OurTupelo

Most of Mississippi’s national parks and monuments are closed to visitors because of the federal government shutdown.

An exception is the Vicksburg National Military Park, which initially closed when the shutdown began Oct. 1 but entered an agreement to reopen the next day with donations from the nonprofit Friends of Vicksburg National Military Park. 

While the visitor center, USS Cairo Gunboat & Museum, tour roads and restrooms are all open to visitors, the park is running on limited staff.

Operating the park during the shutdown costs $2,000 a day, said Bess Averett, executive director of Friends of Vicksburg National Military Park.

“We are not a massive nonprofit, so we do have limited resources,” Averett said. “So far, the public has been very generous.”

Keeping the park closed would make it vulnerable to vandalism, relic hunting and more problems, she said. It also would mean turning away visitors, hurting the local economy.

The military park is the most visited attraction in Mississippi, according to the local tourism office, Visit Vicksburg.

The federal government shut down after Congress failed to pass a budget for the new federal fiscal year. During a shutdown, essential services continue, including air traffic control and emergency response, but many federal employees are furloughed.

Mississippi Today reached out to most of the national park sites in Mississippi and went to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home in Jackson to check if they were open. The calls went to voicemail, the emails either bounced back or went unanswered by the time of publication, and the Evers Home was empty.  

The Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, both in Sumner, are closed. 

Visitors can still access the islands on Gulf Islands National Seashore in Ocean Springs, the Sun Herald reported. However, the Davis Bayou Area appeared to be closed. 

All of Mississippi’s barrier islands are “pretty much shut down,” said Ronnie Wentzell, who works for the privately run Ship Island Excursions.

“When I say it’s shut down, it’s only the fact that there’s no security people, there’s no park rangers on none of the islands or going to the islands,” Wentzell said.

The ferry service is still taking people to Ship Island. However, Fort Massachusetts is closed and there are no public accommodations. 

Kim Foster, a spokesperson for Natchez Trace Compact, wrote in an email, “I am happy to report that the Natchez Trace Parkway and many (not all) of its sites remain open during the shutdown.”

The parkway is open for travel, with a closure that is unrelated to the shutdown, between milepost 181 and milepost 204, roughly French Camp to Mathiston. Most sections of it are open, but some historic sites and trails are closed “for restoration or maintenance.”

Mississippi Today emailed the National Park Service press office, which responded with a statement that national parks would be “as accessible as possible” during the shutdown.

“Critical functions that protect life, property, and public health will remain in place, including visitor access in many locations, law enforcement, and emergency response,” the statement said.

The National Park Service is keeping most national parks partially open during the shutdown. However, more than two-thirds of its employees are furloughed. 

The National Parks Conservation Association is calling on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to close all national parks, arguing that keeping them open is a danger to visitors and the parks themselves.

According to the National Park Service contingency plan, limited staff will remain to perform “exempted activities,” such as law enforcement and fire suppression. 

Trails, park roads, lookouts and open-air memorials “will generally remain accessible to visitors.” However, there will be no updates on road or trail conditions. Websites and social media will only be updated for emergencies. Parks that collect fees under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act can use those fees to provide basic visitor services.

Parks that don’t have accessible areas won’t operate and will have minimal staff.

“As part of their orderly shutdown activities, park staff will post signs notifying visitors that only basic or no visitor services, maintenance, or other management activities will be conducted, and emergency services will be limited,” the plan read.

BELZONI – When Archway Charter School was first proposed, it was described as providing “bridges to a brighter future.” It was later referred to as a “reprieve” from a slew of failing school districts in the Mississippi Delta. Archway students would engage with ancient texts in virtual reality and be immersed in a classical education that only students in more affluent zip codes could normally access.

The school was described as an opportunity for Belzoni, a community of 1,700 residents in Humphreys County in one of the poorest, most rural and least tech-accessible parts of the state.

Regulators, evaluators and others ask: Can a virtual school succeed there?

The county, where over a fifth of the residents live below the poverty level, ranks 61st in broadband access out of Mississippi’s 82 counties, according to research from Mississippi State University.

Belzoni – pronounced bel-ZONE-ah by locals – rises from fields of soybean, corn and cotton,  more than an hour’s drive northwest of Jackson.

The town first appears in gas station signs and a tall neon one off Highway 49 inviting travelers into “the heart of the Delta.” Ponds beside dirt and paved roads still produce the town’s famous commodity. Belzoni has called itself the “Catfish capital of the world” since 1976. 

Plans for Archway Charter School were first announced in spring 2024, with an initial proposal for grades seven to 12. However, the school has struggled to raise start-up funds since gaining state approval. Financial disclosures have also spelled recent trouble for the company contracted to provide the virtual learning component. 

