Teacher, champion of Delta schoolkids
James Jennings, who dedicated his life to reducing educational inequalities in the Little Rock School District and the Arkansas Delta, died this week at age 60.
Born Sept. 29, 1955, in Little Rock, Jennings graduated in 1973 from Central High School, where he started his work on school desegregation that would foreshadow a career fighting education inequality.
While a student at Central High School, Jennings joined a biracial committee that
put together a film, To Dispel an Old Shadow, which depicted the 1957 turmoil at the school over integration.
He returned to the Little Rock School District in 1977 as a world geography and American history teacher. For the next 15 years, he held many jobs within the district, including law education coordinator, supervisor of custodial services and administrative assistant to the manager of support services.
He took the title of associate superintendent for desegregation in 1987.
His responsibilities included designing, implementing and complying with assorted desegregation plans and orchestrating student assignment plans. More than once he spent the night at the district office to meet a deadline, according to an article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
“I’m really disturbed about the issue of disparity in achievement between black and white students,” Jennings told the Arkansas Democrat in 1990. “I think this community needs to take a serious look at it and take some corrective measures before we lose another generation.”
Jennings, who held degrees from Northwestern University, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Vanderbilt University and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, began teaching in the education and history departments at Hendrix College in Conway in 1992.
Jennings was awarded the Cynthia Cook Sandefur Odyssey Professorship this spring for the Above the Line Project 400, a program he designed to aid elementary school students in the Arkansas Delta.
Students with low scores on the Arkansas Benchmark Exam were given weeks of intensive remedial instruction by Jennings and his team from Hendrix College. A release from the college said the majority of students improved their test scores in a number of subjects after getting the instruction.
A report written by Jennings about the program in 2013 was dedicated to his mother, Loretta Whitmore Jennings, who taught fifth-graders in the Arkansas Delta for 37 years, it said.
Jennings also was a pastor at Church of God in Forrest City.
Dionne Jackson, an education professor at Hendrix and one of Jennings’ former students, described him as calm, easy to talk to, a great mentor and a man with an incredible work ethic.
“Everybody has enemies, but I wonder whose his would be. He was passionate about everything he did and he worked very hard. And he did whatever was required,” Jackson said.
“It’s hard to say goodbye to someone who has helped shaped the person I’ve become,” said former student Kathryn Elise Armstrong in a news release provided by Hendrix College.
“He not only impacted my life and the lives of other Hendrix students, but he also strived to improve the educational system and the lives of countless students at various levels in the state of Arkansas,” Armstrong said. “He sought [to] close the achievement gap in [the] Arkansas Delta as the founder of the Above the Line Project. He set the example for what an educator should be and how they should act. I am grateful for his commitment to education and to putting students first.”