OurTupelo

Superintendent Errick Greene wanted to be very clear with the roughly 50 parents who attended Thursday night’s community listening session: Jackson Public Schools already has a policy banning students from using cellphones at school. 

But the leadership of Mississippi’s third-largest school district has decided that a new approach is in order, citing a series of incidents in recent years involving students using their cellphones to bully others, organize fights or text their parents inaccurate information about violence happening at or near their school.

“To be clear, it’s not the majority of our scholars, but I can’t look at a class and know who’s gonna be bullying today, who’s gonna be scheduling a meetup to cut up today,” Greene said toward the end of the hour-long meeting held at the JPS board room. “I can’t look at a group of scholars and say, ‘OK, yeah, you’re the one, let me take your phone, the rest of you can keep it.’”

Under the rewritten policy, students who take their phone out of their backpacks during the instructional day will lose it for five days for the first infraction, 10 days for the second and 45 days for the third. Currently, the longest the school will hold a phone is 10 days.

The Jackson school board is expected to consider the new policy at its meeting next week and the district hopes to implement the change when the new school year starts later this month, said Sherwin Johnson, the district’s communications director.

Students also currently have the option to pay up to a $25 fine to get their phone back, but the district wants to rescind that aspect of the policy. 

“We’ve discovered that’s not equitable,” said Larrisa Harris, the JPS general counsel. “Not everybody has the resources to come and pay the fine.”

Support for the new policy among the parents who spoke at the listening session varied, but all had questions. How will students access the internet on their laptops if the WiFi is spotty at their school and they need to use their cellphone hotspot? If students are required to keep their phones in their backpacks during lunch, how will teachers prevent stealing? How will JPS enforce the ban on using cellphones on the bus?

One mother said she watches her daughter’s location while she rides the bus to Jim Hill High School so she knows her daughter made it safely. 

“If they can’t have it on the bus, who’s gonna enforce that?” she said. “I’m just gonna be real, the bus driver got to drive.” 

A common theme among parents was anxiety at the prospect of losing direct contact with their kids in the event of an emergency. A Pew Research survey found that most adults, regardless of political affiliation, support cellphone bans in middle and high school classes. But those who don’t say it’s because their child can use their phone during emergencies.

“If something happened, will we get an automatic alert to notify us? Because a lot of the time we see things on social media first,” said Ashley McIntyre, a mother of three JPS students. She attended the meeting with her eldest daughter, Aaliyah, who recently graduated from Powell Middle School.

Though JPS does have an alert system for parents, McIntyre said she didn’t know if it existed. She cited a bomb threat at Powell last year that she found out about because Aaliyah texted her, not through a school alert. 

“We didn’t know what was going on, and she texted me, ‘Mom, I’m scared,’ so I went up there,” McIntyre said. “So that puts us on edge.” 

Aaliyah said she uses her phone to text her mom and watch TikTok, but she feels like her classmates use their phones to be popular or to fit in. When a fight happens, she said many students pull out their phones to record instead of trying to get an adult who can stop it. Then the videos end up on Instagram pages dedicated to posting fights in JPS. 

“Once the principal found out about the fight pages, they came around looking inside our videos and camera rolls,” she said. “It happened to me last year. They thought I had a fight on my phone.” 

Toward the end of the meeting, Laketia Marshall-Thomas, the assistant superintendent for high schools, took the mic to respond to one parent who said she was concerned that older students would not come to school if they knew their phone could be taken. 

“What we have seen is, it’s the older students—” Marshall-Thomas began. 

“They are the problem,” someone from the audience chimed in. 

“We’re not saying they cannot have them,” she continued. “We know that they have after school activities and they need to communicate with their moms … but we have had major, major issues with cellphones and issues that have even resulted in criminal outcomes for our scholars, but most importantly, our students … have experienced a lot of learning loss.” 

While the district leadership did not go into detail about the criminal incidents, several pointed to instances where students have texted their parents inaccurate information, such as an unsubstantiated rumor there was a gun during a fight at Callaway High School or that a shooting outside Whitten Middle School occurred on school property. 

“Having phones actually creates far more chaos than they help anyone,” Greene said. 

While cellphones have been banned to varying degrees in U.S. schools for decades, youth mental health concerns have renewed interest in more widespread bans across the country. Cellphone and social media usage among school-aged kids is linked to negative mental health outcomes and instances of cyberbullying, research shows.

