With funding for the planned sixth and seventh grade Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District/Mississippi State University partnership in place, representatives from both entities took time Wednesday to discuss how the school will operate.
Comments from SOCSD and MSU personnel made during a Greater Starkville Development Partnership-sponsored lunch panel indicate that collaboration between the two entities will be important to the school and its students. Kenneth Antony, an assistant professor in MSU’s Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education, said the school will not just involve collaboration with the university’s College of Education, but with units throughout campus.
“It’s more than a partnership,” Anthony said. “It’s a friendship.”
Last Friday, the SOCSD Board of Trustees unanimously voted to move forward with a $16 million bond resolution to help fund construction of the school and other projects in the district. In April, the Mississippi Legislature voted to provide $10 million in funding over two years for the school. MSU has pledged $10 million to the school, including $5 million in land.
SOCSD and MSU are working out the details of a long-term lease for the property that will contain the school. According to Starkville Parents for Public Schools President Jeremiah Dumas, who spoke at Thursday’s panel, renderings for the school will be ready in the coming months. Georgia-based firm Perkins+Will and Mississippi-based firm JH&H are the architects for the project and have been in meetings in Starkville in recent weeks to discuss the design of the new school.
Plans are for the school to be accessible from Highway 182 and George Perry Street when it opens. Long-term plans could include access from East Lee Boulevard, Dumas said. The school will be located just east of George Perry Street and just south of Highway 182, across from the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park.
SOCSD Superintendent Lewis Holloway said in board meetings last month that he hopes to see the school open in August of 2018. The sixth and seventh grade school will alleviate capacity issues at Armstrong Middle School and Starkville High School, which will each house one less grade of students once sixth and seventh graders are in the partnership school.
Anthony said the school will be designed to include classroom observation spaces and that MSU faculty members will be embedded in the school. The school will serve as a demonstration site for students teachers and as a research center on rural education and teaching. Anthony said it would provide a good opportunity for researchers to evaluate current and emerging teaching practices and make it easier to begin pilot programs.
Armstrong Middle School Principal Tim Bourne said he was excited about having experts in the school’s back yard that could assist teachers when they have issues. He also noted the school’s potential for beneficial research, adding that the school is “full of dissertations” for doctoral students in the College of Education.
For the school district, Bourne envisions a new school causing students and community members to want more from the district’s current schools.
“It will push as a district and a community to raise the standard of every school in our district,” Bourne said.
SOCSD board member Lee Brand said during Wednesday’s panel that the school board is working with the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors to figure out what to do with the former East and West Oktibbeha High School campuses, which closed following consolidation of the city and county school districts. Supervisors Marvell Howard and Orlando Trainer have expressed support for acquiring both campuses and trying to facilitate the placement of tenants that can help the community.
The West Oktibbeha campus is located in Maben in the northwest corner of the county. The East Oktibbeha campus is in the southeastern portion of the county on Moor High Road.
“Any time you leave a school, it just goes down,” Brand said. “There are too many needs in those areas to let that happen.”
SOCSD Superintendent Lewis Holloway said last Friday he would “absolutely” consider selling the West Oktibbeha campus to the county. The East Oktibbeha campus cannot be sold because legally it falls under the same guidelines as 16th Section land. However, the county could lease the property from the school district.