Jackson Free Press

Great things are happening in Jackson Public Schools.

Recently, on a frigid winter night a dozen or so advocates for education, including students, sat around a table at the Eudora Welty library and discussed the issues facing public education today, both good and bad.

As the conversation moved, we were asked to think of times when the community rallied around our students and ensured their success or simply a greater opportunity to learn. The school-bond issue was mentioned; as was the community supporting the district through the innovative Alignment Jackson process.

One of the young men, a junior at Murrah, spoke up. He reminded us that he is part of a group of singers from the APAC program in JPS that would be travelling to New York City, over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, in order to perform at Carnegie Hall.

The performance was the New York premiere of "Requiem for the Living." It is a full concert featuring a live orchestra and choir. About 15 or so students from the program were selected to go and when they went to the community to raise funds for the travel, the community responded.

This amazing group of talented young JPS students should remind all of us of the roles we play in ensuring our community's success. We must have the important conversations about how to increase access to high-quality education for our students; how to reduce the suspensions and expulsions that so often feed the school-to-prison pipeline; how to look at how we spend, and seek, money; and how to boost educator morale and systemic support.

We have to think big and take on these challenges through a human-rights framework while keeping our city's young people foremost and present in the dialogue and action that ensues.

Amazing things are going on in our schools right now that often get overlooked by the media and the larger community. I often fall into the same trap in focusing too much on the negative. We can't get around our (approximately) 63-percent graduation rate—and we shouldn't. We have to take it on without shying away from it. We cannot make excuses, nor should we suffer from low expectations. This is on all of us.

We have a new mayor, and we have a new dialogue going on in the city. We have nonprofits, churches, businesses and our colleges aligning behind the district's vision to support our schools. Pay attention to our exemplary schools, check out what they are doing, and figure out how you can help all the other schools obtain those levels of success. Raise expectations for all our schools.

We have world-class arts and athletic programs; we have educators that can go up against the best educators in the state, and we have students who are striving to be the best they can be while making a difference in the community.

Still, we have to be honest and forthright—there is a lot of work to do. So the next time you end up in a circular conversation about "problems" in our school district, cut it off with a simple, reflective question: "What can I do to help and provide great opportunities for our students?" Once you have answered that, let the world know. Then go out and do it.

As the young man from Murrah noted to me in an email about performing at Carnegie Hall: "This is a prestigious event in the context that it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. This is truly a blessing not only to our school, but a blessing to our school district as a whole."

It is our responsibility, as a community, to ensure all our children are blessed with such opportunities—and that they are not once in a lifetime.

Jed Oppenheim is a frequent columnist for the Jackson Free Press. He is also a new member of the Jackson Public Schools board.