Rising property insurance prices force a Louisiana school district to search for answers [The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.]

Dec. 4—With 32 schools, additional administrative and special-use buildings and the new Prairieville High School under construction, the Ascension Parish school system is a significant and expanding property owner in the fast-growing parish.

Louisiana's insurance crisis has hit the system and other public school districts as it has many homeowners in the state — with sharp increases in premiums and often for less coverage, school officials say.

Since 2019, the Ascension Parish School Board has paid twice as much money for half as much property insurance coverage, Ascension school officials said.

Property insurance premiums rose from $1.025 million for $100 million in coverage in 2019 to $2.3 million for $50 million in coverage this most recent year, said Chad Lynch, school system operations chief.

Officials with the Louisiana School Boards Association say what Ascension is experiencing is being felt throughout the state by public school districts, whose biggest costs are typically people first and then buildings and other infrastructure.

In each of the past two years, Tangipahoa Parish schools have experienced a 50% increase in property insurance premiums. St. Tammany Parish schools have seen a 38% increase in the past year. West Feliciana schools saw a 65% increase between 2020 and 2023, said Dannie Garrett III, an attorney and lobbyist for the association.

He said the problem is being exacerbated by virtually flat funding from the state, which has provided two increases in per-pupil spending over the past 15 years.

"So basically, school districts are left to meet this cost with their local tax dollars, and look, for some of them, that have the financial wherewithal to do that, they're able to. For others, they only have so much money available, so it is not just an Ascension thing. It's a Louisiana thing," Garrett said.

With the benefit of a large industrial base, Ascension schools are one of the better locally funded districts in Louisiana, but even school officials in Ascension have been forced to make choices in recent years to balance premium costs against insurance coverage.

The recent trend line, school administration officials say, has led the school system to replace its property and boiler and machinery insurance agent of record of about 30 years, Bourg Insurance of Donaldsonville, with another local firm, Hughes Insurance Services of Gonzales, ahead of the expected policy renewals in the spring.

Hughes Insurance, which under President Clint Cointment a few years ago also took over for parish government from the longtime agent, is offering risk modeling to more-precisely assess how much coverage the system needs.

Lynch told School Board members earlier this month that he and other staff were uncomfortable having to make those kinds of coverage-versus-cost decisions without more information and had been asking Bourg to provide more.

"And the hard part for staff, and I'm just speaking from staff, is that ... that decision on the front end that might save you $100,000 in premiums, it means something on the back end when there's a storm, and I don't know what it is," Lynch said. "It's like am I going to lose millions (of dollars) because I recommended a $100,000 savings to y'all. That's been our fear."

He explained to board members that the system has been grappling with the question for the past year or more, before current Superintendent Edith Walker took over this summer, and had reached out to Hughes Insurance, which already handles the school system's flood insurance, for possible solutions.

What school officials are after is the kind of analysis Hughes has provided to parish government the past two years, assessing risk — primarily from wind because flood insurance is a separate policy — based on the scale of a storm.

The school system had $716.4 million in insured property risk this year, according to school system papers, and is expecting that number to rise by around $100 million this coming year to account for the new Prairieville High, which is expected to open in the fall.

In March 2022, Hughes Insurance employed modeling that checked insurer recommendations and found a 1,000-year storm, which has a 0.1% chance of happening in any year and is an insurance benchmark, would inflict $30 million in damage on parish government buildings and other property assets.

The company used that figure as a baseline and then added coverage for the potential that parish government's two most expensive buildings, the new courthouse and administration buildings next to each other in Gonzales, on the chance they were both hit by the same tornado.

That pumped the coverage figure up to $50 million, or roughly the estimated damage of a 10,000-year storm, according to Hughes' risk model.

For the School Board, the shift toward Hughes didn't come without some public and behind-the-scenes discussions and a push by west bank School Board member Robyn Penn Delaney to put off a vote.

In the name of transparency, she said, she wanted to open up the agent-of-record designation to other companies through a request for proposals or qualifications.

Delaney argued that she and Bourg hadn't been given advance notice about the school system's concerns and about the proposed switch, though other members disputed this, and she contended the process wasn't fair.

Hughes Insurance and Bourg Insurance have ties to School Board members and both have worked with the system for years. Board member Scott Duplechein works for Hughes Insurance, while an immediate family member of board member John DeFrances works for Bourg.

The School Board doesn't pay the agents of record — the system has at least seven in all — but they earn a commission on the premium the school system pays. The commission last year on school property insurance was around $50,000, Lynch said.

According to School Board attorney Jeff Diez, the School Board isn't required to make such a public offering and never has done so in the past for the variety of lines of insurance coverage it holds and the agents associated with them.

But he recommended that the school system should start the practice for all lines of insurance if it also chose to do a request for proposals or qualifications for property insurance agent.

After pitches from Bourg and Hughes officials last week, the board sided with Hughes Insurance and made the pick without a request for proposals. Delaney was opposed; Duplechein and DeFrances abstained.

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