A Happy Haloween 2016

(Originally published on the Delgado Free Dolphin online news blog)

By: Leonard “Lenny” Vasbinder, October 31, 2016

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Prologue: I actually wrote this as a class assignment for Writing For The Media I, during the Fall 2016 semester. It may be my first Pulitzer-eligible story! My professor, Susan Hague, gave the class a break and said we could write a scary story for Halloween, still adhering to AP Style writing but having the latitude to make it fiction. Of course, my story ended up being mostly nonfiction.

A Scary Night In New Orleans

It was a dark, foggy night in late October 1980.  A group of recent high school graduates from Bonnabel High School decided to visit the “Old Haunted House in Lakeview,” near West End Blvd. and Harrison Ave.  They wanted to show a visitor what a real-life haunted house looked like.

It was a 3-story Gothic-looking, gray stone building — almost castle-like.  It looked like something out of any classic horror movie.  Legend has it that two old crazy ladies lived in the house.

The kids piled into their cars in the Kenner-Metairie area and drove to the “Old Haunted House in Lakeview”.  As they pulled up on the street, they noticed all the streetlights were out, making things even eerier.  The full moon barely lit up the area through the dense fog.

They got out of their cars and the teen girls were hugging the teen boys tightly — part of their plan.  They moved around from the front of the house to the side, sticking close together.  The big, corner house took up most of the block on two sides.

One of the teen boys, Donald, decided to jump the fence as the girls and the other boys tried to persuade him not to do it.  It didn’t work and he disappeared over the fence, into the darkness.  A neighborhood dog started barking, scaring everyone.  Nobody saw Donald again that night.

The teens continued looking around and jokingly scaring each other.  Every once in a while, one of them would holler out for Donald but he never replied.  They figured he was just going to scare them at some point.

Then, one of the girls saw a candle in a third-floor window and she let out a scream.  The other girls and boys looked up and they could see the slightly lit up face of one of the old crazy ladies, looking down at them.  The old crazy lady opened the window, let out a bloodcurdling scream and threw some kind of glitter-like powder down at them — screaming that they were all cursed for the rest of their lives.

Their worst nightmare was about to come true as things started spinning like they were stuck in a time portal or a black hole.  They all passed out.

They woke up 36 years later, on the morning of Nov. 9, 2016, not knowing that Donald somehow escaped that night, went on to become a billionaire, and won the presidency in November 2016.  They also saw that his beaten-down opponent was actually the crazy old lady that put a curse on them in 1980.

Delgado Community College Tuition Up Over 100 Percent In The Past Seven Years

By: Leonard Lenny Vasbinder

Republished October 9, 2018 — originally published in The Delgado Dolphin online newspaper, Spring 2017. The Dolphin has now been canceled by Delgado Community College as part of their eliminating the entire Mass Comm program.

Delgado Community College in New Orleans, with several campuses in the surrounding metropolitan area, has seen a substantial spike in tuition in the past seven years.

After having stable tuition fees and costs from Fall 2005 through Spring 2010, the Fall 2010 semester saw the first increase from $768 ($979 with fees) to $944 ($1,195 with fees), an increase of nearly 23 percent for tuition and just over 22 percent for tuition and fees. The Spring 2012 semester maintained the same pricing.

Fall 2011 saw another increase of about 12 percent. Fall 2012, 2013, and 2014 saw similar double-digit increases each year with a slight slowdown for Fall 2015 of only 10 percent tuition and 6.4 percent tuition and fees increase. Fall 2016 did not increase, nor did Spring 2017.

The combined increase is 109 percent for tuition from Fall 2009 to Fall 2015 and 99.7 percent for tuition and fees during the same period, more than double what it cost just eight years ago.

These increases were authorized by the state legislature in 2010 to allow universities to offset the cuts from their state funding.

Recent reports show a drop in enrollment of around 7 percent from 2009 to 2015, with another 5 percent drop from 2015 to 2016. Delgado still has the second highest enrollment in higher education in Louisiana.

Delgado did not reply with a comment in time for the original publication.