I was old enough to sit still and listen, she once told me how as a girl she fished for brook trout in the streams up north. She told me how she’d place a fern inside the cavity of the gutted fish to help keep them cool in a whicker creel basket.
She also told me when she was a young girl what her grocery list consisted of. flour, sugar, lard, coffee, and tobacco. Everything else they grew, raised, caught, picked or hunted, she said.
The seeds of my growing up to hunt and fish were planted at her house on Lewis Street, on the eastside of Flint, Michigan. While sitting in a lounge chair in her living room, I’d read and look at the pictures in Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield magazines for hours. They belonged to my Uncle Earl, who was an avid deer hunter.
My five siblings and I wound up being the victims of an ugly divorce when I was at the impressionable age of 9 years old. Our parents, unfortunately, never thought through things and we kids ended up in a couple custody battles going back and forth between them.
It was while I was living with my father, my mother decided to buy me a shotgun for Christmas. No doubt it was to spite my father and show him she still had some control, but that mattered little to me.
My father and stepmother had moved out of the city of Flint to a subdivision in the rural community of Rankin. While riding to school on the bus, the other boys my age talked about hunting, .30-.30 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns. I didn’t have clue what these numbers meant, but what I did know is I wanted to hunt.
It upset my father so bad, he never took me out to shoot the gift – a little crack-barrel Harrington & Richardson 20-gauge. But one of the older boys, a guy by the name of Dan Drake, did take me. And at 13, I learned to shoot it.
The following year I took the hunter’s safety class required by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and bought my first small game license for the sum of $3.
I didn’t do so well that first season or my second season for that matter. I missed pheasants. I missed quail. I missed rabbits and just didn’t have the knack it seemed at hitting moving objects running or flying. That said, I never quit or became discouraged.
By the time I turned 16 we were back living with our mother again. This time it was she who decided to move out of Flint, and we wound up in the town of Durand.
It also was a rural farming community, where the farmers in the area never had a problem with boys hunting their woodlots, sloughs, fence lines or harvested cornfields.
My grandmother lived with us for a while during my teenage years. My mother had to work nights at the General Motors Buick Fisher Body Plant, in Flint. The plant was famous for building Sherman M4 tanks during World War II. So, my gramma filled in to help mom out.
One year, during Christmas break, my brother Michael and I decided to go rabbit hunting. That October, I had killed my first pheasants and it seemed like I was starting to get the hang of hunting. Between the invitations I got from the older fellas in the neighborhood, reading countless how-to articles, and going every chance I got, I was learning to be a hunter.
It also didn’t hurt that I was old enough to drive. On weekends I’d pretty much come and go as I pleased if I wasn’t scheduled to work at Carter’s IGA in town.
It was cold out and there was a lot of snow on the ground that day. Mike and I were hunting a little cattail slough surrounded by trees between a couple of cornfields, where there was plenty of rabbit sign.
I learned that sloughs had numerous logs and tag alders mixed in with those cattails that formed an impenetrable warm cover for small game to huddle up in. It was easy walking, because the shallow ankle-deep water in the slough had completely frozen over with a thick layer of ice.
Anyone could see the bunny tracks and droppings and even a splash of yellow snow leading into the thickets. All you had to do was follow the tracks and tramp that stuff to jump them. It wasn’t long, where Mike and I did just that.
There’s nothing quite like a cottontail rabbit busting out of a snowbank putting distance between you and it.
We killed two cottontails that morning and did the best we could field dressing them. If I had a weakness at that time, it was game handling and preparation. They didn’t talk much about that in the magazines I read, nor did I have anyone to really show me.
My grandmother met us at the back door when we got home and said, “What did you get Johnny?” and I showed her the two rabbits. I remember them being pretty shot up, full of hair, and not cleaned very well.
It didn’t matter. She made over them like they were the best meat she ever cooked with.
She also heaped praise on us for our kill, making us feel like we really did something special. And the next time I saw those rabbits, they were part of a Christmas meal and absolutely delicious. There was not a speck of hair, piece of No. 6 lead shot, or broken bone in the meat.
I’ll never forget my grandmother, the stories she used to tell me, or the Christmas’s we spent together.
To all of you, I wish you a Merry Christmas and I’ll see you next year …

BATON ROUGE — In fourth-grade teacher Laura Spurgeon’s class, the students who attended school in person during the pandemic sit in one area, and those who were online last year sit in another. A third group, the students still working from home, join in on a screen.
“It’s like I’m teaching three different levels instead of one,” Spurgeon said. “The students who still stay at home ‘sick’ and have to join via Zoom, the ones that opted for online last year and didn’t learn as much, and the kiddos who have been in person the entire time.”
With the COVID-19 disruptions, standardized test scores for students in grades 3 through 8 have fallen in 69 of 72 Louisiana school districts. State performance scores for schools and school districts, released in early December, fell overall as well.
Teachers, administrators and counselors are trying to figure out how to help many students catch up and get K-12 education back on track. However, they must determine how to reach students who are now performing at different levels while also dealing with the psychological fallout on children who had limited social contact during the shutdowns.
What makes this even harder is that many schools across the state are facing a shortage of teachers. Older teachers are opting for retirement rather than face health risks, and new college education graduates are passing on jobs they view as offering too little pay.
And the teachers who are still on the frontlines are working harder than ever and reaching out to parents of struggling students through phone calls or emails.
Morgan Story, a high school teacher at MSA West Academy in Plaquemine, said most parents have been understanding and are working with her to help their children.
