When the Two-Year College English Association of Mississippi held its annual conference on Sept. 21, Holmes Community College Goodman campus professors Jessica Brown, William C. Moorer and LaShonda Levy accepted leadership positions with the association. Brown and Moorer will serve two-year terms as co-chairs, and Levy will serve as Holmes’ representative on the executive committee.
TYCAM, a Two-Year College English Association-Southeast affiliate and part of the National Council of Teachers of English, provides resources to help further English teaching methods and practices in Mississippi’s community colleges. Presidents of those schools and the Mississippi State Board of Community and Junior colleges support it.
In their positions as co-chairs, Brown and Moorer will have the responsibility of planning and running TYCAM conferences and textbook publications. Levy will serve as the liaison between Holmes’ English faculty and TYCAM, and will also work with the executive committee to run the annual conferences.
Brown, Moorer and Levy teach composition, as well as developmental English and reading at Holmes. Brown, co-chair of the college’s English department, also teaches American literature. Moorer, who also teaches creative writing, is the director of the Goodman Writing Center and has served as Holmes’ TYCAM representative on the executive committee since 2012. Besides composition and developmental English and reading, Levy teaches African American literature.
For more information, visit holmescc.edu.
Four State Universities to Share $20 Million NSF Grant
Jackson State University announced on Sept. 19 that it will be partnering with Mississippi State University, the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Mississippi to establish the Center for Emergent Molecular Optoelectronics, an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional materials research program. MSU will serve as the project’s administrative lead, and USM will serve as the science lead.
The center will focus on collaborative research in optoelectronics, energy and biotechnology, especially in relation to the study of organic semiconductors, or solid, nonmetallic materials that exhibit electrical conductivity.
On a sticky and still June weekday, kids trickled into the cool, air-conditioned room on the second floor of New Horizon Church that smelled like homemade enchiladas. Some had swimsuits on under their clothes and carried backpacks with towels. It was a pool day.
To an outsider, this could be any community summer camp or school program—but it is much more. NFusion Metro is a community-based mental-health-care program primarily for ages 11 to 18 years old in the Jackson area.
During the summer, counselors are doing themed weeks for their lesson time. On June 8, the “Around the World” theme was focused on Mexico. NFusion staff made enchiladas and virgin margaritas for the students to supplement their bag lunches and engage them in the lesson. After lunch the students went to swim at the community pool and then came back for group or individual therapy.
NFusion Metro differs from regular therapy for youth largely due to the environment. No part of the program’s rented space on the second floor of New Horizon Church feels like a doctor’s office. A long, open hallway connects staff offices. Counselors, whom the organization calls clinical care coordinators, share office space, and printed-out selfies adorn their doors.
“What we’re trying to do is have a non-traditional approach to therapy,” NFusion Metro Program Director Sabrina Vance told the Jackson Free Press in February. “There is such a stigma regarding mental health, so the reason why we’re not at the community mental-health center is because this age we work with—that population—they don’t want anyone to know that they’re receiving services. …
“We’re trying to provide a stigma-free environment, and that’s why we’re here at New Horizon Church.”
The advantage of a program like NFusion Metro, Shakena Lee-Bowie, one of the counselors at NFusion Metro says, is that she can do non-traditional therapy. Vance said some young people come to the program through referrals from Hinds Behavioral Health Services or Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center. Other times, families find the program through word-of-mouth or another doctor’s referral.
‘It Caught Me Off Guard’
Evandia Woods remembers sitting in the room with her son, Von’Tavius, during a regular doctor checkup and was stunned to hear his affirmative answers to questions about thinking of harming himself.
“It caught me off guard,” Woods told the Jackson Free Press in February. “I was thankful because I had no idea. … (He) went day-by-day just happy and doing things like he normally (would), so I had no idea.”
The doctor referred her son to NFusion Metro, and Woods has seen dramatic changes in his behavior and their relationship since then. She said her son was not a big socializer before starting the program, but now that he has been in it for more than a year, he looks forward to interacting with his peers there.
“He comes every day that he can,” Woods said. “It was real friendly and open; they made us feel like we were welcome.”
When a family signs up to be a part of the system of care, the child, guardian, and counselor sit at the table and decide on what boundaries and care are necessary. Youth get individual and group therapy sessions as a part of the program, but they also have access to their counselor more directly. NFusion accepts all insurance, including Medicaid, and the program currently runs through a federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration grant.