At least 11 states restrict or ban cellphone use in schools. After Mississippi’s youth mental health task force recommended that all school districts implement policies that limited cellphone and social media usage in classrooms, a bill that would’ve required school boards to create cellphone policies died during the legislative session. Still, several Mississippi school districts have passed their own policies, including Marshall County and Madison County.

Another concern about the ban was a belief among a couple of speakers at the meeting that cellphones can help parents hold the district accountable for misdeeds it may want to hide. 

“I just saw a video today. It was not in JPS, but it was a child being yelled at by the teacher and had he not recorded it, his momma would have never known that this sweet lady that they go to church with is degrading her child like that,” one mother said. 

Statements like these prompted responses from teachers and other parents who urged the skeptical attendees to be more trusting or to make sure the district has updated contact information for them in case school officials need to reach parents during an emergency. 

“I think we have to trust the people watching over our children,” said one of the few fathers who spoke. “When I grew up, what the teacher said was gold.”

One teacher asked the audience, “Will you trust us?” 

The committee tasked with overseeing most of Mississippi’s opioid settlement dollars may struggle to keep up with the tight timeline the Legislature prescribed last spring, a plan that lawmakers finalized years after most states enacted their settlement spending plans.

In Jackson on Wednesday, the Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council met for the first time to discuss how Mississippi should go about distributing hundreds of millions of settlement dollars, money paid out by pharmaceutical companies for their roles in catalyzing hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths. 

Before the meeting started, council chair and Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch provided the 15 voting members and 22 nonvoting participants draft documents of how the committee could operate. The proposals included rules the advisory committee should follow, information to provide groups looking to apply for settlement dollars the state is dedicating to address addiction and an application for making that request. 

Council members raised concerns about Fitch’s documents. Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Randolph, one of the voting council members, said he worried the materials were missing important information and could lead to the state not addressing the public health catastrophe at hand. 

Randolph joined over a video call, and he told Mississippi Today after the meeting that severe technical difficulties made it hard for him to hear what was happening in Jackson. 

But he affirmed that his biggest priorities for the council are helping Mississippi families who’ve suffered most from the addiction crisis and ensuring this public money isn’t spent on expenses unrelated to the public health crisis at hand, as Mississippi had done with its tobacco settlement funds and federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Family dollars.

 He said he didn’t think the documents as proposed would address the opioid crisis.

“We have to make sure we do not make the mistakes of the past,” Randolph told the other council members. “We have to make sure we don’t end up with no accountability.”

While some local governments have started spending their settlement dollars, the state government, which is  responsible for a share of Mississippi opioid settlements that could total around $360 million, has yet to start using its dollars to address and prevent addiction. Every state that borders Mississippi has started distributing the largest portion of their opioid dollars, some over a year ago. 

In 2021, Fitch’s office developed a plan to send 70% of Mississippi’s total opioid settlement dollars – which could now be around $300 million – to the University of Mississippi Medical Center for a proposed addiction treatment center. But the plan was never realized, and the Legislature passed its bill this year to create an advisory council tasked with making recommendations on how lawmakers should spend the funds. 

The law mandates the council solicits, reviews and makes recommendations on applications for opioid abatement projects by Dec. 1 of each year.

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and House Speaker Jason White did not respond to emailed questions asking why the lawmakers waited years to initiate their plan for distributing the state’s opioid settlements and why they created a rapid timeline for the attorney general’s office to develop a grant application, publish the form and review grants. 

At the advisory meeting, one of Fitch’s special assistants, Caleb Pracht, told the council members that they are overseeing $73.3 million of the state’s approximately $85 million of opioid settlement funds received so far. Fitch and state lawmakers have allowed for the remaining millions of dollars to be spent on non-addiction purposes. 

The original goal, according to Pracht, was to launch the application in mid-July and have interested groups apply for the grant by Aug. 29. 

But that timeline was pushed back shortly after Randolph and other members pointed out missing information in the attorney general’s material. Joseph Sclafani, a voting adviser and Gov. Tate Reeves’ attorney, expressed concern that while the proposed rules said all qualified applications must be reviewed, the document never defined who meets the qualification.

From the draft material, it was unclear whether individuals, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies or local government agencies could apply for these funds. 

“I don’t think we should be determining on the fly what is qualified and what isn’t,” Sclafani told Pracht. “I think we should have a standard for what is a qualified applicant before we start looking.” 

