Go to any morning hangout in Pine Bluff and above the din of cash registers and clacking coffee cups you’ll hear people theorize as to why things are as they are. How did things get this way? Why is crime so bad? How did the economy become the way it is? What happened to our neighborhoods?
Over the last few weeks, careful reading of local news stories starts to suggest some answers, but one report in particular stands out above the rest. On Tuesday the Commercial reported that the Arkansas Department of Education identified 48 schools statewide including several in the Pine Bluff and Dollarway school districts as being the lowest-performing schools in the state.
In Pine Bluff, the schools identified as “Needs Improvement Priority Schools” include Pine Bluff High School, Jack Robey Junior High School, Belair Middle School, Oak Park Elementary School and Greenville Elementary School.
The search for comprehensive answers can almost stop with this finding. A well-educated populace is the most effective firebreak against a whole gamut of social ills. There is ample evidence of this fact.
First, better educated people — not just people who have been socially passed or negligently pushed through until they’re holding a diploma — but actually educated — are much less likely to become involved in crime. Our prisons are not full of college graduates. They are full of people who dropped out.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
A poorly educated populace explains local economic woes. Look to any city in the country with a large pool of well-educated, highly trained and diversely skilled people and you’ll see a community holding kryptonite against recession. Better educated people have more options when things turn downward. Better educated people have a greater pool of resources from which to create innovative responses to problems. Better educated people don’t sit idly by hoping that someone will come along and save them. A well-educated, highly trained and broadly skilled population has the power to reach a critical mass of success in a way that their less schooled counterparts do not. Success and stability beget success and stability. When things don’t go to plan, better educated populations work together to develop mutually supportive solutions.
In places like Pine Bluff when the wheels come off, the more affluent people leave, poverty concentrates, substance abuse predominates, crime flourishes, businesses shutter and those who are left wonder how it came to be.
There’s an old saying that “you can either build schools or you can build prisons. If you don’t build one, you’ll have to build the other.” Pine Bluff is prima facie evidence of the truth in this. Among much of the local population going to prison has become just part of normal life. Nearly everybody knows someone who has been incarcerated. It’s just how things are.
It is time for this to change.
If we are to save Pine Bluff, we must rededicate ourselves to education. It can cost upward of $35,000 a year to keep someone in jail. If we instead devoted those resources on the front — doing whatever it took to save the hitherto discarded children — we would both save individual lives and rebuild our community.
The report from the department of education should serve as a wake-up call. It is a clarion to abandon old habits and forge a new path. We have little time to spend on replaying long-running turf battles, protecting the jobs of people who are failing our children or perpetuating the path to failure. We must empower our schools, and we must do it now.