Exciting Developments in McComb, Mississippi

Thanks to funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Teaching for Change has been able to work with a school district and community team in McComb, Mississippi in 2010 to:

• Send a team of six representatives from the school district and community to the historic 50th anniversary Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Conference at Shaw University. This was the largest contingent of staff from any school district in the country.
• Help secure a 3- to 5-year U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History grant for McComb and a consortium of 6 other neighboring school districts to deepen instruction about Civil Rights Movement and labor history.
• Provide local staff support for the Young People’s Project as they launch their McComb site. The Young People’s Project is coming to McComb as a result of connections made at the SNCC conference. Training began on December 27 with a team of 8th graders, 9th graders, and a college student meeting all week with YPP staff from Jackson during the winter break.
• Coordinate an author visit by Paula Young Shelton to McComb to share her new book, Child of the Civil Rights Movement.
• Continue to provide professional development and other support for the full year course offered to every 8th grader on a people’s history of the United States and the oral history collection by the Local Cultures class.
• Conduct a professional, outside evaluation of all of this work.
• And much more.