
The Jackson City Council approved each of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s nominees for the Jackson Public Schools Board of Trustees during a special called meeting Wednesday morning.
With Ed Sivak, Letitia Simmons-Johnson, Barbara Hilliard and Jeanne Hairston confirmed the school board can now conduct district business.
“I see this as basically we’ve got one more shot at this,” Sivak told the council. “This is not going to be easy. It’s going to require us to use every tool we have at our disposal to make right decisions for our children.”
Hilliard stressed seeking new solutions for issues the school district faces: “For every problem, there is a solution. I think it’s incumbent upon each of us to find that solution and be about the business of doing what’s best for these children.”
Simmons-Johnson was Lumumba’s only appointee to the school board prior to the state takeover proceedings and indicated his intention to re-appoint her to the board at a previous council meeting.
Sivak is a senior vice president at Hope Enterprise Corp. Hilliard is an International Baccalaureate coordinator at the Jackson school district. Hairston has held several positions in higher education, including at Millsaps College and JPS.
Each member represents one of the city’s seven wards, and they are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the city council. Lumumba still needs to appoint three more members to represent the other three wards of the city.
The new members will replace the previous school board — each member willingly resigned prior to Gov. Phil Bryant’s announcement of the partnership between his office, the City of Jackson, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
According to resignation letters obtained by Mississippi Today, each former school board member resigned on Oct. 25, a day before the governor’s announcement. Each member thanked Lumumba or expressed gratitude for his work to establish another option for the district.
Camille Stutts-Simms, who served as interim vice president, said she was excited the district was “poised for greatness and achievement” and she was ready to assist in any way she could.
“As the lone board member whom your father appointed, I thought about him every day and tried my best to make him proud, but also serve with the integrity and solutions-oriented framework that he would have expected,” wrote former member Jed Oppenheim.
“Resigning does not mean I will stop serving our young people and the community. I appreciate the work you are doing, along with the other stakeholders, to make the district better and stronger for the 21st century.”
Contributing: Adam Ganucheau
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.