The Mississippi Department of Education announced meetings this week for discussion of the consolidation of several school districts.

Local officials will meet in three sessions Tuesday in Winona to talk about details of the administrative consolidation of the Montgomery County and Winona school districts, as ordered by Senate Bill 2495, which was passed during last year’s legislative session.

Montgomery County School District school board members will meet at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the Montgomery County School District Central Office, 618 Summit St. in Winona.

At 4 p.m. Tuesday, Montgomery County elected officials will meet at the Winona School District Central Office, 218 Fairground St., Winona.

And at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Winona School District school board members will meet at the Winona School District Central Office.

A meeting to discuss the consolidation of the Lumberton, Lamar County and Poplarville school districts will be held on Friday in Hattiesburg. The consolidation was required by Senate Bill 2500, also passed last year. It calls for dissolving the Lumberton School District beginning in the 2019 school year. The meeting is scheduled for 1 p.m. in Room 118 of Smith Hall at William Carey University.

Kate Royals is a Jackson native and returned to Mississippi Today as the lead education reporter after serving in the same capacity from 2016 to 2018. Prior to that, she was a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger covering education and state government. She won awards for her investigative work, including stories about the state’s campaign finance laws and prison system. She was a news producer at MassLive in Springfield, Mass., after graduating from Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications with a master’s degree in communications.