Six schools, 2,015 students: what the state's list says about Catholic schooling in Lake Charles

If you want to understand private schooling in Southwest Louisiana, start with one fact from the state's own spreadsheet. On the Louisiana Department of Education's 2025-26 list of BESE-approved nonpublic schools, the 13 approved schools in Calcasieu, Jefferson Davis, Beauregard, Allen and Cameron parishes reported 3,291 K-12 students between them. The six Catholic schools of the Diocese of Lake Charles account for 2,015 of those. That is a little over six in ten.

No other single group comes close. It is why a funding conversation in Lake Charles so often turns into a conversation about the diocese, and why the shape of that school system matters as much as the size of the LA GATOR award.

A young diocese with an old school network

The Diocese of Lake Charles is newer than most people assume. It was created on January 29, 1980, from territory split off a larger neighboring diocese, and it covers the civil parishes of Allen, Beauregard, Calcasieu, Cameron and Jefferson Davis. Its cathedral is Immaculate Conception in downtown Lake Charles, which also gives its name to the cathedral school on Ryan Street.

The schools themselves are older than the diocese. On the state list, every one of the six carries a Brumfield v. Dodd nondiscrimination approval dated August 26, 1976, the same date that appears for many long-established Catholic schools across Louisiana. In other words, these campuses were taking part in state programs before the Lake Charles diocese existed.

Five feeders and a funnel

Here is how the six line up on the 2025-26 list, by K-12 enrollment:

Our Lady Queen of Heaven School, Lake Charles: pre-K through 8, 577 K-12 students and 66 in pre-K.
St. Louis Catholic High School, Lake Charles: grades 9-12, 486 students.
Immaculate Conception Cathedral School, Lake Charles: pre-K through 8, 335 K-12 students and 36 in pre-K.
St. Margaret Catholic School, Lake Charles: pre-K through 8, 247 K-12 students and 67 in pre-K.
Our Lady's School, Sulphur: pre-K through 8, 204 K-12 students and 47 in pre-K.
Our Lady Immaculate Catholic School, Jennings: pre-K through 8, 166 K-12 students and 41 in pre-K.

Add up the five elementary schools and you get 1,529 students across kindergarten through grade 8. Spread evenly, that is about 170 children per grade. St. Louis, with 486 students over four grades, averages a little over 120 per grade. The comparison is rough, since it uses a single year and St. Louis also admits students from public and other private schools, but the pattern is plain. The elementary schools are a pipeline, and the high school is the place it leads.

That structure is different from the large pre-K-through-12 campuses common in other parts of Louisiana. In this diocese nearly every Catholic family faces a deliberate change of school at grade 9. Our ninth-grade guide walks through the timing.

What the federal survey adds

The federal Private School Survey, run by the National Center for Education Statistics, fills in what the state list leaves out. In its 2023-24 round it counted 49.6 full-time-equivalent teachers at Our Lady Queen of Heaven, 29.3 at Immaculate Conception, 28.3 at St. Margaret, 18.8 at Our Lady's and 14.9 at Our Lady Immaculate. St. Louis did not answer the 2023-24 round; in 2021-22 it reported 36.3 teachers. All six list membership in the National Catholic Educational Association.

Those staffing figures translate into ratios between roughly 9 and 15 students per teacher, with St. Margaret at the low end and St. Louis at the high end, which is typical of a high school with larger lecture-style classes. Treat them as a snapshot. The survey and the state list were collected in different years, so a small mismatch between them means timing, not error.

The storms, briefly

No account of Lake Charles schools since 2020 can skip the hurricanes. Hurricane Laura came ashore near Cameron on August 27, 2020, and Hurricane Delta made landfall near Creole six weeks later. The diocese reported damage to churches and schools, and in April 2021 KPLC reported that it had chosen a slate of architects to rebuild schools and churches destroyed by Laura. Families touring a campus today may find buildings that are newer than the school's history. For LA GATOR none of that changes anything: what counts is that all six schools are on the current BESE-approved list.

What this means for the account

LA GATOR pays the same amount whatever the grade: $5,243 for most students, $7,626 for households at or below 250% of the federal poverty level, and up to $15,253 for a student with a disability under IDEA. Elementary tuition at a parish school, especially at the registered-parishioner rate, is generally lower than high school tuition. So the share of a Catholic family's bill that the account covers tends to be highest in the K-8 years and to fall at grade 9.

Two other features of the diocesan schools work in a family's favor. All six were on the state's 2024-25 Tuition Donation Credit list, so a qualifying household can add an STO scholarship on top of the account, up to the school's actual tuition and fees. And because the account belongs to the student, it moves from any of the five elementary schools to St. Louis, or to any other approved high school, without a new application, as long as you renew in the spring window.

Three things to do this fall

Ask your parish school for both the parishioner and non-parishioner rates in writing, along with the fee schedule.
If your child is in grade 6 or above, ask St. Louis for its tuition and fees now, so the grade-9 gap is a number rather than a surprise.
Put the spring LA GATOR window on your calendar for every remaining year, not only the next one.

The full list, with enrollment, staffing and STO status for each school, is on our Catholic schools page, and the stacking guide explains the order in which the account, an STO award and parish aid apply.

Sources

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