OPINION: New school board wants best for all in JMCSS

There’s been a lot of speculation and rumors floating around regarding the Jackson-Madison County School Board and Superintendent Marlon King this year during the elections and since.

I had a couple of readers tell me they were surprised I wrote a story in August acknowledging the flipping of the Board because most would like to think the basic assumption is that all nine members are there for the students and their political affiliations and beliefs aren’t a part of the equation and an acknowledgement of the flip is an acknowledgement that some Board members aren’t sitting at that dais for the students and the betterment of the district.

I disagree with that notion, and I wish most everyone who believes it would too.

You can be for charter schools and still be for the betterment of JMCSS whether or not there’s a charter school present in Madison County.

You can be in favor of King and his leadership of the district even if you may second-guess some of his methods.

You can be for or against the lawsuit against the state’s Charter Commission and still be for the success of JMCSS and everyone in it.

It’s not a huge assumption to think that all nine members of the Board and all 2,000 members of the faculty and staff of JMCSS are performing their roles on a daily basis for the betterment of the district as a whole and the ultimate success of the students after graduating from one of the high schools.

Now they may have different ideas of how to achieve the same result, and some of those ideas may be proven to be incorrect or at least less sufficient once they’re implemented, but I hate it when one group of people here locally are painted with a broad brush by another group, and that brush they’re painting with is regarding a local issue.

Shane Barnes, Jason Compton, Andre Darnell, Debbie Gaugh, Glen Gaugh, Pete Johnson, Andrea Michelle Givens-Moore, Marcia Moss and Harvey Walden are all very different people, with different perspectives, framed by different backgrounds and life experiences … but they all have the same endgame in mind.

And that’s the beauty of local government and legislative bodies.

At the federal level, some members of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate – along with different media outlets at the national level – have a big chunk of the population believing the other side exists only to bring down the United States from the inside because it’s hard to get to the root of a national issue to find the truth.

If someone came in tomorrow and tried to convince us this flipped board with a majority of conservative Republicans filling seats are working together to try to bring JMCSS down, that’s a question that’s easy to answer.

We can ask them directly, or we can watch them and their voting records and the history of their actions.

Then if they need to be called out on it, we have that ability to ask questions and hold them accountable.

Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Contact him at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on X.com @JSEditorBrandon or Instagram @Editorbrandon.