This past week, FCS students and staff kickstarted a week-long campaign to prevent chronic student absenteeism. The campaign was congruen with National Truancy Month and aimed to help bring awareness of the importance of attendance and how truancy can affect our students here at Frayser Community Schools and globally.
Check out this short message from Dr. Rodney Peterson about truancy and how to prevent it below.
Congratulations to Miracle Coleman of Westside Middle School for her inspiring essay on what she would like to see more of in her neighborhood.
“When I first started writing the essay, I started thinking about what the kids in my school go through, what I’m going through and how it is living in Memphis and the environment that you’re surrounded by,” said Coleman.
The essay contest was an extension of Heal the Hood school tour set to continue this month with a stop at MLK College Prep on Friday, January 20. According to ABC 24 of Memphis, the tour aims to inspire children to stay out of gangs and make drastic lifestyle changes. The program lasts for about an hour, as students listen to positive messages created by musicians, actors, motivational speakers, and more.
Coleman said her plans are to give her mother and grandmother the money, because they are her ‘first ladies.’
The tour is in its 16th year and reaches more than 500,000 children in the Mid-South to date.
This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters
Samantha West, Chalkbeat
The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board on Tuesday approved just one of four charter school applications for the 2023-24 school year.
The board’s 7-0 vote means Westside Middle School, an existing charter school operated by Frayser Community Schools in the North Memphis neighborhood, will move out of the state’s Achievement School District and instead join the roughly five dozen charter schools MSCS currently oversees.
Westside is a part of Frayser Community Schools, a Memphis charter network launched in 2014 by Bobby White, a native of Frayser and longtime educator. Westside’s focus is on antiracism, meant to “address and disrupt an unjust educational system and racist practices in hopes of creating equitable opportunities and outcomes for Black students and students of color,” according to the charter network’s website.
The three rejected charter schools will not open, unless the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission overrules the Memphis board on appeal. On separate votes, all seven board members present agreed to reject the applications for the proposed schools:
Board members Kevin Woods and Sheleah Harris were absent from Tuesday’s meeting.
Apart from Westside Middle School, the MSCS board’s decision on Tuesday followed recommendations from administrators, who outlined many concerns with the remaining three charter schools’ applications.
School officials dinged the applications for lacking solid plans to accommodate particular groups such as students with disabilities or English language learners, and some for lacking an adequate facility or a clear academic focus, among other concerns.
Board members did not publicly discuss the charter schools’ applications on Tuesday.
Board members opted not to follow the district’s recommendation to deny Westside Middle School, based on administrators’ concerns about its academic model and academic goals, student recruitment strategy, and its label as one of the state’s lowest-performing schools.
“The application does not have strong supporting data for the school to continue operation,” administrators wrote in their recommendation, referencing the school’s most recent scores on state standardized tests.
In 2021, Westside Middle received an overall composite Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System score of 1 out of 5 — down from its 2019 score of 3. TVAAS measures student growth year over year.
Ahead of the vote, board Chair Michelle McKissack said many in the Frayser community contacted board members in support of Westside Middle and the impact the school has had beyond the classrooms.
“Westside Middle School, many would agree, is more than just a school in that community,” she said.
Westside Middle School was taken over by the ASD, Tennessee’s turnaround district, in 2012. After years of dwindling enrollment and little academic progress, the school switched hands in 2018, joining Frayser Community Schools. Westside Middle has remained under the oversight of the state since then.
After the board’s vote on Tuesday, Tennessee’s largest school district will assume oversight when the school’s charter agreement expires after the 2023-24 school year.
Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
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