The information for grant applicants defined eligible projects but only said they were those that address substance use disorder or other harmful effects of the opioid epidemic. Later in the meeting, Scalfani told the other advisers there should be a system to evaluate applications, and it should be made available to applicants. 

“I’ve never seen a grant you apply for that you don’t know the scoring rubric at the time you apply,” he said. 

By the end of the meeting, Pracht said both the launch of the settlement grant application and the deadline for applying would have to be delayed a few weeks. The council members agreed to meet again before publishing the application, this time entirely over video conference.

Michelle Williams, Fitch’s chief of staff, told the committee that it’s important for the council to evaluate all the applications by the end of November to meet the Legislature’s December deadline. 

After the meeting, Williams told Mississippi Today that while the council’s suggestions added more tasks for Fitch on a tight timeline, Fitch’s office would work to make sure the application publication and deadline wouldn’t be delayed more than a couple weeks. 

“We’re going to turn around as much as we can right now,” she said. “… Get them to do another meeting where they can discuss it, agree to something, and then we’ll push that out right away.”

Randolph told Mississippi Today that he thinks the council, the Legislature and Fitch want these dollars to be spent appropriately. If he and the other members need additional time with the application, he said, they’ll ask the Legislature for it. 

But he said as one member of the council, he will continue to vote against any part of the process that doesn’t ensure Mississippians who’ve suffered the most from the overdose epidemic benefit from the settlement dollars. To do that, the application process needs to be clear.

“I didn’t see that,” he said. “And I’m sure they’re working on that, but I don’t got that all. I’m not ready to sign off on anything until I’m satisfied.” 

Cindy Hyde-Smith did not appear to enjoy being approached in late April by voters who were concerned about reports that President Donald Trump’s administration was pushing to slash federal Medicaid spending.

“Medicaid is not going anywhere,” the U.S. senator assured a group of three constituents at a Ridgeland Chamber of Commerce event in April before being ushered away by a staffer, according to people who witnessed the exchange. “Nothing is going to happen to Medicaid. Why is everyone’s head exploding? I can’t understand why everyone’s head is exploding.”

Fast-forward two months, and Hyde-Smith gleefully voted to do exactly what she had so quickly dismissed that day: cut Medicaid funding.

In Washington, shielded by the Beltway and a perceived security blanket of Trump’s MAGA acolytes, Hyde-Smith and the other four Mississippi congressional Republicans in Congress gloated about their votes.

Back home in Mississippi, however, many heads did indeed explode — and with good reason.

Because of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” that every state delegate except Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson voted to pass, an estimated tens of thousands of Mississippians will lose Medicaid coverage and rural hospitals will lose millions annually in federal funding. While wealthy individuals and corporations will see sizable tax cuts under the legislation, most Mississippians will barely benefit. The bill strips away much of the nation’s safety net for our poorest residents — of which there are obviously many in our poorest state in the nation — and it will add an estimated $3 trillion to our national debt.

For the thousands of Mississippians who had spent weeks trying to relay the long list of negative consequences of the bill to their Washington delegation, final passage felt like a punch to the gut.

It’s a tale as old as time in Mississippi: voters of any and all political persuasions were ignored by their Washington representatives. Mississippi’s congressional representatives have long been out of touch with their constituents once we send them to the halls of the U.S. Capitol, but their avoidance this time felt especially pronounced as valid concern after valid concern was raised about the bill. Their sustained promises to not cut Medicaid, to not significantly raise the national debt and to take good care of people in their home state were not remotely kept here.

If you’re an everyday Mississippi citizen and you want to lodge concerns to your congressional delegation, good luck. Unless you’re deemed important enough to land on their Washington office schedule, you’ll need to get creative. You can call their D.C. or district offices, but you’ll either be directed to a voicemail box or talk briefly with an intern or other low-level staffer whose mandate is to take some notes and move on.

Over the past few months, there has been a loosely coordinated statewide effort to get the attention of those leaders. Thousands of Mississippians took part.

They called. They emailed. They protested outside district offices. They rallied in front of the state Capitol and courthouses. They sent letters, knocked on doors and jammed phone lines. They followed our senators and representatives to luncheons and business forums. They told them — over and over — that they were afraid about the real harm the “Big Beautiful Bill” would do to health care access in one of the sickest, poorest states in America.

In many cases, though, their cries were likely never heard at all by the elected officials.

