The best schools in Mississippi tend to be in the wealthiest areas. Districts in places like Petal, Oxford and along the Gulf Coast serve communities with high property values that generate local tax dollars for education and with children who bring from home many of the tools needed for success.
West Marion Primary doesn’t have that luxury. The Foxworth school serves the rural areas west of the Pearl River in Marion County, where 83 percent of the students receive free or reduced lunch. And its incoming students walk through its doors less prepared for school than the state average, according to kindergarten readiness exams given at the beginning of the year.
Yet West Marion’s academic achievement equals that of Mississippi’s most elite public schools. It bumped its rating from a C in 2018 to an A in 2019, the only school in Marion County to make the top grade in the state’s evaluation system. And by the spring, those same kindergarteners who entered knowing less than their peers in Mississippi leave knowing more, besting the state average on the end-of-the-year tests.
It’s proof that rural schools in Mississippi can succeed despite challenges.
But how do those young Trojans learn so much so quickly?
With something as involved as running a school, there is not one simple answer. Third-year Principal Vicki Boone points to three main factors:
1. Working as a team – Teachers, staff, students, parents and administration who are dedicated and cohesive.
2. Being driven by data – The school uses software that tracks students’ progress, measures where they are falling short and allows teachers to individualize instruction to catch those students up.
3. Creating a positive culture – The school celebrates success in academics, attendance and behavior, working to create an overall experience that makes students want to come to school.
Boone has summarized all of that into a vision statement crafted so that children can understand it and which they recite daily: “We are WMP: One family, one purpose, one journey, and the journey starts with me.”
Of course, most schools say they do those things, but executing those plans is what really counts. West Marion’s test scores prove that it’s been able to make it happen. Its passage rate on the third-grade gate, the reading test required for students to pass to fourth grade, bested the state average by 14 percentage points last year. Its scores on math were even better, with its third graders ranking in the top 10 in the state. Among its third graders, 82.9 percent scored proficient or advanced in math last year, compared to a state average of 51.4 percent.
Kimmie Miller, president of West Marion Primary’s PTO, said she wasn’t surprised in the two-grade jump that the school made from 2018 to 2019.
“Ms. Vicki has always inspired everyone that she comes in contact to be the very best version of themselves that they can be. I had no doubt that she could make that school, like she always says, ‘go from good to great in a hurry,’” Miller said.
Miller, who has a 5-year-old and 7-year-old at the school, said she’s heard that in the past parent involvement was not encouraged by previous principals, but she said Boone has opened the schoolhouse doors to parents and that’s contributed to the children doing great academically. The PTO recently did a raffle of a Disney vacation that raised $15,400 toward a car-line awning, one of several projects parents have spearheaded to help improve the school.
Knowing that level of parental investment in its success, it’s not surprising then that Miller said she got chills when Boone told her West Marion Primary had earned an A.
“We have smart children, and we have teachers that are doing the right thing helping them,” she said.
Vice Principal Traci Sullivan knows the school and community intimately. She’s a Foxworth native and West Marion High School graduate who has worked at the primary school for more than a decade. She’s witnessed firsthand the change in the school’s culture over the past three years.
“When (Boone) first came I was like, ‘These kids can do it. They’ve just got to be pushed a little more because we just settled for mediocre. That was it: Come to work,” Sullivan said. “We had a whole different staff then; they loved on the kids but it was like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ Nothing extra. We just wanted to be a C. That’s just us; we’re going to be a C.”
Sullivan said she believes the relationships between the teachers and students have been the key factor in changing that.
“The teachers, they care. They get to know the students, their needs and wants outside of academics. They build relationships, and then a child will work for you if you show interest in them,” she said.
The new attitude has come about since Boone arrived in 2017. An educator for 29 years in both Louisiana and Mississippi, she served as an assistant principal for three years at a middle school in Poplarville before accepting her first principal’s role at West Marion.
“My first year there were some changes. Second year, we built a new team, and they made great things happen because we were unified. We had a goal,” Boone said. “But ultimately if you look at West Marion Primary from outside in, you’ll see it all starts with the love of children.”
She’s asked her teachers what’s different, and here’s what she said was their reply: “You actually give us time; you give us the support, and you let us teach.”
“We really protect our instructional time,” Boone said. “We do a lot of things on this campus, a lot of extra activities because I said we want to make memories for our kids. But we do that during their activity time; we do not interfere with our instructional time.”
Even those extra activities are done with a purpose. Boone said she told teachers she didn’t want field trips to the movies or the park; She wanted something that would help them build the experiences and background needed to learn new information that many students in rural areas aren’t exposed to. That’s a way to help them compete against children from the state’s top-performing districts, she said.
For example, the school holds an after school readers theater where students act out plays by reading from scripts. Some of the most struggling readers participate, Boone said, and enjoy it because it’s not just reading texts and answering questions but makes learning fun.
Students can also earn “brag tags” based on their attendance, grades and behavior and can get into different clubs. A “Funtastic” event once every nine weeks brings a carnival-like atmosphere where students who don’t have any office referrals can have fun. Gumball machines are on every hall, students earn Trojan tickets for making good choices and can convert those to tokens to get prizes from the machines.
Boone noted that parental and community involvement plays a big part in making all that work. The community has donated many of the incentives, and there’s also a 25 Point Club for parents that encourages parents to read to children at home.
West Marion Primary also holds rallies intended to boost students up for testing, which they’ve already been preparing all year for through a software program called i-Ready. Through diagnostic tests, it predicts students’ proficiency on state tests, and teachers collaborate to analyze the data. The program categorizes students into profile groups and lists specific standards that those children have deficits in.
Teachers have “data chats” with students, who know their score and set goals based on it, and information is also conveyed to parents.
Being a rural school, Boone said students have not always had opportunity to attend pre-K programs and often don’t come to them on grade level. So West Marion Primary tries to spend the first couple of years grooming them. If students aren’t on grade level then they have to show more than one year’s growth, which is called “stretch growth,” to catch up.
The goal is to have them prepared by third grade. In addition to being the last grade that West Marion Primary serves, it is the first year the state administers the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program, which is the principal basis for the grades assigned to schools and districts, and is when the third-grade gate exam is administered.
West Marion Primary’s grade, therefore, is mostly in the hands of its third graders (the improvement rate of fourth graders who have moved on to West Marion Elementary also plays a role). That means in one sense the school starts over every year with the group that will determine its ranking. On the other hand, Boone said it really starts with kindergarten and builds from there as students learn more and more.
Both Boone and Sullivan acknowledge there is pressure once they made an A to maintain it, but they’re using the data to track where the students are to reach that goal. With half the school year complete, this year’s third grade crop has already exceeded the average in math and reading as they prepare for the tests in April. “They’ve already got a year’s worth of growth in half a year,” Boone said. “They haven’t slowed down, and they haven’t missed a beat. They’re continuing to work harder.”
Sullivan said what she’d ultimately like to see is students from West Marion being confident about going to college and knowing they can succeed. That’s the kind of long-term success that can transform communities. And in Foxworth, it’s all starting with kindergarteners who are given the skills – and the love – to make them believe “the journey starts with me.”
