Area school board presidents are fighting for their districts to receive test scores from Golden Triangle Early College High School’s students.
GTECHS, located at East Mississippi Community College’s Mayhew campus and which allows students the opportunity to take college classes during their high school career, accepts students from Lowndes County, Columbus Municipal, Noxubee County, West Point Consolidated and Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated school districts. However, it is considered part of LCSD, which also receives Mississippi Adequate Education Program funding to support the school.
That means LCSD gets credit for all GTECHS students’ test scores, including state end-of-year benchmark testing and college entry exams such as the ACT and SAT — scores which factor into Mississippi Department of Education’s accountability rating of school districts, which are released on an A-F scale each fall.
“It is completely unfair to all districts except the one benefiting from this agreement,” CMSD school board president Jason Spears said in a message to The Dispatch Friday.
Spears has worked with school boards at WPCSD and SOCSD and penned a letter to the state board of education on behalf of all three districts, requesting MDE change the test score allocation so that home districts receive credit for scores before the ratings are released.
“This program is a large allocation within our budget to cover all costs associated with providing this opportunity to our students,” Spears’ letter says. “… All scores and accountability data are credited to the Lowndes County School District even though … the ‘feeder school districts’ were responsible for students’ education the previous eight years.”
District superintendents signed a contract with each other, GTECHS, EMCC and MDE in 2015, agreeing to the test score allocations. WPCSD school board president Gene Brown said he’d known at the time that the test scores would go to LCSD, but that he hadn’t realized that schools such as Columbus-based Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science and the Mississippi School for the Arts in Brookhaven — other schools that accept students from multiple districts — send accountability scores to the students’ home districts. The other two public schools in the state that accept students from multiple districts, Mississippi School for the Blind and Mississippi School for the Deaf, receive their own ratings, rather than sending them to a home district.
“We just feel it’s right,” Brown said. ” … We are bussing the kids there, and they come though the West Point School District up until that point, and we want credit for those students up until they graduate. It’s kind of a no-brainer. If they go to your school system, even though they leave, they never went through Lowndes County School District. Their grades should come back to their home school.”
The state board of education will meet Thursday to discuss districts of innovation, including GTECHS. Spears will attend the meeting in hopes of discussing and amending the contract to reward all respective districts with their students’ test scores.
State school board members did not respond to calls from The Dispatch by press time.
GTECHS Principal Jill Savely said although GTECHS does give state tests, her priority is preparing students for colleges and career. For her, any decision that’s made by the state would not change how the school operates.
“That’s a decision that the department of education will make. Whatever decision they make we will be happy with,” Savely said. “I don’t have an opinion one way or another.”
GTECHS has 221 students total, with 45 from CMSD, 63 from LCSD, 33 from NCSD, 34 from SOCSD and 46 from WPCSD.
Changing the contract
The contract the districts signed in 2015 is due to expire by the end of June 2020, but school board presidents said they wanted to fight for the scores before the contract’s expiration.
“It would stand to reason that if there’s a chance of there being another contract, you want to make sure you have everything ironed out before that new contract,” said SOCSD board president John Brown.
John Brown and Spears both said they’d been unaware at the time the contract was signed that LCSD would be credited with GTECHS students’ scores.
“At no point was it disclosed we were going to give up students for accountability forever,” Spears said. “It wasn’t something that the board talked about or understood.”
LCSD Superintendent Lynn Wright said he’s unopposed to changing the way the scores are allocated. He added the reason GTECHS falls under LCSD is because LCSD is the fiscal agent and helped form GTECHS from the get-go.
“It’s understandable (districts) want their scores,” Wright said. “Whatever the state policy and procedure dictates how the scores should go, we don’t have a problem with that. If they want to send the scores to the other districts, that wouldn’t bother me.”
Even with the contract expiring, Spears said he wants each district to receive the credit he feels it deserves.
“We understand that we can’t go back and get credit for the past years,” Spears said. “Now that we know, it’s our duty to make sure it’s corrected.”
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You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 29 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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Jill Savely
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