Kevin Ford spent the day after his election to House District 54 in Jackson meeting with Speaker of the House John Gunn another House officials to try and set a date for his swearing in and presenting a list of requested committee assignments.

“One of the committees is the Education Committee,” he said. The others are Ports, Harbors and Air Ports and Tourism, he added.

Ford defeated Dr. Randy Easterling in the runoff for the House seat, getting 1,434 votes to 959 for Easterling.

Locally, a total of 2,103 voters —19 percent of the district’s 11,050 registered voters — turned out Tuesday to cast ballots in the runoff election to fill the unexpired term of former District 54 Rep. Alex Monsour.

Ford, who ran on a platform of improving education, carried the district’s precincts in Warren Count, getting 1,247 votes to 856 for Easterling. He also carried the precincts in Issaquena and Yazoo counties.

He said getting on the House Education Committee is one of the moves toward working to improve education.

“I believe the Mississippi Adequate Education Program needs to be fully funded, and I want to work toward doing that,” he said.

Approved by the Legislature in 1997, the MAEP, as it is called, is a state formula to ensure that all state public schools are adequately funded to ensure school systems have the funds to educate students. The program has been fully funded twice since it was passed.

State officials have recently been looking at other formulas to fund education in the state. Ford said he would have to look at those programs after he gets in the Mississippi House of Representatives to determine if any would be better than the MAEP formula.

“For too long Mississippi has been at the bottom of the states in test scores, and that’s something we need to fix,” he said, adding he will work with any legislator to develop a plan to improve education in the state.