These facts, including lack of internet access, concerned the state’s third-party evaluator when Archway first sought approval of its charter in October 2024

“I have seen a hybrid model that worked, but not in rural areas where there’s a high rate of poverty and families that may not have access to equipment or resources to be successful,” said Wanda Giulliaume, one of three independent evaluators who issued a recommendation to the board.

Archway Founder David Herndon responded by saying Archway would pay for internet access for students who need it, by potentially “diverting some funds” to get families access to quality internet. School officials would collect that information along with enrollment applications.

He said he is confident students will be able to connect to the internet after conversations with Southeast Cable and other broadband providers. 

But access issues still worry Mississippi Department of Education administrators and local legislators. 

Kym Wiggins, chief operating officer for the state Department of Education, expressed concerns after consulting surveys from districts about students’ access to equipment and broadband.

“There is an access issue,” Wiggins said. “So what do students do when they don’t have access? They do nothing. And they are going to a McDonald’s in a gas station. That’s not a viable option.”

Tiny communities such as Midnight, Louise and Putnam as well as homes along Highway 12 and Highway 7 lack adequate broadband access, said Rep. Timaka James-Jones, a Democrat from Belzoni.

By the end of the September 2024 Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board meeting, Archway had an approved charter with stipulations before it could open, such as proof of start-up funds.

Once it opens, Archway Charter School is expected to draw $488,817 from Humphreys County School District in the first year to cover some of the $1.4 million in operating costs.

Without a Charter School Program fund and only assumed sources of revenue on its most recently listed budget, Archway has not demonstrated how it will recruit high-quality teachers and finance its operation. Even before the school has opened, Herndon has asked the authorizer board to let Archway expand down to sixth grade. 

“As of today, the school does not have any funds available for operations,” board executive director Lisa Karmacharya wrote in an email Thursday to Mississippi Today. “The school will be required to submit an amended/updated budget to the authorizer (board) in December.”

Now Entering the Delta-verse

On a Friday afternoon in Belzoni, locals congregated on porches, pulled grills and invited friends to shuttered gas stations, leaning up against long-emptied gas pumps with plate lunches and cold beer. One street has shacks with wooden boards for windows and black plastic fluttering under loose roof shingles. Another has a junior high school that can only be glimpsed from behind a chain link fence. Restaurants where families would toast new graduates and fill up on grub in between football games are now vacant with yellowed, sunbeaten signs of the meals they once served. The town’s youngest residents still board yellow buses – and on Friday  nights in the fall, locals still root for the Humphreys County Cowboys. 

For Herndon, the Delta, and particularly Humphreys County, seemed fertile ground for a hybrid school. 

In the application to the Mississippi Charter Authorizer Board, Archway identified 14 Delta districts within a 1.5-hour drive of the future charter with “failing” middle schools. Mississippi law restricts charter schools to districts that earn a D or F on the state accountability system. Humphreys County School District has a D, but nine of the 14 Herndon listed are rated C.

“The vast majority of parents with rising sixth-graders in this district are forced to send their children from successful elementary schools to the district’s only middle school that is failing,” Herndon, the charter school’s executive director, told the board.

While nearly every Delta public school district sees a drop in test scores in middle school, the same phenomenon is true in school districts across the state, including in DeSoto County, Pearl and Pearl River County, among other districts that are labeled A or B in accountability ratings. Nearly a third of Delta region elementary schools received a D or F.

The plan is for Archway to be a hybrid school where each month, students log into virtual learning for 18 days and meet in person for two days for culture building and assessments. On virtual learning days, students will have live classes in the morning and self-paced coursework in the afternoon. On Fridays, students will complete self-paced online coursework all day.

Classes conducted in virtual reality will slowly be introduced to the curriculum as the school grows, Archway’s approved charter application says. The district plans to purchase VR headsets for students and staff.

Virtual charter schools have become more popular since the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many promising better outcomes for students on a more flexible schedule.

However, research from Stanford University found that online charter students saw less academic growth than their peers in traditional public schools, growing 58 fewer days in reading and 124 fewer in math per year.

Most of the elective courses are also contracted out to an online learning software called Edgenuity, which was investigated by the Los Angeles United School District’s inspector general for poor results for students. Hundreds of Plano, Texas, families pulled their kids from an online school that made use of the software because of its poor quality of instruction. A 2020 Mississippi Today story highlighted concerns by students and parents who couldn’t reach a teacher for help during online courses.

The Florida Connection

Herndon said he based his recent failed proposal to expand to sixth grade partly on recent analysis provided by OptimaEd, the Florida-based company contracted to provide the online education component of the Archway curriculum. 

OptimaEd provides “virtual reality educational experiences” to schools primarily in Florida.

In one example of virtual learning posted to the company’s account on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Latin students at The Walker School in Florida walk in avatar form across a digital rendering of a Roman villa. In another post, students at another Florida school virtually traipse across the ocean floor to learn about biodiversity.

OptimaEd’s founder is Erika Donalds, a school choice advocate and the wife of U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican.

