One Saturday afternoon in late May, a few days before the end of his junior year, Harvey Ellington plopped onto his queen-size bed, held up his phone and searched for a signal. The 17-year-old lived in a three-bedroom trailer on an acre lot surrounded by oak trees, too far into the country for broadband, but eventually his cell found the hot spot his high school had lent him for the year. He opened his email and began to type.
“Good evening! Hope all is well! Congratulations on being the new superintendent for the Holmes County Consolidated School District.”
A week and a half earlier, the school board chose Debra Powell, a former high school principal and mayor of East St. Louis, Ill., to lead the rural school district that Ellington attended in the Mississippi Delta. Powell worked as an administrator at Ellington’s school before the pandemic, and she ran track with Jackie Joyner-Kersee when she was a teenager. Maybe, Ellington thought, Powell had what it took to turn the district around.
Ellington’s fingers hovered over his cellphone screen. Soon he would be a high-school senior, and he wanted to sound perfect. He looked around his bedroom, first at the sign that said, “You are worth more than gold,” then at his dresser, where he’d propped a copy of Carter Woodson’s “The Mis-Education of the Negro” underneath a picture of the superintendent’s round-table meeting. Ellington served on the student advisory group his freshman year, and he was president his sophomore year, but the round table no longer existed.
“I have laid out some ideas and changes I want to see,” he wrote to Powell.
Ellington was 7 the first time someone told him the state of Mississippi considered Holmes a failing district. Holmes had earned a D or an F almost every year since then, and Ellington felt hollowed out with embarrassment every time someone rattled off the ranking. Technically, the grade measured how well, or how poorly, Ellington and his classmates performed on the state’s standardized tests, but he knew it could have applied to any number of assessments. His school didn’t have clubs, and even before the pandemic, they hardly went on field trips. Every year, teaching positions sat unfilled for months at a time. The football team often made the playoffs, but the field at the high school was inadequate, and so the squad had to travel 10 miles west to play outside an elementary school.
“Let’s bring a Debate team!!” Ellington wrote. “lets bring back the 18 wheeler club, Lets bring organization for kids that love to write books especially myself. ... Let’s engage more with our kids so they can improve their ACT scores! Let’s bring some positive things around the community so kids can stay out of trouble after school! Let’s bring a big boys and girls club like a huge boys and girls club.”
As he typed, Ellington could hear his younger brothers playing Xbox games in the living room. Ellington had spent most of 2020 guiding the 5- and 6-year-olds through their virtual school days as he tried to tune into his own lessons. After almost failing a class in the fall, he earned mostly B’s in the spring, but he couldn’t take another year of learning that way. Finally, he thought, they had reached the end of what people had been calling a lost year.
In his email, Ellington didn’t mention any of the things he’d lost. He didn’t tell Powell he spent weeks waiting for Wi-Fi and a Chromebook, and he didn’t admit that he skipped parts of his classes as he cooked oatmeal and bacon for his brothers while his mother worked a nursing job an hour away. He didn’t explain that he needed the A.C.T. help as much as anyone. He took the test once during the pandemic, and he scored several points lower than the state average. He could take it again, but few students at his high school had scored higher.
Ellington knew that teenagers elsewhere were eager to return to normal — to schools with clubs, air-conditioning and a reliable slate of certified teachers. But Ellington didn’t want to return to the normal he’d known. He wanted to believe the new superintendent would turn Holmes into the kind of high school that students elsewhere took for granted. He understood how difficult it would be for one person to make progress after years of systemic neglect. Maybe it would take a decade. Maybe he would be long gone. But the one thing Ellington knew he could offer was his experience, and so, he decided, if the new superintendent wrote back, he would tell her everything he learned over the last three years.
“Please get back at me,” he typed. “This is so important to me! Let’s make it happen!!!!”
Ellington spent much of his life daydreaming about leaving Holmes County. Lexington, the largest town in the area, has only a handful of sit-down restaurants and no movie theater. “We don’t even have a Walmart,” Ellington often complained. For teenagers, the lack of amenities meant there was nothing to do, but Ellington understood the deeper implications: In the United States, communities must pay for their own schools. Without businesses, Holmes didn’t have the tax base to give its children an adequate education.
While researchers and activists have spent decades detailing the ways urban schools have failed children, students like Ellington are learning in more dire conditions. Most of the country’s poorest counties are rural, and two years ago, leaders at the Rural School and Community Trust, a national nonprofit group, found that decades of population loss and divestment by state governments has left many rural communities facing “nothing less than an emergency” when it comes to educating children.
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