Matthew Glass: God Save The Delta

Editor’s note: Matthew Glass, author of this guest commentary, is president and CEO of Fidelity Insurance Group in West Memphis. This op-ed first appeared in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business & Politics.

Nearly 10 years ago, while sitting in the lobby of a school in the Helena-West Helena School District, I witnessed a life abandoned. A life that I and everybody else knew was over. Not over in the literal sense like death, but over in the sense of something much worse. This was a life that had zero shot at success in any of the ways that society measures it.

This was the life of a 15-year-old African-American kid who had just walked into school over two hours late. When quizzed by an administrator in the office about why he was late, the student responded that he simply had no ride. Every piece of clothing he had on was filthy. Sweat pouring down his face. I would later learn that this 15-year-old kid who had zero shot at success in life had just walked two miles to a school that would no more prepare him for success in life than a 30-year stint in prison.

Over the last three decades, some of our state’s brightest minds and deepest pockets have come together to form a variety of coalitions and initiatives to combat the plight of the Delta. All of these programs and people have been well focused and intentioned, but in my opinion they will never achieve the level of success needed to revive the Delta with an educational system that relies on a two-parent household.

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the number of children born out of wedlock has risen by more than 300% since 1960. Combine that with the highest poverty rate in the state and an educational model that has made a high school diploma worthless and you have created nothing more than an incubator for future entitlement recipients.

A 2010 study conducted by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs along with the Brookings Institute suggests that the biggest indicator of success in any child’s life is being born into and raised in a two-parent household. Continuing to educate our children using the premise that our students have two parents at home should be criminal. This is a problem that everyone understands, yet nobody does anything about it.

We can’t change the number of children born out of wedlock in the Delta or elsewhere, but we can change how we educate those children. The model that exists today is to take students who come from a two-parent home and prepare them to score well enough on a college entrance exam to gain admission. That’s great for the small minority of kids in the Delta who live in two- parent homes, but it’s either a prison sentence or a SNAP enrollment form for the remaining number of kids who come from a one-parent home.

The recent takeover of the Little Rock school system by the Department of Education is nothing new to schools in the Delta, and it further illustrates the point that our entire state’s educational model is wrong. Instead of schools being taken over by the Department of Education, maybe the Department of Education should be taken over. In his inaugural address, Gov. Asa Hutchinson stated that “today is a new day.”

If the governor means what he says, then I can think of no problem greater than overhauling our state’s educational system. This governor and this Legislature have the opportunity to ensure that the fate of one’s success or failure is not cemented by the circumstances they were born into, but rather by the opportunities that can bring them out of them. God Save the Delta.