Adam Mangana, the company’s new CEO replacing Donalds, lives in Mississippi, according to Archway’s application. For the last four years, he’s held executive positions at the Naples, Florida-based company he helped co-found.

Mangana previously founded Midtown Public Charter School in Jackson, led a virtual reality lab at Jackson Prep in Flowood, and served as dean of students at St. Andrew’s School in Ridgeland and headed the Christian-centered St. Benedict School. 

Midtown Public Charter School has noticeably only received Ds or Fs in the state accountability rating since the 2017-2018 school year.

The application also mentioned that several other company employees were Mississippians whose “proximity” allowed for “a truly unique partnership to Archway as it opens and grows.”

A Florida Bulldog investigation documented the recent financial struggles of the education technology firm. While a previous year’s disclosure listed the company’s value between $1 million and $5 million, the company is now valued between $500,000 and $1 million. This coincides with it losing contracts with three Florida charter schools because of accounting errors.

For third-party evaluators, the “classical inspired” education offered by OptimaEd also didn’t clearly align with standards set by the Mississippi Department of Education.

“There is no evidence to support the effectiveness of classical education principles combined with the proposed curriculum,” wrote the third-party evaluators in their final recommendation.

Herndon is the former headmaster of Saint Augustine School, “a classical Christian school” in Ridgeland. 

Matthew Metcalf, the Archway school board president, serves as director of business and financial services for an Idaho-based company that helps found “classical Christian schools” across the country, according to his LinkedIn page. He also formerly led “classical academies” in both Alaska and Minnesota.

Classical Christian schools are private schools with curriculums informed by great works of Western literature and philosophy as well as the Bible. 

The hub-bub about the hub

Herndon plans to establish an in-person hub whereby students can go to join online classes should they be unable to connect to the internet. 

At the most recent board meeting in September, board chair Marcy Scoggins said it would defeat the purpose of a virtual school to depend on an in-person hub.

The hub would be at Archway’s physical address at Upper Room Fellowship Ministries, off U.S. 49 in Belzoni. Third-party evaluators said Archway overrepresented how much classroom space was available at the hub for students, pitching the idea of setting up classrooms in the gym, fellowship hall and auditorium. 

The Boys and Girls Club, which offers after-school programming to school-aged children, occupied the same site up until this past summer. The Humphreys County club expects to have a new location by January.

Despite outlining a goal to enroll 208 Delta students in Archway’s first year, school officials’ applications or compliance check-ins with the board did not include testimony from any local family planning to enroll a child. 

“It is not the best avenue for this rural area for our district, for our county,” Rep. James-Jones said. “It will definitely harm our public school system.”

During the last board meeting in September, two members appointed by Republican Gov. Tate Reeves – Tupelo pastor Jay Carney and Laurel attorney Ben Morgan – were the sole votes in favor of expanding the charter to include sixth grade.

“I think a little differently that we have some flexibility on the front end,” Morgan said. “I want us to be problem solvers, not problem creators.”

Archway is slated to open in August with the condition that it provides proof that it met 40% of its enrollment goal and that all enrolled students have internet access and an amended budget that demonstrates financial solvency.

James-Jones said she has not received a coherent plan guaranteeing her constituents would have access to Wi-Fi if they enrolled a student.

“I understand the focus of the school is education,” she said. “But you have to have the resources to do that.” 

President Donald Trump has nominated former Gulfport Mayor Billy Hewes III, also a former longtime state senator, to the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission.

If his nomination is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Hewes would join the commission’s acting chairman, Peter Feldman, who’s currently the lone member of the commission after Trump removed three commissioners appointed during the Joe Biden administration and a fourth commissioner, Republican-appointed, resigned.

The commission is a regulatory agency created by Congress in 1972 “to protect the public against unreasonable risks of injuries and deaths associated with consumer products.” It has jurisdiction over thousands of consumer products “from coffee makers to toys to lawn mowers,” according to its website, although it does not have authority over automobiles, foods, drugs and cosmetics.

Hewes’ nomination came as a surprise to some Washington observers, as Trump in his fiscal 2026 budget proposal had called for eliminating the commission and placing its functions under the Department of Health and Human Services. The proposal called for one person serving as an assistant secretary for consumer product safety. This would require congressional action, but Trump’s firing of three commissioners and the resignation of Republican Douglas Dziak appeared to be a move toward elimination or consolidation without congressional action.

In July, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the reinstatement of the fired Democratic commissioners pending lower court litigation.

If his nomination is approved, Hewes would serve a term through 2031. It remains unclear how the commission would operate without a quorum of three. By statute, the commission can have up to five members, appointed by the president and subject to Senate approval for seven-year terms, with no more than three being of the same political party.

Hewes, in a text message responding to a request for comment on Wednesday, said he was on an airplane and could not immediately talk.

