Crawfish processors say new federal guidelines regarding legal foreign worker wages, could cause a big hike in the price of crawfish. Eric Gill reports..
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A survey of Louisiana public school teachers finds that 78-percent of them believe the annual standardized tests are excessive. Jeff Palermo has the story
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Crawfish processors say new federal guidelines regarding guest worker wages, could cause a big hike in the price of crawfish. Louisiana’s crawfish industry depends heavily on guest workers, legal foreign workers, to perform jobs they cannot fill locally. Lafayette restaurant owner and crawfish processor, Frank Randol, says the federal government says those workers now must be paid $12.35 an hour…
Randol says the Department of Labor’s $5 an hour wage hike will result in a $3 per pound increase in the price of crawfish tail meat. There is concern that the price of crawfish could climb higher than what consumers are willing to pay. Since the 90s, guest workers were paid wages based on local surveys done by employers in the market. However, Randol says the Labor Department changed the rules in December…
Lafayette Representative Charles Boustany and other Gulf Coast Representatives are petitioning the Labor Department to reverse their decision. Randol says the process of obtaining guest workers is a long and tedious process closely regulated by the federal government. He says when they started the process in the fall, they were told everything was fine…
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A survey of Louisiana teachers finds 78-percent of them believe state-required standardized tests takes too much time away from classroom instruction. Louisiana Association of Educators president Debbie Meaux says teachers believe there’s an overemphasis on standardized testing in state’s school accountability system
Meaux believes students should only be required to take standardized tests once in elementary school, then again in middle school and one more time on the high school level. She says annual testing does not give teachers enough time to teach the concepts for mastery
Meaux says current amount of standardized tests is also driving younger teachers away
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The Pointe Coupee Parish Sheriff’s Office says a brother and sister are dead after being shot at the Sugar Shack in New Roads early this morning. Captain Steven Juge says the incident remains under investigation, but witnesses have said there was some type of altercation between the suspects and victims…:
Juge says they are currently working to determine if the victims were inside the club when the altercation began…:
Juge says the victims are identified as 38-year-old Seneca Williams and 41-year-old Lichelle Williams. The suspect who remains at large is 31-year-old Jamie Croom. Juge says they were called out in reference to the double homicide at the lounge around 12:30 am..:
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The Union Parish Sheriff’s Office says a Bernice woman is under arrest after leaving her eight-month old son on a relative’s doorstep. Sheriff Dusty Gates says they received a call from the child’s father reporting that the baby was left outside a relative’s residence in Bernice…
The infant’s mother, 23-year-old Keondra Ferguson, is charged with criminal child abandonment. The child was reportedly outside the residence for more than 90 minutes, with temperatures in the mid-30s, before being discovered. Gates says the baby was wrapped in warm clothing and in a car seat when found…
Gates says the child was taken to the hospital where they discovered he has pneumonia. He says the infant had apparently been sick before being abandoned. The baby is now in the custody of his father. Gates says when authorities interviewed Ferguson, she admitted to leaving the infant…
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