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The post Marshall Ramsey: Homestretch appeared first on Mississippi Today.

They were the 1974 Lake High Hornets football team, 29 players strong. But in Scott County, right there just off Highway 80, they are forever known, for good reason, as The Un-Team.

That’s “un” as in: undefeated, untied, un-scored upon, and virtually un-challenged. The Hornets, coached by Granville Freeman, a maniacally demanding 26-year-old in only his second year as a head coach, out-scored opponents 312 to zero over 10 games. No opponent came within three touchdowns of Lake. This was before Mississippi had statewide high school football playoffs, but Lake was the undisputed champion of the old Cherokee Conference. The Hornets won the south division and were supposed to play French Camp for the league championship. Apparently, French Camp decided that discretion really is the better part of valor and declined to play.

Fifty years later, looking at the scores, it is difficult to blame them.

Said Freeman Horton, the team’s best player, who later was a four-year starter at Southern Miss, a longtime coach, and now lives in Horn Lake, “We achieved something back then that can never be surpassed. Some other team, somewhere, might tie our record, but I doubt it. One thing’s for sure, they can’t beat it. There’s no way.”

Coach Granville Freeman was an old school coach in some ways but decades ahead of most high school coaches in so many others, as we shall see. “When I went to Lake in 1973, I told them we would have a team that when opponents got ready to play us, they would be shaking in their shoes,” Freeman said. “I’d say we accomplished that in 1974.”

Old school? Lake ran out of a straight T-formation, nothing fancy. The Hornets played a standard four-man front defensively. Freeman demanded all-out effort, all the time. He drove the team bus to practice 5.3 miles away from the school. After what was usually a long, tortuous practice if he wasn’t satisfied with the effort or performance, he followed in the bus, lights on, while the players ran all the way back to the high school. If they were going too slow, he’d rev the engine. If that didn’t work, he might even bump a straggler’s rear end. 

“You couldn’t do that these days, could you?” Freeman said, chuckling. “I’d need a really good lawyer.”

He would also have needed a jury made up of avid Lake football fans who knew there was method to his madness.

Said Vance of his coach, “He coached 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And he was crazy smart.”

Horton, who starred as an outside linebacker on defense and left tackle on offense, was widely recruited. Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Southern Miss all offered scholarships. So did Bear Bryant at Alabama, and this will tell you much about Granville Freeman’s crazy intellect. Bryant and Ken Donahue, his top recruiter, visited Lake to recruit Horton. Freeman was discussing Horton with Bryant and Donahue after practice when Donahue asked, “Coach, I don’t understand why you don’t you play your best athlete at middle linebacker? At Alabama, Horton would be playing in the middle.”

Responded Freeman, “Well, Coach, I’ll tell you why. If I line up Horton in the middle, I don’t have any idea which way the other team is gonna run. But if I line him up one side, I know for damn sure which way they ain’t about to run. This way, we only have to defend half the field.”

Freeman says he looked over at Bryant. The legendary, old coach was chuckling, as he told Donahue: “Well, now you know, Coach, makes a whole lot of sense to me.”

Many in Lake thought Freeman really had lost his mind during the spring of 1974. That’s when he called his players together and told them summer workouts would be different that year. Twice a week, a ballet teacher was going to come from Jackson and work them out in the gymnasium. Yes, they were going to take ballet lessons, and they would each pay for the lessons. “We thought Coach Freeman was nuts when he told us about it,” said Dewey Holmes, the team’s star running back who rushed for more than 1,200 yards. “But we all did it.” These weren’t rich kids, mind you. Many of the Lake players picked up aluminum cans on roadsides to earn the money to take ballet.

It made all kinds of good sense to Freeman. “Ballet is all about balance, about footwork, about flexibility and core strength,” Freeman said. “I thought it was perfect training for a football player. We called ourselves the twinkletoes Hornets.”

A lot of folks laughed when they heard about it. They weren’t laughing a few months later, not after 312-0.