Hewes is a longtime Gulfport real estate and insurance business owner and a songwriter and musician whose songs have appeared in movie soundtracks. He was first elected to the state Senate in 1992 and served until 2012, reaching the second-highest leadership spot in the chamber as president pro tempore in 2008. He ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 2011, losing the Republican primary to now-Gov. Tate Reeves.

Hewes was elected Gulfport mayor and served from 2013 to June of 2025, declining to seek another term. He has served as an advisory board member for the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Park Service.

Funding for a food and nutrition program that serves nearly 70,000 Mississippi caregivers and children is expected to last through October amid the federal government shutdown, State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said after a Board of Health meeting Wednesday. 

“We have a runway with our current federal funding for all of October, probably early November,” Edney said. “And the shutdown better be over by then.”

This comes a day after state Health Department spokesperson Greg Flynn said if benefits for the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) program dried up this month, the department would have to look at ways to “shore things up” with state funds. 

These funds make vital services possible for tens of thousands of households statewide, offering breastfeeding support and monthly vouchers for healthy foods to women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or postpartum, as well as infants and children under the age of 5. Roughly 300 WIC-approved grocery stores and pharmacies allow members to use their benefits. 

To stretch federal dollars further, the state Health Department will limit new applicants, Edney said. He added that this could help keep the program afloat for a few weeks. He also said he hopes the use of state funds will not be necessary. 

During the government shutdown, new applicants will only be approved if they fall under “Priority 1” designation, which includes pregnant and breastfeeding women and high-risk infants. However, according to Flynn on Tuesday, officials will not require proof of pregnancy, breastfeeding or a high-risk infant to determine priority status, allowing people to get the help they need while it lasts. 

“Priority 1” applicants will still need to follow the guidelines for approval, including bringing proof of income, residence and identification to their initial WIC appointment. More information about the application process can be found on the state Health Department’s website. 

Leadership at the state Health Department is encouraging WIC applicants and enrollees to direct any questions to an agent at 1-800-338-6747.

PASCAGOULA – Strings of papel picado and flags representing Latin American countries hung above the crowd at the Festival Hispano de Pascagoula, their bright colors and patterns flashing in the sun. Families from across the Gulf Coast gathered at Beach Park in Pascagoula Sept. 20 to celebrate food, music and cultural pride in the open air. 

At the festival, vendors offered tamales, fresh tortillas, empanadas and other dishes. Zona Libre played Latin music as the crowd danced and immersed themselves in the sounds with pride and excitement on their faces. Members of the Studio of Dance and Gymnastics wore colorful cultural outfits as they spun in circles, while older eventgoers spoke about heritage and roots in their native countries.

“It feels good to celebrate my culture,” said Nancy Morosky, a Gulf Coast resident originally from Puerto Rico. “I like to be reminded of where we come from, and I want to pass it down to the next generation.”

Pascagoula has one of the largest Hispanic communities on the Gulf Coast. According to the 2020 Census, nearly 15% of its 22,000 residents identify as Hispanic or Latino. In Jackson County, the share is closer to 7%. 

Main Street Pascagoula and the city organized the event, now in its fourth year.

“We think it is important because we have a large Hispanic community that is all along the Coast of Mississippi, and we just love to bring people together to celebrate that with good food, fellowship and good fun,” said Susannah Northrop, executive director of Main Street Pascagoula. 

“There are so many Hispanic people on the Gulf Coast, it is important for us to know our culture,” said Marisol Perez, a Gulf Coast resident originally from Puerto Rico, as she held her 8-month-old granddaughter, Neylan E. Quirindongo. 

The event highlighted more than food, music or cultural outfits. It showed how Hispanic families have built a growing and connected community on the Gulf Coast.

As the day neared its end, drums and maracas kept the rhythms in play. The crowd danced, laughed and celebrated their rich culture and heritage under the southern Mississippi night sky. 

PASCAGOULA — Tiras de papel picado y banderas de países de América Latina —con sus colores fuertes y diseños llamativos— brillaban bajo el sol de septiembre y sobre las cabezas de los asistentes al Festival Hispano de Pascagoula. El 20 de septiembre, familias de toda la Costa del Golfo se reunieron para celebrar su orgullo gastronómico, musical y cultural al aire libre.

En el festival, puestos de comida ofrecían tamales, tortillas frescas, empanadas y otros platos. Zona Libre tocaba música latina y la multitud bailaba, inmersa en los sonidos. Sus rostros transmitían orgullo y emoción. Los miembros de Studio of Dance y Gymnastics, luciendo trajes típicos coloridos, daban vueltas mientras que los asistentes mayores conversaban sobre cultura y raíces en sus países de nacimiento. 

“Se siente bien celebrar mi cultura”, dijo Nancy Morosky, una residente de la Costa del Golfo que nació en Puerto Rico. “Me gusta recordar de dónde venimos y quiero transmitirlo a la siguiente generación”.

