LaMont Cole has received high marks for his first year leading the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, with a score on his job evaluation last bested nearly two decades ago when Charlotte Placide was the superintendent.
โI was pleasantly surprised that all of them had so many nice things to say,โ Cole said of the school board afterward. โAnd the recommendations they made in terms of areas of improvement were all data-driven.โ
Cole, hired in August 2024, has had a busy 16 months on the job. Much of his first year was occupied by the development and implementation of a districtwide โrealignment planโ that brought changes to 28 Baton Rouge schools, closing nine of them, and affecting more than 10,000 students and about 1,400 district employees.
Overall on his job evaluation, Cole received a composite score of 3.6 on a 4-point scale for 2025. It is slightly better than the 3.56 score that Warren Drake received in fall 2019 for his final job evaluation as superintendent.
The last superintendent to better Coleโs mark was Placide in 2007, based on her second of five years as district superintendent. Placide earned a score of 3.8 out of 4.
Under the current grading scale, anything above a 3 โexceedsโ expectations. A score between 2 and 2.9 is considered โsatisfactory,โ while anything below a 2 is considered โunacceptable.โ In years past, a score between 1 and 1.9 was judged less harshly, as โneeds improvement.โ
The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board released Coleโs results Thursday at its regular monthly meeting.
Six board members present Thursdayย โ board members Mike Gaudet, Dadrius Lanus and Carla Powell-Lewis were absentย โย had good things to say about the leader.
Board member Emily Soulรฉ read aloud from her evaluation.
โSuperintendent Cole has shown he is willing to lead by example and do the hard things. He is a joy to work with,โ Soulรฉ said. โIโm grateful for the way he has engaged the community and changed the narrative of EBR public schools.โ
Cole came on the job after the tumultuous three-year tenure of Superintendent Sito Narcisse, during which six of the nine school board members were replaced by voters. A transportation crisis in fall 2023 particularly strained relations between the superintendent and the board.
A veteran educator, Cole was already versed in politics after serving for 9 years on the Metro Council. After becoming superintendent, Cole strove to forge strong relations with his new bosses. During his tenure, he and the board, with a couple of exceptions, have been aligned publicly and kept disputes private. Board meetings, which used to routinely run late into the evening, have been much swifter in the past 16 months.
โAs you know, we didnโt start out too well when most of us came onto the board, and itโs such a good feeling at this moment to feel like we are headed in a positive direction,โ said Board President Shashonnie Steward, who took office in 2023.
Board member Patrick Martin V commended Cole โfor a job well begun,โ but added a note of caution.
โWe still have a long way to go, which he is more aware of than any of the rest of us,โ Martin said.
The school system faces many challenges. Enrollment has steadily declined for years. And while school letter grades generally improved this past year, the school district still is home to many struggling schools. Those struggles are increasing thanks to new, harsher school accountability system that will likely lead many schools to post poorer results, particularly high schools.
Cole said he received his results on Thursday and was still processing them.
โI know we are not where we want to be, but I believe we are headed in the right direction,โ Cole told board members.
Cole is known for getting up early each day and regularly visiting schools. He doesnโt tend to get to the Central Office on South Foster Drive until late morning. He credited his leadership team for working hard with him, acknowledging that he can be demanding.
โI believe after 2:59 a.m., itโs OK to text early in the morning to say what we have to accomplish for the day,โ Cole revealed.
In releasing his own evaluation results, Cole stands in contrast to his immediate predecessor Narcisse, who broke with tradition and refused to release any information about the results of the three job evaluations he received during his tenure as superintendent.
One of those evaluations, for the year 2022, however, did become public the following June after Narcisse gave it to officials in Broward County, Florida, in his unsuccessful bid to become their superintendent. It showed Narcisse earning an overall composite score of 3.42 on a 4-point scale. Narcisse also shared the results for individual board members whose overall scores ranged from two members who gave him a perfect 4.0 score to one who gave him only a 2.09.
Coleโs evaluation process for this year is not over.
In addition to his $285,000 annual salary, Cole can earn as much as $68,400 more in incentive pay. He said the data is still being pulled together on the 12 performance targets outlined in his employment contract.
Each target met earns him $5,700. Examples included a 3% increase in percentage of students earning mastery and above on annual LEAP tests in math and English, and a decrease by five in the number of schools receiving "D" and "F" letter grades from the state.
