Mississippi Today, the state’s flagship nonprofit newsroom, is moving its offices to downtown Jackson from Ridgeland.
For us, this move is more than just a change of address — it’s a reflection of our belief in Jackson’s promise. In late February, we announced the launch of a team of reporters focused on covering the city of Jackson. We believe strongly that the success of the entire state of Mississippi relies on the success of Jackson.
Downtown Jackson, in particular, is Mississippi’s heartbeat. The values represented in this neighborhood are the values that define the people of the entire state: creativity, determination, perseverance, and a tangible sense of community. By investing in this space, we’re investing in the people, businesses, and leaders who are already shaping the city and state every day. And we hope to be representative of a proud next chapter that breathes life into this important place.
Our new home will be in the historic Lamar Life Building, one of Mississippi’s most iconic landmarks. Opened and dedicated in 1925 — exactly 100 years ago — it was the state of Mississippi’s first skyscraper and remains a symbol of Jackson’s growth and resilience.
This building boasts an important literary and media history. A young Eudora Welty, working for her father’s life insurance company, began her lifelong pursuit of storytelling and photography in the building. It was also home to Mississippi’s first network radio station, WJDX, and it also once housed Lamar Broadcasting Television, now known as WLBT. We are proud to build upon these legacies.
Our office, which is currently being renovated, will not only provide a comfortable home for the largest newsroom staff in the state that is already doing so much work downtown at the state Capitol and at City Hall. It will double as a community gathering place and venue for the live programming that Mississippi Today does so well. We want our space to regularly bring people downtown, and we will work to host events that every Mississippian will find engaging.
Stay tuned for more updates as we settle into our new home. We couldn’t be more excited to continue our work from the heart of Mississippi.
Dr. Randy McCoy, a retired longtime public school superintendent and member of the state employee retirement system board, says a plan passed by the Senate aimed at financially stabilizing PERS would cause long-term problems in hiring and retaining teachers and other state employees. He says the system can be shored up with less drastic reductions in benefits for future employees.
Lainey Jackson Little, 3, holds Biggersville’s state championship trophy Friday morning Mississippi Coliseum while her teammates celebrate. (Photo by Brad locke)
To borrow from the Southeastern Conference: Basketball just means more in extreme northeast Mississippi, more commonly known as Hill Country. Never was that more evident than Friday morning at Mississippi Coliseum. In a battle of tiny town titans, the Biggersville girls came from behind to defeat Thrasher 54-47 for the Class 1A state championship in a fiercely contested, well-coached and well-played game.
When the final horn sounded, the basketball court became a sea of emotion, tears flowing seemingly everywhere: tears of joy, tears of despair. As much as the outcome meant – one way or the other to so many folks – it just had to mean more to one family. They would be the Littles of Biggersville.
Cliff Little is the Biggersville head coach. Jana Little, his wife, is an assistant coach. Lainey Jackson Little, their daughter, is a junior guard on the team. Eighteen years ago Cliff and Jana were a young married couple teaching at East Webster in Maben. Cliff was an assistant basketball coach, Jana the team’s scorekeeper. The team qualified for the State Tournament in Jackson, but Jana, six months pregnant, was diagnosed with toxemia (pregnancy-induced hypertension) and stayed home.
On March 1, 2007, Jana gave birth to a daughter, who weighed one pound, 15 ounces. “She would have fit in the palm of my hand,” Cliff Little says.
They named her Lainey Jackson, the middle name from the name of the place they had planned to be the night Lainey Jack, as they call her, was born. The initial prognosis was grim: She might make it, she might not. Lainey Jack spent the first six weeks of her life in the hospital, mostly in an incubator. The tiny girl showed then what the folks in Biggersville have come to know – that she was a fighter.
Let’s move ahead 17 years to this time last year. The Biggersville girls with Lainey Jack as their second leading scorer and playmaker made it to the State championship semifinals against Lumberton, only to lose by a single point on two late free throws.
Biggersville head basketball coach Cliff Little encourages his team to hurry down court and play defense in a tight game against McEvans in the Class 1A finals at the Mississippi Coliseum, Thursday, Mar. 3, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Cliff Little also coaches the Biggersville boys, who went on to win the 2024 state championship. So he wasn’t back in Biggersville the day after his girls were eliminated. He wasn’t in the Biggersville gym when his girls took the floor for their first practice in preparation for what occurred Friday morning at Mississippi Coliseum.. The family have rarely missed a day together since.
They certainly didn’t miss on the eighth day of May last year when, during a players-only practice, Lainey Jack went down with a horrible injury to her right knee. A torn ACL that required surgery and months and months of strenuous rehab.
How strenuous? When his daughter first began her rehab at home, Cliff would make sure a garbage can was nearby for when she would need to vomit, which was all too often. But she was determined and kept at it, day after day. We may assume that when you come into this world weighing 31 ounces, such grit comes naturally.
Said Cliff Little, “I told her back during all that rehab that when we won the state championship I was going to have the date – May 8th – inscribed on her ring.”
Lainey Jack was released to play again in December, just seven months after surgery. She is still working to recover the quickness and cutting ability she possessed prior to the injury, but it’s coming.
She was in the starting lineup Friday, a heavy brace on that right knee.. One minute into the game, she swished a 22-foot three-pointer to give Biggersville its first lead. That would be her only basket, but she scrapped and battled throughout. And, afterward, she was in the middle of the celebration, holding the cherished Gold Ball trophy.