Pascagoula es hogar de una de las comunidades latinas más grandes de la Costa del Golfo. Según el censo de 2020, cerca de 15% de sus 22,000 residentes se identifica como hispano o latino. En el condado de Jackson, la proporción es de casi 7%. 

Main Street Pascagoula y la ciudad organizaron el evento, que ya está en su cuarto año. 

“Creemos que es importante porque tenemos una amplia comunidad hispana a lo largo de toda la Costa del Mississippi, y nos encanta reunir a la gente para celebrar eso con comida, compañerismo y entretenimiento sano”, dijo Susannah Northrop, directora ejecutiva de Main Street Pascagoula. 

“Hay tantos hispanos en la Costa del Golfo, es importante para nosotros conocer nuestra cultura”, dijo Marisol Pérez, una residente de la Costa del Golfo originaria de Puerto Rico, mientras cargaba a Neylan E. Quirindongo, su nieta de ocho meses.

El evento destacó más que comida, música y trajes típicos. Demostró cómo las familias latinas en la Costa del Golfo han construido una comunidad que crece y que se conecta. 

A medida que el día llegaba a su fin, tambores y maracas mantenían el ritmo. Los asistentes bailaban, reían y celebraban su rica cultura y herencia bajo el cielo oscuro de la noche del sur de Mississippi. 

The Clevelands discuss last weekend and the one coming up, including what appeared to be a routine quarterback sack by the Saints’ Carl Granderson of the Giants’ Jaxson Dart that was somehow called roughing the passer. The Saints, believe it or not, won anyway. Also, the conversation turns to what might have been the last Sanderson Farms Championship and the upcoming weekend in college football.

Stream all episodes here.

At least $500 million is expected to flow into Mississippi over the next five years as a part of a major federal investment into rural healthcare. 

The funding aims to offset the disproportionate impact already-struggling rural hospitals are expected to bear as a result of Medicaid spending cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump this summer. 

More than half of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closing. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves will decide what to include in the state’s one-time application for the funding, which is due in just over a month.

Reeves did not respond to Mississippi Today’s questions about his plans or priorities for the funds. 

Legislators hold the authority to appropriate money through the “power of the purse.” During a state budget hearing Sept. 24, House Speaker Jason White expressed frustration that they have not been more included in the decision-making process. 

This sets the stage for a possible conflict between the governor and legislators over who has the authority to appropriate the funds, echoing disputes that arose during the distribution of federal COVID-19 aid. 

“I understand the timeline’s tight,” White said to Mississippi Medicaid Director Cindy Bradshaw. “But I also understand, I think people want to have input on what that looks like if they’re going to be appropriating the money.” 

The state Division of Medicaid and the Department of Health are supporting the governor in crafting the application.

Half of the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program will be distributed evenly among all states with approved applications, amounting to $100 million a year for five years per state if all states apply and are accepted. The other half will be allocated to states based on a variety of factors, including the rural population, the proportion of rural health facilities and the condition of hospitals. 

Health care leaders told Mississippi Today they expect the discretionary funding allocations to benefit Mississippi, where most people live in rural communities and two out of three hospitals are in rural areas. 

“The key takeaway is Mississippi does do really well with this,” said Ryan Kelly, executive director of the Mississippi Rural Health Association, an organization for health professionals and advocates. 

The funding is focused on strengthening access to health care by investing in lasting improvements to preventive medicine, collaboration between health care facilities, workforce development and innovations in care and technology. 

Hospital leaders have warned that the federal cuts could force some rural hospitals to stop some services or close their doors. 

Bradshaw estimated that cuts to state directed payments, which help hospitals offset low Medicaid payments, will amount to a loss of $160 million a year beginning in 2029.

Rural hospitals may also shoulder rising costs of uninsured care if enhanced premium tax credits, which make marketplace insurance more affordable, expire at the end of this year. Over 100,000 Mississippians are expected to lose health insurance coverage if the credits are not extended.

Some advocates caution that the federal investment in rural health care will be too little to offset the losses Mississippi’s rural hospitals will face. 

“It simply won’t be enough,” said Khaylah Scott, a program manager for the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, an organization aimed at improving health policies.

She called the program a “Band-Aid,” noting that it is temporary and will cover only about a third of the estimated losses to federal Medicaid funding in rural areas. 

Bradshaw said the new funding alone may not resolve the challenges facing rural hospitals. 

“Throwing more money at hospitals I don’t think is necessarily the answer because we’ve done that the last two years and they’re still not thriving,” Bradshaw told legislative budget leaders. 

The application opened in mid-September and states must submit a plan before Nov. 5. The federal government will approve applications by the end of the year. 

“The timing is really tricky and maybe even unfortunate that we have such a short amount of time to be able to submit the application,” Bradshaw said.

Mississippi has moved quickly to solicit input from stakeholders and health leaders.

