Billy Joe Ferguson, superintendent of the Carroll County School District, said his district is already working on a plan to address its recent accreditation downgrade.
The Carroll County and Greenwood public school districts were both downgraded from accredited to probationary status by a state commission last week.
Probationary status is assigned to any district that is not in total compliance with state accreditation standards. Both districts must now work with the Mississippi Department of Education over the next two months to develop plans, including timelines, to fix outstanding policy violations.
Although Ferguson doesn’t expect problems in meeting the MDE’s deadlines, he said he is puzzled that the commission’s report includes several violations that have “already been corrected.”
Among citations listed for the district’s downgrade are a failure to provide five and a half hours of daily instruction time to students, inadequate library facilities and materials and several maintenance issues with school facilities.
Until recently, the school district had a longer school day Monday through Thursday, with early Friday dismissal. According to Ferguson, such a schedule was compliant with MDE regulations until they were changed two years ago to require a uniform schedule across the week.
Scheduling is now compliant, with no early Friday dismissal. However, the change was made at an Oct. 8 board meeting, too late to influence the commission’s decision.
“We went nine weeks this year before he (Ferguson) corrected that,” said Donnie Wiltshire, a member of the school board.
The district was also docked for inadequate library services. At the time of the MDE audit, the average publication date of district library materials was 1990. Since then, Ferguson said, the district has purged some 1,400 outdated or damaged books and refurbished the library.
Ferguson said the MDE has yet to take notice of the changes.
“I think it’s due to the fact that they’re in such disarray down there that things have been lost,” he said.
Ferguson said the MDE has promised repeatedly to send the district forms with which to report changes and solutions but has not yet done so.
According to the commission’s report, the Greenwood school district remains in violation of several state policies. Violations have included awarding diplomas to students who failed to pass required high school exit exams.
In a statement released Monday, Greene said the Sept. 2 publication date of the final accreditation report did not leave the district time to address all of the violations before the Oct. 1 deadline but added that the district “remains confident that all findings will be cleared.”
• Contact Nick Rogers at 581-7235 or nrogers@gwcommonwealth.com.