“I worked really hard to come back, and that’s what makes this so special,” she said, before deflecting praise to her teammates, 15-year-old Sadiya Hill in particular. Hill scored 24 points to lead the Lions, while Jaylee Stafford scored 19 and pulled down 11 rebounds despite playing much of the fourth quarter with four fouls.
Stafford and Little are juniors. The gifted Hill is just a sophomore and her talented older sister, K’yana Hill is another junior. So there’s a good chance Biggersville will be back again next year. No telling how many championships the 46-year-old Cliff Little will win before he’s done. This makes seven state championships – five boys, two girls – in all for Little.
“They are all special,” Little said when asked where this latest championship ranks. “They’re all special, but this one, considering the circumstances… this one’s extra special.”
Put it this way: There will be an 18th birthday party, combined with a state championship celebration, in Biggersville Saturday.
Sheldon Bray of Blue Springs said he took his wife and two sons to the “March to Save America” rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, because he wanted to show his boys the importance of making their voices heard.
“I don’t like people that complain about what’s going on, but you don’t participate and let your representative know,” Bray told Mississippi Today. Instead of “sending somebody up there to read your mind,” Bray said, people should “get involved.”
He said that in months before Jan. 6, he had worriedly watched the imposition of mask mandates and the rapid expansion of absentee voting since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Politicians on both sides of the aisle had told us for years that our elections are being messed with and our elections aren’t secure,” he said. “And then we get to 2020, and all of a sudden, this election was perfect.” But he “just kept getting the feeling like an investigation was off the table.”
Four years after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Bray and others among the 13 Mississippians charged in connection with the events of that day – even those who pleaded guilty – defend their actions, which they maintain were misconstrued by the media and misunderstood by a broad swath of the public. As some Mississippians served sentences over the past three years, a community emerged around them, hailing them as patriots and political prisoners. That community now considers the pardons a sign of victory.
In all, Trump granted sweeping clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack on the Capitol.
State Rep. Daryl Porter, Jr., D-Summit, called the pardons “a slap in the face to law enforcement.”
“I think it is a slap in the face to the Constitution. I think it’s a slap in the face to this country,” Porter said. “It sends a really poor message, that if something cannot go your way, you can thus break the law and then be let go, and not face any consequences for what you’ve done.”
A Hero’s Welcome in Oxford
Bray and five other Jan. 6 defendants spoke to about 50 people in a Lafayette County chancery courtroom in Oxford on Feb. 21.
Bray told the group there had been many times when he had to tell the stories of incarcerated Jan. 6 participants on their behalf, “but through the grace of God, I don’t have to do that tonight.”
Sheldon Bray speaks in a Lafayette County Chancery courtroom on Feb. 21, 2025, as an audience of approximately 50 listen with rapt attention, and Lori Cyree of My Brother’s Keeper–Oxford looks on Credit: Mukta Joshi/Mississippi Today
The meeting was hosted by the Union County Republican Women’s Club, the Mississippi Conservative Coalition and My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, a group founded in 2022 to organize letters and donations for Mississippians charged in connection with the Capitol breach. The Oxford-based group is unrelated to a nonprofit of the same name that works to reduce health disparities, as well as an Obama Foundation program that supports boys and young men of color.
Lori Richmond Cyree, the founder of My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford and lead organizer of the event, described the community that formed around Jan. 6 defendants as “the heart and soul of this country.”
Cyree said she hoped the event would foster understanding by allowing people to hear from Jan. 6 defendants in person. “I just believe that if you get people together and they can have honest conversations, wonderful things can happen,” Cyree said.
Several speakers described their actions on Jan. 6 as part of a sea change that had shifted the country off a path they said was corrupt and authoritarian.
Mike Brock of Walls told the audience he never intended to partake in an insurrection – just to pressure Pence to delay lawmakers’ certification of the electoral vote count. Brock said he told federal agents that he felt he had no choice but to travel to Washington in January 2021.
“It’s disgraceful to all the people that have shed their blood for this country to not do nothing, not stand up and even raise a hand, to say, ‘Hey, I’m against this,’” Brock remembered telling the agents.
Brock, who was charged with obstructing and attacking law enforcement, violence on Capitol grounds and disorderly conduct, said he was pushed into a police line by “a whole football team” of running protesters after making his way from the rally to the Capitol. He was awaiting the announcement of his trial date when Trump pardoned him.
Two Mississippi Jan. 6 defendants, Mike Brock and Thomas Harlen Smith, hold up signs Feb. 21, 2025, in Oxford requesting Gov. Tate Reeves to “invite Mississippi’s J6ers to dinner.” Credit: Mukta Joshi/Mississippi Today
Thomas Webster of Oxford suggested that “deep state actors” used the public’s fear of the COVID-19 virus to make way for fraudulent election practices.
“Do you believe COVID was an accident?” Thomas Webster asked the attendees, some of whom responded, “No!”
“The timing of that was just unbelievable. And I believe it was intentional, designed to create that atmosphere to make everybody so afraid.”
Webster, a retired New York City police officer and Marine Corps veteran, was convicted of charges including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon, a flagpole bearing the Marine Corps flag. He said that law enforcement officers outside the Capitol failed to use proper de-escalation methods and that he acted in self-defense after an officer provoked him. He was serving a 10-year prison sentence at the time of his pardon.
At the end of the event, the pardoned speakers gave Cyree and Marie Thomas, who also works with My Brother’s Keeper-Oxford, plaques engraved with Mississippi Jan. 6 defendants’ signatures. “For Love of the Forgotten,” the plaques read.
