Power issues are affecting students at Louisiana’s Southern University.
Capital B News reports that students at the Historically Black College or University (HBCU), based in Baton Rouge, LA, have faced power-related challenges for years. Cherie Allen, an 18-year-old first-year student, called her mother to discuss transferring away. She has missed a week of classes, making it difficult to keep up with her coursework, the outlet noted.
“It is terrible,” Allen told Capital B News. “I want to stay, but it feels hard to see how that makes sense. How are we expected to go to a school without power? Think about it.”
Continued power outages have been shown to hurt students’ academics and can also disrupt concentration, affect sleep, and lead to anxiety, the outlet reports.
Southern University said the power outages stem from aging electrical equipment and delayed maintenance. Repairs could now cost nearly $60 million, Chancellor John Pierre told Capital B News.
The university has routinely received less per-student state funding than the city’s predominantly white Louisiana State University. If Southern University had received the same amount of per-student funding between 1987 and 2020, it would have received an additional $1.12 billion, leaders of the Department of Education and Department of Agriculture noted in 2023.
“If you’re an institution and you have a small deferred maintenance budget, a transformer is not going to be on your top priority list when you got a dorm that has no AC, or you have a classroom that has no light, or a building that is full of mold,” Davante Lewis, a Louisiana public commissioner representing Southern’s region, explained, according to Capital B News.
Last year, the HBCU sought $19 million in state funding for infrastructure but instead received $6.6 million for unrelated priorities. The HBCU is now exploring public and private partnerships to build a sustainable grid.
“Community solutions, especially when it comes to power generation, is something to consider and look into. It is an all-hands-on-deck situation,” Frederick Bell, a community organizer with the Louisiana-based nonprofit Alliance for Affordable Energy, told Capital B News.
Southern University will be launching a 14-week campuswide electrical study to assess areas such as field verification, equipment nameplate capture, infrared thermography testing, and WBRZ Channel 2 reports.
It will also fund emergency repairs by redirecting $1.5 million in maintenance funds. It will specifically fund engineering and replacement designs for malfunctioning transformers and switches, per WBRZ.
A longstanding solution isn’t expected for another nine or 10 months when replacement equipment arrives, Chancellor Pierre said, per The Root.
“It’s being built,” Pierre told the outlet.