About 100 students and parents protested a proposal to create a new school for low-income students in Oxford.
The rally came Thursday after Oxford High School’s newspaper The Charger published an article in which Superintendent Brian Harvey said he had invited an education group from Virginia to discuss the possibility of creating a separate school for low-income students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. The goal of the new school, he told the paper, would be to close the achievement gap in the district.
Harvey told Mississippi Today that parents could choose whether or not to send their children to the school.
“It would be totally voluntary,” he said Thursday evening.
In June, representatives from a group affiliated with An Achievable Dream Middle and High School in Newport, Va., made a presentation to the Oxford school board detailing how it created a separate school for low-income students and increased its academic achievement level as a result.
Harvey said district officials will be visiting the school in late November, but that no decisions have been made.
“A decision hasn’t been made to do that nor has it been made not do that,” Harvey said.
He said school officials have already visited Antioch High School in Nashville to look at what it has done to increase its graduation rate to 77 percent.
Oxford High School student Jaquan Webb attended the protest at the middle school Thursday night because he believes the creation of a separate school would disproportionately impact blacks and low-achieving students.
“They’re just banning some people (out of the school) to get the (test) score higher,” Webb said of the intentions to create separate schools.
He said the decision to create a new school “would affect everybody” and end up creating racially segregated schools.
Protesters had mostly dispersed by around 7 p.m., according to the Charger’s Twitter, but Oxford High School students planned a meeting before school Friday morning.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.