Leflore Legacy Academy, vying to be the first charter school in Leflore County, has finished all the required steps in the application process and now must wait until Sept. 10 to hear whether it has been approved by the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board.
“If I could think of a word that multiplied nervousness by 10, that’s what I am as I wait,” said Dr. Tamala Boyd Shaw, director of the Leflore Legacy organization and an alumna of Leflore County public schools.
“But I am a woman of faith, and even if the outcome is a denial, it doesn’t mean that there’s not an opportunity to improve education in Leflore County.”
Shaw has proposed a middle school with a rigorous college preparatory curriculum for students in grades 6 through 8.
A Greenwood native and a 1992 graduate of Amanda Elzy High School, Shaw studied at Tougaloo College, Jackson State University and the University of Memphis. She heads a nonprofit, Mississippi Delta Academies, and hopes to establish high-quality charter schools across the Delta, starting with Leflore Legacy.
She started the process of applying to open a charter school in Mississippi eight months ago. At the time her initial proposal was submitted, two others were contending in Leflore County, but both were eliminated before the final stage of the application process.
In July, the Charter School Authorizer Board held a public hearing at New Green Grove Church of Faith to hear from citizens, both pro and con, about their concerns regarding the possibility of a charter school in the county. Since then, an independent evaluation team reviewed letters, videotaped comments and Leflore Legacy Academy’s full proposal, and the team then delivered recommendations to Shaw.
On Aug. 24, she responded to those recommendations.
“I can tell you that I think the public hearing went well in terms of public opinion,” Shaw said.
Around 30 people showed up, and The Taxpayers Channel taped the event.
“My board members were there. ... Some faculty and staff from Mississippi Valley, some parents and students, and a few Leflore County School District teachers were there,” Shaw said.
Two groups she hoped would show up did not: pastors and politicians.
The comment session was open to either statements of support or questions about charter schools in general and this one in particular.
“One professor from Valley made a legitimate comment, asking, ‘What about everybody else? You build this great school for a small group of students, but what about the other kids? What happens to them?’”
Shaw said it was a valid question, and she hoped representatives from both school districts would come to the meeting to address those issues.
In Clarksdale, where a charter school opened this fall, a number of people came to the public hearing to oppose the school during its application process. Shaw said she expected the same in Greenwood, but that did not happen.
The independent evaluation team’s most important recommendation to Shaw was that she make it absolutely clear how she and her staff at Leflore Legacy would be able to institute a rigorous academic curriculum with students coming from low-performing elementary schools.
“We had to be crystal clear about how we plan to do that,” she said.
Now she and others affiliated with the school proposal will wait until Sept. 10, when the Authorizer Board will announce whether Leflore Legacy or any other of the four final applicants across the state will be approved to become actual schools. If they get the nod, they will start classes in the fall of 2019.
In Leflore County, that will be at the same time that a new Greenwood-Leflore Consolidated School District opens its newly configured district schools.
Charter schools receive public funds but are not governed by a public school board. For each student who attends Leflore Legacy Academy, should it open its doors, a chunk of funding that would otherwise go to the consolidated district and its schools will follow them.
Shaw has emphasized throughout the process that charter schools are public schools and that she wants her school to do a better job than the existing schools, offering opportunities for students to excel.
Critics of funding charters in Mississippi with public money, including the Clarksdale Municipal School District, Mississippi Association of Educators and the Education Law Center, last week joined the Mississippi Southern Poverty Law Center’s lawsuit that claims charter schools strip needed funds from poor school districts, specifically in Jackson.
The lawsuit, filed in 2016, argues that the Mississippi constitution says ad valorem taxes – local funding — can be used only for the district to maintain schools it oversees. The case is currently on appeal in the Mississippi Supreme Court after a Hinds County judge this winter found insufficient evidence that charter schools are funded in a way that violates state laws.
It is not clear whether legal activity opposing charters will have any impact on the authorizing process that culminates on Sept. 10.
“I’d hate for possible educational opportunities to be held up while the adults fight it out,” Shaw said. “Hopefully that doesn’t happen.”
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
