Organizing for Public Education Reform in the Holmes County Public School District in the tenth low-wealth community in the Mississippi Delta

Update Technology Infrastructure; Training; Database upgrade

www.citizensforqualityeducation.net

$7,500

Building and enhancing the capacity of low wealth parents and students by equipping them with the tools/skills of community organizing and other education and trainings to hold school personnel and public officials accountable to adopting and enforcing public policies that build and sustain a high quality public education system inside of environmentally healthy communities that place families at its center.

It has been our experience inside of our work in community that parents, students and public officials will respond to information, particularly voluminous, when it is prepared in ways that is visually understandable, manageable and impacts them directly. It has also been our experience that parents with low-education attainment, 25% of parents in the community have a high school diploma, are not intimidated with information and training materials that are prepared with both text and pictures that enhances understanding.

One of the strengths we have demonstrated in our work has been our ability to connect with our constituency base as we work, struggle and support each other in understanding much of the information we have been historically denied as a community. Further, our intergeneration approach, young and older people working together to build organization and in the work together, allows numerous opportunities for the young people to become the teachers and for the older people be students in the work.

For the past two years, member of our organization have participated with Southern Echo, Inc., a statewide and regional community-based leadership development and training organization, in demography training in an effort to enhance their abilities to work inside of communities. These young people are now members of the Mississippi Demography Group with the expressed mission of training other community leaders and organizers in the Mississippi Delta in using the tools and skills of geographic imaging and Harvard Graphics to breakdown complex information.

As a result, our youth organizers have taken the annual results of the Mississippi Curriculum Test data by individual schools in the Holmes County Public School District {6 of them}, manipulated it into readable charts and graphs for parents, students, other community people and school officials to understand. Parents and students are then enabled to share and discuss this information with other parents and students and hold their local principal accountable to parents’ requests for school improvement.

We are further interested in building an infrastructure in the use of technology to build our environment education program of work. We have identified and mapped illegal dumpsites manually though-out the county.

However, we seek the know-how and mean to use technology to have available to us the entire county and the Delta communities, so that we can identify and label the streets, roads, waterways, fields, schools, census blocks etc. This infrastructure will be used to support the leadership skills among and between youth in the work. Further, the learning will serve to support our students learning across the curriculum as it also builds their confidence and knowledge in civic participation at local governance.

The organization will seek to build on the use of technology through continued trainings to others in the Holmes County community and in the Delta so that its’ use will be more community friendly. We will also build in procedural safeguards and technology support to prevent unwarranted usage.

We will evaluate the project through an assessment of others in the work. We will participate in debriefing from the work. We will as questions regarding the use of technology in building understanding on behalf of students, parents, other concerned citizens and public officials in the work. Given the low education attainment and limited time frame that members of the Board of Supervisors have to give to a particular issue, did the data/text shared help them understand the facts? Did it move them to effective action? How did the use of the testing data help parents and students work with their local school principal to develop, monitor and evaluate school improvement plans? How did the use of data help parent{s} seek individual education support for their individual child{ren}? How many youth and adults participate in trainings? How did they use the data? How does the organization use technology to reach out to its constituency base?