T.Mac Howard is not your typical civic club speaker, which probably accounts for his popularity.
In most cases, speakers at these events have a story to tell, almost always a story of success from a speaker supremely confident in their abilities. The stories are predictable.
But the story Howard presented to the Columbus Rotary Club Tuesday at Lion Hills Center was different.
Howard is the executive director of Delta Streets Academy, a privately-funded Christian school serving vulnerable boys in grades 7-12 in Greenwood.
It is an heroic effort. Nowhere in this country is the educational landscape more bleak than in the poor, predominantly black, Delta, where the average ACT score is 15, drop-out rates are high and graduation rates are low.
Into that troubled environment came Howard, a kid from an upscale neighborhood near Jackson, armed with only two years teaching experience and determination — for Howard it is a religious calling — to do something.
The school started in 2012 as an outgrowth of a summer and after-school program Howard started at First Baptist Church in town. In 2012, he opened a school — 14 boys in grades 7 and 8.
From humble beginnings, you think, to unprecedented success. That’s how these stories always go, right?
Not in this case. With remarkable candor, Howard acknowledges that the struggle to make Delta Streets viable has been difficult. His speech was peppered with doubts about his own abilities. “I’m not good at that,” he admitted when discussing fundraising, marketing and branding.
“Right now, our average ACT score is 18,” he said. “We can get to the national average of 21. Our kids are capable of that, and if we can’t get there in a couple of years, we’ll have to shut it down.”
Funding, he admits is a challenge, which has limited the school’s growth.
The school, still operates out of the church. It has 60 students this year, but can accommodate 120.
Students pay $750 in annual tuition, a fraction of the cost of the typical private school education, but without access to state and federal grants, the Christian school is almost totally reliant on donations.
Six years after its founding, Delta Streets is still very much an experiment.
And yet, Howard speaks with enthusiasm, with hope, with faith.
“I believe in what we are doing,” he said. “I’ve seen it in the kids, how their lives have been changed. It hasn’t been perfect. For some of the kids it didn’t work and they went back to their public school. But there are some real success stories. For those kids, Delta Streets is making a real difference. It’s changing their lives.”
With a faculty and staff of just 13, Delta Streets may not be able to provide the wide range of opportunities some schools provide.
But its size also has some advantages. It is far more personal. The school can craft its curriculum to the specific needs of its students, a mixture of classic academic studies and life skills, too.
Students learn such practical thing as how to change a flat tire to wood-working to any number of every-day challenges they are likely to encounter.
Delta Streets’ ambitions are modest. The goal is not growing the Greenwood school into a big school. Rather, it is to establish small Delta Streets schools throughout the small towns in the Delta, where options are practically non-existent.
It’s a new way of looking at education. It is not a cure. It’s an option.
And an experiment.
Six years ago, Howard looked at the landscape and realized he had to do something.
That’s where innovation always starts.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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