On Feb. 21, 2025, Marie Thomas, who works with My Brother’s Keeper–Oxford, holds a commemorative plaque bearing the autographs of Mississippians who were charged for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Credit: Mukta Joshi/Mississippi Today
Nancy Frohn, of the Union County Republican Women’s Club, cast Trump’s second term as a new beginning for the country.
“I think God let Joe Biden go into office to let us see how bad things could really get,” said Nancy Frohn of that group.
“We have to thank God every day that he has given our country a second chance.”
‘Every background you can think of’
The Jan. 6 defendants interviewed by Mississippi Today had a wide range of reasons why they were supporters of Trump and part of the broader “Trump community,” as Bray put it.
Thomas Harlen Smith of Mathiston said he never voted in a presidential election until 2020, and he didn’t like Trump until he ran for president. “I thought, he’s a rich guy, you know? I’m just a poor Mississippi guy.”
But Trump “stuck to what he said,” said Smith, and put the country’s economy first.
Smith said Trump’s policies before the COVID pandemic benefited small businesses like his excavation and construction company. “We owe it all to Trump, whether people like that or not,” he said.
“Even during COVID,” said Smith, “I still did fine.”
Smith was convicted of 11 charges in 2023, including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon and obstructing an official proceeding. Smith said he accidentally grabbed a police officer as he tried to pull protesters out of a clash with law enforcement on the West Terrace of the Capitol. He was serving a nine-month prison sentence when Trump issued the pardons.
James McGrew of Biloxi, who served in Iraq and suffered injuries and substance dependency as a result, said he began supporting Trump because of his positions on veterans affairs and in particular, the Veteran’s Choice program, which allowed veterans to choose their healthcare providers.
“All the VA did for me up until about 2016 was give me pills,” he said. It wasn’t until “the middle of 2016, 2017, that the VA started changing.”
The Trump administration expanded eligibility for the program in 2017, though it was first passed in 2014 during the Obama administration.
“I supported Donald Trump just for that reason alone – that he supported me.”
McGrew pleaded guilty in 2022 to “assaulting, resisting or impeding” law enforcement officers and was sentenced to 78 months in prison.
Some of the Jan. 6 defendants made it clear they did not consider themselves uncritical supporters of Trump. Brock said that he’s a Trump supporter at the end of the day. But “I got a lot of stuff that I could say against Trump,” he said, “that I wish he’d have done different, or would do different.”
Brock said that although Trump is “the man of the hour,” he thinks the president doesn’t “admit any of his mistakes” and pushed COVID restrictions and vaccines too hard during his first term.
As general principles, he believes in small government and worries about the role of money in politics.
“We don’t need the federal government to do nothing for us,” Brock said. “What we need, worse than anything, is somebody to get the federal government out of our business.”
And Brock said something needs to be done about corrupt politicians.
“They call bribing lobbying,” he said. “To me, that’s become the same thing.”
Bray said he had a distrust of billionaires, and Trump being a part of that club made him wonder whether one could really believe that he was for the people.
He also took issue with people seeing Trump as a savior. “There’s a lot of Trump voters that are like, ‘This will fix everything. We just gotta elect Trump, and everything’s fixed.’”
Bray was convicted in 2024 of obstructing law enforcement, and of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building. He said he used a police riot shield to part crowds in the Capitol rotunda as he and his son were trying to leave, but he denied interfering with law enforcement. He recalled complying with officers’ instructions and offering his first aid kit to an officer who appeared injured. Before the Justice Department dropped his case last month, his sentencing was scheduled for February.
Bray spoke about the importance of engaging with politics, learning about representatives, tracking how they vote, and speaking up. “You can’t just flip on the TV for one hour each day and watch whatever your favorite brand of news is, and just take that and say, ‘Okay, I’m informed’,” Bray said.
An attendee of the Feb. 21, 2025, event in Oxford proudly shows his T-shirt. Credit: Mukta Joshi/Mississippi Today
“All the nationwide media, the legacy media companies, they portrayed us as terrorists, extremists, conspiracy theorists,” McGrew said. To a lot of people, he said, “we were monsters.” But he wants people to know that the people who participated in Jan. 6 aren’t a monolith. “We’ve had every background you can think of as part of this movement.”
Cyree believes that the way to make progress is for individuals to talk to each other directly.
“We’ve got this groupthink that needs to stop,” Cyree said. “Groupthink sometimes goes to group hate and group misunderstanding. If you can get one person to talk to another person, they can find out they have a lot more in common that unites them, than separates them.”
Mid-South Food Bank has shuttered 12 of its mobile food banks in Mississippi as well as dozens of others in Arkansas and Tennessee with the ending of federal COVID-19 rescue funding.
Under the America Rescue Fund Act, the Department of Human Services, Office of Economic Opportunity, awarded $4.3 million to food banks across the country. Mid-South Food Bank added more sites to its mobile food program to reach more people during the COVID lockdowns in 2020.
Interim President and CEO Scott Fortin explained that the cuts are part of the nonprofit’s efforts to spend their donations and funding better. He said some of these sites were redundant as there were brick-and-mortar locations close by.
“We are doing our best to continue to distribute food through the programs that we’ve always had, and while looking at those programs we expanded during COVID to see how they can continue to run but more efficiently” he said.
In all, 49 mobile sites were closed. The food bank’s website has a schedule of all the current mobile pantry locations and times.
The Mid-South Food Bank distributes over 2.5 million meals annually to parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi with 186,550 of them in Mississippi.
Memphis-based Mid-South Food Bank serves 440,000 meals a year. It saw a huge spike in demand during the pandemic. Fortin said that has since decreased. But in general, food banks across the country are reporting increased demand, according to a 2023 survey by Feeding America.
