Joplin School District
The Joplin School District is located in Jasper and Newton Counties in the City of Joplin, Missouri. It serves more than 7,700 students in the school district.On May 22, 2011, an EF5 tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri. In the path of the tornado, Joplin High School, Franklin Technical Center, East Middle School, Irving Elementary, and Emerson Elementary were destroyed; Cecil Floyd Elementary, Duquesne Elementary, Eastmorland Elementary, and Kelsey Norman were damaged as well. In the months after the tornado, plans have been made to rebuild all schools that were destroyed in the tornado. The school district re-opened its Middle and Elementary schools on January 9, 2014; and Joplin High School and Franklin Technical Center re-opened in August 2014.
Scott Joplin
Joplin's music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of a million-selling album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award-winning 1973 film "The Sting" that featured several of Joplin's compositions, most notably "The Entertainer", whose performance by pianist Marvin Hamlisch received wide airplay. "Treemonisha" was finally produced in full, to wide acclaim, in 1972. In 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
According to author Edward A. Berlin, "One tenacious myth tells us that Joplin was born in Texarkana, Texas, on November 24, 1868. The location is easily dispensed with: Texarkana was not established until 1873." But, based on a letter discovered by musicologist John Tennison in 2015 in the December 19, 1856 edition of the "Times-Picayune," it is clear that Texarkana was established as a place-name at least as early as 1856. Consequently, it appears possible that Joplin, born 12 years later, could have been born in Texarkana. Despite evidence to support such a conclusion, some insist that Joplin was born in Linden, Texas, either in late 1867 or early 1868. He was the second of six children (the others being Monroe, Robert, William, Myrtle, and Ossie) born to Giles Joplin, an ex-slave from North Carolina, and Florence Givens, a freeborn African-American woman from Kentucky.