Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves urged lawmakers to use public education funds for private schools during his State of the State Address.
The Mississippi Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether public COVID-19 relief funds can go to private schools.
While Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann urged senators to prioritize funding public education, House Speaker Jason White urged expanding “school choice.”
“I can’t tell you how many white people, many of them young, have walked up to me at a restaurant or a grocery store and said: ‘Thank you. I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery,” Editor Donna Ladd writes, explaining why her Mississippi newsrooms have reported difficult historic context for over two decades.
Private schools in Mississippi could receive $10 million in public COVID relief funds if the Mississippi Supreme Court agrees with Attorney General Lynn Fitch in
The Mississippi Legislature’s attempt to divert $10 million in federal relief funds toward private schools for infrastructure improvements is “a clear violation of the Mississippi Constitution,” Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Crystal Wise Martin ruled Thursday.
Midtown Public Charter School offered to pay Jackson Public Schools $80,000 per year to rent the abandoned Rowan Middle School building, but JPS did not take the offer. Working Together Jackson’s Lead Organizer and concerned parent Chevon Chatman challenges the JPS Board to “fight appropriately, toward the architects and gatekeepers of a system that harms children by not fully funding traditional public schools” instead of fighting one another over scraps.
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.
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