Food insecurity went up after the COVID pandemic, according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the latest available. The U.S. House resolution budget bill passed this week and endorsed by President Trump includes $230 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program (SNAP). If it passes, food banks could be impacted even more.
While nationally one in 10 Americans are food insecure, in Mississippi the number is one in four and the state has the highest rate of food insecurity in the country, according to Uproot Mississippi.
Extra Table, founded in 2009, is a statewide
nonprofit food bank with a mission to fundraises to purchase new healthy and shelf stable foods that are delivered to 60 food pantry and soup kitchen partners for free monthly. Credit: Josh McCoy/City of Oxford
Executive director Martha Allen Price of Hattiesburg-based Extra Table, which receives no federal funding, said she’s seen an increase in demand for food since the pandemic, especially with rising grocery prices. She noted that “13.4% of Mississippians are working and still not making a living wage, and so they’re using the food pantry as an emergency source of food.”
Extra Table partners with food pantries to fundraise on their behalf for healthy and shelf-stable foods. Their funding comes entirely through private donations. They work with food pantries in 51 Mississippi counties.
“We provided 1.3 million pounds of food last year to our food pantry and soup kitchen partners,” Megan Burkes with Extra Table said.
by Justin Glowacki with contributions from Stephani Perez Munoz, Sonya Woods, Matthew Martin, McKenna Klamm, Pragesh Adhikar and Miracle Jennings
GAUTIER – Across Mississippi, pets are being abandoned on bridges, at dead ends and even outside closed animal shelters. The issue has grown more pressing as shelters reach full capacity, leaving pet owners with two options: wait for an available surrender date or leave their animals in a place where no one will see them.
Weak legal protections and limited enforcement make the problem worse. Unlike most states, Mississippi does not explicitly define animal abandonment as a crime, a gap that has led to growing calls for reform from animal advocacy groups.
A difficult crime to enforce
Grinch, a one-year-old Labrador Retriever/Bull Terrier mix, sits in the Jackson County Shelter after being abandoned by his former owner.
Animal control officers and shelters work to care for abandoned pets, but those responsible often go unidentified.
“It’s the complete anonymity of what happens at the crime,” said Joseph Barlow, director of the Jackson County Animal Shelter. “People aren’t completely stupid, what they’re doing is choosing times, locales, that are really, again, go back to the anonymity.”
Jackson County Animal Shelter, which also oversees animal control for the county, handles a steady flow of abandonment cases each year. But by the time officers arrive, Barlow said, the trail is usually cold.
“You’ve got a call that a homeowner has found four puppies on their property when they got up in the morning, that they didn’t own and have never seen before – and that’s all we know,” Barlow said. “Typically, we don’t have much to go on whatsoever.”
Unlike most animal control agencies, Jackson County’s officers are not part of law enforcement, limiting their ability to investigate these cases.
Image of Jackson County Animal Shelter located in Gautier, Mississippi.
“Most animal control agencies work for a law enforcement agency. Jackson County is a little unique. They work for the shelter,” Barlow explained. “My guys are commissioned sheriff deputy officers, so they don’t have the full authority to do a full-scale investigation. We’d have to partner with the sheriff’s department when we have a lead.”
Because of these limitations, abandonment cases are rarely prosecuted.
“It’s a situation where probably one out of ten cases where you would have any leads to go on who did it. And when you do and you can identify (who it was), you’re still not talking about criminal charges, but you’re talking about charges in justice court. Court date, fines associated with it,” Barlow said.
Mississippi’s legal gaps
Mississippi’s current “simple animal cruelty” charge can apply to abandonment cases, but it is classified as a misdemeanor, punishable by fines up to $1,000 and/or six months in jail.
However, the law does not explicitly classify abandonment as a standalone offense — an omission Kathleen Wood, senior staff attorney at Animal Legal Defense Fund, said makes Mississippi “unusual.”
Blackjack, a two-year-old husky/ pit bull terrier mix, sits in Jackson Animal Shelter after being abandoned.
“Mississippi actually doesn’t have any laws explicitly addressing animal abandonment,” Wood said. “There are some provisions around animal neglect that may apply depending on the situation, but the laws don’t explicitly address abandoning an animal.”
Even the term “animal abandonment” appears only once in Mississippi law, under the Veterinarian Protection Act — which only applies to cases where a pet is left at a vet’s office, according to Barlow.
Barlow believes Mississippi’s approach is too narrow.
“We’ve defined some very narrow abandonment scenarios,” he said. “For example, one would be if a customer brought a pet to a vet for care and didn’t pick it up, and then after a period of ten days, that animal is considered abandoned. Well, that’s great and probably appropriate, but the scenarios for animals being dumped or truly abandoned in my mind are not fleshed out quite enough.”
Another challenge is the lack of funding for enforcement.
“There are currently four states that have dedicated prosecutors whose job it is specifically to do animal cruelty crimes throughout the state,” Wood explains. “That is a great way to ensure that there are adequate resources, especially rural areas where counties might be strapped.
Mississippi ranks 46 in animal protection laws
Cat lays down in the Jackson County Animal Shelter awaiting adoption.
The Animal Legal Defense Fund ranks Mississippi 46th in the country for its animal protection laws, citing significant gaps in enforcement and regulation. In addition to a lack of laws explicitly mentioning animal abandonment, laws protecting animals are only applied to certain pets.
“Mississippi is ranked in the bottom five because it has some decent dog and cat protection laws,” Wood said. “Unfortunately, those protections are not afforded to many other species, which is a big part of why it’s ranked so low.”
