VAIDEN — A three-hour meeting is bound to produce some off-the-wall comments.
That was certainly the case Monday night during a marathon session of the Carroll County School Board.
At one point Board President Ben Shute said Superintendent Billy Joe Ferguson was “full of baloney.” Ferguson denied it.
Board member Kenneth DeLoach made a loud claim — apparently without any truth to it — that pigeons were roosting in a school gym.
Board member Marcus Kuykendall said a bond attorney referred to by Ferguson was “crazy as all get out.”
And board member Laura Davis complained about Shute loudly clicking his pen.
The meeting grew tense at times as Shute, Kuykendall and DeLoach pressed administrators about progress in lowering the district’s dropout rate and questioned Ferguson’s spending proposals.
Ferguson countered that student morale would improve if school board members would attend some events. He said Shute has never attended a Carroll County school function during his tenure on the board.
Shute admitted not going to any events but said he does care about the education students receive.
“I’m serious about this dropout rate,” Shute said.
When a proposal to renew the annual license on some educational software came up, Shute said he wanted evidence of the program’s effect on dropout and graduation rates.
The dropout rate at J.Z. George High School is 25 percent, and the graduation rate is 67 percent.
The high school is under a state-mandated two-year improvement plan to get those numbers up for white students. Black students met goals for graduation, but white students fell 0.1 percent short.
Ferguson said special education students — who make up 12 percent of the Carroll County student population — are factored into the graduation rate even though many of them aren’t even in degree programs.
He also said the relatively small number of white students means a few dropouts can swing the results dramatically. He said the district believed the white dropout count was incorrect and asked for a hearing but the state never responded.
Shute said the entire system is failing students and that the district is only paying lip service to its problems rather than getting to their roots and solving them. He said he begged to differ when it was proposed that the issues were the result of poor home environments and many white students attending Carroll Academy.
DeLoach agreed: “If any of them was as poor as I was when I was going to school, they wouldn’t know nothing,” he said. “But we didn’t use that as no excuse.”
Davis said teachers can do little with disruptive students who have no interest in learning and are only waiting until they turn 17 to drop out.
Shute said a couple of weeks ago he asked for the dropout prevention plan and it still bore the name of J.Z. George’s former principal. He said that indicated it had been put on a shelf without being read or used.
The board also tangled with Ferguson over several spending issues, including buying new buses, a recently purchased cargo trailer at Marshall Elementary and a proposal to renovate the visitor’s fieldhouse at J.Z. George.
Ferguson said the fieldhouse is a tin former chicken coop with no utilities and requested that the board spend bond money to fix it up. Ferguson said the district is facing a three-year deadline to spend its bond money, which prompted the “full of baloney” comment from Shute.
The board, which has repeatedly denied the request, said students could dress out in the nearby gym, which cost more than $2 million. Kuykendall said the district built the gym to do away with the old buildings and that Ferguson just wants to spend money.
He said the board had given the superintendent an alternative plan to fix the building after walking through it but that Ferguson never responded because he wants an architect to completely redo it.
“You want something that you’re not going to get, so you might as well forget about it,” Kuykendall said.
Also, the board voted 3-2 to advertise the former Hathorn Elementary School building in Vaiden for sale based on the appraised value. Shute, Kuykendall and DeLoach voted for it, and Davis and Rubye Miller voted nay.
Miller said the decision to sell was premature because the district hasn’t had enough time to evaluate how the new plan — which involves only one county elementary school and a newly formed middle school — is working. This is the first year under that structure.
Central Mississippi Inc. had expressed interest in leasing the building, but Ferguson said a CMI employee unofficially told him the nonprofit, which runs Head Start and other programs, would not take it.
The superintendent said one person had expressed interest in buying the former school and opening a restaurant in part of it, but that person has since moved.
Vaiden Mayor Mel Hawthorne requested the board donate the building to Vaiden. He said the town has invested several hundred thousand dollars in recent years to provide water and sewer service to the former school. He said plans are in the works to have the 1956 structure declared an historic landmark and convert it into a museum.
• Contact Charlie Smith at csmith@gwcommonwealth.com.
