Jackson Jambalaya

How about start as a community to stop having kids with no date around. That might help.

Impressive! Pass the bond issue and elect him as Mayor!!

Other,
I am a resident of NE Jackson and here's what you tell the children when they ask why things at JPS are the way they are... tell the students that the JPS board hired unqualified people that over spent and spent much more money outside of the classroom than any other district. This is all garbage anyway. Not a funding problem. I vote NO!

Perhaps Mr. Cain can tell the children JPS spends the money on salaries for administration positions and butler snow rather than on the children. He them that othor... tell them the truth and it's a shame JPS does what they do... I will vote HELL NOOOOO!!!!!

He paints a picture of third world Delta schools in the sixties. Tell the children the truth. It's not the fault of the white man in Terry or Madison or Brandon. It's the fault of incompetent administration leaders at JPS over the years. A veritable revolving door of incompetence. But there were always national searches, right?

This man is deluded. When he becomes mayor he will be really dangerous.

The Jackson Public School had "aging" school buildings thirty, forty, even fifty years ago. The difference then was the administrators planned ahead to keep the buildings repaired. They didn't have a top heavy system that employed more pencil pushers than teachers. When a bond issue was passed the money was used to obtain quality construction, not to hand out contracts to unqualified friends and family that were unqualified to build a tree house, much less a school that wouldn't fall down after a few years. Yes, the kids deserve better, but the suits need to look for a solution to the problem that starts at the top. Don't blame surrounding districts just because they are better managers of the funds they have. By the way, none of the JPS schools that I attended were air "condition" and it didn't hinder the students in the least. Suck it up Othor!

I am a graduate of the Jackson Public School System......1961.....Murrah H.S......one of the top high schools in th United States at that time. There was no air conditioning in the schools then and the weather was just as hot! This is yet another attempt to equate performance with the amount of money spent per pupil......JPS is the best example available to us that you cannot BUY sufficient “home training”.

I'm sure its the fault of the upper class whites in NE Jackson that send kids to st Andrews prep JA etc... Just like everything else pay the taxes and pay private tuition but it's our fault.

He might want to go look at the Rankin bond issue that failed. It had $10 million or so for athletics. Helped kill it at the polls. They stripped it out last year and it passed.

I don't think anyone wants to have non-air-conditioned schools.

Put me in the doubtful column. I don't believe there are un-airconditioned schools in the JPS empire. If there IS one, that's the fault of the money-managers employed by JPS.

Will more money be used for upkeep on the buildings or wasted on salaries for friends and family?
Before voting they should explain where all of the money for upkeep in the last few years went.

I think the children would be better served if each one were handed 25k of this bond money to put into a pattern day trading account with a no commission brokerage. You could also afford to give each one a smart phone from which to trade. They'd learn all kinds of stuff about money, capitalism, taxation. Stuff they could really use in the real world. I bet the crime rate would go down, too.

It is about the children, right?

I live in Jackson and my household is voting NO.

We are tired of the incompetence, the mismanagement, and the complete and utter WASTE of our tax dollars.

Skin color has never been a legitimate basis for employment and business decisions... yet it seems to be the only qualification needed in Jackson, whether you are running for office, running a school system, or bidding on public contracts.

The results speak for themselves.

We are already a top spending public school district and continuing to RAPE the few remaining tax payers in Jackson (who are already the highest taxed in the state) is the very definition of insanity.

All those funds are doing is padding the pockets of people like Othor and his cronies.

The poor kids will never see that money. They are doomed.

Considering that the JPS is top-heavy with non-teaching friends and family, does anyone know if there is a culture of "no-show jobs?"

These are employees on the payroll (friends/relatives) who rarely if ever even show up to work.

New narrative will be that the white people killed the bond issue.

Where are the un-airconditioned schools in the JPS District?

Oh I can see it now on front page of the white guilt press also known as Jackson free press headline reads... affluent white NE Jackson voters kill funding for kids at JPS. Donna Ladd will have a hissy fit!!! I'm also voting NO...