A survey released at the end of July yielded over 120 responses. Thirteen stakeholders were invited to a closed-door meeting Aug. 28 to present their ideas for the program to representatives from the governor’s office, the Division of Medicaid and the Department of Health. 

The state has not held any public meetings or hearings. Other states, including Louisiana, have held outreach meetings around the state to gain feedback from stakeholders and rural residents. 

“We feel like those funds really need to be focused on the rural hospitals to help them absorb some of the upcoming losses of those supplemental payments that have been so vital in keeping the doors open and keeping access to care alive in those rural areas,” said Richard Roberson, the association’s president and CEO. 

The association has proposed using the funding for a grant to help rural hospitals cover costs of uncompensated care, improve infrastructure, create programs to recruit and retain health professionals in rural areas, expand the state’s ability to share information between providers and improve telehealth technology. 

The Mississippi Healthcare Collaborative, which represents other hospitals and health care organizations and was also invited to present at the forum, did not respond to a request for comment from Mississippi Today. 

The program will give Mississippi the opportunity to fund “ready projects” the state has been studying the past two to three years, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney said in an interview with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. 

Department of Health spokesperson Greg Flynn declined to say which projects Edney was referencing, citing the governor’s authority to make final decisions about the application.

Kelly, of the Rural Health Association, said it is difficult to determine how to support rural health care with a large amount of funding. 

“Normally we have to find ways to do things without money,” he said. “Now, it’s like we have to flip on its head what we’ve had to do, and now we have to find a way to spend money – a lot of money. And that’s kind of a challenge.” 

GULFPORT – “This is an outdoors person’s state, you know what I’m saying?” Derrick Evans said of Mississippi on a muggy September evening at his office in Turkey Creek. “It’s agricultural, it’s fishing, it’s hunting.”

Yet, Evans said, political priorities in the state, named after the immense river to its west, seem detached from that very culture. 

“A polluted stream, an environmental vulnerability, is actually an abrogation to what we might call the Southern way of life,” he said.

In 2023, a study concluded Mississippi was the most vulnerable state to climate change in the country. The research, done by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University, quantified how a litany of social inequities exacerbate frequent natural disasters – such as flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat and drought – not just in Mississippi but across the South. 

Grace Tee Lewis, a Texas-based senior health scientist with EDF and one of the study’s authors, said the region’s history of segregation and underinvestment in public services comes back to bite it when a disaster hits. In a rural state that ranks near the bottom in health outcomes and access to care, for example, a hurricane is all the more likely to sever a sick person’s access to medicine.

“In the South, where you have historical policies that have created a lot of stratification in wealth and resources, I think that contributes to disparities in vulnerability,” Lewis said. “That extends itself to investments in climate – flood mitigation, hurricane preparedness. Often what we see in the Gulf is, they’re the same communities that are getting hit time and again.” 

Lewis and her colleagues’ work echoes similar findings by the federal government. Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Global Change Research Program published reports in recent years linking social disparities in the Southeast to a higher risk of impacts from natural disasters.

The study also said Turkey Creek, the historic Gulfport neighborhood founded by Evans’ ancestors and other freed slaves after the Civil War, sits in the fifth most vulnerable census tract out of over 73,000 in the United States. 

As he walked outside his mother’s house, Evans pointed to just under the roof, showing where the water finally stopped after Hurricane Katrina landed in 2005. While surprised Turkey Creek ranked so highly, he was well aware of its environmental challenges. 

The neighborhood’s settlers, he said, knew how to comport their lives with the surrounding watershed. They built their homes, for instance, on a ridge following the curvature of the surrounding streams. But especially after the city of Gulfport annexed the neighborhood in the 1990s, the watershed slowly devolved into pavement-laden developments.

“Climate resiliency,” Evans proclaimed, “starts with not being ground zero to someone else’s future.”

Over the years, coastal developers and officials replaced wetlands, which naturally absorb water, with concrete slabs that repel flooding onto other property.

David Holt, coordinator of sustainability sciences at the University of Southern Mississippi, explained that coastal cities after Katrina began developing further inland, replacing forested or grassy areas with subdivisions. But in doing so, Holt said, they were “not really thinking about drainage.”

“We get a lot of localized flooding with these new developments,” he said. 

Gulfport officials denied to Mississippi Today that commercialization has harmed the city’s drainage, adding they’ve improved stormwater management standards for new construction. But lifelong Coast residents, like Rose Green in Turkey Creek, said their ditches still regularly overflow, and fear their vulnerability to climate change will only grow without better planning. 

“The water is going to back up,” Green said. “We’re going to get drowned out here.”

“We are all in a disaster area”

Leaders and scientists around the world agree greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are warming the planet, leading to more variability in climate trends and a spike in extreme natural disasters. 

“The Southeast faces increasing intensity of climate change impacts including warming temperatures, extreme precipitation events, droughts, sea level rise, and tropical cyclones,” the Environmental Protection Agency says on its website.

