The Mississippi Board of Education voted unanimously to place the Jackson Public School District on probation. The Board also voted to conduct a full audit of JPS. The audit will take most of the school year to complete. An MDE audit released in June found JPS failed 22 of 32 standards. The audits found many schools were unsafe, lacked licensed teachers, graduated students that did not meet the requirements, and teachers that did not control their classrooms.
The JPS response is posted below and was obtained through a public records request. The Board of Education is discussing the audit and JPS's response. JPS apparently did not ask for a hearing on the audit findings. Follow Kate Royals (Mississippi Today) and Jeff Amy (AP) on Twitter for live coverage.
Here are Jeff Amy's tweets from the discussion:
Read these earlier posts to learn what MDE said in it's audit
Commission votes unanimously to put JPS on probation
audit looked at 22 of 58 schools
Lee Childress tells@DrCedrickGray that he can introduce school board but not address commission
Vanderford says JPS would have 60 days to file corrective plan or lose accreditation.
Vanderford says@DrCedrickGray met with Carey Wright about corrective action and technical assistance last week
Vanderford says JPS noncompliant with 19 standards of 29 evaluated
Vanderford says JPS didn't ask for a hearing. Says written JPS response inadequate on buses, facilities and school safety
The Superintendent does not provide effective educational leadership."
Audit shows dark and dangerous side of JPS schools
Send an email to Kingfish1935@gmail.com if you would like a copy of the response and audit.
34 comments:
Only crickets and soft whistles inside the graveyard newsroom at the Sam R Hall led Clarion-Ledger. He and DonnerKay will be meeting later today to strategize how to soft-pedal this debacle and, in Donner's case, turn it into a race story.
"Teachers didn't have control of their classrooms." Fix that and most everything else will fall into place.
another reason we need charter schools !
Congratulations to the National Association of School Superintendents' Superintendent of the Year. How out of touch are those folks?
How out of touch is Jackson's black leadership for not raising hell to have him summarily removed?
Well they passed 31.2% of the standards - isn't that enough to graduate from a JPS school??
And all Nancy Loome does is complain about the high standards. JPS is the worst example of what goes wrong when there are no options for kids. Sad. Good that there are more charter schools coming.
The good news is that the upcoming crops of JPS "graduates" will be too stupid to figure out how $h!++y their political leadership is.
3:20, You are very much correct.
That "award" was such a crock. It reeks of a PR company move. Someone about to look bad? Get them some BS award. Maybe there are some public records on that.
Guess it takes a move like this to get action. The amount of money that has been spent is nothing compared to the futures JPS has squandered. Change must happen and it must happen now. Let's put videos in every room to record every move and cameras in every school bus to record every word. Let's publicize these tapes. No matter what drastic measures it takes, shine the light in and lets clean this up. The tail has been wagging this dog for far too long and excuses are all lame and unacceptable. Children go to school to learn. If there is no discipline in the classroom there can be no learning. Mr. Jim Barksdale offered to conduct a national search and to pay for the best superintendent. Former Board turned him down. Let's see if he will still do it and let him. The fear seemed to be he or she would be white. So what? It should not matter.
I wonder if it ever crosses their minds on how many children they are sending to their doom as fast food workers. It takes a special kind of person to think of their own finances instead of all of the children they are sending out in the world to fail.
"Dr" Gray is incompetent at best and should be shown the door immediately. But wait, he is black and that's good enough for the JPS parents. Reap what you sew parents. The world needs ditch diggers too! PS: from a parent in the shaw school district which he destroyed before becoming your problem. Wake up black people!
Sow not "sew" hypocrite.
" Let's put videos in every room to record every move and cameras in every school bus to record every word. Let's publicize these tapes."
Great call 6:16 !
I'd donate to a "Body Cams for Teachers" Fund.
but the super won a national award! isn't that worth something?
You aren't going to attract better Superintendent candidates until you change the law that bars any sitting Superintendent from ever being Superintendent in the state again if MDE takes over. You can't get the very best people to leave secure jobs to take the risk of being unemployable. Time and again it has kept districts in distress from having a deep pool to pick from. Why on earth would someone leave a successful district to take on a distressed one knowing they could lose their job? That is why you see a pattern of districts in trouble hiring people from out of state who are at the very least vested in their home state if not drawing retirement. Most of them don't have experience as a Super. These are jobs that would be out of their reach anywhere else- but, we can't get politics out of education.
6:16 - A 'national search' isn't necessarily the key. One of those searches got us Dr. Carey Wright!
We have overcome.
Probation - Probation?
I thought they were already on double-secret probation? Oh wait, that was Animal House.
10:34 sez: "That is why you see a pattern of districts in trouble hiring people from out of state who are at the very least vested in their home state if not drawing retirement."
Please state the name of a Mississippi school district that has hired a superintendent from out of state. And if you manage to know of one, is that a pattern?
8:33 JPS
Teachers in JPS want support from administration - in the past few years administration has limited suspensions to inflate reports to show a positive light. No suspensions, no detentions- no paper work trail at all. Students realize there are no consequences- sooo they do what they want - when they want. Teachers in the elementary schools were being cussed out - kicked - and hit without consequences. Can you imagine what these babies are learning (no consequences at all)? It's not just an academic environment- it's supposed to be an environment where values are learned. Changes have to be made at the top ....
JPS is the only hope for these children and the city of Jackson. It's everybody's business. Love the faculty/staff body cam idea. Also hope the JFP race algorithm isn't successful in scaring off those trying to help and doom us to another decade of failure as it has for the past decade.
The incompetent, greatly over paid Super typically refers to the JPS students as "our scholars". Funny if not so sad.
Just keep lowering the bar; otherwise, it becomes a racial thing. Doesn't it always?
Welcome to Little Detroit.
Oddly, the mostly maligned charter schools in Jackson are performing exceptionally in the very areas JPS is being sanctioned with probation by MDE.
In addition the charter schools are doing it with less money per student....
SMH!
8:57 - Pattern?
8:58 you are correct(sow) not sew. Auto spell sometimes doesn't distinguish b/t certain meanings and spellings of words. Now go get yourself a bow tie and apply for a teaching job at JPS. I'm certain they could use your help smarty pants. You must be one of those people that votes based on color rather than who is best for the job.
What has happened to the parent group that families like the Medleys and Molpuses did such long time admirable work trying to help raise the JPS system?
Their kids graduated and moved on. Now their money has gone into such wonderful ideas as the Initiative for full funding of MAEP. the Parents Campaign can't be bothered with dealing with the failures of JPS anymore after their kids finished the Advanced Placement small classroom treatment
Would like opinions. Would it be better for JPS if the Superintendent resigned and let someone else clean up the mess, or is there less disruption with his remaining and following a plan of recovery? Plus, what is best for the students?
4:22, you will have to look hard and long to find anyone who cares about the students. I don't think you will find such and individual in the admin. Might be a teacher or two that still care about the kids but they will be beat into shape in another year or so. Parents, as long as it is free day care and they bring the lunch sack home every day they could not care less.
Not all parents are AWOL. Some desperately want better for their children. And just because a child has an addict or bum for a parent, it doesn't necessarily follow that child can't be educated. We must do better.
It takes a village, right 8:36? We must join hands and make the world a better place. And we've started with Fondren. Cue the Coca Cola song with Michael Jackson and what's his name.
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