BATON ROUGE — The East Baton Rouge Parish School District has scheduled meetings over the next six weeks to discuss possibly merging schools as it has more space than is needed for its 40,000 students.

"The district currently has around 20,000 more seats than students, leading to under-enrolled schools, inefficient resource allocation and inequitable access to academic opportunities," the district said in announcing the meetings. "Realignment ensures that all students have access to high-quality learning environments."

Superintendent LaMont Cole said community meetings set March 12 at Magnolia Woods Elementary, March 27 at Capitol Elementary and April 10 at Broadmoor Elementary would go a long way in determining how to best serve students.

"We recognize that some schools may need to be reimagined, and others may benefit from joining forces to provide students with stronger academic and extracurricular opportunities," Cole said in a statement.

"Ultimately we have older buildings, we have schools that are failing, and so what we want to do is align our facility footprint, with our student population," Cole said in an interview with WBRZ.

Cole said this is the first phase of three, and every school district will be examined and schools will be evaluated on four criteria. "With a consolidation or an alignment effort like this we will see an opportunity to streamline the services we have so students have better access to better teachers and access to more resources," Cole said.

The review will assess the conditions of district buildings, enrollment figures, school performance, and the cost of operations. And then a decision will be made.

"A school would be upgraded or perhaps built a new one, or it could be closed", Cole said.

The district says that if a school is closed, students would transfer to one with stronger academic programs and better facilities. The district hopes to have a realignment plan ready at the end of this school year.