By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
The Hospitality State, well, surely not for education, and keeping up with education funding in Mississippi is a full-time task. Lots seems to go on behind the scenes – out of the public view. There is plenty going on right out in the open, too – once you discover where to look.
In vogue right now for Republican legislators is finding ways to increase vouchers to tuition-based private schools. And in addition to private schools in Mississippi, we now have nine charter schools, having been blessed by the Charter School Authorizer Board. Charter schools, like traditional public schools, are not tuition-based, but rather are paid for by Mississippi taxpayers.
Per the state legislative budget office, fiscal year 2023 appropriations for public education were $2,967,252,713, which includes six categories. The appropriation for higher education was $1,210,796,863. For the current fiscal year, over 50% of the general fund budget goes to education activities – for a state ranked #48 in education by US News & World Report.
Glancing inside our public schools, there are many data points. Worldpopulationreview.org ranks our public schools #39. Jackson City Public School District has a letter grade of C. Hinds County School District is rated B.
For comparison, Tate County School District is rated B, New Albany Public Schools are rated A, Meridian Public Schools are rated C, Jones County Public Schools are rated A, Clarksdale Municipal School District is rated D, Greenville Public School District is rated C, Columbus Municipal School District is rated C – all per the Mississippi Succeeds Report Card, which can be found at https://msrc.mdek12.org/
For non-traditional public schools, Mississippi currently has nine Charter Schools – permitted to do business by the Charter School Authorizer Board. This board has six members and an executive director. They are appointed by the governor and lieutenant governor, and one by the state superintendent of education. Just one of these appointees is African American, despite the well-known demographics of our state.
To gain entry to a charter school, a student’s own school district must be graded as C, D or F. Of the nine charter schools, three have no data reported, one is rated B, two are rated C, one is rated D, and two are rated F. Think that through for a minute.
Then we have private schools. In June 2023, the Biloxi Sun Herald reported there are 264 private schools in Mississippi. All are tuition-based, and some offer up to 30% financial aid based on Niche.com analysis and rankings.
Forty-nine of our private schools that began operations between 1963 and 1970, can be referred to as segregation academies – they sprang up in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating desegregation of public schools.
One legal case, McNeal v. Tate County School District, continues to this day – nearly 54 years later. The African-American plaintiffs – seeking a unitary school system – are represented by Solomon C. Osbourne. The defendant representation includes none other than John Thomas Lamar III – the author of HB1020, the Trojan Horse legislation that brazenly injected a white-controlled state police force into our 80% African-American city and creates a new court system with judges and prosecutors appointed by the white chief judge of the state supreme court and the white state attorney general.
In addition to lawmakers like Lamar continually attempting to push legislation to fund these schools with taxpayer money, they benefit from the 2019 Children’s Promise Act where individuals and businesses can donate to these private schools and receive up to a 50% credit on their Mississippi tax liability. Put differently, all Mississippi taxpayers are continuing to support private schools, albeit indirectly. Last year, 21 of the 49 segregation academies benefitted by a total of $4.7 million, or 53% of the total years $8,925,558 tax credit allocations to private schools, per the Department of Revenue.
Despite their deepest desires, the administrators and board members of these segregation academies realize they must enroll minorities. In 1976 (Runyon v. McCrary) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that private schools that discriminate on the basis of race or establish racial segregation are in violation of federal law. So, you have school environments where 5% or far less of student population are minorities, and these children – with few exceptions – receive instruction from people that don’t look like them or act like them or think like them – so long as their families can pony up the tuition of $4,000 to $7,000 per year.
Today, more broadly, Republican legislators are trying to scrap the funding formula called MAEP that was implemented in 1997 – but only fully funded twice – and replace it with HB1453 which is titled: “Investing in the Needs of Students to Prioritize, Impact and Reform Education (INSPIRE) Act of 2024”; Create Parent’s Campaign has said, “House Bill 1453 – strikes Mississippi Adequate Education Program from law, replaces it with a new plan for funding schools that has no objective formula for determining base student cost.” Despite their recommendation against the bill, it passed the lower chamber March 6, 2024, with a vote of 94-13, and 15 members present but not voting.
We can easily see that these Republican-led efforts contain no attempt to help the overall dismal performance of public schools in The Hospitality State. Starkville’s Republican Representative Loyd Roberson II’s HB1452, is an example and fortunately died in committee. March Madness is upon us and using basketball vernacular, they want no part of teamwork or assists – just blocks and steals and fouls. On March 25, 2024, the embodiment of technical fouls, Governor Reeves, posted on X endorsing the INSPIRE Act, “We must fund students, not systems.” What he doesn’t say is that he and his ilk are in a full-court-press to cripple public schools in favor of classist alternatives.
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