Led by One Voice of Mississippi, a coalition including the Mississippi State Conference NAACP, the Parent’s Campaign, the Mississippi Association of Educators, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and the Mississippi Statewide After School Network, held an informative conference in the historic Masonic Grand Lodge on Lynch Street in Jackson last Saturday.
The agenda before the conference was the reporting and discussion of its public school findings resulting from nearly a year of research that included town hall meetings in Jackson and Gulfport, focus group meetings in each region of the state, and thousands of survey responses. In total, 79 of the state’s 82 counties were represented; only Issaquena, Montgomery, and Sharkey counties were not represented.
The five public education challenges most often cited in the data are as follows…