Local and national leaders in the Call Me MISTER program were on the JSU campus Thursday and Friday brainstorming on ways to promote educational attainment among black youth.
Less than 2 percent of U.S. public school teachers are African-American men and approximately 2 percent of Mississippi’s public elementary school teachers are African-American men, according to JSU’s Mississippi Learning Institute.
The JSU Call Me MISTER program is leading the way in recruiting more African-American male teachers for Mississippi classrooms with 15 students enrolled and all but four of them Mississippi natives, said Amy Berry, Interim Director of the Mississippi Learning Institute.
The MISTER program began in South Carolina, said Dr. Roy Jones executive director of the national program and associate professor of educational leadership at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., who was attending the meetings.
Jones said educators were concerned in the 1990s when statistics showed that fewer than 1 percent of teachers in South Carolina were African-American males, while making up one-third of the state’s population.
This “stark reality” led to the creation of the program “to change the culture and face of education in South Carolina,” Jones said, by providing a pipeline for African-American male teachers to act as role models.
The MISTER (Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models) program started in 2000 and now includes 31 colleges nationwide, Jones said.
The educational leaders were at the INNOVATE Center at H.T. Sampson Library to craft a strategy for improving Mississippi children’s education in partnership with the program, Berry said.
A goal is to develop a program for second graders at Jackson’s Isbell Elementary School, said Toni Y. Kersh, Office of School Improvement, Office of Dropout Prevention and Compulsory School Attendance with the Mississippi Department of Education.
The program would be part of the third-grade reading initiative in Mississippi and could act as a national role model, Kersh said.
Dr. Beth P. Reynolds, executive director of the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network, Clemson, S.C., was participating in the planning, as was Dr. Daniel Watkins, JSU dean of the College of Education and Human Development.
JSU’s program started in 2012 with five students and is the only Mississippi university in the program. Five students are recruited per year. The Learning Institute will soon be accepting applications for next year, Berry said.
For more information, see: https://www.jsums.edu/mli/mister/