One of the biggest challenges faced by Lowndes County is bettering its educational attainment, the CREATE Foundation’s Lewis Whitfield told a crowd of about 70 people Monday night during the Lowndes County Foundation’s Community Conversation 2.0.
The public event, held at the Nissan Auditorium in Parkinson Hall on the Mississippi University for Women campus, was a successor to a similar event held in 2018. Planned followups for 2020 and 2021 were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think it was Governor William Winter who said the road from poverty leads through the school house,” Whitfield said. “I think that’s perfectly right.”
Whitfield, who made a similar presentation four years ago, told the audience that while Lowndes County was comparable or slightly better to the state overall, it suffers when compared to national figures.
According to the 2020 census, when looking at adults 25 years old and older, 4.3 percent dropped out before completing the ninth grade and 9.4 percent dropped out between their freshman and senior years, Whitfield said. Both of those numbers are slightly better than the state average.
When it comes to college degrees, 14.5 percent of residents have a bachelor’s and 8.8 percent have a graduate degree, Whitfield said. Again, both of those are slightly better than the state average.
“You stack up pretty well with the state,” he said. “But if we put national numbers up here, both the state and Lowndes would be behind.”
That hurts the state when it comes to recruiting, he said.
“I went to a conference put on by the Mississippi Development Council in Jackson, and they brought in a developer from New Jersey,” he said. “He helped pick out plant sites. He told us that Mississippi is hardly on the radar because the educational attainment level is so low.”
A large part of the problem facing school districts in both the state and in Columbus and Lowndes County is poverty, he said. More than 95 percent of students in Columbus schools and 59 percent of students in Lowndes County schools were eligible for free and reduced lunches in the 2019-20 school year, he said.
Statistics from that school year were used because all students got free lunches during the COVID-19 pandemic, he explained.
Columbus has one of the highest rates of free and reduced lunches in the Tupelo-based CREATE Foundation’s service area, he said, while Lowndes County is fourth out of 32 districts.
“Schools not only have to deal with these students not being ready for school, but they have to deal with all their economic and social problems,” he said. “It’s a real burden and an opportunity at the same time.”
The overall poverty rate in Lowndes County is 16.5 percent, he said, compared to 18.7 percent in Mississippi and a national average of 11.9 percent. The 2020 per capita income in Lowndes County is $44,152, which is slightly above the state average of $42,129 but far below the national average of $59,150.
“The difference between Mississippi and the nation boils down to three things,” Whitfield said. “The biggest factor is our educational attainment level is lower than the national average. If we were at the national average, our per capita income would rise significantly.”
The state also has a large rural population and low employment per capita, he said.
According to data from 2015, about 20,803 workers both live and work in Lowndes County. About 6,500 workers commute into the county for their jobs, while about 3,800 commute outside the county to work.
Lowndes is one of only five counties in the 17-county CREATE Foundation service area that is showing more workers coming in than leaving to work, he said. The others are Alcorn, Lafayette, Lee and Oktibbeha.
With that being said, Lowndes County and Columbus are both losing population, according to the 2020 census. In the past 20 years, Lowndes County’s population has shrunk from 61,586 to 58,879, and Columbus has shrunk from 26,052 to 24,084.
In the 10 years since the last census, Lowndes County has shrunk by 1.51 percent, he said, and the state has shrunk by 0.2 percent. On the other hand, the US population has grown by 7.35 percent.
“The population of Columbus peaked in 1980 at 27,383,” he said. “Lowndes County peaked in 2000 at 61,586, but it’s down in the last two census periods. It baffles me that the area is not growing.”
It’s not all bad news for the area, though, he said. Median household income has increased 16 percent in Lowndes County since 2018, while poverty has dropped from 21.2 percent to 16.5 percent. The graduation rate has also increased from 89.8 percent to 91 percent.
CREATE Foundation Executive Director Mike Clayborne urged the audience to work to help make Lowndes grow.
“If anything is going to happen to grow our region, it has to happen at the local, community level,” he said. “… Pulling this information together is just the starting point, but you have to know where you are before you can start making plans for where you want to go.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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