Almost two decades ago, Nancy Loome received a call from her state representative in Clinton, Mississippi. It was a plea: Could she stop telling people to contact him about his record on education funding? After three days of persistent calls and emails, he felt harassed at every turn.
“I thought, that’s great,” she said. “That’s exactly what we wanted.”
Loome had spent a lot of time volunteering in the state’s public school classrooms in the early 2000s. Then a mother of two elementary-age children, she said she was struck by what she described as the “little miracles” she witnessed teachers perform each day.
Now, she’s the founder and president of the Parents’ Campaign Research and Education Fund (TPCREF), one of eight Vote Your Voice grant awardees in Mississippi to receive funding from the Southern Poverty Law Center to support grassroots work engaging voters around key issues that impact their communities.
In 2006, Loome couldn’t reconcile her personal experience in the classroom with the debate she watched unfolding each evening on the news, about whether lawmakers should follow the mandated education funding formula established in 1997 to ensure districts had adequate resources for each student.
“I thought, well, that’s a ridiculous thing to even debate. Of course we should follow the law,” she said.
The exchange with the lawmaker prompted Loome to mount a grassroots campaign that brought parents, teachers and community members together. Building on the momentum, she founded an advocacy organization that would reach far beyond her local school district and blossom into a network of people invested in strengthening public education throughout the state.
This type of local grassroots organizing highlights the mission of the SPLC’s Vote Your Voice initiative, conducted in partnership with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. The SPLC has pledged $100 million in grants over the next decade to support organizations that are involved in voter outreach and civic engagement in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.
“All the work we do is related to increasing the field and moving the needle. Relationships are a key part of that,” said Robin Brulé, Vote Your Voice program officer at the SPLC. “We have grassroots leaders and organizations that know their communities, know the people they’re talking to. They know the challenges that folks are facing day in and day out. Voting is an everyday process. It must be about what’s happening at the local level and how people can get involved.”
Building a grassroots network
When she started that first grassroots campaign, Loome knew that the per-student public school funding rate in Mississippi was among the lowest in the country. What she didn’t know was that for years lawmakers had bypassed the state’s school funding formula.
“I naively assumed that the problem was with legislators in other districts,” said Loome. “Well, I learned how to check votes.”
She lived in a community that she described as strongly supportive of its public schools, so much so that voters had recently elected their school board president to represent them in the state House of Representatives. Yet, she discovered that he was voting to underfund the state’s schools.
Loome called a friend who also had children in her district’s school. Had she known? No. They began calling friends and other parents they had met at their children’s schools. They soon found out that many shared their confusion.
“When asked why,” Loome said, “We’d say, ‘I don’t know. Call him up and ask him.’”
Not long after Loome’s phone campaign, the state representative asked her to arrange a meeting with the parents to address their concerns. He told the group he was worried that using the state’s formula to fully fund schools would eventually require the state to raise taxes.
Those dollars, he told them, would not only serve their city, but places like Jackson, the state capital, and the Delta region – two majority-Black areas – among other municipalities. Loome said the representative likened it to throwing money away.
Instead, he suggested, by underfunding schools at the state level, the city could raise local taxes so all the new revenue would be kept within its bounds for its schools alone.
“He said, ‘Don’t you think that’s a good idea?’” Loome recounted. “He fully expected us to agree with him. I said, ‘No. I think that is a terrible idea.’ I was very angry.”
Loome familiarized herself with Mississippi teacher organizations and their lobbyists. She began reaching out to more parents in the school district and was given permission by the superintendent to tape notes on teachers’ mailboxes at schools to let them know when education-related votes were coming up. She wrote down legislators’ phone numbers on the notes, too, so people could call and voice their concerns.
Eventually, she worked with other education associations to hold a 2005 rally in Jackson that drew a crowd of more than 1,000 supporters and garnered a lot of media attention. The group marched about a mile, from the state fairgrounds to the steps of the Capitol, with a petition of more than 150,000 signatures in support of their cause.
The next level
Loome worked on a volunteer basis for a couple years, until a wealthy state donor, who had been educated in public schools, offered funding to help her incorporate a nonprofit.
Since then, TPCREF and other education advocates have helped make a big impact on education in Mississippi. About a year after the group formed, Mississippi enforced its public-school funding formula to fully provide the amount dictated per student. Dramatic improvements in fourth-grade reading scores saw the state climb from second worst in the nation in 2013 to 21st in 2022, leading onlookers to dub its progress the “Mississippi Miracle.” TPCREF has been credited with helping to increase literacy funding by hundreds of millions of dollars, resulting in a 60% increase in money appropriated to schools to support the state’s early reading intervention efforts.
TPCREF volunteers are encouraged to offer as little or as much time as they can. Loome emphasizes that the group is nonpartisan and has been able to bring people together despite the opposing views on just about everything but public education.
Toni Lowe-Fisher got involved with TPCREF in 2022 through a mutual friend. She has been active in her local public schools since her teenage son began attending school in the Vicksburg-Warren district more than a decade ago – participating in school board meetings, holding donation drives for classroom resources and volunteering to help with extracurricular activities.
Lowe-Fisher said she realized early on that her son needed added support and that if her family was struggling to find resources, other children with far less support must be having an even more difficult time. She has spent her time both independently and with TPCREF calling Mississippi representatives and educating people on pending legislation and laws that affect public education.
“Education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty; it’s the key to economic wealth and development,” said Lowe-Fisher. “Without it, we’re looking at the demise of our communities. You have to put that investment in, in order to be able to grow and build the healthy, economically stable communities we so desperately need in Vicksburg, throughout the state of Mississippi and the nation.”
‘You’re never done’
Schools in Mississippi face many of the same pandemic-related challenges as others across the country. A shortage of teachers, exacerbated by the pandemic, has made it more difficult to meet all students’ needs. Further, education funding has been slower to recover following the economic fallout from the pandemic. In addition, there’s a continual effort in the Mississippi Legislature to privatize public education. TPCREF has persistently pushed back against these efforts to divert public money from state schools for the use of private school vouchers.
Like many small, grassroots organizations, raising funds has also presented a challenge. The Vote Your Voice grant could not have come at a better time for TPCREF. Almost a year ago, it lost much of its funding when an organization that had been a major funder closed its doors, forcing the group to reduce its staff by about half. Vote Your Voice will provide $110,000 a year for three years to help TPCREF continue its urgent work.
“I appreciate so much the Vote Your Voice funding for these efforts,” Loome said. “There are organizations similar to ours in states across the country that have little to no funding battling an anti-public education lobby that is backed by extremist billionaires. That’s not a sustainable model.
“That’s the hard thing about public education advocacy. We win these big victories – for example, we killed all the voucher bills this year – but next year they can come back and just wipe it all out. You’re never done. But we’re very proud of the work we do, and we’re determined that we’re going to keep protecting our public schools.”
Picture at top: Nancy Loome, left, founder and president of the Parents’ Campaign Research and Education Fund, greets attendees in Jackson, Mississippi, during a stop on last year’s Fulfilling the Promise statewide tour. (Courtesy of the Parents’ Campaign Research and Education Fund)