On June 30, the day before the Senate passed the bill, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker’s Washington office was not accepting calls or even messages from constituents because “the voicemail inbox was full.” Five days earlier on June 25, an automated phone message at Wicker’s D.C. office said, “Calls to this number have been suspended.”

On July 3, the day of the final House vote to pass the bill, Mississippi Rep. Michael Guest’s D.C. office phone line had a busy signal most of the day. When a group of about a dozen people showed up to Guest’s district office in Brandon on July 3, the doors were locked and a sign was taped to the door with a number to call. An organizer of the protest called the number and spoke for a few minutes by phone with a Guest staffer, who some attendees believed to be inside the Brandon office all along.

Since February, groups of Mississippi constituents made three trips to Wicker’s Jackson office and three trips to Hyde-Smith’s Jackson office. Each time, they were either locked out of the offices or granted just a few minutes with staffers inside who worked to downplay their concerns.

So why, exactly, do our elected officials feel so confident ignoring the will of so many constituents or transparently voting against our state’s interests?

There’s certainly a long conversation to have about how special interest groups, led by the uber-wealthy who have never stepped foot in Mississippi, have commandeered our representative democracy. There’s even more to say about how our nation’s shadowy campaign finance regulations, successful efforts to gerrymander congressional districts and a slew of shady election laws allow D.C. incumbents to cling to power.

But in this instance, the answer could be a lot less about our government systems and a lot more about what’s right in front of us.

“They’re more afraid of Trump than they are of their own constituents,” surmised Kathleen O’Beirne, one of the people who confronted Hyde-Smith about the Medicaid cuts back in April. “Looking specifically at their votes on Medicaid, it sure seems like their disdain and hatred for poor people and people of color is stronger than their love for Mississippi. There’s no other explanation, especially if you understand how health insurance works. And I’d assume and hope they all do.”

O’Beirne, a retired attorney and mother of two in Ridgeland, has helped organize nine Mississippi rallies since February. She’s emerged as a leader for thousands of Mississippians who are feeling more than overlooked or slighted right now by our elected officials.

“It’s definitely frustrating at times,” she acknowledged of not being able to get through to congressional leaders. “But we aren’t going to stop. We’re not easily deterred. We’re seeing what’s happening, and we’re adding more Mississippians who are tired of this. If they (members of the congressional delegation) aren’t going to listen, we’re making it our job to be a thorn in their sides.”

As the negative effects of the legislation will become clearer in Mississippi over the next few months and years, it’s worth closely observing whether our state’s congressional delegation starts feeling a prick from that thorn. For now, they don’t seem to notice it.

Mississippi hospitals could lose up to $1 billion over the next decade under the sweeping, multitrillion-dollar tax and policy bill President Donald Trump signed into law last week, according to leaders at the Mississippi Hospital Association.

The leaders say the cuts could force some already-struggling rural hospitals to reduce services or close their doors.

The law includes the largest reduction in federal health and social safety net programs in history. It passed 218-214, with all Democrats voting against the measure and all but five Republicans voting for it. 

In the short term, these cuts will make health care less accessible to poor Mississippians by making the eligibility requirements for Medicaid insurance stiffer, likely increasing people’s medical debt. 

In the long run, the cuts could lead to worsening chronic health conditions such as diabetes and obesity for which Mississippi already leads the nation, and making private insurance more expensive for many people, experts say. 

“We’ve got about a billion dollars that are potentially hanging in the balance over the next 10 years,” Mississippi Hospital Association President Richard Roberson said Wednesday during a panel discussion at his organization’s headquarters. 

“If folks were being honest, the entire system depends on those rural hospitals,” he said.

Mississippi’s uninsured population could increase by 160,000 people as a combined result of the new law and the expiration of Biden-era enhanced subsidies that made marketplace insurance affordable – and which Trump is not expected to renew – according to KFF, a health policy research group. 

That could make things even worse for those who are left on the marketplace plans. 

“Younger, healthier people are going to leave the risk pool, and that’s going to mean it’s more expensive to insure the patients that remain,” said Lucy Dagneau, senior director of state and local campaigns at the American Cancer Society. 

Among the biggest changes facing Medicaid-eligible patients are stiffer eligibility requirements, including proof of work. The new law requires able-bodied adults ages 19 to 64 to work, do community service or attend an educational program at least 80 hours a month to qualify for, or keep, Medicaid coverage and federal food aid. 