In the last 10 years, according to federal weather data, storms in Mississippi caused an estimated $1 billion in property and crop damage. The data, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, directly link those events to 84 deaths and 608 injuries, and indirectly to 19 other deaths and 100 other injuries. 

Half of Mississippi’s counties saw a direct or indirect death linked to a natural disaster in the last decade. 

“ The reality is that we are all in a disaster area,” Holt said. “Every corner of this state can be hit by a natural disaster.”

In many ways, surviving and recovering from disasters comes down to wealth, both on a personal and communal level. 

“Preparedness looks different for people who are low-income,” said Rhonda Rhodes, president of the Hancock Resource Center, which offers disaster counseling on the Coast. “They can’t just go get a hotel at whatever cost, so they’re stuck going to shelters, whether the storm gets here or not. They don’t get paid if they don’t work, they don’t have money for gas. 

“It is a real crisis for families that are low-income to have to evacuate. So a lot of them don’t, which is its own problem.”

The nation’s poorest state, Mississippi is already feeling the financial impacts of climate change more than most states. In 2021, only three states – Louisiana, Florida and Oklahoma – had a higher financial burden than Mississippi paying for home insurance premiums, which have risen as insurers adjust for the risk of increased disasters. 

Last year, amid rising temperatures, a third of Mississippians were unable to pay a recent energy bill, the highest rate in the country.

Over the summer, an Urban Institute study found that, based on average income, Mississippi would have the least fiscal capacity of any state to handle disasters should the Trump Administration follow through with plans to gut the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

“Should more disaster responsibility be pushed to the states, Mississippi would face some unique challenges relative to other states that have a broader set of reserves (for disaster funding),” Sara McTarnaghan, one of the study’s authors, said.

A scramble for mitigation funds

In recent years, governments at every level have shifted their focus to mitigation, or projects that better protect homes and infrastructure from natural disasters. 

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency is overseeing 160 local mitigation projects. Those include safe rooms and sirens to prepare for tornadoes, drainage upgrades to deter flooding, and backup generators for water systems. 

But all of the state’s mitigation efforts are primarily funded with federal programs, and mainly through FEMA. The Trump administration cut one of the agency’s key mitigation programs – the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities fund, or BRIC – earlier this year. Moreover, the recent slew of cuts to EPA grants included $20 million set for a self-sustainable resiliency hub in Jackson. 

For many small, rural areas, federal mitigation dollars are the only path toward funding local climate resilience. Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, said recent changes on the national level will disproportionately leave poorer communities in danger going forward.

“The cuts to FEMA are really devastating,” Wright said. “You really see bleak days ahead because Mother Nature is not backing off.” 

In the Delta about 20 miles east of Clarksdale, officials in Marks are worried that flooding could contribute to the outmigration the small city’s seen over the last few decades. 

“In the early spring, it was raining every day,” said Joe Shegog, the town’s former mayor who stepped down from office earlier this year. “A lot of people couldn’t get in or out of their homes unless they used a boat.” 

Since 1980, Marks’ population dropped by over a third, Census data shows, from about 2,200 people to 1,400. The median household income is about $25,000 less than the rest of the state. 

A combination of flash flooding and water from the Coldwater River – which local officials say has gotten worse because of seepage from the Arkabutla Lake north of Marks – has become a regular threat to residents as the city’s drainage infrastructure has aged. 

A large swath of the city and its surrounding areas sit in “Zone A” of FEMA’s flood map, meaning they have high risk. As is the case with much of the Delta, flooding incapacitates Marks’ local farming, a key economic driver in the region and state as a whole. The EDF and Texas A&M study ranked Quitman County, where Marks is located, in the 98th percentile of climate vulnerability in the country. 

Shegog, who served as either an alderman or mayor in Marks since 1987, said the city’s small tax base can’t fund needed infrastructure improvements. In 2023, Quitman County applied for $5 million from FEMA’s BRIC program to upgrade drainage pumps and shore up levees. 

FEMA didn’t select the project, leading local officials to wonder if Marks just didn’t have enough property value to attract the spending. Velma Wilson, the county’s economic director, said the county planned to reapply before the federal government announced plans to cut the BRIC program in April. 

Similarly, Shegog said it’s hard to attract attention from the state with a dwindling population.

“There’s not as many votes in these small areas,” he said. 

“We can’t do this forever”

In 2024, 63% of American adults were worried about global warming, according to a Yale University poll. In Mississippi, that number was 55%. 

What climate change will look like in the state isn’t a simple answer, explained Holt, the USM professor. While the conditions for hurricanes, for instance, have become more common as the ocean warms, increasing wind shear may also keep them from building and hitting land. What’s more clear, he said, is that the average storms are intensifying more rapidly and they’re coming during a wider span of the year.

“We’re supposed to be all nervous and worried in July and August, not October and November,” he said.

