The Beauregard Parish School District will be hosting a series of “straight talk” sessions for students during the month of September.

Eddie Joslin, Beauregard Parish School Board child welfare and attendance supervisor, said that last school year he attended 175 alternate placement hearings. The student offenses that led to these hearings varied in severity.

“They were brought to me, sometimes with habitual knucklehead stuff. Sometimes they were very serious offenses that not only violate our parish school policy, but bleed over into the world of law enforcement.”

While interacting with these students, Joslin said he would ask them why they violated district policy, and sometimes laws.

He found that many students didn’t have a good grasp on the way their actions affect themselves or others due to a lack of communication and resources.

“They don’t have good answers, and it’s not because they are not good kids. They just don’t have the information they need in order to fight off the temptations that our world is putting in front of them.”

These sessions aim to correct that with “insight into what is on the other side of some of our students’ poor or dangerous choices,” he said.

The sessions will feature an extensive panel with counselors, law enforcement officers and representatives from the District Attorney’s Office.

Topics like vaping, social media threats, suicide prevention will be discussed through the lenses of discipline, mental health and judicial practices to give the students a full scope of understanding.

The sessions will be treated like field trips, so students must have a field trip form filled out by a parent to attend. To ensure that parents understand the content that will be discussed during the sessions, they will have an opportunity to attend parents-only sessions at the end of this month.

“We fully understand that the parents have the ultimate decision on what their child hears… If they think that this is something that their child can benefit from, that’s what we’re here for. If you think you want to handle this as a parent, absolutely, one hundred percent okay with us.

“If we have 10 kids there, we’ll talk to 10 kids. If the auditorium overflows, we’ll do it twice.”

He hopes that parents and the Beauregard School Board can work together to reduce juvenile delinquency among BPSB students.

“We’ve got to do something more than what we’re doing now.” “It is a tag-team effort to get our kiddos through their 12th grade year… we depend on parents, parents depend on us. It is a hand-in-hand, hand-in-glove situation.

There will be two parents-only meetings. The first will be on Tuesday, Aug. 29 at DeRidder High School and the second will be on Thursday, Aug. 1 at South Beauregard High School.

The student sessions begin Sept.  7 at DeRidder Junior High School and high school. On Sept. 19, the panel will travel to Merryville High School and Singer High School.

The last sessions will be at East Beauregard and South Beauregard high schools. Both will be held Sept. 28.