Germain McConnell, executive director at the Mississippi School for Math & Science, freely admits the two-year residential high school located on the MUW campus isn’t for everyone.
But during his speaking appearance at the Columbus Exchange Club Thursday at Lion Hills Center, he confessed the school isn’t anywhere near reaching its full potential.
“We are a state-supported high school and that’s how we’re funded,” said McConnell, who has been at MSMS since 2011. “When the school was founded, the plan was have 300 students, but funding has been flat for the past eight years. In addition to the funds we receive from the state, we also have a $1,000 room and board fee. But for any of our students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, that fee is waived. The result is that we’re nowhere close to reaching our full student capacity.”
This year, the school is home to 238 high school juniors and seniors, McConnell said, and while funding has raised the competition level for those coveted slots as the school’s reputation continues to grow, those who arrive on campus are on the path to a transformational educational experience.
“We are focused on innovative learning,” McConnell said. “What we tell the students when they arrive on campus is that the taxpayers of Mississippi are making an investment in you. And when someone makes an investment, they expect to see a return on it.”
In that sense, it nay be one of the best investments the state makes each year.
Average ACT scores for MSMS students hover near 30, with students improving their ACT scores by an average of 4 to 5.5 points during their two years on campus.
MSMS graduates accept, on average, $7,000 in scholarship money per student, and the median income for MSMS students upon completion of college is $103,000 — compared to $39,000 for the average Mississippi college graduate who did not attend MSMS.
McConnell is particularly pleased to note the achievement of those students who have overcome hardships to excel.
Early in his career, he spent two years working in Tunica County, one of the poorest areas in the country with schools that struggled to educate their children.
“What I found is that I spent the vast majority of my time working with that large group of struggling students because they were the ones who desperately needed that help,” McConnell said. “But the truth is, that small group of students at the top didn’t get what they needed. That’s true in poor schools, but it’s true in probably every school in the state. These are the kids who are bored to tears and are looking for a challenge. Believe me, we give them a challenge when the get here.”
Students from poor households may trail their peers upon arrival at MSMS, but they quickly make up the ground.
“We see it after about nine weeks,” McConnell said. “That’s typically how long it takes them to close the gap.”
Those students benefit not only from what they are exposed to in the classroom, but the entire environment.
“A lot of those kids just don’t grow up in an environment they need,” he said. “They come home. Maybe they have to take care of younger children while their parents are at work. They don’t have a good place to study. They don’t have a computer. There are a lot of obstacles, real obstacles, facing them.”
Unencumbered by those obstacles at MSMS, they flourish and by the end of two years, it is difficult to distinguish the student from a poor home from the student who has grown up “with everything they need,” McConnell said.
“Some of the greatest jumps in ACT scores are from those students,” McConnell said. “It’s not just that they have more room to grow because they came to us with lower scores. It’s also, I believe, that they better recognize the opportunity and really value it.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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