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Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save Young men in East Baton Rouge Parish who committed violent crimes typically spent their childhood growing up in the poorest neighborhoods and although enrolled were frequently absent from parish public schools and never earned a high school diploma. These insights are drawn from a new report released Thursday and published by The Baton Rouge Area Foundation . Entitled “Community Safety: New approaches for preventing violence in Baton Rouge,” the 13-page report pools together 15 years of education and criminal justice data.
The conclusions are consistent with national research on the connection between education and violent crime, but the data and the people scrutinized are all from East Baton Rouge Parish. The report pays particularly close attention to young men, aged 18 to 29, who were convicted of murder between 2007 and 2022. They accounted for 70% of the 160 murder convictions during that 15-year span.
“I’m one of the people who could easily have gone down a path of crime had I not focused on something at school. For me that was basketball,” said LaMont Cole, superintendent of East Baton Rouge Parish public schools. “Even though I wasn’t a great basketball player, I had basketball.
” The murder rate in Baton Rouge rose over that period and remains high, surpassing almost every other medium and large city in the nation. The Capital City’s murder rate in 2024 was higher than New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore and New York. It has not fallen from pandemic-era levels.
In his introduction to the report, Chris Meyer, president and chief executive officer of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, wrote these homicides are "occurring in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty and school disengagement among young men." Analyzing a database of roughly 120,000 students who attended East Baton Rouge Parish public schools over those 15 years, researchers hired by the foundation estimated — 300 to 400 boys each year — exhibit risk factors that suggested they might turn later in life to violent crime. Meyer found this small number of children in each grade a cause for hope.
“This means that with strategic, well-funded support, we can make a significant impact on both educational and public safety outcomes,” Meyer wrote. These kids, who represent about 7% of children in Baton Rouge parish schools in any given year, show one more of five “signals of disengagement”: low readiness for kindergarten; chronic absenteeism; frequent behavioral incidents; as well as inability to read at grade level in elementary school and perform math well in middle school. The report suggested ramping up early literacy tutoring, math tutoring as well as programs that counsel and mentor boys based on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy.
Such interventions, relatively cheap in the early grades, increase in cost by factors of 10 as kids get older, with prison by far the most expensive, according to the report. “Investing in these early interventions — at a fraction of the cost of reactive measures such as incarceration — can yield long-term benefits for both individuals and the broader community,” Meyer wrote. 'This is really, really bad' This new report is the fifth in a wide-ranging, ongoing series of reports known as the Opportunity Data Project .
For each report, the foundation has partnered with Common Good Labs , a data analytics firm. Previous reports looked at early education, K-12 education, public safety and changing neighborhoods in Baton Rouge. Future reports will focus on health care, economic prosperity and regional resilience.
Meyer, who took over the foundation in 2021 , said before he launched the venture, he spoke with community leaders about what they thought the foundation should delve into. District Attorney Hillar Moore, who has worked in the prosecutor's office for 39 years, was one of the people who offered suggestions. “I didn't see (then) the number of juvenile homicide defendants or victims like we do now," Moore said in an interview.
"Ages are getting younger. It’s getting really bad.” Data from his office already showed a high correlation between poor school attendance and crime.
Moore asked for the foundation's help to go deeper. “We started looking at school statistics and looking at our victims and defendants, and we're saying, ‘Oh, wow, this is really, really bad. No one getting killed or shooting someone is in school,’” Moore said.
Drawing on the records of 113 young men convicted of murder, researchers found eight out of 10 attended traditional and charter schools operated by the East Baton Rouge Parish school system. Of those public school students, only 30% finished high school. That’s less than half the district’s graduation rate of 73%.
Common Good Labs also examined a larger sample of more than 300 young men convicted for murder and other violent crimes. It found 81% of them were chronically absent for one or more school years. That's at least 10% of the school year, or about 18 days.
'They’re homegrown' Moore agreed with the Baton Rouge foundation's emphasis on early intervention. He said he used to think you could wait until kids were at least 13, but now children need to be reached starting at preschool age. “If Baton Rouge is to survive and change, this is how we're going to do it.
We need to pour money into getting to kids early,” Moore said. “It’ll take 10 to 20 years for things to change, it's a generation or two, but it’ll be lasting change.” Mayor-President Sid Edwards echoed the district attorney's sentiments.
“Years ago, intervention would start in the eighth grade,” Edwards, a longtime educator and coach, said in an interview. “Intervention needs to start in the second and third grade now. It's a different world.
I mean, there are 10-year-olds out there packing now.” Edwards also expressed concern at how many murderers were previously students in the parish school system where he worked for years. “They’re homegrown,” Edwards said.
“We know where they're coming from.” 'I didn’t have clothes' Cole, a former Metro Councilman who became the schools leader in August, had a complicated, personal reaction to the report. “I was one of those kids,” the East Baton Rouge schools superintendent said.
He grew up in Baton Rouge in neighborhoods the new report labeled places of “concentrated poverty,” meaning at least 30% of residents earned less than the federal poverty line. Cole praised his mother for working hard to provide a stable home for his family, but it wasn’t always enough. He recalled days when he came to school smelling bad, his teeth aching because he hadn’t been to a dentist.
“In 1984, I didn’t go to school for two days,” he said in an interview. “I didn’t have clothes.” He recalled bringing extra food home from school to feed friends who didn’t have enough to eat.
As a Metro Councilman, Cole’s district was rife with substandard housing, grocery stores with healthy food were distant as were hospitals and doctors. Many residents lacked ready transportation. Now as superintendent, he runs a school district of almost 40,000 students, many from similarly troubled communities.
Given all the issues students bring to school, Cole said educators get the best results when they first forge strong relationships with their students so they view school in a positive light. To that effect, Cole has pushed for improving customer service and getting educators to improve their professionalism. Cole also sees value in increasing sports, arts, trade and other classes that get students to stay in school.
It worked for him. He said schools need to serve as a “positive” counterweight to the often negative quality of life in the neighborhood, but it’s hard because that’s where children spend the bulk of their time. “If you spend enough time in a negative environments, you are going to do something negative,” Cole said.
“The negative energy is way stronger.” Patrick Sloan-Turner contributed to this story..