“They really just needed a voice of a teacher being like ‘All right, I know we’re struggling. This is where we’re at with it, too. This is what you really need to focus on.’ And that helped a lot of parents.”
Funding, staff morale problems, and concerns about student performance are long-standing issues for many Louisiana school districts. But they have taken on a new urgency as schools try to return to normal operations to accommodate all their students.
“We do so much that doesn’t go into the contract that you sign,” said Taylor Rising, an art teacher at McKinley Middle Academic Magnet School in Baton Rouge. “You know, it’s not in the job description, the number of things that we have to do for the children.”
Not only do they have to adequately teach the material in-person and online, but they also have to take care of themselves while helping students who are struggling emotionally and psychologically.
“It’s hard to take home, and it’s hard to hear my kids going through some of the same things I’m going through, and then I have to respond to that,” Story said.
Standardized test scores released in August showed that the percentage of students in grades 3 through 8 statewide who achieved the mastery level or above in key subjects dropped to 29% from 34% before the pandemic.
The test score results also showed that the students who attended in-person last year achieved the mastery level at a 15% higher rate than students who were completely online, and the online students had an 11% higher rate of unsatisfactory scores on average than the in-person students.
Some of the biggest drops were in math, and teachers and parents are turning to tutoring to help children improve.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, the number of students attending class virtually peaked at 15,613 as COVID cases surged through the state. That number dropped this fall, though it could rise again as the Omicron variant spreads. The East Baton Rouge district also established an online school for students wanting to continue their education entirely online.
“The students who participated in online learning are clearly behind,” Spurgeon, who teaches at Twin Oaks Elementary School, said. “I can see it in almost every activity they do.”
Dr. Susan Thornton, a licensed care specialist at McKinley Middle, said that besides being more easily distracted online, many children missed the familiar sounds that typically anchored their school days.
“You’ve got the bell sounds, you’ve got somebody yelling, you got a door slamming,” she said. “Those are the sounds. Those are the teenage school sounds we need to be hearing. They missed that. They really missed that.”
As a result, she said, “We need to dig a little bit deeper to see, you know, what’s happening, or if they just break down and start crying…we need to find out what’s going on. We missed that in the pandemic; we didn’t have it. They were not here.”
Rising, from McKinley Middle, said she notices students acting out-of-line more often than usual since the pandemic. She mentioned a national trend on TikTok called “devious licks,” which shows students misbehaving and even partaking in criminal behavior during the pandemic. Rising has noticed some of her own students developing similar behavior.
“I think that they see the world is kind of like, on fire, and so I guess their instinct is to, like, act out to get attention or something like that,” she said. “But yeah, I really feel for these kids.”
The shortage of teachers is also making it harder for schools to recover from the pandemic.
Johnita Smith, a librarian and English language arts teacher in Jefferson Parish, said some schools have compensated for teaching vacancies by increasing the numbers of students in their classes and by moving teachers from one subject to another.
When one school had trouble finding a curriculum director this fall, she said, students had to hang out for days in the gym waiting for class schedules.
Some teachers are leaving because of a lack of adequate pay, while some say the profession does not get enough respect for all that it entails.
“It was just too much for some people,” Rising said. “It’s a lot to ask...for the amount of pay and the smidgen of respect we get.”
Even with a recent $800 a year raise, public school teachers in Louisiana earn an average of $50,923, or $4,007 below the Southern regional average. Gov. John Bel Edwards said Friday that he would push for another pay raise for teachers next year.
Teacher retirements surged during the pandemic, and a survey by the LSU Department of Education in August found that up to 35% of the remaining K-12 teachers are considering leaving the profession.
The number of education majors at LSU has also dropped sharply in recent years, reflecting a national trend.
Dr. Richard Baker from LSU’s Geaux Teach Humanities Program said that some teachers do not feel they have the time, trust or safety to do good jobs. Along with the health risks, he referenced the stories of gun violence and the responsibility of teachers to be prepared for life-endangering situations as reasons to not be in schools.
“Teachers are thinking, ‘If I don’t feel safe as a human being, I’m going to do something else,’” Baker said.
The state requires teachers to receive advanced education, while also spelling out what and how they can teach. Teachers additionally face an assessment called the value-added system, which combines student test scores with individual teacher evaluations. A teacher who fails could lose his or her license.
“It’s very discouraging to teachers,” Dr. James Madden of LSU’s Geaux Teach STEM program said. “Teachers don’t like to be treated as a number, and value-added reduces them to numbers.”
Madden said that the STEM program, which was founded to inspire a new generation of science and technology teachers, produced 30 students seven years ago but is now producing a dozen at most.
“We are approaching the Dead Sea,” he said.
Rising said some of the students hit hardest by all these problems are those who face the biggest transitions, such as shifting from elementary to middle school.
“We’re pretending that everything is peachy-keen and fine and dandy, but it’s really not,” she said. “But you just kind of have to keep pushing, and they’re going through it.”

Joseph B. McGee, 87, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, and resident of Bayou L’Ourse, died Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2021, at his residence.
He is survived by four daughters, Martha Streetman of Bayou Vista, Kathryn Giroir and Sandy Fabre, both of Bayou L’Ourse, and Carolyn Smith of Bossier City; three sisters, Doris McGee, Theresa Curry and Faye McCullin, all of Shreveport; nine grandchildren; and numerous great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
He was preceded in death by his parents; first, second and third wives; and two grandchildren.