Opponents say qualified recipients could be stripped of benefits if they lose a job or fail to complete paperwork attesting to their time commitment.

Georgia became the case study for work requirements with a program called Pathways to Coverage, which was touted as a conservative alternative to Medicaid expansion. 

Ironically, the 54-year-old mechanic chosen by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to be the face of the program got so fed up with the work requirements he went from praising the program on television to saying “I’m done with it” after his benefits were allegedly cancelled twice due to red tape. 

Roberson sent several letters to Mississippi’s congressional members in weeks leading up to the final vote on the sweeping federal legislation, sounding the alarm on what it would mean for hospitals and patients.

Among Roberson’s chief concerns is a change in the mechanism called state directed payments, which allows states to beef up Medicaid reimbursement rates – typically the lowest among insurance payors. The new law will reduce those enhanced rates to nearly as low as the Medicare rate, costing the state at least $500 million and putting rural hospitals in a bind, Roberson told Mississippi Today. 

That change will happen over 10 years starting in 2028. That, in conjunction with the new law’s  one-time payment program called the Rural Health Care Fund, means if the next few years look normal, it doesn’t mean Mississippi is safe, stakeholders warn. 

“We’re going to have a sort of deceiving situation in Mississippi where we look a little flush with cash with the rural fund and the state directed payments in 2027 and 2028, and then all of a sudden our state directed payments start going down and that fund ends and then we’re going to start dipping,” said Leah Rupp Smith, vice president for policy and advocacy at the Mississippi Hospital Association. 

Even with that buffer time, immediate changes are on the horizon for health care in Mississippi because of fear and uncertainty around ever-changing rules. 

“Hospitals can’t budget when we have these one-off programs that start and stop and the rules change – and there’s a cost to administering a program like this,” Smith said.

Since hospitals are major employers – and they also provide a sense of safety for incoming businesses –  their closure, especially in rural areas, affects not just patients but local economies and communities. 

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson is the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation. He voted against the bill, while the state’s two Republican senators and three Republican House members voted for it. Thompson said in a statement that the new law does not bode well for the Delta, one of the poorest regions in the U.S. 

“For my district, this means closed hospitals, nursing homes, families struggling to afford groceries, and educational opportunities deferred,” Thompson said. “Republicans’ priorities are very simple: tax cuts for (the) wealthy and nothing for the people who make this country work.”

While still colloquially referred to as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the name was changed by Democrats invoking a maneuver that has been used by lawmakers in both chambers to oppose a bill on principle. 

“Democrats are forcing Republicans to delete their farcical bill name,” Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York said in a statement. “Nothing about this bill is beautiful — it’s a betrayal to American families and it’s undeserving of such a stupid name.”

The law is expected to add at least $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years, according to the most recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

For only the sixth time since 1970, Mississippi collected less in tax revenue than it did the previous fiscal year, according to the latest report from the state’s Legislative Budget Office. 

The report says Mississippi collected around $64.3 million, or .83%, less than it did the last fiscal year. In Fiscal Year 2024, the state collected around $7.7 billion, while it collected $7.64 billion for Fiscal Year 2025. The budget cycle runs from July 1 to June 30.

The main reason the state is taking in less money than it did last fiscal year is that it collected $232.5 million, or 24%, less from corporate income taxes than it did last year. The state collected more sales taxes, individual income taxes and use taxes than last year. 

Despite the slump in revenue, state government is still living within its means and is collecting more than lawmakers who set the state budget had estimated. 

The Joint Legislative Budget Committee, a group of 14 lawmakers, had estimated that Mississippi would collect $7.6 billion in taxes. Since the state had a lower estimate, it collected $41 million more than it projected. 

Even with the low $7.6 billion estimate, the Legislature during a May special session voted to adopt an even lower $7.1 billion state budget, meaning it left around half a billion dollars unencumbered. 

Still, the fact that the state is receiving less money could be an early sign of recession, or that massive tax cuts passed in recent years and still being phased in are not stimulating economic growth like proponents of the cuts hoped.

Mississippi is continuing a years-long phase out of its franchise tax, which is part of the corporate income tax, and has been cutting its individual income tax. The franchise tax will be eliminated in the next few years, and the already low individual income tax will be phased out over more than a decade. 

Over the last few years, the state has seen increased revenue and lawmakers have increased spending, largely due to unprecedented federal spending and handouts to states for economic stimulus and recovery from the global pandemic. The new Trump administration in Washington is working to cut federal spending and in some cases rescind money already allocated to states.

