JACKSON - Sophomore Brittany Martinez was so proud this year that North Pontotoc High School at last had a journalism program and students could put out a school newspaper. They've called it the Viking Vibe.
And she could write for the paper. Something that would make her step-grandmother, retired veteran Mississippi reporter Norma Fields, proud.
In its first edition last fall, the Vibe featured many new assets at North Pontotoc, among them new teachers, new buildings, new classes, a new science lab. Upgrading the quality of the school's curriculum largely came from beefed-up K-12 funding pushed through by Gov. Ronnie Musgrove.
Fifteen-year-old Brittany is no dummy. She's picked up the vibes that some of North Pontotoc High's improvements are in jeopardy now if education budget cuts advocated by Gov. Haley Barbour and the state Senate prevail over a House education funding plan.
Brittany realizes her precious Viking Vibe may well be one of those new school assets now on the chopping block if the budget cuts come.
So she is emphatically speaking out editorially in the upcoming issue of the Vibe, decrying what she sees is an "ominous sign" that the Senate is unwilling to support public education as a priority.
Specifically, the feisty 10th-grader (with no prompting from her local school officials) zeroed in on several Northeast Mississippi senators who joined in defeating on April 15 by a vote of 28-21 the House's bill to fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program.
Superintendent John Simmons of the Pontotoc County school district has been put on notice by the state Department of Education that the district faces the loss of $1.1 million next school year if the Senate/Barbour budget proposal cutting $161 million from MAEP is enacted.
Simmons wouldn't say for sure if the North Pontotoc school newspaper is on the endangered list. But he said he has already begun to gear up for possible program cuts. "We're trimming wherever we can," he declared.
While anxious school officials statewide have notified hundreds of teachers they will have no job next school year if the budget cuts go through, so far Simmons said he has sent pink slips to only three teachers.
However, he quickly adds, if the Pontotoc County school district is whacked $1.1 million, the jobs of at least 35 teachers are in danger. "I'm hoping and praying that we don't have to do that," he said.
Meantime in the halls of the state Capitol, the fate of MAEP funding remained in doubt, in an atmosphere of hardening political partisanship that largely finds Democratic lawmakers in the pro-education camp and Republicans in the opposition camp.
Mind you, the joint Senate-House conference committees (three members from each branch) that must agree on the two principal bills governing how much money K-12 will get, as of last week had not even been appointed, much less joined in the brutal struggle that is sure to come.
Thus, any idea the Legislature would adjourn the 90-day 2004 session on May 9, as ordained by joint procedural rules, appeared a mere pipe-dream, with the major decision yet to be reached on education - the state's No. l problem.
Gridlock is almost certain this week to grip the state Capitol, as this column had predicted at the start of the legislative session under the most highly partisan administration this state has ever seen.
The question then becomes: How long will it take to break the gridlock, and who will yield in order to break it?
Meantime, hundreds, probably even thousands, of teachers, parents, and other supporters of public education will be streaming to the Capitol bearing signs in protest of the Senate and governor's position.
The first mistake the Legislature, and the Barbour administration, made was to scrap the 2003-established "Musgrove Doctrine" to appropriate education funds in a package first in the opening month of the session. Once the commitment was made, it was then up to lawmakers to find the funding.
The word is abroad in the education community that Barbour is trying to hold education hostage until he gets his tort reform measures passed.
However, battle-hardened House Speaker Billy McCoy, being the devout education backer that he is, most assuredly will see that nothing - tort reform among them - will move until the schools are adequately cared for.
Barbour came into office with the mantra that jobs were the first priority to raise Mississippi's quality of life. But educators and many others who have dealt with Mississippi's problems longer and more intimately than Barbour strongly disagree.
They are convinced that the road to a better life in Mississippi runs first through the schoolhouse door.