Local Efforts and Challenges
Despite legal challenges, local shelters and advocates are working to protect abandoned animals.
“Our first priority is always the welfare of the animals,” Barlow emphasized. “From a punishment perspective, certainly we’re interested in (increased penalties) to a degree. But again, the number one priority is getting the animals safe, fed, and medical care and whatever they need.”
Still, he believes Mississippi needs a statewide approach to addressing abandonment.
“Having a state approach that’s again, a little more broad and addresses animal abandonment in all its forms would be nice,” Barlow says.
Wood agrees, and said Mississippi could benefit from looking at states with stronger animal protection laws.
For now, abandoned pets in Mississippi remain caught in a legal gray area — left to fend for themselves while advocates push for change.
A lawmaker playing hardball may cost poor pregnant women a policy that would help them receive timely prenatal care – after the program’s implementation was already delayed a year because of administrative hiccups.
Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, told Mississippi Today he will not be taking up a House bill to fix the issues in the program. He called it “his prerogative as chairman” – despite authoring his own bill last year on the policy and purportedly being a strong proponent.
House Medicaid Chair Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, the author of last year’s bill on presumptive eligibility for pregnant women that passed into law, re-worked the bill this year to match federal guidelines so the program can take effect. It passed the House unanimously Jan. 24 and was transferred to the Senate.
But now, it may die in the Senate due to political bartering.
Blackwell added the policy to the Medicaid tech bill, legislation that comes up nearly every year to make technical amendments and updates to laws governing the Division of Medicaid. But Blackwell’s bill contains dozens of items – including special interest items such as mandating that the agency cover a new, $16,000 postpartum depression drug and a sleep apnea device.
Sage Therapeutics, the Massachusetts-based company that makes the postpartum depression drug, has hired the local lobbying firm the Clearwater Group this year.
House Medicaid Committee Chairwoman Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, said the passing of legislation that would extend postpartum Medicaid coverage from two months to a year, by the committee is “the right thing for women and babies in Mississippi,” Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, at the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
“I don’t believe it’s the best idea (that) something so critical (as pregnancy presumptive eligibility) should be attached to a $7 million laundry list of unrelated lobbyist requests, particularly as our federal government has stated its intent to trim such unnecessary spending,” McGee told Mississippi Today. “The House will continue fighting for the people who don’t have a hired lobbying effort.”
Medical experts say early prenatal care is essential to mitigating bad health outcomes like preterm birth, for which Mississippi leads the nation.
Should Blackwell’s 186-page technical amendment bill pass, it would cost the Division of Medicaid $6.8 million. In contrast, it was estimated last year that presumptive eligibility would cost just under $600,000. Lawmakers appropriated that amount to the agency last year.
Although Blackwell’s bill passed the full Senate on Feb. 12, another lawmaker also had questions about the costs associated with the bill.
“It looks to me like we’re covering a lot more than we have in the past, and I think – don’t we have like a $25 million Medicaid deficit?” Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, asked on the floor.
Blackwell confirmed that the agency is facing a deficit next year.
Blackwell’s bill is now in the hands of the House Medicaid committee, which McGee chairs.
McGee’s bill – which strictly fixes the issues with pregnancy presumptive eligibility and would allow the Division of Medicaid to continue training providers and allow pregnant women to take advantage of the program – will die if not passed out of Blackwell’s committee by the deadline Tuesday, March 4.
The policy, called Presumptive Eligibility for Pregnant Women, would allow low-income women who became newly-eligible for Medicaid once pregnant to receive immediate prenatal care as soon as they find out they’re pregnant – even if their Medicaid application is still pending. The policy is especially effective in non-expanded states, where the majority of low-income women aren’t eligible for Medicaid until they become pregnant – meaning a lengthy application process can cut well into their pregnancy.
Mississippi is currently one of only three states with neither expansion or presumptive eligibility for pregnant women.
Family Health Center in Laurel was one of the first clinics to sign up for the program when it was rolled out by the Division of Medicaid last year. Dr. Rashad Ali, an OB and the CEO of the clinic who has made it his mission to serve uninsured and underinsured women, was disappointed to hear that the policy needed to go through the Legislature once again to be amended.
Now, he worries what will happen if the policy never goes into effect.
“I think they’re missing out on great opportunities to enhance the wellbeing of pregnant moms in the state of Mississippi,” said Ali. “… We are one of the leading states in terms of maternal mortality. This is one of the things that can help bring us out of the top.”
The Mississippi House has once again passed legislation to increase the size of a program that already sends millions in state dollars to private schools.
The House, as it did in 2024, approved legislation on Wednesday sponsored by Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, that would increase the tax credits available through the Children’s Promise Act. Private schools have been receiving money through the law since 2020.
Lamar said the Act shores up nonprofits that provide services such as foster care and special needs, and that demand currently outstrips the amount of tax credits it makes available. In addition to other nonprofits, the statute also makes tax credits to private schools that meet its criteria.
“Right now there is not enough credits for the need,” Lamar said.
Some Democrats and public school advocates said the proposal — along with two other measures the House passed Wednesday bolstering the tax credits available under the Children’s Promise Act — was the latest measure in a flurry of bills introduced this session that would send taxpayer money to private schools.
“If we continue to bolster private schools with public schools’ money, it continues to harm the public school system,” said House Minority Leader Robert Johnson.
Under the Children’s Promise Act, a person or corporation can make a donation to one of the private schools certified by the Department of Revenue and receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for up to 50% of the donor’s state tax liability.
The maximum a private school currently can receive through the program is $405,000 a year.
