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The new Children’s Resource Center is meant to offer a more hands-on experience, said Morgan Hanrahan, the center’s manager and the head of early literacy at the New Orleans Public Library.

Before the renovation, the center looked like a regular library branch that featured books geared toward children, Hanrahan said. Now, there are fewer stacks and more play areas. That’s to curate it to the needs of children aged five and under, and to reinforce the five facets of early literacy: reading, playing, talking, singing and writing, Hanrahan said. She hopes the building will be “very loud,” unlike a traditional library. 

Last year, the 118-year-old building on Napoleon and Magazine closed for renovations, which cost a little more than $700,000, giving the library time to transform the space. It reopened on Tuesday, and a formal ribbon-cutting and opening ceremony is scheduled for Saturday morning.

A progressive grassroots group has started a pressure campaign aiming to get U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, the Republican candidate for Louisiana’s open U.S. Senate seat in the November election, to face off against her opponent, Democrat Jamie Davis, in a public forum. 

Given Louisiana’s Republican leanings, Letlow has largely been considered the favorite in the contest. But two recent polls, commissioned by the Davis campaign, have her at a mere four point lead over her lesser known Democratic challenger, within the margin of error. The most recent poll was released last month. Still, there are no scheduled debates in the race, and Letlow has not agreed to a recent invitation from a New Orleans TV station to face off against Davis.

Last week, Indivisible Louisiana, a coalition of several Louisiana-based organizations, launched a petition after NBC affiliate WDSU-TV sent invitations to both Letlow and Davis in August to attend a “Hot Seat” debate to discuss the race. Davis accepted the invitation, but his campaign team said Letlow has not.

“A U.S. Senate seat represents every parish and every community in Louisiana. Voters deserve the opportunity to hear from both candidates in the same forum before making their decision,” said Bethany Viviano of Indivisible Tangipahoa in a press release. 

The Black Schoolhouse, located at 1660 N. Roman St., is soon to be the home of The Black School, a nonprofit organization that provides arts education for teens and young adults and is geared toward community organizing.

Founded by Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters Cuillier, the 10-year-old organization was launched in New York City and for the past five years operated out of Xavier University. With the new community arts center, the founders plan to expand its youth arts programming and join in on the artist-led activism they see in New Orleans.

“It makes perfect sense to house a new model of a Black art school in this city, in this culture amongst all of this tradition,” Peters Cuillier said.

The Black School will celebrate the arts center’s opening on Oct. 10.

The local branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation wants to challenge the expression “the first 72 are on you” with a space in the Holy Cross neighborhood to help residents weather the immediate aftermath of hurricanes and other ecological disasters.

Assata Nkosi, an organizer with the PSL, said it was important to build the resource center in a part of the city that still bears the scars of Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s still one of the places that you can see the aftermath that still hasn’t been resolved, that still hasn’t been developed. It still has been abandoned by the government,” Nkosi said. “You can go down this street and that street and you’re still going to see SOS on abandoned houses. You’re still going to see all the evidence of Katrina that has not been remedied.

The group hopes it will serve as a resource for Lower 9th Ward residents unable to easily access city-operated shelters and cooling centers, which are often located outside of the neighborhood.

Local privacy advocacy and First Amendment groups recommended at a city council committee meeting on Monday (Aug. 31) that the New Orleans Police Department suspend its Drone First Responder Program amid a push for more transparency into how the department uses its drones.

The groups made the recommendation after they discovered what they called an incomplete log of the NOPD’s usage of drones.

At the New Orleans City Council Criminal Justice Committee meeting, the Eye on Surveillance and ACLU of Louisiana presented flight log data from the program and highlighted issues of transparency and following internal policies.

Both groups recommended that the City Council create opportunities for the public to comment on drone policies, build a portal with publicly available information about drone usage and evaluate the cost of the program, among other measures to help the public understand how the department is using drones.

Edith Romero, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance, said that until recommendations are implemented or there is more enforcement of them, the drone program should be suspended.

Even now, Jimmie Duncan is haunted by the 27 years he spent on death row as a wrongfully convicted man.

He remembers 23-hour solitary confinement. 115-degree heat in the summer, conditions that were so brutal “there were a few times when I got up, I didn’t even know my name.”

The worst of it all was thinking his loved ones could believe he had committed an unspeakable crime. From inside Louisiana’s Angola prison, Duncan said he was helpless as his family fell to pieces: “My brother ended up going from being the region’s No. 1 car salesman to … dying of overdose. He just couldn’t take it. He couldn’t escape being my brother.”

