Canton Mississippi Education

CANTON, Miss. — When school begins next month in Mississippi, Akeeleon Lewis will head to kindergarten for the second time. He started school last fall not knowing his colors or numbers.

"He couldn't even hold a pencil," says Judy Packer, his kindergarten teacher at McNeal Elementary School in Canton, a city of 13,000 about 30 miles northeast of the state capital in Jackson.

Akeeleon wasone of about 10 percent of kindergarteners kept back at McNeal when the school year ended in May, a rate twice the national average. Before he arrived at McNeal, he hadn't played much with children his age or ever set foot in a classroom.

Thirty years after Mississippi established statewide kindergarten and made school attendance compulsory starting in first grade, classroom readiness remains amajor obstacle to student success in this state, which has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the country and test scores that are consistently among the nation's worst.

Although neighboring states have made great strides in early education, Mississippi remains the only state in the South — and just one of 11 in the country — that doesn't fund any pre-k programs. Researchers have foundthat high-quality pre-k programs can improve long-term outcomes for low-income children and help close an achievement gap for minorities that tends to worsen over time. Being able to stand in line, listen to directions or make eye contact with the teacher play in an important role when it comes time to try to teach kids how to read and write. And a lack of school readiness is evident the minutechildren walk in on the first day of kindergarten, says Kaye Sowell, who has taught for 30 years in Rankin County. "I've had to chase children into the street," she says. "I have kids who don't know their given name and can't recognize it in print. They can't go through the lunch line without holding it up. You can't fathom it unless you've lived it."

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Failure to prepare children for kindergarten or first grade costs the state a lot of money. One of every 14 kindergarteners and one of every 15 first-graders in Mississippi repeated the school year in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. From 1999 to 2008, the state spent $383 million on children who had to repeat kindergarten or first grade, accordingto the Southern Education Foundation. Children like Akeeleon start so far behind they may never catch up, and those who repeat one or more grades are much more likely than their classmates to drop out of school, decades of research have shown.

The state's academic results — abysmal by just about any measurement — don't improve as the children grow older. In 2011, the state's fourth-graders wereoutperformed on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress by their peers in 44 states. In math, they finished second to last in the nation, ahead only of fourth-graders in the District of Columbia.

Just 61 percent of Mississippi's students graduate from high school on time — more than 10 percentage points below the national average. Mississippi found itself at thebottom again this week, ranking 50th on six of the 10 national indicators of child well-being in a report released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Over the years, countless committees, taskforces and politicians in the state have argued that investing in pre-k will improve high-school graduation rates and build a more highly educated workforce in Mississippi. Retired military leaders addedtheir voices in May, calling for state-funded pre-k to help prepare the more than 75 percent of young Mississippi residents who are ineligible to join the military because, among other reasons, they failed to graduate from high school on time.

But legislators have held firm in the belief that the economically depressed state cannot afford pre-k. Nationally over the past decade, enrollment in...