James Johnson-Waldington has performed a major assist for next year’s consolidation of the Greenwood and Leflore County school districts.
In less than a year, the interim superintendent of the Leflore County district has achieved what neither one of his two predecessors could accomplish during the previous four years of state control: He led the district to a decent accountability grade.
The leap from F to C is especially remarkable since a year ago, during the troubled tenure of another state-appointed conservator, not only did the Leflore County district get a failing grade, it got the lowest failing grade in Mississippi.
In the past, some of the opponents to consolidation have argued that merging the two districts wasn’t fair to Greenwood. The assumption was that the county students, given their poor track record on state tests for most of this decade, would automatically bring down the rating of the city schools.
With Leflore County now a grade higher than Greenwood, that should silence that line of argument.
There certainly will be others, including resistance from some in the community — and possibly within the new consolidated school board — to do more than the absolute minimum to satisfy the legislative mandate that the districts consolidate by July 1, 2019.
In an interview this past week, Johnson-Waldington said he has received a lot of concerns about the possible closing of schools. He tells people who are worried about it that the statute only dictates consolidation of the two districts’ administration. As for school buildings and school zones, those are local decisions, provided they don’t conflict with state regulations and federal laws or court orders.
If all the consolidation accomplishes, though, is a modest paring down of the layers of administration, that will be a squandered opportunity.
The leadership in this community — the City Council, the county Board of Supervisors, the business owners — should push the new school board to seize this moment of change to comprehensively reconfigure how public education is delivered so that it best serves the students and the taxpayers. If that means closing some schools to get the most bang for the buck, then close them.
One change that’s patently obvious is reducing the number of high schools in Leflore County. Once the districts are merged, in the short term one of the three high schools should be closed — most likely Amanda Elzy, given its close proximity to Greenwood High. But a good long-term plan might be to build a new, thoroughly modern high school in Greenwood that would serve all of the county.
Such a countywide school, based on present enrollments, would include about 1,300 students — about the size of Greenwood High in the early 1980s, before white flight and overall population losses shrunk its enrollment.
Twenty years ago, there was an effort to build a new high school in Greenwood, but voters soundly rejected the bond issue to finance the construction. The feeling at the time from those discouraged by the outcome was that it would be nearly impossible to ever command in Greenwood the 60 percent approval that state law requires for a bond issue to pass.
There seems, however, to be a growing acceptance in Mississippi that it’s time for communities to make major investments to replace or renovate aging or inadequate school infrastructure. Bond issues are finding success with much greater frequency. In the past five years, at least 22 school bond issues have been approved in the state, some of them by better than 4-to-1 margins.
Admittedly, the loyalties in some of those areas are less divided between public and private schools than they are in Leflore County. That split, however, may not be as major an obstacle as it once was. Business people understand that if the public schools are weak, poorly equipped or dilapidated, not only does it make it hard to attract people to move here, it hurts the quality of their companies’ workforce.
In order, though, to get voters to agree to have their taxes raised for new school buildings, they’re going to have to be convinced that the consolidated school district is being frugal elsewhere. That means really cutting staffing bloat — and yes, eliminating some jobs — rather than doubling down on the number of assistant superintendents. It also means eliminating structural inefficiencies, such as keeping two half-occupied schools open rather than combining them into one.
Next month, voters will select two members to the five-member consolidated school board. The other three seats will temporarily be filled by current members of the Greenwood School Board, although those seats will also come up for election in coming years.
Any candidates who take anything off the table, including the closure or merger of schools, are not what we need.
• Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
