Drew School District - History

History

In 1967 civil rights activist Mae Bertha Carter and Marian Wright Edelman, a lawyer who worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., sued the Drew School District to challenge the Mississippi "freedom of choice" law. In 1969 the plaintiffs won the suit.

After Drew School District was desegregated, White residents of Drew enrolled their children in North Sunflower Academy.

In 1986 a petition to merge the district with the Sunflower County School District circulated. John Q. West, a board member of the Drew School District, said during that year that "I'm afraid we're going to end up having neighbor against neighbor."

Billy Turner of The Times-Picayune said that Drew High School had few markers that Archie Manning, a famous American football player from Drew, had attended school there.

In June 2011 the Mississippi Board of Education voted to take over the Drew School District. In February 2012 the Mississippi Senate voted 43-4 to pass Senate Bill 2330, to consolidate the Drew School District, the Indianola School District, and the Sunflower County School District into one school district. The bill went to the Mississippi House of Representatives. Later that month, the State Board of Education approved the consolidation of the Drew School District and the Sunflower County School District, and if Senate Bill 2330 is approved, Indianola School District will be added. In May 2012 Governor of Mississippi Phil Bryant signed the bill into law, requiring all three districts to consolidate. SB2330 stipulates that if a county has three school districts all under conservatorship by the Mississippi Department of Education will have them consolidated into one school district serving the entire county.

Read more about this topic:  Drew School District

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.
    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)

    I saw the Arab map.
    It resembled a mare shuffling on,
    dragging its history like saddlebags,
    nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.
    Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)