BOONEVILLE — Walking through a parking lot at Northeast Mississippi Community College on a November afternoon, Nickeda Shelton was eager to get to her job as one of the school’s student counselors. 

She loves working at the Booneville campus, enough so that she drives around 60 miles round trip every day from her home in Tupelo. It was an exciting change after roughly two decades of work in a K-12 setting. 

Amid the rising costs of colleges across the country, Shelton said the school has done a good job of keeping tuition relatively affordable for people who live nearby. 

“It’s calm, it’s relaxing and you can always find family,” she said. 

But the school isn’t immune to some of the resource scarcity that’s common for public services in northeast Mississippi. Shelton sometimes struggles to meet the health needs of all students — especially as rates of anxiety and depression have climbed among college students across North America since the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Years later, Shelton and her coworkers do what they can to help all who struggle with their mental health. But Northeast has over 3,000 students, and some still fall through the gaps.

“It’s kind of been all over the place,” she said, adding that more staff could help address these needs. 

Northeast Mississippians said this type of mismatch between resources and services that would help locals and what’s available close to them is common in their corner of the state. In one of the most remote regions of Mississippi, people across Prentiss and Alcorn County told Mississippi Today that they, their families and their friends would benefit from more resource support from their local governments and the state.

From Jackson, it takes at least 3.5 hours of law-abiding driving on the 50 miles-per-hour speed limit Natchez Trace Parkway to get to Booneville. Shelton said she thinks transportation and distance factor into the gap between people’s needs and the opportunities available to them.

“It’s kind of off the beaten path,” she said. “And because of that, sometimes we get left out because we are so far up north.” 

It’s not just the college that could use more resource support. Jennifer Kendrick, a Booneville mother of two, sends her children to the local public schools. She attended the same schools when she was a kid, playing the bassoon at football games and competitions for the Booneville High School marching band. 

Her freshman son plays the trombone for the same team, and her daughter plays the trombone for the feeder middle school.

“Booneville has for decades had an amazing band,” Kendrick said.

But there are other extracurriculars the schools don’t have that she sees offered elsewhere in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. Prentiss County is split into three separate school districts — allowed by Mississippi’s laws around county and municipal school districts — and Kendrick worries that splitting up her rural county this way means no high school can offer all the opportunities others do.  

Booneville High School doesn’t have a debate team, a theater club or a choir — all extracurriculars Kendrick would like her kids to have the option of exploring. When she was in school in the 1990s, she was part of a program no longer offered called Future Problem Solving, a club that invited kids to think of solutions to large problems like drunken driving. It then asked the students to work through the problems of those proposed solutions. 

“I would love for my kids to be involved in it,” she said. 

In addition to building relationships and community with other high schoolers, Kendrick said these clubs offered potential pathways to paying for college. The 2023 per capita income of Prentiss County was under $40,000 — about $10,000 less than that of Mississippi as a whole.

Without scholarships, like those awarded for a skill that could be developed through an extracurricular activity, she said she won’t be able to pay for her kids’ college tuition. It’s just too expensive, especially as she expects her health insurance premium to go up next month. 

“We’ve already discussed, ‘You need to be looking for ways you can get scholarships,’” she said.

The resource gaps of local schools could have repercussions into adulthood. While exploring the W.M. Browning Cretaceous Fossil Park in Baldwyn, Emmy Nelson and Joanna Bishop interact with people from across north Mississippi through their work as traveling New Testament ministers. While they don’t work directly with the schools in the area, Nelson said she meets with many adults who likely should have received special education for dyslexia. 

Through their travels, Bishop also notices that there’s a gap between the level of unaddressed trauma among people she meets with and available mental health services for those needs, often using substances to cope with issues.

“When you never deal with the problem and it’s still reoccurring, then it doesn’t solve anything,” she said.  

Twenty miles north in Corinth, Heather Hurt sees that service gap in her own life. She filed a domestic violence protection order recently, and she said she hasn’t been able to find a support group in the area for victims of the crime. 

S.A.F.E. Inc., a domestic violence shelter 50 miles south in Tupelo, serves Alcorn County and offers support groups once a week. But although there are virtual video call options for the meetings, they’re held in -person two counties south of Hurt’s home. 

“Sometimes, it would be nice to just have other women that you could go and listen to and talk to,” she said. 

Not knowing where to find or being able to get social services is a problem Hurt says affects the most financially and medically vulnerable Alcorn County residents. And the problems aren’t limited to long-term programs. Hurt works as a paramedic in Tennessee, and she said she’s experienced difficulty getting first responders on her side of the state line to show up in a timely manner. 

While Hurt thinks Corinth is a great place to live, she would like to see her state representatives work to address these resource gaps. So far, she said she hasn’t seen them in the community nor had a chance to tell them that.

“I don’t ever hear of them coming up here,” she said.

Even with the public service access challenges, Kendrick said small businesses in the area work to fill some of the communities’ needs. She has her own private therapy practice in Booneville, and she’s worked with other groups in the area to address community needs herself. 

In September, Kendrick and a local gym partnered to host a free class on domestic violence, where she said she shared information about recognizing the signs of abuse and exiting an unsafe situation. Although only a few people attended, she said those who did were very engaged in the discussion.

“We ended up partnering and supporting and promoting each other,” Kendrick said. Hurt hadn’t heard of the class, but she said it would have interested her.

The small business relationships in Booneville is one of the things Kendrick loves about her hometown, which she returned to after attending college in Memphis. She sees many residents making decisions with her and her neighbors in mind, not out-of-state stakeholders. 

“There’s less of a buffer.”