When the Mississippi Economic Council came through Meridian Thursday to talk about improving our state's economy, the bulk of their presentation was less about dollars and cents and more about providing a good education for our children.

The more our state struggles to attract good, new jobs for its residents, the more we hear about improving education. That's because most economists feel that if Mississippi doesn't have a skilled and educated workforce, industries will pass us over and locate somewhere that does.

"Education is critical to the future of our state," MEC chair Blake Wilson said.

MEC's presentation at the MSU-Riley Center included many guest speakers and video speakers who where there specifically to talk about education.

In a recorded speech, State Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds said, "Whatever the question is, the answer is education." How to get more jobs, high quality jobs for our communities, how to enrich the lives of our citizens, these things and more, he said, can be done through education.

For Bounds, the fight for education and the fight against poverty are one in the same.

"Poverty is the single greatest inventory of what a child's education will be," he said. "We must provide all children a strong foundation for learning regardless of their parents' income level."

Bounds said that impoverished families usually cannot afford high quality early childhood education for their children, and that this causes children of poverty to start kindergarten at a disadvantage. Early childhood education, he said, is the key to a more prosperous Mississippi.

"Mississippi will never be the Mississippi that we know it can until we are fully invested in education from birth forward," he said.

In another recorded speech, Dr. Lana Seivers, of the Center for Education Innovation, talked about a program that would put early education in line with K-12. The Kellogg Foundation has invested in Mississippi's early education, and wants to see public and private sector resources coordinated to improve early education while incurring only a relatively small cost to the state.

Mary Peavey, a leader in dropout prevention in Lauderdale County, spoke on the importance of after school programs. She said that kid's from single parent families who spend a lot of time at home alone are the most likely to drop out in Lauderdale County. She said good, affordable after school programs could help keep those kids in school by ensuring that they have supervision and spend their time productively at night.

Peavey said she wants people to see that the ongoing problems in education and the staggering drop out rate are problems just as urgent as the crisis that's happening on Wall Street right now.

Sara Carmichael, the East Mississippi Business Development Corporation's education liaison, spoke on the many educational programs in which EMBDC is involved, especially a program called School Counts. With School Counts, students who have good attendance and good grades are given preferential job interviews by area employers once they graduate. Carmichael said that all the students in all five of the public high schools in our area voluntarily signed the School Counts pledge.

MEC is concerned, not just with keeping students in school, but with keeping teachers there too. Wilson proposed that Mississippi provide more incentives for current teachers to continue teaching even after they are eligible for retirement benefits.

Full text available at Meridian Star.