Some Mississippi schools will hold classes on weekends and during the early summer to make up for the time lost during three and a half weeks of wildcat strikes by teachers.
The state’s teachers returned to work late last month after the Mississippi legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto and approved a $4,400 pay raise for teachers over the next three years. (See Education Week, March 27, 1985.)
Some districts have made up for lost time by shifting their spring-break schedules. But those changes will not cover all of the strike days, which totaled 17 in some areas.
N.F. Smith, the department’s director of administration and finance, said all districts will have to provide a minimum of 175 days of school, as required by state law. He said there is currently no estimate of what the strike will cost school dis-tricts by the time those days are made up.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has intervened in a lawsuit aimed at requiring 23 suburban districts to participate in an interdistrict school-desegregation plan with the Milwaukee public schools.
The civil-rights group charged in papers filed with a federal district court on March 11 that the suburban districts’ failure to cooperate with the city district in the development of a voluntary student-transfer plan was racially motivated. It also alleged that state officials have refused to use their authority to order the consolidation of the metropolitan-area districts.
Milwaukee school officials filed suit in June 1984 seeking a mandatory interdistrict desegregation plan after suburban school officials overwhelmingly rejected the voluntary desegregation proposal six months earlier. (See Education Week, Dec. 21, 1983.)
Special-Ed. Students
