Gloria Dickerson sat in a large crowd of Drew citizens on Monday night, listening to three options that are on the table that could improve school facilities in Sunflower County.
The District 5 Supervisor represents the northern portion of Sunflower County that includes the city of Drew, and she left Monday’s meeting both optimistic and skeptical of the recent initiative of the Sunflower County Consolidated School District that includes multiple community meetings designed to get citizen feedback.
Overall, she thought the meeting went well.
At the same time, however, she believes some of the schools in the northern part of the county may not benefit in the district’s final plan, which has yet to be determined.
“My gut feeling is that we have people who are already really leaning toward Indianola, leaning toward rebuilding Gentry in the city,” Dickerson said. “I don’t know what they would do for the other schools, if they built that one school in Indianola. I don’t know if Ruleville would stay like it is, or if our schools would be neglected if they took all of the money and put it in that one school.”
The best case scenario for northern Sunflower County is the construction of two new high schools, including a replacement for Ruleville Central, but that option almost seems out of reach for the cash-strapped county that enjoys a maximum bonding capacity of $16 million.
So for Dickerson, and others at the meeting, the second best option is one school for the entire county. But even still, the high school would have to be centrally located for it to work logistically, she said.
“You have people in Rome, which is a long ways from Indianola, and we definitely do not want our kids to be bussed to one school in Indianola,” Dickerson said. “We don’t want that. That’s too long of a ride. By the time they get there, they’re tired, and by the time they get home, they’re tired. They can’t do their homework or anything.”
Dickerson admitted the consolidation of all of the county’s schools into one district has made the decision making difficult for district leaders.
“Drew was a separate school district at one time, Sunflower County was a separate school district and Indianola was a separate school district, and now they’re all in one school district, and now we have an obligation to take care of all of our kids through that one district,” she said.
For now, Dickerson is taking a wait-and-see approach to the situation, which should come to a head this winter when the data from the citizen feedback is collected and analyzed.
