By Stacey Patton

When school begins this Wednesday, 267 of Biloxi’s top-performing elementary students will be attending a new school less than a mile down the road. But some parents and city residents feel that move will threaten the student’s continued high scholastic achievement.

The reasons: those students will be moved from their new $15 million state-of-the-art building to a lower ranked school and mixed in with 240 lower performing students. Some also say the consolidation of the two schools will be further troubled by the influx of special education students being “mainstreamed” from other schools into the same building.

The controversy is the more intense because it involves race.

The students from the high-performing Nichols Elementary School are largely black and the school itself is located in a black neighborhood. The 90-percent black Nichols Elementary hails not only first in Biloxi, it also ranks 16th out of 432 elementary schools in the State of Mississippi. Last year one of its faculty members was named Mississippi Teacher of the Year.

Despite its five-star status, earlier this year each of the district’s white school board members voted to close Nichols Elementary, citing budgetary constraints. They said shutting down the school will save $400,000 a year. But the closing, protestors say, was an act of racial discrimination, not fiscal prudence.

And now, the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Division is investigating a complaint that the district was racially discriminatory when it decided to close Nichols and consolidate it with Gorenflo Elementary, which is ranked 156th in the State.

Kim Duffy, attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice is representing a group of concerned community members and she has said there is a great deal of confusion over why one of the oldest black and highest performing schools in the district was chosen to be shut down.

“It is a little perplexing to the community why to understand, to even understand what the school board’s thought process was especially to choose to close this school,” said Duffy.

The schools superintendent Paul A. Tisdale has repeated the same answer in justifying the decision, “It was a question of economics, not race.” Last month Tisdale told The New York Times that Biloxi endured a $5.5 million cut in state education financing and a $1.5 million decline in casino revenue. “This is the Great Recession,” he said. “What do you do as a steward of taxpayer dollars?”

Biloxi’s only African-American city council member Bill Stallworth told The Defenders Online in a phone interview that the school board is hiding behind demographics and money issues. The city council, he says, can’t get involved because the school board is autonomous and has the right to govern itself.

“The Council has no influence over the school board,” said Stallworth while noting that Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway’s brother Kenny Holloway is President of the school board. When NAACP President Ben Jealous met with Biloxi leaders in June to discuss the oil crisis, he also addressed the Nichols issue and suggested that the city draw new boundaries to keep the school open. Mayor Holloway told Jealous that the city was forced to close the school because of budget reasons.

Superintendent Tisdale has also noted that almost five years after Hurricane Katrina, school enrollment is down 22 percent overall, and down 45 percent in east Biloxi. According to enrollment numbers before Hurricane Katrina up to the end of the 2009-2010 school year reported on the district’s website, there was a decline in numbers. Before Katrina there were 3,626 students attending Biloxi’s seven elementary schools – Beauvoir, Gorenflo, Nichols, North Bay, Popp’s Ferry, Michel, and Jeff Davis (named after former Confederate President Jefferson Davis). By the end of the 2009-2010 schoolyear the number of students fell to 2617. But it was the predominantly white schools – North Bay, Popp’s Ferry and Jeff Davis that saw the biggest enrollment decline.

In addition to Nichols, two other predominantly white schools – Michel and Beauvoir were also closed this year.

Unlike the Nichols children, those students will not be transferred to Gorenflo. The district has confirmed that they have been “rezoned” and will be split between the predominantly white Popp’s Ferry and Jeff Davis.

When the decision to close Nichols was made in April, Biloxi’s black community complained that there was no outreach nor were they given a chance to mobilize resources. Stallworth says the only outreach came in the form of a phone call from the superintendent to James Crowell, President of Biloxi’s NAACP and the local paper to make the announcement about the closing.

“The community read about the Nichol’s closing on a Sunday. The school board met on Tuesday and it was a done deal,” said Stallworth. “The community never got a chance to respond.”

At the same meeting in which the board voted to close Nichols, a financial review revealed that the district still had a $10 million surplus in its budget. Stallworth says that $3.1 million of that was slated to build a new school.

“We were floored,” said Stallworth. “Here the superintendent was saying that they were closing Nichols to save $400,000 a year and we find out that there’s a $10 million surplus. And on top of that, they’ve put aside $3.1 million to build a new school. So you want to close a new school to build a new school? It doesn’t make sense.”

When asked if he knew where the new school was to be built Stallworth said the superintendent indicated that the $3.1 million has been in the budget for a long time and there are currently no plans to build a school anytime soon. But Stallworth and others suspect that if a new school is to be built in the future it will most likely appear in the northern predominantly white section of Biloxi.

Since April Nichol’s alumni and its supporters have been scrambling to save the school. Over the course of the summer they found an ally with the Kellogg Foundation. In June, Gregory Taylor, Vice President for Programs, met with superintendent Tisdale in an attempt to find a solution to keep Nichols from closing.

“We wanted to take the issue of money off the table,” said Taylor.

The Kellogg Foundation offered the school district a $1.5 million grant that would be paid out over three years. Those funds would take care of the projected $400,000 short fall of keeping Nichols open. Tisdale and the school board did not consider the proposal.

Taylor said that the Kellogg Foundation has been interested in the East Biloxi community, particularly in trying to foster coalitions between leaders and community members around important issues. Before signing off on a grant he needed some kind of written assurance that the school board would work with the Nichols community but he still hasn’t received a response. For the Biloxi superintendent and school board, closing Nichols appears to be a foregone conclusion, he said.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Taylor. “Here you have the only five-star school in the district, effective in educating black children and there’s no way the community and school board could come together to find a solution. It’s an example of a school system not taking into account the community it purports to serve.”

Stallworth says the school board claims that with school starting this week it’s too late to move furniture back to Nichols, that registration has been completed and teachers have been assigned.

“The school board can do anything it wants,” said Stallworth. “They’re stuck on stupid. Most school districts would kill for this opportunity from Kellogg and they are blowing it off because they truly don’t care enough. They are locked in this notion that ‘we made our decision and we need to stick by our decision.’ I can’t get my head around this by any stretch of the imagination.”

Stallworth contends that the school board’s closing of Nichols and moving its students to a lower ranked school, along with it’s refusal to accept money from the Kellogg Foundation, was done “to make sure that white schools in this district never have to be embarrassed by being out performed by a black school again.”

Stallworth said school officials have long justified closing predominantly black schools on the grounds that the buildings were in decay, the students were low performing and the teachers were not up to par. “Now, we’ve come around. We have a new school. We’re kicking your butt academically. We had teacher of the year from Nichols. Now you want to change the rules, throw out all the old criteria and come up with new criteria.”

For Taylor, the Kellogg Vice President, blaming the closing of Nichols on loss of revenue or population is the wrong conversation. While there was disrespect for the community and its processes, he also believes there has to be more to the conversation than raising issues of race.

“Can you mobilize and partner with a community to take a vested interest in a school so there’s an alignment in what’s happening in the home, the churches and surrounding community?” Taylor asked. “What’s amazing about Nichols is this notion that even in this vulnerable, under resourced community, this community has continued to build this powerful gem for black children.”

For Stallworth, the battle continues. “If we manage to beat them again, they’ll change the rules again. I am sick and tired of fighting the same old battles that we always have to fight. But we will have to continue to push on.”

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor of The Defenders Online and a writer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.