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A Member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Executive Team Visits
the Perkins Center
Dr. John
Perkins
and Tom Vander Ark tour the Center.
Elizabeth Perkins talks with Vander Ark
about programs offered at the center.
Working to Improve Public Education
Tom Vander Ark,
execution director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, stopped by the John M. Perkins Foundation
headquarters during a recent visit to Jackson. Vander Ark
was in town to meet with the state's Superintendent of
Education to discuss the status of public schools.
Vander Ark travels the country in search of schools or
school districts the foundation can invest in. Bill &
Melinda Gates, who believe schools must be redesigned for
all students to succeed, have invested nearly $1 billion in
high schools. He visited Perkins at the Spencer Perkins
Center, a place he's heard so much about but has never seen.
Vander Ark's father, Dr. Gary Vander Ark, a noted
neurosurgeon, is a member of the John M. Perkins Foundation
Board of Directors.
"I
visited schools in New Orleans before coming here," Vander
Ark explained to Dr. Perkins. "Various reports have told us
that nearly one out of every three public high school
students fail to graduate. Unfortunately, half of all
African Americans and Hispanics leave high school without a
diploma.
"We can no longer rely on a system that offers only 25
percent of young people a high-quality education."
Vander Ark said if the country is to remain competitive and
meet its obligations as a democratic society, all children
must be educated to high standard.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is partnering with
communities across the nation with a commitment to raise the
high school graduation rate and helping students - regardless of race or family income - graduate as strong
citizens ready for college and work
Our prayer is for a partnership to develop with the
schools here in Mississippi.
Prize-Winning Author Charles
Marsh Visits the 2005 Intimate Leadership Retreat
Charles Marsh Speaks
Noted
theologian and author Charles Marsh talked to retreat
participants about his new book,
The Beloved
Community:
How Faith Shapes
Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today
(Basic Books, 2004).
Marsh, who was in Jackson for a book-signing, spoke to the group
at the request of Dr. John Perkins.
Marsh,
a professor of religion at the University of Virginia and
Director of the Project on Lived Theology, is the only child of
a well-known Baptist preacher who pastored the largest and most
influential church in Laurel, MS during the turbulent Civil
Rights era. He wrote about those times in The Last Days: A
Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South
(Basic Books, 2001). Marsh is also author of Reclaiming
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (Oxford
University Press, 1994) and the award-winning God's Long
Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton University
Press, 1999).
He is
a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and holds a Ph.D. from
the University of Virginia. He has taught theology and
ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Md. and has helped
establish the college's service/learning initiative, helping
integrate social justice internships into the curriculum. As
part of the initiative, he helped establish the spring-break
immersion experience at Voice of Calvary Ministries in Jackson,
Miss., an intentional interracial community in a low-income,
high-crime neighborhood founded by Dr. John Perkins. Marsh now
lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A
Historic Moment
Dr.
John Perkins and the Rev. Ed King together at the 2005 Retreat
Introducing the Rev. Ed King as one of his heroes, Dr. John
Perkins told retreat participants it's an honor to have the
United Methodist minister in their presence.
The
first white chaplain at the predominantly black Tougaloo
College, King participated in a number of sit-ins at area
restaurants, kneel-ins at Jackson churches, pray-ins on federal
property to protest police brutality, pickets at the segregated
county fair, and boycotts of Jackson stores during the Civil
Rights Movement.
On May
28, 1963,
King and
sociology professor John Salter (now known as John Hunter Gray)
were beaten by bystanders and doused with ketchup, mustard, salt
and sugar. That week more than 50 college and high school
students were arrested during protests in Jackson.
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