Parents and guardians get plugged into their child’s mental health care at NFusion, too. The program hosts nights specifically for parents to help break down the stigma of mental illness and bridge communication gaps.
At Their Level
Nadia Snyder has struggled with attention-deficit hyperactive disorder and got in trouble for acting out in school during middle school. She went to Hinds Behavioral Health for services, but at some point, her health-care coverage cut out, and she fell into a gap during middle school. When she was referred to NFusion Metro, she was nervous.
“I don’t know these people. How can I relate to these people?” she recalls thinking when she first started.
Bowie, Snyder’s care coordinator, agreed that Snyder should stick with it. She had a busy senior year. She was working two jobs, participated in Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and was expected to help at home as the only child still living there. She came to the program when she could. Eventually, Snyder took a break from working and was able to start coming to group more.
“It helps me getting along with people because I’m really not a people person,” Snyder told JFP.
Snyder, who is 18 and recently graduated from Forest Hill High School, says NFusion Metro is different than other therapies she has gone through. She can text Bowie and keep her updated on how she is doing at school or work.
“Because we do nontraditional therapy, she will text me about issues that she has … and she’ll tell me how she handled them in a positive way instead of snapping off or some of the old behaviors,” Bowie said. “So she’ll text me and say, ‘This is how I corrected it or chose to ignore it.'”
The program has eased tensions in Snyder and her mother’s relationship, Snyder said, and she helps out a lot more at home. Bowie attended Snyder’s graduation from Forest Hill High School, and Snyder plans to attend a local junior college. In the meantime, she can still come to group and individual sessions at NFusion Metro because the program can serve youth up to 26 years old.
Vance is focused on making the program sustainable in the coming months, so it can continue after 2020 when the grant funds run out. Currently, the program is capped at 30 students a day, with a maximum of 10 students per counselor. This, of course, limits the reach of a community-based system of care. Vance said her goal is to create Rankin and Madison County NFusion Metro programs.
There are six SAMSHA-funded system-of-care programs similar to NFusion Metro statewide, including ones in Oxford, Southaven and Columbus.
JACKSON — Kids and teens who are 18 years old or younger can participate in Jackson Public Schools’ summer feeding program, which begins on Monday, June 4. The district uses federal funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pay for lunches served in Jackson at 12 different sites around the city.
On Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., students can go to one of the 12 locations to receive a free lunch from June 4 through July 13. The program is only closed for July 4.
Mary Hill, executive director of food service at JPS, said this is the 27th year in a row that the program has operated in the city. She said the goal is to not stop the stream of meals that students receive at school. The district is 100 percent on free-and-reduced lunch, meaning students eat free at school throughout the school year.
“I’ve been told that there are students that really rely on the program that we have,” Hill told the Jackson Free Press.
No transportation is provided to the 12 sites (listed below), but the only requirement for a student to eat is to be between the ages of 0 and 18 years old. Hill said the district projects it will serve about 4,500 meals a day this summer. She said groups from vacation Bible school or summer enrichment programs often participate. JPS will be reimbursed for every meal they serve.
The Mississippi Department of Education held a lottery for 90 unused vouchers in the current school year as the Legislature could debate this afternoon whether to expand the program beyond special-education students to all children in the state.
The ESA program currently awards vouchers to children with special needs who have had an individualized education program from a public school in the past five years. The program allows them to leave public school and use the voucher on services elsewhere, including at a private school.
MDE accepts applications in the summer before the school year begins, and in 2017, the department awarded 435 ESA vouchers worth $6,494 each (almost $3 million in state funds). Participants in the program submit requests for reimbursements on a quarterly basis. As of January 2018, families had used ESAs at 88 private schools around the state, a list from MDE shows.
The ESA voucher program is on a rolling admission basis, and 90 families who had received an ESA by February still had not asked MDE for reimbursement. The department announced a lottery for the remaining vouchers on Friday, Feb. 2, which closed on Tuesday, Feb. 6. The ESA program had more applicants than slots in 2017, so 367 applicants in the pool were eligible for those 90 slots. MDE will send letters to the 90 families on Friday, Feb. 9.
Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves supports expanding the ESA voucher program.
“Senate Bill 2623, expanding eligibility for the state’s successful ESA program, could have more impact on long-term economic progress than any other bill debated in the Legislature,” he said in a press statement.
MDE has not used the nearly $3 million appropriated to the program in past years.
Sen. Gray Tollison, R-Oxford, will have to bring out his voucher-expansion bill today in the Senate in order for it to stay alive. Senate Bill 2623 would ensure that the program prioritizes special-education students and low-income students before opening up to all other public-school students.
If MDE receives applications after Feb. 6, they will go into the 2018-2019 school year application pool. Participants in the program are currently allowed to roll over into next year and continue receiving the voucher, however, limiting the number of open slots.
Email state reporter Arielle Dreher at arielle@jacksonfreepress.com and follow her on Twitter @arielle_amara for live updates from the Capitol.
JACKSON FREE PRESS — Jackson Public Schools can start clearing accreditation standard violations as early as January. William Merritt, the executive director of school improvement, told the school board at its last December meeting that the board needs to get the new JPS corrective action plan to the Commission on School Accreditation by Jan. 16, 2018.
The next JPS board meeting is scheduled for Jan. 9, and the JPS Board of Trustees is expected to pass the district’s new corrective action plan at that meeting. On Dec. 19, the board had a work session where district administrators answered board members’ questions about the CAP. The Mississippi Department of Education found JPS to be out of compliance with 24 accreditation standards in the fall.
“We are of course still working with a sense of urgency in making sure that we correct all deficiencies that exist,” Merritt told the board on Dec. 19. “We are excited as we prepare to clear some standards and we will begin that process in January.”
Previously, JPS administrators believed they could not clear accreditation standards until after the Mississippi Board of Education had approved the district’s new CAP in February, but now JPS will be able to call MDE staff out to the district at the start of the year to begin clearing standards. Merritt said the district is prepared to clear several standards including the annual financial audit, dropout prevention plans, ensuring enough instructional time for students, professional development, child nutrition and safety.
“There’s continuous work that goes into that, and again we feel confident that we’re moving in the right direction with those standards and will be able to address those in short order when we return,” Interim Superintendent Freddrick Murray told the board on Dec. 19.
Other standards will be tougher to tackle, Merritt told the board, including having enough licensed teaching staff, repairing aging infrastructure and having an instructional management system.
After the Commission on School Accreditation and the Mississippi Board of Education approve the new JPS CAP, the district will have until July 31, 2018, to clear remaining accreditation violations.
Email state education reporter Arielle Dreher at arielle@jacksonfreepress.com.
JACKSON FREE PRESS — Otibehia Allen’s days in the Mississippi Delta start and end with her five children—three boys and two girls. She feeds them. Clothes them. Their well-being rests on her shoulders. She does it all on her own.
It is hard for her to put into words what it is like to raise five children. It is even harder to discuss her fight for them.
“My greatest hope for my children is that they see I’m trying to have a better future,” Allen said last summer, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m trying.”
Allen lives in Jonestown, Miss., which sits in Coahoma County with a poverty level of 38 percent. Mississippi’s three-year average poverty is 20.8 percent, which makes it the state with the highest poverty rate. In 2017, the state’s population was 2,892,894; of those, 602,768 lived below the poverty threshold of $24,340 for a family of four.
The U.S. Census Bureau shows that poverty in Coahoma, 18 miles northeast of Clarksdale, is far above the national average of 12.7 percent. Even the poverty rate in the state’s capital city, Jackson, is more than twice the national average at 30.7 percent.
Mississippi Delta counties—places where African Americans were first enslaved, then became poorly paid workers and sharecroppers—average a poverty level of 30 percent, and services and opportunities are even farther apart than in a city like Jackson—and food and shopping desserts can span the width of entire counties.
Coahoma County’s average income per capita is just over $15,000.
Allen’s story of generational poverty—inherited because it is so difficult to break due to long-time structural inequities embedded back when rich planters made Mississippi the wealthiest state in the union—is common in Delta counties. Her story and many others are what brought activist and Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman back to the Delta in July 2015 along with journalists she invited to hear the stories of Delta residents like Allen.
As tears streamed down her face, Otibehia Allen faced Edelman in the packed New Baptist Church in Jonestown on July 12, 2017, naming the stakes that she and her children face in the nation’s poorest state.
“Do you want me to die?” she asked the congregation.
‘Against the Law’?
People can miss Jonestown, Allen’s current hometown, in a blink. The town’s old roads connect even older houses and trailers. The businesses in town are limited. There is a post office, police department, a few local churches and an oil mill—which grinds oil out of seeds such as cottonseeds or peanuts.
It is a place that looks like both history and people passed it by—which arguably they did—and is similar to other Delta towns trying to get a more solid point on a map since their early 18th-century days of helping drive the state’s, region’s, and even nation’s economic engines through cotton production and the use of free labor.
Fortunes in the Delta have shifted dramatically after many of the early white planter families sold out and moved on, leaving behind many poorer residents, especially African Americans, with few opportunities, a dearth of good jobs and poor educational quality.
In fact, civil-rights veteran Bob Moses, who helped launch Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964 to help blacks get the right to vote here, calls the post-integration public schooling available to many African Americans a “sharecropper education.” And that isn’t a compliment; it’s a symptom of the cyclical poverty that the Delta represents in full relief.
Research by the Pew Research Center found that a white household in Mississippi can easily have a net worth 13 times higher than those of black families. PBS reported in 2016 that the average median income for a black family in the Delta town of Cleveland is less than half the average for a white family.
This wealth disparity plays out in everyday lives and in inter-connecting ways. Allen cannot afford a car, so she pays $10 a day or as much as $20 to commute to and from work. Her job is 15 miles from Jonestown, a familiar situation for many people in the Mississippi Delta.
“That $50 I could use it if my son needs a new pair of shoes or we need some soap and tissue or I need to go to the washer; that’s what makes it difficult,” Allen said at the church.
Jonestown does not have a medical facility, clinic or grocery store.
“I can’t get to where I need to go,” Allen said. “Everything I need is in another city. I have to drive to get there.”
Allen said the simple task of building a Dollar General in her town would change its citizens’ current lives tremendously.
“I could just walk to the store and get what I need,” Allen said. That’s a concept many people do not have to consider in their everyday lives, she added.
The town’s limited resources are a constant problem. “I have to worry about money. That wasn’t something that I was fortunate enough to have, so you shouldn’t penalize somebody else because they don’t have what you have. That’s discrimination. Isn’t that against the law?”
Robert Kennedy’s ‘War’
Not enough has changed since Edelman helped get then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to come to Mississippi 50 years ago to face first-hand the poverty levels of the Delta and those in the worst condition: children. Then 27, she was an NAACP attorney based in Jackson and testified in Washington, D.C., to the Senate subcommittee on poverty, which included Kennedy. The help was not getting to the people who needed it more; more than 50,000 people were going hungry in the Delta, University of Mississippi journalism professor Ellen Meacham, the author of “Delta Epiphany: RFK in Mississippi,” wrote in The New York Times last April.
Kennedy, the former U.S. attorney general, then visited three Delta counties in Mississippi in 1967 after her testimony to see for himself how well the federal “War on Poverty” was working in one of the nation’s poorest states. With a poverty level of nearly 70 percent, the Delta was in crisis when he arrived. He met with many adults and children in the Delta, and came away believing not that government could not do everything itself, but that the best anti-poverty efforts engage and are informed by people living in poverty themselves.
“Instead, he envisioned businesses and charities working with government to provide jobs and strengthen poor neighborhoods in rural areas,” Meacham wrote. Kennedy wanted collaboration combined with data that prove that the programs work—moving them far beyond mere hand-outs to becoming systemic approaches that can interrupt the cycle of poverty and what it breeds, such as crime, neighborhood decay and hopelessness.
Meacham mentioned several programs that used a systemic, data-driven model, starting with the early Bedford-Stuyvesant Renewal and Rehabilitation Corp., which Kennedy had helped create in New York in 1966.
The Delta Health Alliance was one result—working with private and public partners in 18 Delta counties to improve health-care options. Edelman’s Children’s Defend Fund is another bright example—a data-driven collaborative effort to interrupt the cycles for children in poverty.
Still, the Ole Miss professor wrote, in the three poverty-stricken counties Kennedy visited, poverty rates for minor children are around 50 percent now. Not enough consistent effort has yet broken the cycle for too many families, and the State of Mississippi, as well as the newest presidential administration, are weakening the safety net that can help create bootstraps for poor Mississippians to pull on.
Notably, the programs that are working, Meacham writes, use the model that Kennedy and Edelman embraced then.
“If he returned to the Delta today, Mr. Kennedy would cheer the advances but be dismayed at how hard advocates must fight to maintain that limited progress,” Meacham wrote of Kennedy.
‘We Have No Jobs’
When Marian Wright—she wasn’t married, yet—first arrived in Jackson, Miss., during spring break 1961, local NAACP leader Medgar Evers picked her up at the airport. She had dinner with Evers and his wife, Myrlie, and their children. He then drove her 95 miles north to Greenwood. She didn’t know anyone in the Delta, and there were only four black lawyers in the entire state.
But she had a job to do then, and now. “Movements are built from the ground up,” Edelman said in July. “We are the leaders.”
In Edelman’s return to the Mississippi Delta this time, she wanted to once again bring the conversation of both its progress and the long road still ahead to the forefront as Kennedy had helped do then. Her main fear, she said, was the Trump administration’s cuts to social services, which are too often framed as a way to clean up waste by people too lazy to do for themselves.
“America is going to miss the boat,” Edelman said in July about children’s education and health.
Poverty in the Delta is not as high as it was during the 1967 Delta Poverty Tour, but more hard work is needed, Edelman emphasized, and with programs that bring systemic change over time.
“We are still working hard to improve the economy for socially, economically disadvantaged,” Mississippi Delta Council Executive Director Don Green said in July. “We have been working very hard to improve life here in the Delta.”
Green said Coahoma County had a poverty level of about 50 percent as far back as 1989. It now sits at 41.8 percent, a slight decrease.
“We’ve reached that hard spot,” Green said. “We’re trying to get it (poverty level) lower than that 35 percent.”
Green said some of the current programs are bringing progress, but the struggle will be reducing the current poverty level of each of the counties, which range from about 30 to 35 percent.
Glendora, a small village in Tallahatchie County, is home to the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center.
“On these grounds, here is where he (Emmett Till) was initially beaten and almost killed,” Glendora’s mayor of 35 years, Johnny B. Thomas, said in July. “So we call it ‘Ground Zero.'”
White adult men murdered the 14-year-old Till 18 miles away in Money, Miss., but Thomas said the premeditation took place in Glendora, where one of the boy’s killers, J.W. Milam, lived.
“It’s here in Glendora where we say that we are the beginning to modern civil rights,” Thomas said.
“Our museum is the beginning of the healing,” he added.
The historical draw of the town does not hide the financial burden of its residents. More than 40 percent of the 161 residents in Glendora live below the poverty level. Thomas says the root problem is jobs for residents. The town of Glendora employees offer only four part-time jobs, the only jobs in town, he said.
“We have no jobs,” Thomas said. “The job here are four hours round-trip.”
The main job prospects for Glendora people are either in Washington County at a catfish factory or in a casino in Tunica. Both trips are one to two hours away.
Thomas said the town no longer has the grass and agricultural stability to grow cotton, a job he once had.
“We are 99.99 percent low-wealth,” Thomas said. “We won’t say ‘impoverished’ anymore because we have hope in all of the young folks we’ve got here.”
In the town, the grass is high and unkempt with a limited number of small houses surrounding the museum. Thomas said someday Glendora will be where it needs to be, though.
“This community should be a picture,” Thomas said.
“We will make it a picture.”
Hope and Dissatisfaction
Access is a major problem in the Delta counties, whether it is to health care or a convenience store or opportunity.
Glendora residents once went as far as an hour away for toilet paper and other basic necessities, but the town now has a grocery store.
“We have been without,” Thomas said during the July Delta tour.
Amelioration of poverty in the Delta, and much of Mississippi, moves slowly. In September, the U.S. Census Bureau released new data showing that Mississippi holds the highest rate of income inequality and poverty in the country. It shows that more than 50 years after Kennedy’s initial tour here that upward of 20 percent of Mississippians still live in poverty. The towns of Glendora, Jonestown, Marks and most Delta counties have a poverty level of 35 to 40 percent, sometimes higher.
“We don’t just want to show it off,” Oleta Fitzgerald, the director of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Southern Regional Office, said in July. “We want to show that there’s still work to do 50 years after the Kennedy site visit.”
Access to quality health care is a primary block to progress—especially for poor children in the wake of the federal delay on continuing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which could expire in 2018. CHIP covers 9 million children in the U.S. whose parents do not qualify for Medicaid. In September, Congress failed to reauthorize CHIP, and the program has yet to be reconciled in Washington. More than 43 percent of Mississippi children rely on Medicaid, an analysis of census data from Georgetown University Center for Children and Families shows.
In the three Delta counties Edelman visited—Tallahatchie, Coahoma and Quitman—more than 55 percent of the children are on Medicaid or CHIP, the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families showed, based on U.S. Census data. Seventy-four percent of children in Quitman County are on Medicaid or CHIP.
“Ninety-five percent of all children today are now covered by either CHIP and Medicaid,” Edelman said in July.
Even if CHIP survives, Mississippi kids’ caretakers cannot always stay well enough to work and care for them well. Allen, for instance, does not qualify for Medicaid, but her children do. “If I get sick, then I can’t go to the doctor because I can’t pay for it,” Allen said.
Delta residents desperately hope these conditions will change. “We are already at the bottom. I don’t know how we can go any further,” Thomas said. “Hopefully, he (President Trump) will change the situation. I’m hopeful.”
They also want more people surrounding them to open their eyes and pay attention.
“I want people to know that there are small towns and other cities that need help,” Allen said. “I want everybody to reach out in any way that they can, even just by listening to the stories.”
The main thing, retired Mississippi Rep. Robert Clark said, is to avoid complacency and use the dissatisfaction to demand change.
“If you look at the statistics, you will see where Mississippi, particularly the Delta, stands, and I am not satisfied,” Clark told journalists in July.
“We’ve got to look at where we are and see where we go from here.”
Read and comment at jfp.ms/poverty.
Disrupting Poverty: 5 Points
A Disrupting Poverty Conference in Boston highlighted five points that not all may consider to help people achieve self-sufficiency:
“Poverty is more complicated than it used to be.” “A high school diploma, a resume and a reference,” isn’t enough, the San Francisco Foundation wrote about escaping poverty, and entry-level jobs pay much less than they did previously. “Getting out of poverty requires education beyond a high school degree, a job that pays a living wage, a supportive peer or family network, and enough assets to have a cushion to fall back on.”
“Poverty is ‘sticky.'” That is, poverty is often generational and passed down; children in poverty are likely to be adults in poverty. “Breaking poverty cycles takes time, persistence, dogged engagement, and relentless outreach. … It has to occur in the context of everything going on in our lives—safe and stable housing, individual and family well-being, higher education, competitive job skills, financial capability and a strong network of support to rely on.”
Needed: prep, tools for “high-demand, high stress jobs.” “[H]holding a job in today’s environment means a person needs to be able to multi-task, manage multiple priorities, and make many high-stakes choices throughout the day. It is virtually impossible for a family to get ahead in any one critical area if other areas are unstable.”
Brain science can help “executive function.” “The executive function capabilities allow us to multi-task, organize a set of steps, control our inhibitions, and keep the goal in mind, even under pressure. Under extreme and pervasive emotional stress, resulting from living in poverty and in violent communities, executive functions are compromised, and impulses are extremely difficult to control. It’s harder to calm down; dealing with authority feels threatening; maintaining confidence is challenging; and being resilient to make myriad decision necessary to hold jobs and keep families together feels impossible.” But modern brain scene shows that the brain’s “plasticity” can help build executive function “required to solve complex problems and set goals necessary to successfully manage their lives.”
Essential: “peer network and a supportive community” “Engaging with peers through productive and supportive community-led activities, such as social events, learning circles, support groups, and healthy activities, promotes healthy living, provides emotional support, builds trust, creates social cohesion, builds leaders, and encourages positive engagement in the community. Communities support individuals to stay on track with their goals, which is necessary component of moving out of poverty and achieving self-sufficiency.”
Read full post by the San Francisco Foundation at jfp.ms/poverty.
ANSWER to “Poverty: Causes and Effects”
Pat yourself on your back if you circled and drew Xs through every item on the list. In the complicated cycle of generational poverty, research shows that the causes of poverty is also an effect, and vice versa. It’s circular: This means that to interrupt the cycle of poverty, we need to tackle all spokes at once. Where do you fit, and what can you do to help? Please pledge an immediate action here or at jfp.ms/poverty.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A state takeover of the Jackson school district is back on the table, less than a month after Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant decided he wanted a more collaborative approach to its problems.
A Mississippi Department of Education panel on Wednesday decided to recommend to the state Board of Education that as many as three districts be folded into a new statewide achievement school district aimed at improving academic performance.
The panel recommended that Humphreys County and Noxubee County schools get top consideration when the board votes in December. But the panel recommended that the board secondarily consider Jackson. Like Humphreys and Noxubee counties, Jackson has been rated an F for two straight years by the state. Also like those two, more than half its schools are rated F.
“We need to provide the board options,” said state Superintendent Carey Wright. “We’re making recommendations, but they’re just that…”
On a sticky and still June weekday, kids trickled into the cool, air-conditioned room on the second floor of New Horizon Church that smelled like homemade enchiladas. Some had swimsuits on under their clothes and carried backpacks with towels. It was a pool day.
The Mississippi Department of Education held a lottery for 90 unused vouchers in the current school year as the Legislature could debate this afternoon whether to expand the program beyond special-education students to all children in the state.
