BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The East Baton Rouge Parish school system is poised to launch a new online school that caters to both struggling and advanced students. The board hopes to grab a share of the burgeoning virtual education marketplace in the capital city.
    
The Advocate reports the system will join dozens of other school districts in Louisiana that have launched their own schools to compete with for-profit, publicly funded online schools. It also will be a second go at online schooling for the state's second largest school district.
    
The two biggest competitors, Louisiana Connections Academy and Louisiana Virtual Charter School, opened in 2011 and have grown quickly, currently educating more than 4,000 students statewide, more than 250 of them from Baton Rouge.
    
The board will take up Superintendent Warren Drake's proposal Thursday.