SCHOOLS IN DUCK HILL

    As I drove north the air was dead calm, slightly warm, and a bit unnerving, considering the tornado alert. Some miles south of Duck Hill a previous tornado had scoured the area on either side of the highway for half a mile. Trees were uprooted and nearby buildings sat with damaged roofs waiting to be repaired. I found my way into Duck Hill where I contacted Drustella White, another MIRA team leader. It was only a few blocks from the gas station that I turned into a nice-looking old house with a comfortable front porch. Drustella and her husband Al White met me and gave me a short tour. They explained that the house had been acquired for a very small fee. It had been a crack house that was taken over, and it had been refurbished to accommodate Al White's video production equipment, other office space, and the living room served as a meeting room around which were located the MIRA computers.

Drustella explained that getting people to the training was a major accomplishment because many had no phone or automobile, so the coordination and logistics had to be planned carefully. With her background as a teacher in Alameda, California, and as a PR specialist she understood the value of the subject matter covered in the training sessions. As a community activist she was anxious to add new tools (or perhaps weapons) because of a long festering problems related to the way the county school superintendent was elected. "We had a case where five black kids were charged with a felony for throwing peanuts on a school bus. This brought us together." It was partly a racial matter but also one where the smaller rural villages were not treated equitably by the board which was dominated by the people in Winona, the more populous county seat. The rural schools were in Duck Hill and Kimichael. "In effect,we have two school systems, the more sophisticated Winona school and then ours." Before MIRA started she had helped form a group called Concerned Citizens of Montgomery County. It was supported by Southern Echo "a leadership, development, education, and training organization working to develop new, grassroots leadership in the African American communities in Mississippi." At that time she had no computers to use. The training provided for the MIRA project was welcome. The training session held at the Duck Hill School attracted over 250 people, including about 150 from town. As the training went on she was trying to get non-profit status for the citizens group. When they got the computers, they realized a lot of the children did not have basic literacy skills to make use of them.

Southern Echo helped her challenge an election procedure for school superintendent through a lawsuit. A civil rights lawyer name Mahi Zaki filed suit in 1999 and it ended in 2000 when a federal judge found the election process to be unconstitutional. White said that their own persistence allowed them to get local records from the county seat but the Internet helped them research other parts of the case. This whole complex political process was going at the same time as MIRA. The superintendent of thirteen years was replaced by Carolyn Swanson, one backed by the people of Duck Hill, but it seems that once in power she began making decisions that did not please White and other former supporters. Now there is a move to close the Duck Hill School for economic reasons and bus the students about 30 miles to Kilmichael. The fight continues.

Locally the center where we met could easily become a focal point for learning activities outside of school. Al White had recently purchased a large amount of used video production gear and wanted to teach the children some of these skills. I put him in touch with Dan Marano of Taos Talking Pictures and Francisco Guajardo of Llano Grande Center in Texas where young people are actively producing digital stories, iMovies, and other multimedia works. While this kind of training might not lead to jobs in Duck Hill, it would better prepare the local people for the world outside.

My trip back to Jackson avoided the tornado, which that night swept northward through the state. Near Tupelo it cut a 23-mile swath, destroyed five hundred homes and killed five people. Duck Hill and Kosciusko escaped any damage. The next morning I returned home safely to earthquake country and sporadic power blackouts in Silicon Valley.