MERIDIAN —     Meridian Public Schools will open Monday with an expected enrollment of more than 6,000 students.

    When school opens Tuesday for the Lauderdale County School District, nearly 7,000 students will return to classes.

    Superintendents from the two school systems spoke with The Meridian Star about the upcoming school year.



Meridian Public Schools    



    Dr. Alvin Taylor, superintendent of Meridian Public Schools, said there are no new major policy changes this year, but there are changes in the discipline policy to help keep students out of trouble.

    "We've done a little tweaking with the discipline but only to provide more intervention steps for our students and putting in more pieces to provide interventions for our students and parent contact," Taylor said.

    Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports is an attempt to not only give consequences for bad behavior, Taylor said, but to work with students to see what is causing their misbehavior.

    "We're doing more with counseling to try to work with them and their behavior to not just to give them a punishment, but to also work with them so if they get into this situation again, how can they make better decisions."

    Also new this year is a law passed by the Mississippi Legislature that will make it easier for teachers to buy school supplies. School districts may now issue debit cards to teachers.

    Teachers have routinely received Education Enhancement Funds, which are administered through the state and distributed to each school district, but now they can use debit cards to pay for classroom supplies.

    "It's just a matter of us uploading the funds on the debit card and issuing them out to the teachers," Taylor said. "They can use the cards to get instructional materials that can help them help their children become successful."

    Teachers don't have to get a purchase order, they just have to keep receipts for five years.

    As always, preparing a budget for the new school year was difficult, but Taylor said they managed to do so without  any major cuts this year.

    "It's always a challenge, but we are completely solvent. We are in good shape and we did a lot of cost-cutting measures in terms of energy," Taylor said. "We did a lot to watch our spending last year so we're in pretty good shape. We're not rich but we're not in any situation where we're having to look at cutting jobs or anything like that. All of our positions were renewed. We're ready to have school."

    The district has nearly 600 teachers and about 500 support staff.

    Taylor hopes for continued success with the district's support from parents.

    "We did a big push last year for our parent and community involvement and we were pretty successful," he said.

    The district has a community parent committee comprised of parents from each school who meet monthly.

    "We've been getting good parental involvement, good community involvement," Taylor said. "We feel that that's played a major role in us meeting almost all of our goals this last year."



Lauderdale County School District

    

    Lauderdale County School District Superintendent Randy Hodges said the school district is holding its own with the budget, but it's a challenge.

    "This will be the fifth year of going into a school year during the recession. The recession affects all of us, businesses, the community and we're certainly not exempt," Hodges said. "We've had to be so selective on how we spend dollars. It's difficult to meet all the many needs our students have and that our faculty has."

    Hodges hopes that funding can increase when the economy improves.

    "We haven't raised taxes in four years because we've been very sympathetic to the community. It just says we're doing well and we're doing it with less and we're managing doing the best that we can," he said. "We need some help. We've been asked to have larger classroom sizes, cut some programs and that's not the way you want to operate when it comes to educating a child. You don't want to spare anything that's needed."    Something the district is working on for the future is the Common Core Curriculum which will be fully implemented for the 2014-2015 school year. The district has already implemented the program in kindergarten.

    More than 40 states have adopted the Common Core Standards, which cover K-12.

    The standards are very demanding, especially with writing and reading, said Ryan Powell, director of curriculum for grades five through 12.

    "We hope that in 2015 when we take our state assessment, which will be a Common Core assessment, it will be the same as 46 other states," Powell said. "We can actually compare our state results to 46 other state results."

    The district has information on its website that will explain to parents what to expect from Common Core, Powell said.

    "For a parent who has a child entering school for the first time, it gives all the details of what the student should know and be able to do," Powell said.

    Common Core spells out the expectations for what students should be learning at each grade in order to be prepared for college and a career.

    "We try to give them as much information as we can so they'll have somewhere they can go and get information," Hodges said. "Common Core is going to be much more rigorous and that's something parents will need to know. The assessments will be done differently from the way we've been doing it in the past. The bottom line, comparing it with 46 other states is just going to make us all better. It's more challenging and more difficult. It's going to make us better as a state when it comes to educating our children."

    The Lauderdale County School District has 479 certified teachers, 508 support staff, 22 principals and assistant principals; and eight employees at Central Office.

    More information about the school district can be found online at www.lauderdale.k12.ms.us.