Members of the state’s joint budget committee will meet in the fall to hear from some agency leaders about their budget needs and begin crafting a state budget for the next fiscal year. 

Some residents of a small community in the Mississippi Delta say they fear their health might be at risk after a train derailed and spilled a hazardous chemical compound that burned for hours.

Part of a Canadian National Railway train went off the tracks Saturday in Glendora, about halfway between Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi. The derailment prompted a temporary evacuation of the village after a tank car containing benzene caught on fire.

Desiree Simmons and Diamond Hoskins said they were leaving work at an Emmett Till museum when they realized they had to take their families to safety. The derailment occurred nearby.

“We came out of the building, and all we heard was a ‘boom,’ and the ‘boom’ was a couple feet down from where we was, and all we saw was black smoke,” Simmons told Mississippi Today.

Benzene is used in several products, including detergents and plastics. Symptoms of benzene poisoning include drowsiness, fast or irregular heartbeat, tremors and headaches.

Local fire departments worked several hours to extinguish the flames, according to the Tallahatchie County newspaper, The Sun-Sentinel. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality built a berm around the tank car to contain the spillage and firefighting liquids.

Employees of the Department of Environmental Quality, the state Health Department, Canadian National Railway and the National Transportation Safety Board have been on-site in Glendora, a rural community of about 140 residents. 

No buildings or homes were damaged, but the derailment damaged the main water line, which has since been repaired. Glendora was put under a boil water notice – a common practice after water lines break and temporarily lose pressure.

Simmons and Hoskins picked up their children and quickly left after the derailment. They and some other Glendora residents went to hotels in Cleveland, about 30 miles away, but the women said several people lacked transportation and could not evacuate.

Hoskins said people from CN gathered residents in Glendora on Monday and gave each family a $100 Walmart gift card. 

Since returning home Tuesday, both Simmons and Hoskins say that they and their children experienced headaches, fatigue and other symptoms. Both said they plan to visit a doctor soon, and both are worried about their families’ health.

“We’re not using our water. Scared to use it,” Simmons said. “We’ll probably take a shower or something, but I haven’t even cooked because I’m scared of the water.”

Hoskins said there was too little communication from those responding to the derailment.

“How do we know that we haven’t been exposed?” Hoskins said. “How do we know? You’re not reassuring us, you’re not saying nothing to no one.”

Mayor Johnny B. Thomas said he believes the evacuation began too late and ended too soon, and the Glendora community isn’t involved enough in the response.

“They did not evacuate us in a timely manner and in an urgent manner as it should have been with this type of chemical exposure,” Thomas said. 

In a statement to Mississippi Today, the Department of Environmental Quality said air monitoring began promptly after the incident.

“There have been no detectable levels of benzene found and air quality in the community remains at safe levels,” the department said. “Therefore, initial evacuation orders have been lifted.”

The department said air monitoring continues as a precaution.

“We will release any information where there is a threat to public health or the environment,” the department said.

The railroad company directed Mississippi Today to the National Transportation Safety Board for comment, and the board said it will release a preliminary report within 30 days.

The Mississippi Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council held its first meeting Wednesday at the Walter Sillers building in Jackson.

State law requires the members to meet by the end of the day Wednesday. A virtual meeting link also was available for anyone who could not attend in person.

The group is responsible for advising the state Legislature on how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars Mississippi is receiving from pharmaceutical companies accused of catalyzing thousands of overdose deaths throughout the state.

It’s unclear how the Legislature will go about distributing these funds, but the agenda for the meeting said the members would propose rules, priorities and a grant application process.

The MSHOF will induct eight new members on Aug 2. Rick Cleveland has covered them all and he and son Tyler talk about what makes them all special.

Stream all episodes here.

BRANDON — Rankin County residents packed Brandon City Hall to discuss whether a Confederate statue belongs in the town center where a bulk of local traffic flows. But most took stances on whether it represents heritage or hate.

“It’s hatred,” Janie Mclaurin-Wheaton said at the meeting Monday. “You want to leave ‘that’ history, but you want to take mine out of the school? What about my history? I was born here, too.”

Mclaurin-Wheaton, who is Black, was a member of the first graduating class to integrate Brandon High School and was referring to a new law that seeks to restrict teachers from discussing “divisive”concepts like slavery and the causes of the Civil War. Her grandfather was the first Black man in Rankin County to own land and a car. She was one of the first Black women hired in the Rankin County Tax Assessor’s office, where she worked for 27 years.

