Church Street Elementary wax museum

Second-graders at Tupelo’s Church Street Elementary portrayed famous Americans at a wax museum Friday morning. I attended the event to see my daughter, who portrayed Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I saw other children dressed as Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Betsy Ross, Jackie Robinson, Dolley Madison, Amelia Earhart, Lance Armstrong, Oprah Winfrey and I could go on and on! Congratulations to the students for their thoughtful research and interesting costumes. I hope you enjoy the pictures. (If they’re heavy on the prairie girl, just blame a proud mama.)

TPSD to survey parents, staff, community

The Tupelo Public School District has developed a survey for parents, employees and the community. It’s easy - just four questions - and can be completed online here or you can pick up a hard copy at the Central Office at 72 S. Green St. The last day is March 7. Fill out the survey and let district officials know what they’re doing right and how they can improve. Read more about the survey in today’s Daily Journal.

Mooreville Elementary wax museum

I went to a great activity yesterday at Mooreville Elementary School, where gifted fourth- and fifth-graders were participating in a living wax museum. Gifted teacher Linda Herndon chose a presidential theme for the project because of the upcoming election, so students had to portray a U.S. president or first lady. A couple of students got creative and portrayed presidential pets. George Washington was there, as was Teddy Roosevelt, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Check out my story in today’s Daily Journal, and here are some of the great pictures staff photographer Todd Sherman snapped.

ExPECT launches corporate membership campaign

ExPECT, the nonprofit that funds grants in the Lee County Schools, has launched a corporate membership campaign. Letters were mailed this week to 1,000 businesses to raise money for the private organization. ExPECT board member Gena Yarbrough said all of the money goes back into the classroom. She sent me these photos of students using grant-funded materials at Saltillo Primary School. Read my story in today’s Daily Journal, and call Gena at (662) 869-1853 if your business would like to get involved.

Mooreville Middle School gives back

Peggy Gray, the seventh-grade Career Discovery teacher at Mooreville Middle School, sent me these photos of her students with some of the 650 cans of food they recently collected. Gray’s students were learning about human service and the project was an easy way to help others. Then the tornado hit Caledonia and Gray knew that’s where the donations should go. Read my story on these students who learned to give back in Monday’s Daily Journal.

Guntown students win dropout video contest

A student-produced commercial has won a video contest that’s part of a regional dropout prevention campaign sponsored by the North Mississippi Media Alliance.
Students from Guntown Middle School wrote a song about living in a box with holes in their socks because they didn’t go to high school, said Shey Edwards, the Lee County School District’s public information officer.
The winning video was one of 13 submitted by gifted classes from Guntown for the contest, Edwards said. All of the Guntown videos can be viewed at www.leecountyschools.us under the Stay in School Commercials link.
Edwards said representatives of WTVA visited the school on Friday to present Dalton Capps, Arthur Hines, John Forrest Kelly, Christopher McKee, Corey Scribner, Tyler Scruggs, Justin Stowers and Tucker Wood with a certificate and the grand prize, an iPod Touch portable media player.
In addition, Edwards said the video commercial will begin running in regular rotation on WTVA/WLOV/WKDH and will be submitted to become part of the regional dropout campaign.

Lee School Board to meet Monday at Guntown

The Lee County School Board will hold its next meeting at 11 a.m. Monday in the library at Guntown Middle School.
The five-member board, which typically meets in the board room of the district’s Central Office on College View Drive, is for the time being rotating its meeting among its campuses.
“I think it’s wonderful,” board member Lisa Roberts said after the Feb. 11 meeting at Plantersville Middle School. “It’s a good thing for them to know who we are as well as us to know who they are.”
On the agenda for Monday’s meeting are school bus purchases, school trips and a report from Superintendent Mike Scott.

TPSD temporarily without Internet access

Can’t get on to www.tupeloschools.com? Switching Internet service providers has temporarily shut down the Tupelo Public School District’s Web site and e-mail service.
“This is required by the Mississippi Department of Education,” TPSD public information officer Kay Bishop said. “The Internet will be down for a while and e-mail being sent out of the district will not be available for a while.”
The upgrade began at 1 p.m. Wednesday, said Caron Blanton, MDE’s director of communications. The state has a new contract with BellSouth/AT&T, she said, which offers a new networking technology called Multi Protocol Label Switching, or MPLS.
The upgrade will provide the TPSD with a faster, more direct connection to the Internet, Blanton said, and will allow applications such as video conferencing and near real-time video streaming.
Bishop said access to www.tupeloschools.com could be restored as late as Friday.
“We rely so much on e-mail and the Internet,” she said, noting that telephones and faxes are filling in the communication gap until the upgrade is complete.

How to be an education writer

I write about education, but today I got to teach. Well, sort of. I’m being shadowed, even as I write this, by Mooreville High School senior Onnika Johnston. Onnika, 17, is contemplating a career in either journalism or education. So who better for her to shadow than an education writer? Onnika accompanied me to an assignment at Parkway Elementary this morning, toured the Daily Journal, and got to meet some of my editors and colleagues. (I hope we haven’t changed her mind about a writing career.) Onnika is planning to write a story about job shadowing, so watch for her byline in the Feb. 24 Education section.

Lawndale Leadership Academy at state Capitol

JACKSON – Here’s an update to my earlier post from Jackson, where I went on Wednesday with sixth-grade students in the Leadership Academy from Tupelo’s Lawndale Elementary. Thanks to Amy Tate of TVA for organizing the trip and to Leadership Academy facilitator Claudia Hopkins for inviting me to tag along. My mission was two-fold: I wanted to update the Feb. 5 Daily Journal story I wrote about this amazing group of kids, but I also got to talk to Lee County’s legislators about the proposed Quality Education Act of 2008. In the previous blog entry I posted my own photos from the trip. I hope you’ll enjoy these from Leadership Academy participants Abbie Banko and Mathilda Lail.