What are they doing on College View Drive?

There has to be some kind of smokescreen of impartiality when we deal with offices that serve the public. I realize that everyone who gets in doesn't support the candidates that I do. But, shouldn't their endorsement stop when they get into vehicles not their own? Who would want the Water & Power departments around the state to put stickers endorsing Candidate A or B in the race for supervisor or city council on their work vehicles? What about Park and Rec endorsing someone for mayor with their little league uniforms? These aren't the things that publicly owned vehicles are supposed to be used for. They aren't floating billboards for candidates, and I'm pretty sure there's some kind of law or regulation against such a thing when it goes to vehicles not owned by the driver but by the public.

So who thought it might be a good idea to stick a Jamie Franks sticker on Lee County Schools work truck #001? Witnesses speaking to the Tank have placed that truck in the Saltillo school district (north Lee County), meaning that it serves either Saltillo or Guntown schools. I don't know about any other trucks; perhaps the powers that be don't think Mr. Franks needs the advertisements in his hometown of Mooreville (hate to tell them, but Mr. Franks lost the Mooreville vote in the last election-he polled only 48.6% in Lee county last time, and his district lies almost entirely in the Mooreville school district, with a couple of precincts in Saltillo and Tupelo) or the Shannon district, whose students are 60% African-American, 66% eligible for free/reduced lunch (that's higher than the state average). Mooreville, by comparison, is 93% white, with 44% eligible for free/reduced lunch; Saltillo, 90% white, 28% free/reduced lunch. It's the school in Lee County pegged for the most growth from the Toyota plant, its boundaries buttressing nicely against the PUL nexus.

We've already established the Franks connection to Lee County Schools' administration-his wife works in the central office, and the superintendent is his good buddy-so somehow I doubt this is an isolated rogue maintenance worker. The desperate acts that Mr. Franks' coalition has begun to resort to are amateurish, even for his standards. Of course, by Monday the truck will have been tracked down and stripped of the sticker, and probably scrubbed with a fine toothed comb. Whoever was driving it will get reassigned. The sticker will get burned and the culprits will vanish into the night to pull down Phil Bryant signs and build a bonfire with them. By the time the staff at the Daily Journal or Clarion Ledger are out of the gate looking for the truck, it'll be like Keyser Soze all over again.


It's another strike against the way things are done in Lee County Schools. It's power politics at its best (worst?)-after all, who is to stop them? There's no superintendent's race, with Mike Scott running without opposition (but no longer the principal at Shannon High). The press could care less about something so trivial. We know what the Attorney General will do-not a damn thing. Meanwhile, a bunch of bullies are allowed to run roughshod over the people they're supposed to serve, all in the name of the holiest of holies-public education-and anyone who opposes them hates children and education. Because that's the atomic bomb of accusations these days, unless you've been in a dogfighting ring.

People wonder why folks are leaving the public schools, and often they point to race. I'm not sure they're always wrong, but examples like this one in Lee County, so full of hubris, should give the public pause in a majority white, fairly well-off school district. You'd think they'd get better than they do. It's amazing kids learn anything with this kind of "GREAT LEADERSHIP" as some would call it.

They can call it what they want. I call it ridiculous. I call it disgraceful. I call it abuse. Because that's what it is.