original hand-drawn logo

LAPCAE traces its founding to August 26, 1975, when representatives of the Louisiana Association of Public School Adult Education (LAPSAE) and the Adult Education Section of the Louisiana Education Association chartered a new, unified association — the Louisiana Association for Public Continuing and Adult Education — at the Ramada Inn Motel in Alexandria, under LAPSAE President Walter Wright and Adult Education Section President Charles Loeb. LAPSAE held its own final conference that November in Bossier City, voting to dissolve and fold its treasury into the new organization. A statewide election that December made Robert M. Arceneaux, an adult education supervisor with the Lafayette Parish School Board, LAPCAE’s founding President, with Stewart Collins as President-Elect and Jerry Kaufman as Secretary-Treasurer, effective January 1, 1976.

The following June, LAPCAE held its 1st Annual Convention on the University of Southwestern Louisiana campus in Lafayette — the first of what became an unbroken, fifty-year tradition of annual gatherings. Less than a year later, in March 1977, the board voted to adjust the association’s name to the Louisiana Association for Public Community and Adult Education, bringing it in line with the Louisiana Department of Education’s own Bureau of Adult and Community Education. The acronym — LAPCAE — has stayed the same since the day it was chartered.

Over the decades that followed, LAPCAE grew from a state professional association into one capable of anchoring a national stage. It hosted the Commission on Adult Basic Education’s (COABE) national conference in New Orleans in 1993, again in 2013, and a third time in 2019 — each occasion standing in for LAPCAE’s own state convention that year. Convention themes tracked the field’s evolution, too: 1997 and 1998 turned the spotlight toward “workforce,” years before the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) made that alignment the organizing framework for adult education nationally.

The association’s more recent history reflects the same throughline of adaptability. When the COVID-19 pandemic made an in-person gathering impossible, LAPCAE moved its conference online rather than skip a year, meeting virtually again in 2021 under the theme “Stronger. Better. Survivors.” A planned 50th-anniversary convention in 2025 was postponed; LAPCAE marks that milestone in 2026 instead, under the theme “From Legacy to Leadership,” November 1–3 in Baton Rouge.

Fifty years on, the organization’s throughline hasn’t changed: a volunteer-led, statewide network for the people teaching adult basic education, high school equivalency, English language, and workforce-readiness classes across Louisiana.