The program was initiated in 2019 and touted as a mechanism to provide additional money to nonprofits that care for foster children. But a provision to provide tax credits to private schools was tucked into the bill.
Under current law, a total of $9 million a year in tax credit money can be doled out to private schools. HB 1903, which passed Wednesday, would increase that total up to $16 million in 2025, with the potential for more increases in future years.
The legislation does this by increasing the maximum amount of tax credits allocated by the Department of Revenue for the program from $18 million to $40 million in 2027.
“Clearly, Chairman Lamar’s priority is to get public money to private schools,” said Nancy Loome, director of the public education advocacy group The Parents Campaign. “He’s been trying to do this in many different ways, sneaking it into bills and that sort of thing. It is not the priority of the people of Mississippi. They have overwhelmingly made it clear that they oppose tax dollars benefiting private schools,” Loome said.
According to Loome, 100 private schools qualified this year for Children’s Promise Act money on a first-come, first-served basis. The schools have no obligation to provide any accountability on how the taxpayer money is spent, she added.
Under HB 1903, no more than 50% of the allocated tax credits during a calendar year could be directed to schools.
Another bill that passed Wednesday, HB 1902, would redirect some unused state tax credits to the Children’s Promise Act, Lamar said. A third bill that could be used as a vehicle to increase the tax credits, HB 1894, was initially sold by Lamar as a bond bill, to borrow money for capital projects. Lamar inserted language dealing with the tax credits into the bill, but neglected to mention this to the rest of the Ways and Means Committee he chairs before they hurriedly voted to pass it late Tuesday.
All three bills dealing with the Children’s Promise Act passed with large bipartisan majorities on Wednesday, but Johnson and other opponents said all of them should be altered before becoming law.
Senate Education Chairman Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, told Mississippi Today on Thursday that he does not support sending more tax credit money under the Children’s Promise Act to private schools.
In years past, legislators have attempted to amend the law to direct all of the tax credits to benefit organizations that house and serve children in foster care. Lamar was successful in defeating those efforts.
Johnson wants to narrow the criteria used to evaluate which organizations are eligible for the tax credit so that private schools don’t get taxpayer money. He also wants provisions directing the Department of Revenue to collect more data on how the money is spent.
The Department of Revenue is responsible for certifying the private schools that are eligible to receive funds through the Children’s Promise Act. But, according to responses provided by the department, no information is available on how the funds are spent.
In 2024, the department told legislators that it did not know how the funds were used. DOR also did not have updated information on the number of children served through the Children’s Promise Act. Lamar said in 2024 that he would obtain that information, but it was not clear Thursday if he had done that.
The House’s desire to greatly expand the size of the Children’s Promise Act comes against the backdrop of a legislative session where legislative leaders have made school choice, which can entail sending taxpayer money to private schools, a central priority. The primary measure that would have done that died in the House earlier this month.
A group of independent pharmacists from across Mississippi gathered at the Capitol Thursday to urge lawmakers to increase regulation and transparency of pharmacy benefit managers, who they say are threatening their survival.
“Pharmacy benefit managers, also known as PBMs, have been monopolizing the industry and making it hard for independent pharmacists to compete and ultimately, to continue serving our communities effectively,” said Michael Jones, the owner and pharmacist of Helping Hand Family Pharmacy in Vicksburg.
If legislators do not pass a law this year to further regulate the companies, which serve as middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry, some independent pharmacies may be forced to close, warned Jones.
Pharmacists cited pharmacy benefit managers’ low payments to independent pharmacies, practice of charging insurers more for drugs than pharmacists are paid to inflate their profits, and steering customers to affiliate pharmacies as some of the ways the companies’ business practices harm independent pharmacies.
Pharmacy benefit managers negotiate pricing and conditions for access to drugs, process prescription claims and manage retail pharmacy networks.
A Federal Trade Commission report published last July argued that the companies’ anti-competitive business practices have increased prescription drug costs, hurt independent pharmacies and diminished consumers’ choice about which pharmacy to patronize.
The Mississippi House of Representatives and Senate have both passed bills that would further regulate pharmacy benefit managers, authored by Speaker of the House Jason White, R-West, and Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, respectively.
Both bills prohibit spread pricing, or charging a health plan a higher price for a prescription drug a pharmacy is paid. They also give the Mississippi Board of Pharmacy more tools to conduct audits and require drug manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers and health insurers to submit data to the Mississippi Board of Pharmacy.
While White’s bill focuses on transparency of pharmacy benefit managers, Parks’ bill includes additional language that would tighten appeal procedures, ensure pharmacy benefit managers promptly pay certain claims, and mandate that affiliate pharmacies are not paid more for dispensing drugs than other pharmacies.
Independent pharmacies spoke in support of the Senate’s bill, SB2677, because of the additional protections it includes.
“The Senate bill has more teeth right now,” said Jones. “But there’s nothing to say that the Senate, who now has HB1123, can not put language in it.”
In a press release issued Wednesday, White said the House is working with the Senate to create impactful pharmacy benefit manager reform legislation.
“It is a priority in the House of Representatives to support independent pharmacists who are such an essential part of Mississippi’s communities and protect consumers from heightened drug costs at the checkout line, while also guarding against increased health insurance and premium prices for our state’s businesses and citizens,” it read.
Parks told Mississippi Today that conversations between the two chambers are progressing.
“This is the most progress we’ve had in two years,” she said.
Legislation in the House and the Senate has not yet passed out of committee in the opposite chamber.
