Holly Springs Part Three

“We’d love to,” said the Holly Springs Superintendent (who shall remain nameless for reasons soon to come), when she heard our idea about MTC basically running summer school with our first and second-year teachers at Holly Springs High. “We’ve been wanting to run a summer school for years but could never get enough teachers.”

After the meeting Germain and I stopped at a gas station near the district office to buy soda pop and congratulate ourselves. It was 10:30 in the morning and there was an inebriated man at the counter buying two more bottles of beer. As we stood there in our suits he turned and looked at us.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.

We smiled and told him we were from the University of Mississippi.

He said, “Look at y’all, you don’t have any grease on you or anything.”

After we left the gas station Germain and I drove back to Oxford bouncing ideas back and forth. We spent the next few months laying the groundwork for the MTC Summer School. It was slow going, meeting with the Dean and Dr. Mullins, meeting with the various faculty at the School of Education, discussing how to change or shift the second-years' course schedule, getting approval from everyone, and continually meeting with Holly Springs. Finally, on a Wednesday in late March, Germain and I planned to drive up to Holly Springs the next day to officially sign a contract to run summer school. The meeting was abruptly canceled. The next day (the day we were supposed to sign the contract) we found out that the Superintendent had been fired for embezzlement.

All the groundwork was down the drain. And we had no backup plan…