Mississippi 2001 Teacher of the Year Renee Moore: Mississippi's Shame

Today we have an insightful analogy and a haunting image of the lengths to which teachers must go to get much needed resources. Take a moment to ponder the questions posed from Cleveland, MS.

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Imagine I need to renovate my house. After careful study, I know I need at least $50,000. I hire a highly qualified contractor, but I only give her $35,000 to do the project. Oh, but I still want all the features included in my $50,000 design. To make matters worse, I come back periodically during the project and add more requirements, but not more money. The professional insists I haven’t provided enough funds even to bring the project up to code, yet I accuse them of gouging. My project ends up unfinished, and I publicly rail about the contractor’s incompetence.

Mississippi’s schools find themselves in a similar scenario with our state leaders’ annual refusal to fully fund districts across the state—based on the formula the legislature itself put in place (Mississippi Adequate Education Program – MAEP). Tragically, we’re not talking about a fictitious project, but rather the very real lives and futures of Mississippi’s children.

Despite designing what is a relatively innovative (among states) and accurate way to determine school funding, the Mississippi legislature refuses to follow the law. MAEP has only been fully funded in two (non-consecutive election) years since its inception, even when there were sufficient state revenues to do so. Economists declare Mississippi now spends “less per student than before the [2008] recession” (MEPC). To compound the misery, as the Legislature continues to under-fund the schools, it distorts the MAEP formula to allow for even lower allotments, meaning schools, especially poor ones, never catch up with their minimum requirements.

What does this perennial, intentional neglect look like on the ground – especially in the schools serving the already poverty-entrenched Mississippi Delta?  It’s not pretty. It means our children have to do without many things students in other places take for granted. Things like school nurses on site, functioning computers, science labs, seats……and teachers. These deprivations at school compound what those students face at home. Consequently, we send those who most need encouragement and educational opportunity a doubly negative message.

God bless the poor parents trying to use candy and doughnut sales to help make up for the state-sanctioned shortfalls. Thank God for heroic teachers and administrators struggling to provide the best education possible under the circumstances, often purchasing out of their own pockets, or begging for teaching materials that should have come from their and our state taxes, or, as I and my co-workers did one fall, dumpster diving for textbooks.

But why should those who teach the most impoverished students have to do so much more than our counterparts just to get what the State of Mississippi itself acknowledges is the minimum we need to do the job? Can schools that were set-up to fail, truly be labeled “failing schools”? Ultimately, it is the children who pay for decades of cumulative neglect.

Where is our conscience? Where is our common sense? The least the Mississippi leadership can do for the least of these is fulfill its promise of minimal support.

Renee Moore is a National Board-certified teacher in the Mississippi Delta. In 2001, she was named State Teacher of the Year for Mississippi. She has served on the Teacher/Administrator Licensure Commission in Jackson for ten years, is a proud member of the Mississippi Association of Educators, serves on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Board of Directors, and was one of the original members of the Teacher Leader Network- now the Center for Teaching Quality Collaboratory. She blogs at TeachMoore. (We've purposefully linked to one particularly provoking post about Mississippi.)