She joined some 80 neighbors — Black and white– with deep roots in the city and county to speak before the Brandon Board of Aldermen. Dozens crowded into chairs before the first speaker approached the podium at 6 p.m. City hall employees were forced to unfold extra chairs in the hallway when space ran out.

This discussion follows a June 16 meeting, during which Brandon city leaders approved a first step to assess the cost and logistics of relocating the 37-foot-tall statue of an unknown soldier built in 1907. Mayor Butch Lee cast the tie-breaking vote.

In an interview with WAPT, Lee said the statue is “in harm’s way.” He cited three cars that have recently struck it as well as a recent incident in which it was shot at.

Few locals cited the traffic concern as a top priority. Lee and the board drew condemnation from audience members who questioned why the decision wasn’t left to the voters. 

A favored candidate for the relocation is the Confederate part of the Brandon cemetery – a location some feel could hold and preserve the historical monument without glorifying a difficult part of American history.

“There could not be a more serene, more dignified place to address this history than Brandon’s cemetery,” said Lance Stevens, an attorney and 30-year Brandon resident.

Bettye Ward Fletcher, a Black Rankin County native, called for the city to move the statue she sees as a harmful symbol.

“It continues to be painful,” she said. “Your hometown continues to honor the men that fought to maintain you and your people in slavery.”

“I want something different for my grandkids,” said Will Sims, a Black U.S. Air Force veteran who expressed disappointment with seeing the monument still standing when he returned from years in the service.

However, for some residents, the monument and its history are nothing to be ashamed of.

Former longtime Rankin County Assistant District Attorney Dan Duggan pulled out a portrait of his great-great grandfather, a Confederate soldier, for the board to see. The fifth-generation Southerner said removing the monument would be a betrayal to the memory of his ancestors and other soldiers.

“This is a memorial to soldiers who left their homes to defend their country, the Confederate States of America, against an invading force,” said Mark Allen, a longtime resident of Rankin County and descendant of a Confederate soldier.

Brandon’s Confederate monument was erected across from the courthouse where Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman ordered his Union troops to stack their arms as a sign of military occupation of the town, according to the National Register of Historic Places.

In February 1864, Sherman largely burned Brandon as part of what modern historians call a practice run for his famous March to the Sea, in which he employed “total war” that burned and pillaged everything in his army’s path. 

“It’s a place that people could go to that’s maybe the only representation that they had of their relative who had never come home,” said Allen. 

However, some argued that the statue is a symbol of white power rather than a memorial to fallen ancestors. It was erected 42 years after the end of the Civil War, at a time when white Mississippians worked to ensure the marginalization of Black residents. In 1890, the Mississippi constitution enshrined the disenfranchisement of Black residents into law. By 1900, virtually no Black residents could vote despite constituting 59% of the population. 

John Toney, a local attorney, brought up that Brandon spent $3,000 – what would amount to $105,000 today – on the statue.

“They used these monuments to start a political and cultural dialogue,” Toney said. “On the north side of the statue is carved into the marble: state’s rights and home rule will rise again. That’s not a dog whistle, that’s a training whistle.”

“I doubt any Blacks voted in 1907 to spend taxpayer money on the statue,” said Toney.

Despite its complicated past, some claimed the historical monument should be preserved.

“It’s our history. Whether it’s bad or good, let’s not try to second guess it,” said Sharon Neely Egan, a white resident who opposes the removal of the statue. “I don’t think we need to erase Brandon’s history.”

Still, many feel that leaving a monument built as a homage to the Confederacy in one of Brandon’s busiest streets is siding with a skewed version of history, and disregarding the pain it evokes to Black residents.

“Our past is important, but there’s a difference between remembering and honoring,” said Brandon Middle School principal Trey Rein. “We have an opportunity here to make a statement that we are focused on our town’s future more than its past.”

The rain let up just after 7 p.m. as speakers and spectators exited city hall for their cars and homes. Mclaurin-Wheaton departed with some of her classmates from Brandon High School. They are still good friends today.

“I just see some people stuck in the past and don’t know how to move forward,” Mclaurin-Wheaton said. “That’s because mama told you, daddy told you, sister told you, but when you become of age, you got to learn to do the right thing for yourself.”

The next public discussion over this topic will be July 21 at Brandon City Hall.