JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - One message from the uncertainty over whether Gov. Phil Bryant will approve a state takeover of Mississippi’s second-largest public school system? Jackson is special.
You have to imagine that message has been received loud and clear in the 16 districts the state has taken over since 1996. That might be especially true in some of the districts the state has taken over twice, like North Panola, Tunica County, or the now-merged Oktibbeha County.
Bryant enunciated the message pretty clearly last week when he told reporters that he was hesitating over approving the emergency declaration requested by the state Board of Education in September. He said that Jackson’s 27,000-student enrollment makes it different from all the other emergency declarations he has approved.
It is true that few districts that appeared headed for state control avoided that fate. Yazoo City negotiated a deal with the state Board of Education in 2013 to retain local control. In exchange, the district agreed to give up state accreditation for a time and to allow the state to appoint consultants to oversee improvements. Key to that deal? The district hired a superintendent that the state found credible. It also probably didn’t hurt that the school board attorney was state Sen. Briggs Hopson, a Vicksburg Republican and member of the Senate Education Committee.
In 2014, officials decided not to take over the Greenwood school district, amid concerns that school system politics might have driven complaints of accreditation violations.
Observers had long thought that the Jackson district was effectively too big to fail - that the state Department of Education saw it as too large and too much of a political lightning rod to take over. That changed sometime after Carey Wright became state superintendent, maybe not surprisingly since she had spent time working in the big and political Washington, D.C., school system.
In addition to Wright’s willingness to grasp a thorny problem, there’s also the basic fairness question. If the state finds repeated accreditation violations in Jackson but doesn’t take over the district, how can the state take over the next district with similar violations? If Bryant flat-out refuses to approve a Jackson takeover, it’s going to be an open question whether he’ll approve any others.
Bryant’s reluctance could push the state to develop more collaborative ways of intervening in school districts. Bryant said he wanted a “third way.” That’s the motto of a Massachusetts nonprofit called Empower Schools. The group provides monitoring and expertise to a state-local partnership to turn around middle schools in Springfield, Massachusetts. Similar innovation zones have been tried in Memphis, Tennessee, and elsewhere, but Empower co-founder Brett Alessi said one advantage of the Springfield model is that the special structure provides stability because state or local officials can’t unilaterally back out.
Alessi said he’s talked to some people in Mississippi, but hasn’t been contacted by Bryant, the state Department of Education, or others. Confusingly, the entirely separate Empower Mississippi, which promotes school choice, has also been talking to people about Jackson schools, said President Grant Callen.
Bryant named the Kellogg Foundation as a group that might help craft options for Jackson. Rhea Williams-Bishop, who leads Kellogg’s local effort, declined to provide details, saying in a statement that “we welcome the opportunity to continue our conversation.”
It’s not clear how advanced talks are surrounding other options, or what would be legal under current law. Developer Leland Speed, who’s also involved, describes himself as a “concerned citizen.”
“All I’ve done is encourage people to work together on this situation instead of developing an ’us-versus-them’ scenario,” Speed said.
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Jeff Amy has covered politics and government for The Associated Press in Mississippi since 2011. Follow him at http://twitter.com/jeffamy . Read his work at https://www.apnews.com/search/Jeff_Amy .
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