But even now, after his conviction was overturned, Louisiana could force Duncan to go back to prison. The district attorney, who did not respond to our requests for comment, has said in court that he still believes Duncan is guilty and deserves to be executed. He has until June to decide on a retrial, though his term ends in January and he is not running for reelection.

Until then, Duncan’s life remains in limbo, both mentally and financially. 

Read our full investigation with u/propublica_**,** taken from more than 6 hours of interviews with Duncan: https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-angola-death-row-wrongful-conviction-jimmie-duncan

Attorneys for an affordable housing developer suing the city of New Orleans claim they have evidence that City Councilmember Freddie King had “discriminatory intent” when he moved to block a proposed 278-unit apartment complex near his West Bank home.  

In a Thursday court filing, the developer, Xinhong Zhang of Stanton Square, LLC, submitted a series of text messages between King and a friend sent hours after the council unanimously voted against adopting a zoning measure that would have allowed the complex to move forward. In the messages, King said he voted to reject the development because he did not want “dread heads and bonnet wear fools next to me.” 

Louisiana is giving sheriffs 20% of its opioid settlement cash, but sheriffs aren't required to report how they spend it. We teamed up with KFF Health News, The Current and Gulf States Newsroom and followed the money.

Of the $8.1 million in reported expenditures, here were some of our top-line findings:

• Nearly $2 million paid for equipment used in arrests or investigations, including body cameras, crime scene cameras and drug testing equipment,
• Approximately $1.3 million paid for medical and mental health support and other assorted resources for treatment and recovery,
• Another $1.3 million paid for automated external defibrillators (AEDS),
• Over $660,000 paid for officer salaries, benefits and overtime,
• More than $439,000 paid for public awareness campaigns, including billboards, websites and mobile apps,
• Approximately $300,000 paid for vehicles and vehicle accessories.

See the rest of our findings: https://veritenews.org/2026/08/27/louisiana-opioid-settlement-sheriff-spending/

Louisiana’s Interchurch Conference, an interdenominational group of 15 Christian churches in the state, organized a public prayer service in Alexandria on Saturday to call for humane immigration policies and to lend support to the area’s residents in their fight against the construction of a family and child detention center at England Airpark.

In February, the airpark’s governing board, the England Authority Board of Commissioners, authorized the England Airpark Executive Director to execute new contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) and the LaSalle Family Foundation — the nonprofit arm of the private prison firm LaSalle Corrections — which has been selected as the operator of the Alexandria facility.

According to Ralph Hennessy, the executive director at England Airpark, those contracts have since been signed.

The board is set to hold its next meeting on Thursday (Aug. 27), and many of the people attending the prayer service said they are planning on showing up to encourage the board members to pull out of the contracts and reject the construction of the facility.

A group of civil rights attorneys is accusing University Medical Center New Orleans (UMC) of violating the city's “ban the box” law when it fired employee Devon Jones in April, allegedly due to his criminal background.

The ban the box law prohibits public employers from discriminating against job applicants and current employees because of past arrests or convictions. While the law allows those employers to conduct criminal background checks, they have to show that a past conviction would directly interfere with an applicant or employee’s job duties.

In an Aug. 12 letter addressed to the city’s Chief Administrative Officer Joe Giarrusso and circulated to New Orleans City Council members, attorneys representing Jones allege that he was fired from his position as a violence interrupter based solely on his conviction for a 2009 armed robbery.

Jones’ “conviction bears no relationship to his job duties — his lived experience was, by the program’s own account, a basis for his hiring — and he has an extensive, documented record of rehabilitation,” the letter reads.

Dr. Evelyn Griffin had led a life out of the spotlight until she testified at the Louisiana statehouse five years ago and experienced what she called her “great awakening.”

The state health department wanted to add Covid vaccines to the school immunization schedule, a move no state has ever implemented. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then known as a leading vaccine skeptic, had already claimed the Covid shot was “the deadliest vaccine ever made” during a poster board presentation at the legislative hearing.

Dr. Griffin, a longtime obstetrician, relied on nearly identical images during her own blistering testimony against the proposal. After the hearing, she expected splashy headlines about Mr. Kennedy’s assertions, shifting the public debate over Covid policies and vaccines. But that did not happen; one news outlet dismissed him as a promulgator of propaganda. Dr. Griffin was shocked.

That is “when I saw how the world worked,” she recalled in a podcast interview. Dr. Griffin said she and her husband, a vascular surgeon, decided to take action and “shine light on things.”

Now, Mr. Kennedy is the nation’s health secretary, and Dr. Griffin holds prominent roles that position her to help carry out his vision.

