Imagine Starkville High School and the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science operating as sister schools on the campus of Mississippi State University.
The two schools have their own identities and facilities — the residential MSMS sporting new dorms for its 240 students. Cafeteria, labs and other spaces would be shared. Who knows? Maybe MSMS students suit up to compete on Yellow Jacket athletic teams.
Students from both schools could seamlessly engage with faculty, programs and facilities at the state’s largest university.
Over the past year, legislators, as well as leadership at MSU, MSMS and Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District, helped form that vision. An ex-MSMS executive director claims pursuing it got him fired. A failed state Senate bill this session has shelved any MSMS relocation plan for now.
District 43 Rep. Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, hasn’t given up on this vision. As chair of the House Education Committee, he intends to see it through.
“I think it makes sense,” Roberson told The Dispatch last week. “… The reality is that MSMS is going to have to find a new home at some point.”
Building projects align
MSMS opened in 1988 as a school for gifted juniors and seniors from across the state, occupying six buildings at Mississippi University for Women.
Since then, the legislature has not allocated the school any money to upgrade facilities, MUW President Nora Miller told The Dispatch earlier this week.
MSMS contracts with The W to use buildings on its campus, but MSMS, which receives funding through the Mississippi Department of Education, is responsible for maintenance. Efforts to move the school elsewhere come from “valid” facility concerns Miller feels the legislature created.
The school’s two residence halls are in disrepair. Other facilities need extensive work. To that end, MSMS requested $90 million from the legislature this session.
“They were encouraged to shoot for the moon,” Miller said. “So I don’t know if $90 million is actually what is needed. … For the residence halls, it’s like $40 million. Then I think the other is just, ‘We need some other facilities. This should cover it.’”
Meanwhile, Roberson is greasing the wheels for state funding to help build a new Starkville High, something the school district began exploring last year. That project alone could cost $200 million, he said, though he admits that estimate is fluid. SOCSD can borrow up to $87 million in bonds toward the project, if it happens in the next three years.
The two schools on one campus, Roberson thinks, should be cheaper than addressing them separately, due to shared facilities and economies of scale.
“We can move MSMS in for $40 million. … That could save us $40 million or $50 million,” Roberson said, referencing the MSMS’s $90 million legislative request this year.
With or without MSMS, a SHS campus at MSU would look to harness the same success as Partnership Middle School — a campus that opened there in 2020 for grades 6 and 7. The university uses the middle school as a training and research ground for education students and faculty.
Adding MSMS students into the SHS plan would maintain the residential high school as a separate entity, even if the two schools share lab space, take some classes together and participate in similar programs. It could open opportunities for additional extracurriculars for MSMS students.
“MSMS, they don’t have sports. They don’t have band,” Roberson said. “Those kids could use our facilities and come join the band, or the football team, or the basketball team. There are ways to have those students acclimated into a school system that allows them to have more resources as well.”
MSMS does have some extracurricular activities, including sports, like soccer, swimming and tennis.
Miller sees an additional motive.
“I think it sounds like Starkville School District would like to benefit from having some extremely bright students to up their profile,” she said. “That’s certainly a way to do it.”
SOCSD hasn’t committed to building a high school at MSU, district public information officer Haley Montgomery told The Dispatch. Its board of trustees hired a construction management and architecture firm Tuesday to begin site selection and design in earnest.
Right now, Montgomery said, SOCSD is considering several locations. MSU’s campus is “an” option but not “the” option.
She was vague about SOCSD’s willingness to share space with MSMS.
“We value partnerships,” Montgomery said. “We have a lot of them and we like to capitalize on them. So we’re not closed to a partnership related to MSMS.”
Roberson hopes to get a “chunk” of money for SHS in this session, nail down better cost estimates before next year, and possibly sponsor new legislation to bring MSMS into the fold.
As for MSMS’s $90 million facility overhaul?
“That’s not happening,” Roberson said. “We’re probably giving them more to the tune of a few million dollars just to get some stuff fixed. It could be more than that because I don’t want these kids sitting over there in squalor either.”
MSMS Interim Director Ginger Tedder, in a March 1 email to The Dispatch, did not offer a preference for the school’s location. Wherever the school lands, she said facilities need to improve. She also noted MSMS’s $5.7 million in state funding for Fiscal Year 2024. Though up from previous years, it still significantly trails similar STEM schools in Alabama ($9.9 million), Louisiana ($11.8 million) and Arkansas ($13.2 million) — all of which have comparable enrollment.
Cook’s quest
Donnie Cook, a graduate of MSMS, became the school’s executive director in June 2022.
MSMS had been bussing students to MSU for mentorship and research programs, and by early 2023, he had approached MSU leadership about strengthening ties with MSU, which quickly evolved into discussions about moving the campus there.
Through public records requests, The Dispatch obtained emails from both MSU and MSMS related to those discussions, which show Cook engaging MSU Provost David Shaw and Vice President for Research and Economic Development Julie Jordan as early as February 2023.
