State Auditor Shad White said the Mississippi Department of Education limited school laptop purchases to two vendors, Apple and an Illinois vendor. State Superintendent Carey Wright denied it. Either way, now those limitations are no more.
Weeks into the fall semester, Mississippi schools have already identified at least 897 COVID-19 cases among students and teachers. By last Friday, schools had also ordered at least 6,532 others to also quarantine at home for two weeks due to exposure and possible infections.
For the first time in years, Brenda Pittman did not greet schoolchildren on Monday morning as they arrived for their first day back at West Marion Elementary School in Foxworth, Miss. The 49-year-old music teacher and resident of the small Marion County community died one week ago yesterday after a weeks-long battle with COVID-19. On Sunday, a day after her funeral, her husband, Charlie Pittman, also died of the novel coronavirus.
In a pandemic season of closed theaters, New Stage Theatre in Jackson redesigned and rescued its three-week summer day camp, albeit with fewer than half its usual number of participants.
Mississippi’s public schools “would be miles ahead of where we are now” in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic “had schools not been dreadfully underfunded,” The Parents’ Campaign Executive Director Nancy Loome says, days after the Legislature overrode the governor’s funding veto.
Gulfport High School sent about 100 students home today to quarantine “out of an abundance of caution” after a teacher developed coronavirus-like symptoms, Sandy East, the school’s public relations director, told the Mississippi Free Press.
It appears we will be in this era of flux for some time, and whether we are returning to campus classrooms or virtually online, we need to all put our thinking caps on and get ready for our cerebral journeys and cognitive explorations ahead.
Ki Harris says Mississippi’s children are “more than capable” of achieving success in any avenue they choose, but that they often aren’t being properly “supported” and “counseled” throughout the process.
Lisa S. McCusker said she had been at the DMV for hours with her youngest son, Aidan McCusker, on June 11 before she finally returned
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