In all sincerity, I hope that Johnnie Vick is a good fit in the McComb School District. I hope he is able to solve some of the district’s problems and be the positive leader it needs.
It is past the time for things to calm down, for fewer employees to resign, and for a superintendent to be given a fair chance to deliver results.
The school board reportedly voted last week to offer Vick, a former South Pike superintendent, the McComb job, and he has accepted.
For the school year that just ended, he was principal of Leland High School in Washington County. The McComb job returns the Amite County native to the part of the state where he grew up.
I hope he knows what he’s getting into. There has been a definite trend of bad news among the three most recent superintendents.
The school board voted 3-2 to dismiss nine-year superintendent Dr. Cederick Ellis in late 2023. The district’s federal programs director, Betty Wilson, was interim superintendent for several months until Dr. Tiffany Hicks arrived in July 2024.
Ellis’ lawsuit against the district has not been resolved, as far as I know. Wilson, returning to her federal programs job, got fired by Hicks and is in the middle of an appeal of that decision. And the school board, which hired Hicks on a one-year contract, did not renew it. Her next job is as a principal in Vicksburg.
The first question about Vick’s hiring is, what kind of contract did he accept? Hopefully it’s more than the one-year agreement that Hicks worked under, but I was not able to confirm that Friday.
I’ll say it again: No superintendent can make a difference in a year. A three-year employment contract would be a minimum, with four or five years preferred.
Hate to add this, but I’d be truly surprised if Vick got anything more than a three-year deal. I just can’t shake the feeling that the school board’s three-member majority has serious trust issues.
The next issue is personnel. Teachers have been speaking with their feet. This month’s board meeting included at least 21 resignations, and I’ve heard that as many as 30 are leaving. That’s two or three times the normal annual turnover.
Here’s a bit of good news for Vick: The district has hired a bunch of teachers, according to this month’s board meeting information. But most of the new hires have the note, “pending license approval,” which means they are new to the profession.
There are surely some good teachers in there. But it’s going to take time for them to develop. They will need good principals and administrators to help them.
Finally, the district badly needs an image makeover. The most obvious example is the building at Summit Elementary School, where construction stopped a few months ago. What message does an incomplete building send?
Ultimately, the message is that the district didn’t have the money to complete the work. Which is exactly what happened, possibly because McComb will not be reimbursed by federal covid-relief money for improvements to some buildings that didn’t qualify for the program.
Some people may fault the school board for this, but it’s more of a staff problem. Nobody caught the fact that some work wasn’t eligible for federal money until it was too late. That’s why at least two companies have come to the school board in recent months asking for payment and threatening to sue.
Wait — there’s one more thing that Vick needs to know. The state Department of Education has been attending school board meetings since August. Why is this? It can’t mean everything’s OK.
If Vick is, as I suspect, on a short-term contract, then he will have to get after things right away. I wish him the best, because the McComb School District needs exactly that.