Fair Jones, the co-owner and pharmacist of Sav-Mor Drugs and Gifts in Grenada, said that independent pharmacists offer value to communities because of the pharmacists’ personal relationships with customers and ability to help them in times of need.
She recalled her husband and co-owner, Taylor Jones, walking door to door to deliver prescriptions during an ice storm in Grenada, when roads were too slick for people to safely drive.
“We are here today with hopes for legislation that, yes, will bring PBM reform to Mississippi and allow us to practice on a level playing field. But ultimately what we’re asking for, begging even, is the opportunity to continue serving our communities in the ways that only an independent pharmacy can,” she said.
The first 24 hours of “100 Days of Peace,” an initiative announced by Jackson leadership Wednesday, were marked by a solemn energy and a renewed dedication to making Jackson safer.
In the course of the day, the mayor presented a large ceremonial check to local credible messengers – formerly incarcerated people who work with youth in the juvenile system to interrupt violence – on the steps of City Hall. Separately, kin to gun violence victims from across the state traveled to the capital city to mourn their loved ones outside the state Capitol building and call for gun control policies. Local police patrolled and responded to 911 calls as normal.
And just as it seemed the day would end without wounds, a man was shot in the knee during a domestic disturbance at a Belhaven apartment complex around 8pm.
100 Days of Peace, also called 100 Days of Action, is a city-wide initiative which aims to find community solutions for crime reduction. The initiative is a partnership with credible messenger programs and will include community listening sessions and town halls, as well as trainings leading up to a Sneaker Ball – a formal gala with informal footwear – to celebrate the work in June.
Benny Ivey, co-founder of Strong Arms of Mississippi Credible Messenger Program, said that he hopes to use his past as an incarcerated person and a former gang leader to mentor younger people who cycle in and out of juvenile detention. Strong Arms of Mississippi received one of three $50,000 grants Wednesday to build up the program’s capacity.
The organization’s motto is “rebuilding communities we once helped to destroy.” Credible messengers are people who have lived experience in the communities that they’re trying to reach.
“Our mentorship program is about building those relationships so that they will listen to what you have to say, because you’re listening to what they have to say,” said Ivey. “We’ve learned that these young men will open up to us about things that they won’t tell anybody, and that’s the first step in changing the mindset.”
Fredrick Womack, Executive Director of Operation Good, which also received one of the grants, said that unity within the community takes a village. He points to helping mothers in the community and getting people who are willing to work into job development courses at Hinds Community College to learn a trade.
“We’re here to do what’s necessary to heal the problem,” he said. “Not just be a bandaid.”
With the funds provided by the city, Womack hopes to host more community events and block parties to engage at-risk youth. He also said that crime prevention alleviates the strain on city resources used to investigate and prosecute crimes after they happen.
“I’m glad the city took on this effort in the reduction of crime on the community level,” Womack said. “Each murder that we prevent in Jackson, it prevents the cost of upwards of a million dollars to the city.”
The third organization awarded a grant is Living with Purpose, established in Byram last year by longtime peer counselor John Knight.
The funds come from the city’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, launched in 2022 with a $700,000 grant from the National League of Cities and Wells Fargo Bank. The office is staffed by director Keisha Coleman and community outreach specialist Kuwasi Omari and operates largely as an umbrella, coordinating support for the three grantees who have been conducting youth mentorship and violence intervention on the ground for years.
“We want to be very clear, this 100 Days of Action and 100 Days of Peace is not geared toward what we call the ‘bubble kids’, the kids who are out here that are straddling the fence. It’s geared towards those youth and those communities that are at the highest risk,” Coleman said. “So yes, we are engaging gang members, we are engaging cliques, we are engaging affiliates, we are engaging anyone who’s at high risk of shooting a gun or being shot.”
At the press conference, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba said he has witnessed the credible messengers passing out food in under-resourced communities. When the water crisis peaked in 2022, the mayor said those men were some of the first who entered the frontlines to deliver drinking water to Jacksonians. Research has shown that hunger can be associated with increased risk of experiencing or perpetrating violence.
“I’ve seen statistics in a limited block radius where they’ve had nearly half of a year with no gun violence within one of the areas that had some of the most pronounced gun violence prior to their work,” Lumumba said at the press conference.
The Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery did not supply reports or data on the success of the programs when asked, but Coleman directed Mississippi Today to the individual organizations’ websites. Operation Good’s website claims that while using its own crime intervention model, the organization saw a decrease in violent crimes, from 87 percent to 14 percent over a 3-year period, in the area it had a presence. But “due to the majority of our members being ex-con they started to fade away,” the website states, and in their absence, Jackson’s murder rate began consistently rising, peaking in 2021.
Starting in 2021 under a new national model called the Cure Violence approach, Operation Good reports that it ushered in a 286-day period without gun-related deaths in its first year.
In other cities that have declared periods of nonviolence, leaders have made specific calls to action. For many years in Birmingham, the city council has asked high schoolers to take a 100-day pledge to avoid violent situations, according to local reports. In Memphis, the mayor has successfully asked opposing gang leaders for a 7-day ceasefire in the city, CNN reported. In exchange, the gangs asked for access to well-paying jobs and training to secure those jobs.
“They need money in their pockets. That’s the way you can change it,” Memphis Mayor Paul Young said in 2024, the local news station reported.
During the 100 Days of Action, the city of Jackson said it will partner with the crime-invention groups to host job fairs.
“The reality is while they (JPD) are solving crime, crime is still taking place. You can’t arrest yourself out of the problem. If you arrest somebody at 5 o’clock and you have done nothing to affect the conditions that led them out there in the first place, then they will be there at 6 o’clock,” Lumumba said standing outside of City Hall Wednesday morning.