Cook initially denied these conversations as rumors, but The Dispatch reported on internal communications with his faculty in April of that year, which led Cook to speak more publicly about “MSMS 2.0” and a possible relocation. That same month, Cook met with SOCSD Superintendent Tony McGee to discuss a partnership.
Planning continued through meetings that included MSU personnel, per the emails.
In August, Shaw shared with both Cook and McGee a “draft concept paper” for a joint campus on MSU property on Highway 182 adjacent to the Partnership School. It included a new SHS, new classroom and dorm space for MSMS, a shared cafeteria, band hall, labs and classroom space, and a shared “state-of-the-art” fine arts center.
Cook admitted publicly that he continued these discussions after the MDE, which oversees MSMS under the direction of the State Board of Education, told him to stop. He was terminated Sept. 29.
Jordan told The Dispatch that MSU’s planning for taking on MSMS stopped after Cook’s termination. It didn’t revive until late February when Dist. 43 Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, filed SB 2715 calling for MSMS to relocate to MSU by 2026.
Shaw, and MSU legislative liaison Lee Weiskopf, offered DeBar edits to his bill — delaying relocation to 2027 and making MSU responsible for governing MSMS and managing its budget, which would “(take) MDE out of the loop,” according to obtained emails.
“Every other public school district has an independent board,” Jordan told The Dispatch. “So in that sense, (MSMS) would look like any other public school district because it would have a separate board.”
An MDE spokesperson, in a Thursday email to The Dispatch, did not comment on Jordan’s position, other than noting state law gives the State Board of Education governance of MSMS, the Mississippi School for the Arts and the Mississippi School for the Deaf and Blind.
Shaw suggested changing MSMS’s name to something more modern, per a Feb. 26 email The Dispatch obtained. Weiskopf took that to DeBar, then relayed the senator’s response.
“… He chuckled and said, ‘Remember, trying to change a name is why we’re here,’” Weiskopf wrote, referencing a controversial and erratic effort to rename The W over the past year. “He asked if we could make that part of the plan, and let’s get this bill passed first.”
That never happened.
‘Those kids need facilities now’
DeBar has not returned calls to The Dispatch, including for this report, since filing SB 2715.
Roberson had an alternative, more methodical, plan to DeBar’s. He met with MSU and SOCSD leadership before the session. At that time, the main focus was SHS. The MSMS piece “was just vaguely talked about.”
He needed better cost data, possibly some designs. In short, he felt he needed another year.
Ultimately, DeBar made a last-minute change to his bill, seeking instead to bring The W under MSU’s control. That effort failed, taking with it the original bill’s intent to relocate MSMS.
“It just weighted the bill down to where nobody could support it,” Roberson said “… MSMS was a much easier piece to figure out. Those kids need new facilities now.”
Fully engaged with SOCSD
Dead legislation makes bringing MSMS to MSU a dead issue, Jordan said.
However, MSU is fully engaged with SOCSD’s high school plan.
“Proximity matters,” Jordan said. “… The more distance you have to travel, the more logistics are involved. … The (students) can walk to our library or to go to the archaeology museum or … attend a concert. … Just like (Monday) they could have participated together with (MSU) students on the eclipse watching. And then our faculty can engage with them easier.”
If the legislature brings MSMS into the conversation again, Jordan believes the school could “absolutely” fit with that dynamic.
“The opportunity is fascinating to think about,” Jordan said. “I’m not naive enough to think it wasn’t going to come with its own set of challenges to do something that had never been done before.”
Miller believes The W’s smaller campus and tighter-knit community better benefit MSMS. Students have access to a college campus there, too, with downtown Columbus at its front steps.
“They are able to walk to church, walk to the Columbus library,” she said “… I don’t know how (MSU) would replicate that.”
MUW is bolstering its programs with MSMS, Miller said, by expanding dual enrollment and student research programs.
“In the Donnie Cook year, he was really promoting everything with Mississippi State and gearing everything toward them,” she said. “There was very little communication with us about what we could do and how we could better partner. We’re having those conversations now.”
A different approach
District 15 Sen. Bart Williams, R-Starkville, planned to vote for DeBar’s bill to relocate MSMS to MSU.
Like Roberson, he feels the school fits naturally with plans to build a new SHS campus. He believes access to MSU sweetens the deal for those students.
“These are some of our best students in the state,” he said. “… It just enhances that experience even more for them.”
Unlike DeBar, and to some extent Roberson, Williams at least wants to hear The W out.
“The legislature doesn’t need to force things like this,” he said. “I think we need to talk to all of the stakeholders, MUW, MSMS leadership, the alumni, … sit down and have a constructive conversation with no options off the table. … I’m a firm believer that if we all get eyeball to eyeball, we have a better chance of coming up with something that’s workable without the collateral damage.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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