The impact of state education funding cuts has expanded the student-teacher ratio, led to staff reductions and hindered maintaining facilities and a new school bus fleet, among other issues, McComb School District officials said.
Superintendent Dr. Cederick Ellis recently commented on a study that examined how funding cuts to the state education system in recent years have impacted school districts.
The study took a look at five impoverished districts in Mississippi, including the McComb School District.
P3 Strategies of Jackson conducted the survey with the hope of assessing “the impact of funding reductions that occurred during the recession after significant drops in state revenue.”
The survey focused operations in the Cleveland, East Jasper, Hattiesburg, Jackson and McComb school districts.
All of the districts have high poverty rates, ranging from more than 70 percent to more than 90 percent — a factor that is common in more than 60 of Mississippi school districts, including South Pike and Amite County schools.
“We hope that people will read it and be very objective in reading it,” Ellis said of the report. “We hope that it will make an impact where it needs to make an impact.”
McComb schools have a $29.3 million budget for the current fiscal year. The district has seen nearly $1 million cut from its share of state funding since 2010. Ellis, who started at McComb in July, said he has seen available resources used to the fullest in his first year.
“We have been able to manage because when we look at other school districts, they’re hit very hard as well,” he said. “Since I’ve been here, we have been able to manage with the funding provided, but if we were fully funded, there would be more things we could do for our children.”
The state uses a funding formula for K-12 education known as the Mississippi Adequate Education Plan. It has only been fully funded twice since it was created in 1997.
Since 2010, McComb has reduced its number of office and teaching staff by not filling vacant positions as readily as before, which has caused the student-to-teacher ratios to increase over time.
McComb finished the 2012-13 school year with 2,795 students and 187 teachers, giving the overall district a 15-to-1 ratio. However, each school has a different classroom ratio, ranging anywhere from 18-to-1 without a teacher’s aide to 25-to-1 in some lower grades with aides.
“We all know that if you have small classes, you can provide individualized instruction for those students,” Ellis said. “In the past, you could have smaller classes so that you can provide quality instruction for those students. It impacts the classroom because there are more students in a class, and the individualized instruction sometimes gets to be problematic.”
District financial director Cathy Jones said the cuts have affected all areas of education, from staffing to maintenance and technology.
“You’re clamping down on everything,” she said. “Are you doing as much facility-wise as you could have done? Probably not. It’s not any particular one thing — it’s across the board.”
McComb aims to buy two new school buses every year to keep the fleet within 10 years old, but with funding cuts, that hasn’t always happened.
“We don’t have an unsafe bus out there, but we were able to maintain a newer fleet (before the cuts),” Jones said.
Ellis said another result of the cuts is a somewhat outdated technological infrastructure. McComb does not have wireless Internet access in all buildings, and both teachers and students can be hindered by the lack of modern amenities available without wireless Internet. The district is in the process of applying for additional funding to address the infrastructure.
Jones said one concern with the cuts is the morale issue it creates for some teachers and administrators.
“I think it takes its toll,” she said. “It’s hard, year after year, when it’s tight. You feel like the state Legislature says they’re for high-quality education, but that’s not the top of their funding priority. But we had a good growth year as a nation, so I would be surprised for the legislators to come up with an excuse that there’s no money.”
