Lessons from NOLA: Ailing Mississippi district should be wary of charter schools
"Don’t allow a financial storm to be your Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that led to dismantling the public school system in New Orleans."
CKSON, Miss. — From the outside, Forest Hill High School is a picture of strength and prosperity. A far cry from the one-room schoolhouse that sat at its current location in the 1850s, the contemporary academic and athletic facility sits on more than 47 acres of land, and seems to have all the physical attributes parents and teenagers could want.
Inside, it’s a different story. Forest Hill High is failing students. The public school built in 1989 received an “F” rating on its most recent state evaluation, as did almost a third of the schools in the Jackson school district.
No one understands this struggle better than Sharolyn Miller,chief financial officer for Jackson Public Schools. All summer, Miller struggled to fix a failing HVAC system the high school couldn’t afford — just as JPS found $600,000 for two new charter schools in the city.
“The downside is that half a million dollars that I could have put into HVAC systems in Forest Hill High School is gone,” Miller told me when I visited Jackson to learn more about why some dissatisfied public school parents and state legislators are pushing charter alternatives.
Since that time, the district has run into a slew of new troubles, which could result in the removal of Jackson School Superintendent Cedrick Gray after the school board meets on Friday. Charter schools competing for funding from a skimpy budget may be the least of his worries.
JPS has problems: 21 failing schools, a 67.7 percent graduation rate and an average composite ACT score of 15.6. On Friday, JPS will hold a school board meeting to evaluate Gray — who has not publicly responded to the calls for his resignation that followed the release of the district’s grades — and discuss the administration’s improvement plan. Undoubtedly, there will calls for more charter schools in Mississippi, viewed by many as an alternative to a system that will always fail families.
Gray and JPS are under fire at a time when some are already pushing for an expansion of charter schools — public schools that are Lessons from NOLA: Ailing Mississippi district should be wary of charter schools - The Hechinger Report:
