Dr. Lisa Karmacharya, executive director of the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board, writes that the board established by the Mississippi Legislature authorizes high-quality charter schools that expand opportunities for underserved students and increase access to good public schools.
Speech-language deficits are the most common childhood disability, affecting around one in 12 children. Without treatment, speech-language problems can lead to behavioral challenges, mental-health problems, difficulty reading and academic failure. The Magnolia Speech School is a nonprofit school established with a mission to help children with communication disorders develop their potential through spoken language and literacy. The program takes kids as young as 1 year old up to age 13.
In this Jackson Advocate-Mississippi Free Press collaboration, the BWC Project team has spent a year planning, reporting, hosting solution circles of Black women and doing deep historic research on, so far, three counties. Our big, hairy goal is to show why COVID-19 initially affected Black women in our state harder than any other group including even Black men.
Central Academy was one of Mississippi’s dozens of segregation academies that opened in the 1960s in anticipation of a final Supreme Court mandate, while many others were “founded in 1970” soon after the Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decision finally ended legal public-school segregation. They demanded and often got public funding even as they excluded Black children and openly taught racism to many of today’s prominent white Mississippians and decision-makers.
Noxubee County mothers and educators, many of them resilient Black women, are determined to make it work and find solutions that their students and families deserve. But that is a challenge now, just as it was before the pandemic hit, due to long-term disparities and historic and intentional inequities that made the effects of the pandemic especially acute for the Black women of the county and their families.
Through the partnership of the Mississippi Free Press and the Jackson Advocate, the (In)Equity and Resilience project is gathering and listening to Black women virtually from across Mississippi, creating a safe space for them to voice their stories of vulnerability, fear, injustice, pain and joy. We are also digging out the deep, historic causes of inequities they and their families face.
Jurassic Quest, billed as one of the largest and most realistic dinosaur exhibits in North America, is coming to the Jackson Convention Complex from Friday, Oct. 22, through Sunday, Oct. 24. The edutainment event features 100 life-size animatronic dinosaur models, dinosaur-themed rides, interactive science and art activities and informational shows from Jurassic Quest’s team of “dinosaur trainers” covering prehistoric life and fossils from around the country.
As a Black entrepreneur and the owner of Clarksdale’s Delta Blues Alley Café and founder of the Birthplace of American Music Festival (BAM Fest), I want to encourage you to patronize local businesses and uplift our culture. Dollars spent at Black-owned and small businesses instill our communities with pride and strengthen our families.
I was 15 years old the first time someone said Emmett Till’s name to me, and I’d hear it countless times over the ensuing years. I say his name now for myself, proving my English professors’ belief that Emmett Till’s blood cries out to us from the pen of Mississippians. I say it even though the governor and half the Legislature might say that it’s proof of the nefarious “critical race theory” infiltrating Mississippi schools.
Mississippi Journalism and Education Group is a a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization (EIN 85-1403937) for the state, devoted to going beyond partisanship and publishing solutions journalism for the Magnolia State and all of its people.
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The Mississippi Free Press is a project of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit journalism organization (EIN 85-1403937).