Families who have lost loved ones to gun violence gathered on the steps of the Mississippi Capitol on February 26, 2025 for “A Day of Mourning” to urge legislators to pass stricter gun laws in Mississippi. Credit: Maya Miller/Mississippi Today
Later in the afternoon, half a mile away on the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol, dozens gathered from across the state for a day of mourning as part of the National Victims of Gun Violence Day, demonstrating that gun violence is a widespread problem for Mississippi, not just Jackson.
Data shows that Mississippi has the highest rate of annual gun deaths at nearly 30 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Jacqueline Alexander of Woodville, Mississippi, said she lost her nephew in a shooting nine months ago. For her, the wound is still fresh.
“I was bitter. I was angry. I was more hurt than anything,” she said through tears. “My nephew was a vital part of my life, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. People don’t understand, during the funeral times, you have all the love shown, but what do you do after the funeral is over?”
Alexander criticized her local government, saying that there should have been a call to action to solve his murder, and four other unsolved murders in their small town.
“Nobody deserves to be gunned down. A 15 year old child – there should have been a call to order,” she said. “The town should have been on fire.”
Angenel Washington of Natchez, whose daughter was killed in 2020, said she hopes that city and state leaders will use their platforms to push for more policing.
“I’m hoping that leaders will see that this is something that is out of control, and they understand that if they don’t do anything or don’t talk about it, they give consent that they’re OK with it,” Washington said. “… My daughter was willing to fight to help others, so they need to take their job seriously and get to the problem at hand.”
Mississippi Impact Coalition, along with partners The People’s Advocacy Institute, the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, One Voice and The Sweet Spot of Jackson, came together to demand the Mississippi Legislature pass universal background checks. They also want to repeal open carry, and add restrictions to assault weapons and mandatory waiting periods for gun purchases. No such measures have been advanced by state leaders this session.
“This isn’t just about laws. It’s about lives. It’s about justice. It’s about breaking cycles of trauma and building a future where our communities thrive instead of mourn,” said Danyelle Holmes of the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign.
Mississippi ranks 49th in the country for gun law strength, with no foundational laws in place such as one requiring a concealed carry permit or no carry laws after a violent offense.
Mayor Lumumba said that the 100 Days initiative primarily focuses on interrupting violence before JPD is ever called. JPD employees, the mayor said, have unreasonably been expected to play a dual role of detective and psychiatrist.
“By the time the police have arrived, it has already gone wrong,” Lumumba said in his announcement.
Reached hours after the city’s press conference, Jackson Police Department Chief Joseph Wade said he was not aware of the “100 Days” initiative, though he later met with city leaders to discuss the community-led efforts.
“I’m for this initiative. I fully support it. I am about saving lives in the city of Jackson. I talk about it. I’m transparent to the community,” Wade said, adding that he and his commanders are hosting a public event at Christ United church in north Jackson Thursday afternoon to discuss patterns and strategies in addressing crime. “I just need to know, like, what do the components look like?”
After meeting with city officials Wednesday, Wade explained that the initiative is community-led – JPD does not play a formal role – but that the department will offer whatever educational support is requested.
Day 1 of Peace was an otherwise typical day for the city’s police force, JPD public information officer Tommie Brown said – squad cars patrolling, officers responding to calls and detectives working investigations. By 5pm, Wade said there had not been a homicide in the city and he was unaware of any shooting reports.
The state-run Capitol Police force did not receive any violent crime reports by late Wednesday afternoon, Mississippi Department of Safety spokesperson Bailey Martin told Mississippi Today, but in the evening it responded to a gunshot victim at Pagoda Village Apartments on Jefferson Street in Belhaven. Martin said the shooting was the result of a domestic disturbance and officers arrested a 30-year-old at the scene for aggravated assault.
Just after midnight, JPD responded to the shooting death of a 22-year-old Memphis woman at Studio 6 hotel in north Jackson. And Thursday morning, a 15-year-old boy who had been reported as a runaway was found deceased in south Jackson from a gunshot wound to the head, according to a briefing by Wade. Officers are searching for suspects in both cases.
So far in 2025, JPD has investigated 11 homicides. This includes two shooting deaths in south Jackson over the past weekend, a woman accused of killing her husband and a teenager charged with killing his grandmother.
“Every single one were about people that knew each other – interpersonal conflicts, domestic violence situations. And we have a 100% solvability rate,” Wade said Wednesday, before the next two homicides occurred. “Domestic violence situations that happen inside homes, or conflicts dealing with individuals who do not know how to mitigate conflict. So we really need help inside homes, inside residences.”
Capitol Police, which responds to incidents in a central area of the city spanning from south of downtown to north of the Fondren neighborhood, have worked 3 homicides this year for a total of 14 killings in the capital city. This is down from 15 homicides this time last year and 21 in 2021, the year with the highest recorded homicides, according to WLBT.
“Data shows us that even though crime and gun violence is high in Jackson, it’s a small percentage of people that’s committing the violence, and so we are going to target that small population of people who are actually toting the guns and being on the other side of the gun and try to get them into these mentorship programs,” Coleman said.
Coleman told Mississippi Today that the data she referenced was provided by JPD’s data analyst, but the information doesn’t exist in a formal, sharable report because the office “is still developing a dashboard to synthesize the variables to support the raw data.” Later in the spring, though, the office plans to publish a community landscape assessment. Mississippi Today submitted a public records request for the office’s data and expenditures.
Jackson Editor Anna Wolfe contributed to this report.
