New Hotel in Cleveland

[Mississippi Alabama Line]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

If all the people who put their kids into private schools, returned to the public schools, they could take over and set the tone. But that's too hard. Easier to just write checks, and go slowly broke. I guess headmaster at a private schools is the new career path.

For towns like Cleveland and Starkville, yeah, I wish they'd demo the private schools. Whole town needs to be on board with making the public schools as good as possible. And if you're worried about getting attention in classrooms, well, they have A.P. classes. This tends to work out better in thriving small towns like the ones mentioned above. Probably a pipe dream, though. People will always want to separate based on class.

In deteriorating towns, it's just a bad all-around situation in general. And in city metro areas, it's a little different animal, because communities tend to be clustered around 'peer' groups.

[Mouldy Old Schmo]

Originally Posted by Mississippi Alabama Line

For towns like Cleveland and Starkville, yeah, I wish they'd demo the private schools. Whole town needs to be on board with making the public schools as good as possible. And if you're worried about getting attention in classrooms, well, they have A.P. classes. This tends to work out better in thriving small towns like the ones mentioned above. Probably a pipe dream, though. People will always want to separate based on class.

In deteriorating towns, it's just a bad all-around situation in general. And in city metro areas, it's a little different animal, because communities tend to be clustered around 'peer' groups.

It's odd to me that the public schools in Oxford would be great and those in Starkville poor.

[Mississippi Alabama Line]

Originally Posted by Mouldy Old Schmo

It's odd to me that the public schools in Oxford would be great and those in Starkville poor.

Starkville has always had Starkville Academy, which pulled away a lot of students, whereas Oxford did not. For the longest time, Starkville really didn't have a middle class either....either well-to-do or very poor.

It's changed in a big way now.

[kgpremed13]

Honestly it isn't really just a Mississippi thing, small towns and rural areas are dying all around the country. They are just boring as **** and there isn't anything to do. I'm a black millennial and I grew up in the Mississippi delta, very close to Cleveland, and the Walmart is the biggest thing in town. It's depressing. Delta State really is trying, but the quality of the education you get there is not on the same level as UM, MSU,or USM. I got a degree in biology from USM in 2011, I think I got a quality education that is on par with any university in the southeast ( physical sciences is a little weak), I took a few extra classes at Delta State right before I applied to med school, and I could tell it was a lot easier to do well there. It just doesn't have the same level of academic rigor as the big universities in the state. Ultimately I hope to end up in either Chicago or Atlanta. I don't have any kids, but I understand why people want to give their kids the best chance in life, and sadly that means that moving anywhere (maybe besides Detroit), is better than the economic wasteland that is the Mississippi delta.

[the_little_truth_writer]

Originally Posted by GrandviewGloria

You're right. It will take about ten years, for parents to exhaust the retirement accounts they'd started to build, and for grandparents to exhaust their savings. It'll take that amount of time, for the EXODUS to become really noticeable.

There WILL be an exodus. People who had too many children (more than one, for most people, if they're paying for private schools.), will face (as has happened in every OTHER town in the Delta) a hideous set of choices. They can leave the kids in public schools, to be traumatized, to develop Stockholm Syndrome, and to end up as mental cases/potheads/meth addicts. They can homeschool. Or they can MOVE AWAY.

Frequently, they move far, FAR AWAY - as far as they can go, or as far as they think it will take, to distance themselves from the demographic nightmare back home. I know of someone from a nearby town, who (after running out of money) accepted a menial job in a resort in the Intermountain Northwest, just to keep his daughter from being brutalized in Mississippi's public schools.

His parents had other grandchildren, and helping pay for their private schooling, has left those grandparents without savings. They're both critically ill, and have NO money to pay for uninsured treatments, or for any of the incidentals associated with being old and dying. These are people who both inherited land, and who have multiple pensions. They were from wealthy families, got good degrees, lived moderate and prudent lives, and had long careers. They should be wealthy.

But paying for their children's private schools, and then for their grandchildren's private schools, has eaten-up every cent of what would have a comfortable retirement. The wife has been showing up at functions, in the same pair of very-fine shoes, since the year of the last Steinmart Saks Fifth Avenue Sale. She must take them off, the very second she's out of public view, in order to conserve them. I can barely imagine the desperation she must feel, if she has to make a pair of shoes last for thirty years, which she bought for five-Cents-on-the-Dollar. And that couple are hardly unique.

I know of a lake, where elderly people, driven from their nice homes in the Delta's dying towns (a person can endure only so many assaults, threats, and burglaries), huddle in broken-down little travel trailers on the lake bank, struggling to survive on Social Security. Their retirement savings never happened, because they had to pay for their children's schooling, then for their grandchildren's schooling. The value they had built up in their homes, was wiped-away by "Social Change". In the towns from which they were driven, it's not unusual to be unable GIVE houses away. If a town shrinks from fifty thousand people, to thirty thousand people, it stands to reason, that two-fifths of that town's houses will be unwanted. So, there's one little trailer after another, far from the towns - out in the underbrush - occupied by elderly people without hope.

It takes a few years, for local businesses go under, after it becomes apparent that nobody has the money to pay for ANYTHING, anymore (because private schools have eaten-up every cent of discretionary income). It takes a while, for business owners to realize that "the new casino!", "the new luxury hotel!", or "the new pickle plant!" are not going to save the day - because the same people who ruined everything else, will inevitably find ways to ruin the new things.

A college town like Oxford, Hattiesburg, or Starkville, is somewhat immune. Those towns are magnets for the children of the insurance brokers, the greedyguts doctors, the successful attorneys, the overpaid coaches, and the rich preachers. THOSE kids spend. The poor kids who go to Delta State, don't have money to blow in bars and boutiques. They won't be able to offset the spending by local residents, which will now cease - kaput - just as happened, decades back, in Greenville, Greenwood, Clarksdale, and Indianola. https://www.roadsnacks.net/these-are...n-mississippi/


On the other hand, this disaster for Cleveland's schools, will have only a limited effect. It affects only the limited number of people who have (or who would have) children in those schools. The new hotel will draw from a wide area. It's sad to think that the 'big events' anticipated as draws for the hotel, include such dreary things as baseball tournaments. But then, Mississippi has become a very dreary place.

I could not agree more with what you wrote even though I am not from Mississippi nor have I ever lived there. Who are "the same people who ruined everything else" and "will inevitably find ways to ruin the new things"? Please discuss this in more depth. I have witnessed, what I believe, to have been the same case in other cities, e.g. New Orleans, Louisiana, and Pasadena, Texas.

Ever since I can remember, Mississippi was ranked last in the nation for public education just below Louisiana, and I can personally attest to the fact that Louisiana's public schools were worthless by the 1960s at least, if not earlier. I question public school systems in general. Whatever the cost, if you have children, the best thing you will ever do for them is to put them into the best private schools you can afford until they are ready for university.