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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.
President Joe Biden is dissolved the 1776 Commission, a group that includes ex-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant. Former President Donald Trump appointed the committee late last year, tasking them with formulating a national plan for “patriotic education.”
University of Mississippi administration has spent much of 2020 performing damage control in one way or another. The Mississippi Free Press obtained a copy of a recent UM climate study that it was closely guarding. Here’s what it says.
Mississippi House Rep. Price Wallace has apologized after he responded to President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ victory with a tweet hearkening back to the state’s Civil War past.
The day before President Donald Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett as his U.S. Supreme Court pick, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith told a radio host that Republican senators would come with “guns loaded” and “packed” to ensure the president’s nominee is confirmed.
Oak Grove High School students are fighting back against what they claim is an atmosphere of racism and indifference in a historic white flight suburb in Mississippi’s Lamar County.
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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).