Emile “Sid” Edwards is the newly elected Mayor-President of East Baton Rouge Parish. Despite holding office for less than two months, his tenure already has issues associated with it.
In an interview with The Reveille, Edwards proposed moving library funds into the city parish’s general fund and would raise police salaries by 15 to 41 percent.
I find this proposal to be comical, considering that Edwards was both an educator and football coach before he took office.
As someone whose mom is a teacher, I cannot imagine how an educator could even consider defunding libraries, especially in Louisiana, where we are 32nd in the nation in terms of education.
This proposal is disappointing to me because I wanted to believe in Edwards. I thought he wasn’t like other politicians because he’d never held office before ascending to mayor-presidency, but I was wrong.
Baton Rouge needs change, but the mayor-president has prioritized the police over the people.
Prior to the election in December, I wasn’t excited about any of the candidates that had a chance of winning, and I considered voting for him.
However, this all changed when I went to a football game at my alma mater, where I saw people advertising to vote for him outside of the Memorial Stadium in Baton Rouge on Sept. 27, 2024. Once I saw this, I morally could not vote for him.
Using a high-school football game to advertise a political candidate is wrong. Catholic High School has done an impressive job in preventing politics from being interjected in their events, so it caught me off guard.
Not to mention besides the teachers, according to my own calculations, approximately 20% of the student body at CHS can legally vote in the first place.
I know that Edwards worked with Coach Dale Weiner as an assistant football coach at CHS, but despite this, I think using his influence and tenure to imply CHS’ support of him is morally unjustifiable. The school shouldn’t have been forced into a Catch-22 for his campaign.
Edwards’ advertising at the game made it seem like CHS supported him. This puts CHS in an all-lose scenario, either asking him to leave, causing CHS to outwardly oppose him or doing nothing, like what they did, which shows their support for him.
So I voted for Ted James; I wasn’t excited about it because he’s just a standard Louisiana machine Democrat. But at least he was neither Broome nor Edwards.
Unfortunately, James was out in the first round, and there was a run-off.
In the run-off between Broome and Edwards, I voted for Broome. I don’t regret this decision like I would’ve if I voted for Edwards, but I’m not happy that I had to choose between the lesser of two evils.
Despite all of this, I still had a dangling thread of optimism in my spool of pessimism that maybe Edwards could bring the necessary change to the city.
Obviously, what was happening wasn’t working, so maybe there needs to be a change. So, I was as optimistic as possible, especially with the embarrassment of the federal election.
But then I found out that Edwards wants to cut library funding.
As someone who grew up in Baton Rouge, I used my libraries a lot growing up. I sometimes found the library more comforting than my own home. When I needed to be away from home for a while, the library was there for me.
The library is where I practiced my writing. Many times while I was writing, I’d be tapped on the shoulder by a librarian, who told me the library was going to close and politely escorted me out. The library was almost perfectly halfway between school and my home, so it was a great spot to study and slowly tire myself out before getting home and crashing into my bed.
And to think some of those kind librarians may get laid off or their pay reduced because Coach Edwards wants to give a pay raise to the same people who tortured detainees in their Brave Cave.
Though this may have happened over a year ago, the Brave Cave was where Baton Rouge Police Department officers tortured and abused inmates to coerce a confession. It was named after the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination, or BRAVE, a street-crime unit.
As evidenced by this incident, the police have done nothing as of late to warrant any sort of pay increase, and giving them more money when the Brave Cave trials are still ongoing infuriates me.
The only reason I ended up voting for Broome in the run-off was because she closed the BRAVE cave and immediately went after the police officers responsible.
Coach Edwards, I’m not going to lie; I wanted to believe that you wouldn’t be like the rest of the Republicans in this state. Many of my former teachers whom I looked up to supported you and campaigned for you.
Yet, I still thought that even if I disagreed with some of your policies, you would still put Baton Rouge citizens first.
You, as a former educator, should know better than to make it harder for people to learn.
We have increased education since the pandemic, and we should be on an upward trajectory, but cutting library funding is not how we get better.
We need to fund the libraries and library programs more instead so we can no longer be a national embarrassment when it comes to education.
Andrew Sarhan is a mass communication freshman from Baton Rouge, La.