There are people in this world who are absolutely and totally unable to solve the problem of failed education in the "inner city" but these same people want soooo
bad to be "leaders" and recognized as authorities on the subject. They know that for the problems that plague these schools there will NEVER be enough money, so they can keep blaming the inevitable lack of money for the problem. Cain and his ilk will be looked to for "leadership" by the victims who accept the proposition that our problem is not us, but "them". "Them" being anyone who denies us one more dollar. If JPS were swimming in money (impossible with the dwindling tax base) it
would mean there would be several more Mercedes and SUV's in the parking lot and the district might, might, if lucky, be a D instead of an F. Might.

The sad part is many of the people that vote to approve the bond issue will be renters. Most of them think that because they are not property owners any tax increase will not apply to them. Wrong! Somebody pays the property tax on rental property and it certainly is not the owner.

NEWS FLASH!!!!!!

Impending "White Guilt" news story by Jerry Mitchell on how it destroyed Jackson's Education system, never mind what the facts say or show.

Will be time to dumb down an already failing system. What is going to be the blame when passing scores get down to around 40 for a "D"?

This may fail, because the white privileged children of the rich pro-Trump mostly republican voters in NE Jackson attend private schools, so they don't give a damn about the children who attend public schools.
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Gotcha, just kidding.

Mr. Cain,

Your reasoning, as usual, is faulty, very faulty.

You start by saying that all planning starts with a budget. That's about the only sensible thing you say. The problem here is that JPS "leaders" refuse to provide that budget - except of course, for the bottom number. They deny the ability to say how much each of the proposed uses is ESTIMATED to cost. Instead they provide a long list of MAINTENANCE items -- painting, carpet replacements, HVAC repair, landscaping (renamed soil erosion control), facade replacements, etc. by individual schools. In the end, they give a grand total for these maintenance items of $30 million or so. The other $30 million or so is for athletic facilities - Newell field MAINTENANCE, and a baseball/softball facility.

If they have the budget you claim, it should be provided to the folks being asked to support this bond issue and being required to pay for it. If you, Mr. Cain, are so impressed with their having a budget, provide us with this secret knowledge that JPS has not been willing to give to others.

After getting past the fact that JPS doesn't want to tell us how the money is going to be spent, is the fact that they want to borrow long-term money to spend on short term maintenance items. Painting, flooring, landscaping, etc. should not be paid for with 30 year money - it should be budgeted and spent annually out of regular operating income - of which JPS has a bunch! Even HVAC repairs or replacement should not be done with a long term borrowing.

Responsible people do not take out a new mortgage every time they have to repaint their house, inside or out. And they do not take out a 30 year mortgage for a new HVAC system. Yes, they might borrow using a short term home loan for such a significant expense as replacing their air conditioning recognizing that a normal home owner is not operating on a $30 million annual budget. Even so, if JPS had to borrow to repair air conditioners in some schools they could do so much cheaper and more responsibly than by doing a bond issue of this nature.

My question to you, Mr. Cain, is did these poor kids that you claim will have to go to school this fall and not have air conditioning - is this a new situation? Have the HVAC systems worked previously, but now suddenly conked out in several different facilities throughout the district all at the same time? Will these poor kids have to wait a couple of years sweltering in their non-airconditioned buildings while the bonds are sold, contracts let, and construction completed? If you were REALLY, REALLY concerned about the kids having no air conditioning this fall while looking across the Pearl into Rankin County, you would be insisting that JPS go downtown to Trustmark or some other bank and take out a bank financing to fix those HVAC units - not lying about the problem in order to satisfy the bond pimps and justify your 'consulting fee' to help sell this to your folks.

So IF the majority of this 65 million dollars is supposed to go to "maintenance" within JPS, just where ARE the good folks of Chokwe's Marxist Utopia that can donate their time and materials to fix things? Am I to believe there are no HVAC technicians or roofers or painters or.....just a whole lot of skraight-pipers and City Employees that can't read a water meter? I mean, there IS a tool shed, right?

Deferred maintenance is never a good thing to spend bond issue money on!

Maybe JPS should start by trimming their hugely inflated budget before asking for more money.

I wonder how much this clown named Othor Cain pays in taxes... it's hard to take anyone serious with a first name like that
I feel bad for him in a way. These people are proof that we need charter schools as well as vouchers to compete with public schools. This is a total fiasco and not fair to the students.