Another complicated trend, Holt explained, is that seemingly opposite extremes are each becoming more common: intense heat and ice storms, heavy rainfall and drought. 

But while more of the public recognizes the threats of climate change, the language around the issue is still politicized, Holt said. 

“People want to say it’s not climate change, it’s just a natural cycle, or it’s all in God’s plan,” he said. “But the reality is, it doesn’t change anything.”

Holt argued that the economic effects of climate change may be the key to attract the attention of politicians and other decision-makers in Mississippi: If more intense flooding and drought continue to threaten one of its top exports – the state exported $2.3 billion in agricultural products in 2023 – and the federal government continues to cut funding it relies on, what does that mean for the state’s future?

“I think sustainability is an easy argument,” Holt said. “Do you want what we’re doing right now? Do you want to do that in 10 years? If you do, that’s sustainability. Resiliency is (recognizing) we can’t sustain this. We can’t do this forever. We can’t behave like this forever.”

The Jackson City Council voted Tuesday in favor of taking the city’s water and sewer systems back from under third-party control.

In 2022, as part of a federal consent decree, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate put the struggling water system under the control of now JXN Water manager Ted Henifin, who also took over Jackson’s sewer system in 2023. Henifin said repeatedly he planned to stay until 2027, although Wingate has the ultimate say over when and whether to transition control back to the city.

Tuesday’s resolution “encourages” Wingate to reverse the 2022 order. Longtime Ward 3 Councilman Kenneth Stokes introduced the measure and described a strained relationship between the utility and Jackson residents. Stokes characterized the utility as being “disrespectful” and having “talked down” to customers.

“The citizens are beginning to lose faith in JXN Water,” he said.

Specifically, Stokes claimed JXN Water is sending out inaccurate bills and then aggressively shutting off connections until customers make large down payments on their debt.

The council voted 6 to 1 to approve the resolution, with Ward 1 Councilman Ashby Foote the lone dissenting vote.

Later in the day, JXN Water responded in a statement that financial challenges with the water system need resolving before returning control to Jackson. The city, the utility added, is largely at fault for those challenges.

“Significant progress has been made in restoring and maintaining reliable operations,” the statement said. “However, achieving financial stability remains the greatest challenge and must be resolved before any transition can occur. Otherwise, Jackson risks returning to the same conditions that led to the federal government’s intervention.

“The failure of the City’s water and sewer systems can be directly tied to a lack of financial resources — largely due to the City’s past inability or unwillingness to set sustainable rates and ensure all users paid for the services they received. Without a long-term, financially sound plan, the system will inevitably deteriorate again.”

Before Tuesday’s vote, Ward 5 Councilman Vernon Hartley asked the city’s chief administrative officer, Pieter Teeuwissen, if there were plans to transition the system back under Jackson management. Teeuwissen said the court order over the water system says the parties need to have a transition plan in place in October 2026, but added he expects the transition to begin sooner than that.

“I suspect the timeline will be something sooner than what the city previously agreed to,” he said, noting that he, Mayor John Horhn and Henifin met last Friday and are “constantly” meeting to discuss transition options.

JXN Water confirmed they’ve met with the city, but said it will be “months before a viable proposal can be shared.” The statement also said a utility authority with appointed board members would likely need to temporarily run the systems after JXN Water while the city developed a transition plan.

While voting for the resolution, Council President and Ward 4 Councilman Brian Grizzell supported the idea of a separate utility authority. It would be more sustainable, Grizzell said, if the systems weren’t subject to the regular turnover in the mayoral and public works offices.

JXN Water communications officer Aisha Carson said multiple council members have reached out to the utility to request it restore water to connections it turned off due to nonpayment. Carson said the utility couldn’t “cherry pick” which accounts to shut off, and added that the city council had earlier this year asked JXN Water to ramp up collections to address revenue shortages.

“It’s very difficult for us to apply that collections policy when we experience pushback from City Council leaders who have actually told us to ramp up collections,” she said.

Carson said JXN Water is shutting off water connections to about 1,000 accounts a week, a rate its maintained for the last three to four weeks. Earlier in the year, the utility said in its financial plan that it found over 14,000 accounts that receive water but weren’t paying, and that they would be the focus of its collection efforts.

In another move, the council voted unanimously for another resolution to encourage JXN Water to offer bill adjustments. Stokes, who introduced that resolution as well, said customers who see discolored water from their taps should receive a discount.

In August, JXN Water said it was seeing increased levels of manganese, a naturally occurring mineral, in the Ross Barnett Reservoir. While the increase may turn tap water brown in some cases, the utility said, the effect is only “aesthetic,” meaning it’s not a health concern. The utility said at the time it was adjusting treatment techniques to reduce the effect, which Carson said adds to their expenses. But some customers, Stokes said Tuesday, are still not drinking the water when they see the discoloration and instead paying extra to buy bottled water.