Last month the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board agreed to delay the opening date for Mississippi’s first “hybrid online" charter school to August 2026, and organizers say they are prepared to meet the new deadline. Critics, however, wish they wouldn’t open at all, claiming the new school will be a drain on Humphreys County resources, and that the school offers a learning format that targets wealthy urban households with faster, more reliable internet, not Humphreys County.
We’re hoping we can stop this freight train because it’s going to be detrimental to the county school budget,” said Rep. Timaka James-Jones, D-Belzoni.
Archway Charter School will serve grades 7-12 with a hybrid learning approach, allowing students to benefit from both classroom instruction and online curriculum. The brunt of learning will be conducted at-home over live-stream morning sessions and through “self-paced online learning” in afternoons, as kids pursue teachers’ morning assignments. Students will retain access to teachers in the afternoons, either through phone or one-on-one video conferencing. Twice a month, students also will meet face-to-face with teachers at a campus location “to engage in hands-on and extra-curricular activities.” Archway organizers say 89% of respondents to a countywide survey believe the community “needs more education options,” and 70% are "supportive" of a charter school in their area.
The school’s application suggests Archway could ultimately attract students from the Mississippi Delta’s legion of segregation school academies established to duck 50 years of school integration. The vast majority of white Humphreys County students, for example, attend Humphreys Academy, which gives the private school an 86% white student population and a Black population of less than 10%. Segregationist organizers created the school in 1968 specifically to circumvent federal integration laws and reduce white exposure to Black students. To this day, the school’s baseball team calls itself the “the good ole rebels” in the school's "fight song."
With monthly tuition at $560 (plus $200 registration fee), some “Rebel” parents may jump at the prospect of free classes without proximity to Humphreys County’s 97% Black student population. Organizers’ application suggests they hope to use the charter school to lure seg-school students back into the public school system: “Archway … believes that its innovative model could be appealing to families who are not currently enrolled in Mississippi’s public schools but have sought out needed flexibility and improved offerings elsewhere.”
Additionally, applicants anticipate pulling in kids enrolled in expensive homeschooling programs that require robust parental attention. The Archway school format does resemble some internet-dependent homeschool programs, but critics say most Humphreys County families do not have the parental resources to use it.
“The only kind of family that would be in a position to make the most of this is the kind of family that would have a parent at home, or even a babysitter or housekeeper,” said James-Jones. “This does not sound like the living situation for the typical $48,000 Humphreys County home.”
James-Jones said the recent pandemic uncovered major issues with government-mandated virtual schools and online education programs. “We’ve already seen the data showing test scores were in decline during COVID, when students were at home. And this was when parents were also home because of the pandemic. Many of the parents now won’t be there for this. They’re working as far away as Canton or Greenwood or Greenville.”
Math and reading scores for American 9-year-olds dropped precipitously in the first two years of the pandemic with reading and math scores seeing their largest decrease in 30 years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. However, Archway organizers say the COVID-19 pandemic instead served to expose “the unpreparedness of traditional brick-and-mortar schools to adequately educate students outside of the traditional classroom,” because they were not focused on online programs.
“While traditional schools struggled to provide a quality education through emergency remote learning, those that intentionally utilized online learning prior to the pandemic had already developed strategies, policies, and platforms to effectively educate students outside the traditional classroom setting,” the application claims.
But some parents say those strategies aren’t possible in one of the most remote, cash-strapped districts in the nation. Humphreys County resident Antoinette Well has children at three county schools, which include Ida Greene Elementary School, O. M. McNair Middle School and Humphreys County High School. Well said she was not sure how organizers think Belzoni students are expected to participate in an online class with the town’s limited internet options. The town of Belzoni only has one provider of hard-wire internet service, and she claims even that service is spotty.
“We use Belzoni Cable, but the wind can blow and it’s out. Just last night we were sitting up in the house watching Roku and — BAM — out goes the internet for 20 minutes. You can try to email Belzoni Cable but who can you contact at 8:30 at night? They don’t have 24-hour service. And the rest of the providers are just mobile providers, and you know how reliable that is way out here,” Well said. “When we were out during covid and doing study-at-home it really sucked around here because of the internet.”
Well added that the lagging internet, combined with most homes containing two working parents, made her doubt if organizers were sincerely targeting Humphreys County students at all.
Organizers do propose to pull in students from at least 14 counties outside the Humphreys school district, including C-rated Jackson Public Schools, thanks to a state law allowing students in C, D, and F-rated districts to travel across district boundaries to attend charter schools. White legislators passing this law were careful to prohibit these same students from attending affluent traditional public schools in majority-white districts in Madison and Rankin Counties, however. Jackson parents who dare enroll their children in Madison County schools get arrested. Still, organizers hope to use this law to boost enrollment.
“Because of its model, Archway expects to attract students from across district boundaries throughout the lower Mississippi Delta region, home to around 6,000 students in the targeted grade levels currently attending C, D, and F-rated districts,” the Archway application states.
Well complains the financially challenged Humphreys County tax structure “isn’t made to benefit from this, but we’re expected to pay for it.”
The cost of opening a new school in Humphreys County will not be cheap. School applicants project $1.4 million in expenses, with $488,817 of that funded by local district schools. Applicants expect that $1.4 million to expand to $2.4 million by the fifth year and for the local district(s) to contribute $733,225 (Page 411) by then.
The total projected revenue for Humphreys County School for the 2023-2024 School was $34 million, compared to bigger urban districts like Jackson Public Schools with its $308 million budget. School districts derive a portion of their revenue from sporting events, cafeteria food sales and property taxes, but property in Humphreys County is not known for its high value; the county’s average $30k income can’t sustain it.
Even Archway organizers acknowledge “100% of Humphreys County students attending public schools are economically disadvantaged,” but they argue “underserved Mississippi Delta school districts … deserve alternative education options (using) innovative models … to counteract … the growing achievement gap between low performing and high performing school districts.”
That’s not the way James-Jones sees it, however, with the proposed school serving out-of-district students and also employing out-of-district teachers.
“We have to realize that we only have 427 students in our high school. And our county is without industry, for the most part. Other than the few farmers we still have left in the county and one-and-a-half catfish processing plants—one full-time and one part-time—there’s really nothing else. The next largest employer is county government, so absolutely we cannot afford this.”
The board voted to approve the charter in November but stalled implementation until school organizers can address county broadband limitations, revenue issues and enrollment concerns. Delta State University and Belhaven University adjunct professor David Herndon, Archway’s proposed executive director, told the board at its Dec. 9 meeting that he considered the school’s challenges “overcomeable,” and said he believed the challenges were merely “conduits to solutions.”
Herndon added that he was confident the school would be up and running in 2026.