The Weakest Link in the Chain

Mississippi usually finishes last, or near to last, when public school effectiveness is measured and evaluated.

Last year, The New York Times Magazine’s Casey Parks reported on the Holmes County Consolidated School District, one of the lowest performing school districts in Mississippi and the country. The story is sobering, and you would think that the story comes from a place like Haiti, or India, or the Sudan – not the United States of America.

Parks begins by writing,

“One Saturday afternoon in late May, a few days before the end of his junior year, Harvey Ellington plopped onto his queen-size bed, held up his phone and searched for a signal. The 17-year-old lived in a three-bedroom trailer on an acre lot surrounded by oak trees, too far into the country for broadband, but eventually his cell found the hot spot his high school had lent him for the year. He opened his email and began to type.”

“Good evening! Hope all is well! Congratulations on being the new superintendent for the Holmes County Consolidated School District.”

Parks continues,

“Ellington was 7 the first time someone told him the state of Mississippi considered Holmes a failing district. Holmes had earned a D or an F almost every year since then, and Ellington felt hollowed out with embarrassment every time someone rattled off the ranking. Technically, the grade measured how well, or how poorly, Ellington and his classmates performed on the state’s standardized tests, but he knew it could have applied to any number of assessments. His school didn’t have any clubs, and even before the pandemic, they hardly went on field trips. Every year, teaching positions sat unfilled for months at a time. The football team often made the playoffs, but the field at the high school was inadequate, and so the squad had to travel 10 miles west to play outside an elementary school.”

“Ellington knew that teenagers elsewhere were eager to return to normal [after a pandemic year that kept Ellington and his fellow students out of school] – to schools with clubs, air-conditioning and a reliable slate of certified teachers. But Ellington didn’t want to return to the normal he’d known. He wanted to believe the new superintendent would turn Holmes into the kind of high school that students elsewhere took for granted. He understood how difficult it would be for one person to make progress after years of systemic neglect. Maybe it would take a decade. Maybe he would be long gone. But the one thing Ellington knew he could offer was his experience, and so, he decided, if the new superintendent wrote back, he would tell her everything he learned over the last three years.”

Park concludes the article by writing,

“Debra Powell [the new superintendent] didn’t respond for nearly two months. (She told me she inherited a mess and was busy prioritizing finding teachers.) When she replied in mid-July, she didn’t mention any of Ellington’s suggestions. Instead she told Ellington she’d decided to go ‘in a new direction’ to give other students a chance to lead. Ellington was hurt and confused, but he decided to ask his principal if there were other opportunities to help. The principal said he would meet with the teenager, but a week later, the state accreditation board released a 372-page audit showing that since the consolidation, the district had violated 81 percent of the state’s process standards. Holmes County, the audit suggested, might have reached a state of emergency.”

“[The previous superintendent], the interim superintendents [before Powell], and the school board had failed to provide ‘effective educational leadership,’ auditors found. The district was financially unstable. An elementary school still didn’t have social-studies textbooks for half its students, and the school didn’t have science books for Grades K through 4. Two other elementary schools were using ‘various websites’ to teach science – a method that had left Holmes with the lowest science proficiency in the state.”

“The high school stored its textbooks – most of which were out of date and in poor condition – in a utility closet next to mops, buckets and cleaning solutions. During the pandemic, auditors found, the school’s math and social studies teachers provided no instruction at all. (Ellington disputed this finding: He wasn’t sure how other classes fared, but his geometry teacher taught every virtual class, he said.)”

“Though the temperature hovered above 90 degrees in early August, most of the district’s schools didn’t have air-conditioning or the kind of upgraded ventilation equipment other districts had installed while students were learning at home. The board had only recently agreed to buy new HVAC systems – too late to install them before school started. Nearly a third of the district’s buses were out of service, and the rest had ‘significant’ issues like inoperable brakes and turn signals and broken emergency doors and windows. The county still didn’t have enough qualified teachers. More than 60 percent either didn’t have a license or were teaching outside their subject area. ‘This district has been failing these kids from kindergarten all the way through graduation,’ a lawyer for the state testified.”

“The Mississippi Board of Education agreed. Two days before the new school year, the board conceded that the consolidated district the state had created had reached a state of emergency. Mississippi would take over Holmes. The local school board would be dissolved, and Debra Powell would lose the job she had just started. A new interim superintendent would replace her.”

“Sitting in the gym, sweating through his school uniform, Ellington told himself to hold on to the bit of hope he had left. The new superintendent hadn’t arrived yet. He wanted to believe that she could fix things, but he knew the work was too much for one person to do alone, and nine months [until Ellington would graduate] hardly seemed long enough to make up for what he’d lost. His brothers were still young, though. Maybe, he thought, there would be time enough for them.”

I’m not hopeful – not hopeful for Holmes Consolidated and not hopeful for the thousands of school districts just like Holmes.

The saddest part of these under-performing districts is that most are filled with black, brown, and poor children. Whoever said that public education was the way out of poverty, lied to generations of these types of kids.

It’s said that the weakest link to a chain tells you exactly how strong that chain is. Well, I’m here to tell you, if Holmes Consolidated and other district like it are our weakest links, then it’s time for a serious system change when it comes to public schooling.

By the way, the website Great Schools reports that all Holmes Consolidated schools continue to fall below the Mississippi average in school quality, and 100% of its students are making less academic progress than their peers at other schools in the state.

Til tomorrow. SVB