BThe Greenwood Public School System is still without a strings teacher and has been since Doug Phillips left at the end of 2005.
"We can't find an instructor," school system Superintendent Les Daniels said Tuesday. "We have used Valley State. We have used Jackson State. We have advertised since last spring … The position is still open."
For the last two years, students at Threadgill Elementary School learned to the play the violin, cello and other instruments through the pilot music program created by Phillips, a Jackson State University student working on his master's degree in music education.
Created on a $10,000 budget, the program was well-received and was designed to work with the music program at Greenwood Middle School.
Daniels, at the time of the program's inception, said, "I see this program spreading to other schools in the district, and if it does, we'll have a district orchestra in our near future."
In a Greenwood Commonwealth letter to the editor June 21, Phillips said the reason for his departure was the refusal of the school to increase his teaching schedule from part-time to full-time.
In his explanation, he said Daniels would not allow the board to vote on Phillips' proposal to expand the position. Daniels told Phillips there was a budget shortage, Phillips said.
"There was no way that I could continue to teach 150 students on a half-time teaching schedule," he wrote.
Willie Young, personnel director, said few universities offer the specific music program that Phillips attended at Jackson State.
"We checked all the resources we had," he said.
All school districts are required to advertise with the Department of Education, he said. They also use university job-posting lists and recruitment days when looking for teachers.
But music teachers are hard to obtain in the Delta, just like math teachers and foreign language teachers, Young said.