Last September, Mr. Kennedy appointed her to the advisory panel for federal immunization policy, where she voted to recommend limiting access to Covid vaccines and ending universal newborn immunizations for hepatitis B, steps that a federal judge has blocked. In December, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a conservative Republican and ally of President Trump, named Dr. Griffin as the state’s surgeon general.

That makes her the top public health physician in Louisiana, which has the worst health outcomes in the nation.

She is an unconventional choice. Dr. Griffin has no background or specialty training in infectious disease or public health. She is aligned with alternative health movements — including Make American Healthy Again, or MAHA — and has hosted some speakers promoting fringe medical views.

Dr. Griffin declined interview requests for this article. “My vision as Louisiana’s surgeon general is to help shift our health care system toward preventing disease, not just managing or treating it,” she said in a statement.

It's back-to-school season for New Orleans students, and the kids are kicking off the school year in style 😎

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In 2024, more than a third of the state’s early childhood education centers didn’t serve children under four years old, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Education. The younger a child, the fewer the options parents have for placing their child in a program. 

While Louisiana’s early education system manages to serve 92% of the four year olds in need, only 18% of children age three or younger have access, according to the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children, a nonpartisan, independent source of data and research for policymakers. 

During a news conference on Thursday (Aug. 6), child advocates, early child care providers and elected officials called for more public investment in the state’s early childhood care to increase access for infants and toddlers in need. 

Early last year, the Trump administration ended two Biden-era programs that gave state and tribal governments federal funding to purchase food for food banks and schools from local farmers.

Farmers who had been relying on the sales panicked.

Margee Green, the Executive Director of the Louisiana Food Policy Council, responded with a plan. For a relatively low price, the state could provide grants for farm equipment and infrastructure, such as coolers, soil inputs and packing machines, that would help farmers scale up their operations and serve larger clients like restaurants and food banks, with or without federal subsidies.

State lawmakers responded, appropriating $3 million to the Food Policy Council for “direct farm purchasing.”

But in the year since, the state has made a number of adjustments to the program, reducing the allocation to the Food Policy Council by two-thirds, with $2 million going to other organizations. Thus far, the Food Policy Council has only been able to access $50,000 from the state.

Green is frustrated with the lack of transparency around the implementation of this program, called Farmers First, and worries that it has negatively impacted critical partnerships and in the process, harmed local food systems.

Following a meeting between public officials and law enforcement, New Orleans Police and the Louisiana National Guard have been sweeping busy corners near the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library.

A mix of people — commuters, unhoused people and library patrons — cycle through the area, especially directly in front of the library, which also operates as a cooling center during the scorching summer months.

But during a July 21 meeting, community members met with officials from the city of New Orleans, the Regional Transit Authority and state and local law enforcement to discuss safety concerns, including the effect of criminal activity, emergency medical calls and sanitation on RTA passengers who use the main library stations.

Within a week of that meeting, officers from NOPD and National Guardsmen were spotted conducting sweeps of the area around noon and 5 p.m., which are some of the busiest transit hours in that corridor.

Exonerated after more than four decades in prison, Elvis Brooks thought he had an airtight case when he applied for compensation from the state of Louisiana. Under a state program, he’s eligible for up to $480,000 from a special fund to compensate wrongfully convicted people.

But state Attorney General Liz Murrill has vigorously fought Brooks’ compensation claim, asserting in court filings that he is still guilty and therefore should not receive any money at all.

It isn’t just Brooks: Since Murrill took office, she’s done the same for nearly every claim — 22 out of 23 — that has come before her. These include cases in which men were exonerated through DNA or blood evidence and others in which police were accused of fabricating evidence.

Murrill’s opposition doesn’t necessarily mean that Brooks and other exonerees won’t eventually be compensated, as claims are decided by district court judges. But it ensures that a process the law says is allowed to take no more than five months could instead drag on for years, exacting financial hardship and emotional pain on people who have already endured decades of both, a senior law professor said.

Read our full investigation with u/propublica_**:** https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-wrongful-conviction-compensation-liz-murrill-elvis-brooks

The state attorney general’s office declined to answer questions regarding her approach.

Many parish-level leaders and volunteers for Louisiana Deserves Better, the statewide campaign to force recall elections against Gov. Jeff Landry and state Attorney General Liz Murrill, have left the organization due to alleged financial mismanagement and poor leadership on the part of its chairperson, Marian Gbaiwon.

Louisiana Deserves Better formed in early May when Marian Gbaiwon and Katilyn Stepter filed the petition to advance the daunting task of collecting more than 500,000 signatures within 180 days for the recall.

But now the former parish-level leaders, who still are committed to trying to recall the officials, say Gbaiwon has failed to be transparent on how donations are being spent and has not provided any accounting of the number of signatures collected so far.