“Our Children, My Top Priority!”

Betty Ward-Cooper, Monroe City School Board Member for District 5, announced that she would seek a second term in the upcoming election on Tuesday, November 8, 2022. Qualifying is next week—July 20, 21, and 22. She first ran to represent District 5 because she was very concerned about the lack of student achievement, lack of Board accountability and transparency, lack of salaries for our teachers and staff, and lack of stakeholder input. After winning the election on December 8, 2018, she hit the ground running as the lead advocate that the Board holds its committee and regular monthly board meetings at times more convenient for stakeholders to attend and have their voices heard. She advocated strongly to have all board meeting businesses be vetted via the proper board committee(s) as stipulated in board policy. Board member Betty Ward-Cooper is a graduate of ULM and is well-known and well-connected in the community. She is a career educator. Five years ago she retired after 43 years of consecutive teaching (8 years with the Ouachita Parish School System and 35 years with ULM). She was a faculty member in the university's College of Business and Social Sciences. A few highlights of her main accomplishments in her first term as Monroe City School Board Member include: as Chairwoman of the school board’s Curriculum Committee (CC), she was the lead advocate to hold the Superintendent accountable to improve student achievement, and she closely scrutinized and monitored the implementations of curriculum strategies and education mandates to ensure that progress was being realized; the CC also achieved board approval of the first early childhood-tier 1 Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum program that provided parents the opportunity to enroll their children as young as four-years-old to acquire language arts skills.