Can a new early reading program help revive this poor Mississippi town?
The Early Learning Academy opened its doors in April with an ambitious goal: to boost child literacy in the tiny, impoverished town of Lambert, Mississippi.
LAMBERT, Miss. — When Evelyn Jossell took over as the superintendent of schools in Quitman County, she had no illusions about the challenges ahead.
Poverty has long had a stranglehold on this rural, predominantly Black community in the Mississippi Delta. It was the poorest county in the poorest state when Martin Luther King Jr. visited in 1968 and described seeing “hundreds of Black boys and Black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear.”
Today, 57% of children in Quitman County live below the poverty line (the national average is 16%). And with the area’s textile factories and cotton processing plants now shuttered, few jobs exist in a place that went years without a single grocery store.
Martin Luther King Jr. visits Quitman County, Miss., in 1968.Dr. James Goldman / Quitman County As superintendent, Jossell quickly identified her most pressing problem. The majority of students couldn’t read at grade level. So in 2016 she began sketching out what was then a pie-in-the-sky idea: a literacy program geared toward Quitman County’s youngest children.
“I wanted something to meet them when they were really young because I felt that’s where the gap was,” Jossell said.
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