No Education, No Equal Opportunity!

Desmond Jones

Dec 5, 2019 · 7 min read

The corruption in school systems through low funding in public schools.

Teachers make sacrifices and students suffer. Education in America has always been a major issue. It has been an issue since the early 1930s, which was known as, the Great Depression era. During the Great Depression, poor African Americans had little to no schooling experiences with education.

Let’s think about the word “deperession”. When you think about the word “depression” and put “great” in front of it, you think about a major decrease of money in America. It wasn’t like a regional depression. It was everywhere. Schools were still segregated and African Americans were pulled out of school, because their parents would suffer from poverty.

On the other hand, White American students would receive more money to go to school, because they received more public dollars. African American students would only attend school two out of three months of the year, school facilites were over-crowded, and different grade levels were taught in one distinct room. Not many Afrcian Americans teen went to school, because they were pulled out into the workforce to help support their families from a financial standpoint.

At the same time, it also improved the situation about black education. When America was divided into two regions, that of, the north and south. The north school board would desegregate education to save money versus the people in the south being afraid of having African Americans running the streets unschooled, so they built high schools just to keep them off.

Some of these problems are still shown in modern education today. I had the chance to talk with some experts currently in the education field. They all believe that if teachers received more funding to provide the common necessities for their students like textbooks, technology, binders, pencils paper, better food, etc. students could be very effective from proficient test scores to higher graduation rate within the public school system.

Early summer 2019, the Jackson Public School District loss two-hundred thirty six out of two-hundred forty one teachers due to licensing snafu. Teachers were unable to return the following school year due to the Mississippi Department of Education enforcing a last-minute policy in which educators who were in the process of becoming fully licensed only had a year to complete this process versus many teachers and educators leaders stating you normally had three years to meet the requirements as long as the candidate was showing progress towards completion.

Peyton Bell from Mound Bayou, MS and a sophomore majoring in Social Science at Jackson State University, says he feels that the education system is corrupted as a whole. “I feel that it’s a systemic corruption, because it only effected lower income school districts.” When the policy was enforced by the MDE, it was only effected by those in Delta and the Jackson-Metro area school systems. However, teachers still didn’t give the benefit of the doubt that they loss their job, but were also still eager to find alternate ways to stay in the public school system.

Even after the policy was issued and educators were decimated, teachers still continue to show their passions to go back and teach with pay cuts being involved. Educators agreed to be long-term substitutes or “limited service” educators with their earnings going from $203.81 to $85 a day before taxes. Keep in mind that insurance, retirement, and other benefits are if they choose to acquire those options, which leaves them with 58 percent of a pay cut.

As you can see the public school system has been poorly funded and treated badly for over a long period of time. Jamessa Jones-Smith, a Instructional Interventionist of Siwell Middle School (JPSD), has been a educator for over a decade now with the Jackson Public Schools District. I had the chance to chat with her and understand more about the issues of low-funding in public schools and why it has made a major impact on the loss of teachers.

Mrs. Smith informed me about the struggles that herself and other teachers have to go through just to manage a regular school day with limited supplies. She said that teachers are only provided with $300 for the entire school semester to get supplies and other materials that are needed for the classroom.

“Well, low funding is something that has been going on for a long time. It’s been going on for a while. With the lost of teachers, they need to first be able to pay those teachers that deserve to be paid. The second thing is that they need the resources and materials for students that are needed in the classroom, so that teachers won’t have to pay out of pocket,” says Mrs. Smith. She harps on this issue in a critical manner, because she feels that teahers are limited on resoures and are having to pay out of pocket for most of the classroom supplies that are need which plays a big factor in the loss of teachers.

“Teachers are not getting the materials to purchase classroom and supplies that are needed for students. You have to fund those professional development classes with these funds. One of the main issues about low funding is that teachers don’t have the resources and supplies that teachers need to provide students with inside of the classrooms. Low funding affects teachers pay.” The average salary for Jackson Public Schools District is $33K. That’s less than what a manager makes on salary at McDonalds, which is $39K-46K. That is absolutely unacceptable with education being the leading source to establish multi-million companies and bussineses as well as job opporutnities.

So, now what? We have the problem and been facing it for several decades now. Now, it’s time to find a solution to better this issue or at least help solve it. Education experts believe that the government is doing poor job on this matter to even wanting to fix it.

Bell says he’s currently receiving a good education now, but he knows the piss poor performance and care the government are doing to these public schools. He comments about his public school experience back when he was a student in middle school. “I am currently receiving a good education now. I’m not going to say I have before though. My education before was outdated. We used old textbooks and I was barely in class with certified teachers.” He agrees that it can be better, but yet the governement overlooks the struggle of public school funding.

“The government needs to take more actions in making sure teachers are paid to do their job. They need to put money into the actual school facilities, so students can have something to work towards or uphold,” says Peyton Bell. Bell believes that if the government would actually pay attention to the public school system more and actually make them look like grade A facilities, teachers would not complain about the issue as much and students would also have a repertoire for going to school and not just being there.

Ja’Mareous Thompson from Columbia, MS and a sophomore majoring in Elementary Education at Jackson State University believes there’s several solutions that won’t cost much to do in order to help change the school systems and its community. “You can actually start paying teachers more, have better internship opportunities, you can have different camps so you can be able to teach different types of students who come from different environments. You can’t teach Madison County schools how you teach Marion County schools.” Thompson who has a passion for teaching in the education field understands the education system from learning from his college professors and dean. He wants to make it better than what it is now.

Education is a discussion that everyone should be having and concerned about now, especially all African Americans who are suffering from this. There are too many job opportunities, black-owned multi-million companies, and other successful careers out there wanting to hire our young black people, yet we are stuck in a bind with the government. Funding through our public school systems are causing teachers to suffer from pay cuts, coming out of pocket because they are limited on resources to provide for their students, and poor treatment from the boards of education. This is what we call today, “Modern Segregation”. A change must be made.