And nobody was laughing in the locker room at halftime of a game at Hickory. Lake led only 7-0 and Freeman was furious. So, he yanked the helmet off one player and threw it through a window. “I surprised myself with that,” Freeman said. “I thought, ‘Now, I’ve done it.’”

So he did it some more. He grabbed more helmets, threw them through more windows. Final score: Lake 42, Hickory 0. Of course, Hickory wanted those windows fixed and when the bill arrived, Lake Hornets fans raised the money to pay.

Another time, after a scoreless first half with Stringer, Lake players feared what would happen in the locker room. They expected another tirade. Instead, Freeman walked in and told them he was so disgusted he was quitting on the spot. So, he walked out of the locker room and took a seat in the stands. And that’s where he was when the Hornets returned to the field and proceeded to score 40 straight points.

Why? Burnout was surely one reason, and there were at least 485 more. His last monthly paycheck at Lake was for $485. Said Freeman, I did the math and figured out what I was making per hour. I was coaching the junior high and high school teams, mowing and lining the fields, watching film, carrying it to Jackson to be developed, doing scouting reports, washing uniforms, running the summer program, teaching, driving the bus. It came out to 17 cents an hour. I wasn’t sleeping much.”

As many coaches in Mississippi have, Freeman stopped coaching and started selling insurance. Fourteen years ago, when he explained the reasons for his his early retirement from coaching, the interview was interrupted when someone knocked and slipped a payment under the door of his State Farm office. Freeman never missed a beat, laughing and telling this writer, “You know, that right there never happened back when I was coaching.”

Now 77, he has retired also from State Farm. The insurance money was far better in those later years but nothing ever happened to come close to the satisfaction of that unparalleled autumn half a century ago.

Undefeated. Un-tied. Un-scored upon. Perfect. That’s why all 26 living players are coming back. That’s why end Dexter Brown is traveling from Frankfurt, Germany, to take part. That’s why Holmes, the star running back who later rose to the rank of full-bird colonel and traveled the world in the U.S. Air Force, is coming from his home in Tucson, Ariz.

“We grew up together, we achieved together,” Holmes said. “I wouldn’t miss this.”

So many stories will be told, none more than what follows.

Nobody had come really close to scoring on the Lake Hornets until the final game, when a fourth quarter fumbled punt gave Edinburg the ball at the Lake 8-yard line. Three plays later, the ball was still on the 8, and Edinburg, trailing 38-0, lined up for a field goal. Moochie Weidman, the Hornets’ nose guard who might have weighed 140 pounds, broke through the center of the line so quickly he blocked the kick with his chest.

How did it feel, someone asked Moochie, after he regained his breath. He answered with a grin. “It hurt so good,” he said.

Freeman Horton says it remains probably his favorite memory of that un-season. “Moochie was our smallest guy, the one you’d least expect, and he was the hero,” Horton said.

Sadly, Moochie Weidman is one of the three deceased 1974 Lake Hornets, but he will be remembered, ever so fondly, Saturday night.

The post At Lake High School in Scott County, the Un-Team will never be forgotten appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Senate on Wednesday unanimously confirmed Bill Cork as Gov. Tate Reeves’ pick for a permanent chief economic development officer, despite a background report provided to senators that he “created a toxic workplace” and had faced complaints including sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment.

In a hearing before his Senate confirmation, Cork said he did nothing wrong, has a winning economic development record, has overhauled MDA.

“… If that takes a little hostility to get that done, that’s what’s going to happen,” Cork said in the hearing on Tuesday.

Cork is now the first permanent director of the state’s economic development agency since 2021, when former agency director John Rounsaville resigned after sexual misconduct allegations.

Cork is credited with recently helping the state land record-setting large economic developments, including Amazon Web Services’ commitment to spend $10 billion to construct two “hyperscale data centers” in Madison County.

A background report provided to the Senate Finance Committee before members voted to confirm him said that Cork, who has worked at MDA since September of 2020, was investigated by the Mississippi Personnel Board in 2021. The investigation followed a claim against Cork of sexual harassment, age discrimination and creating a hostile work environment while he was serving as chief economic development officer at MDA.

The personnel board said it conducted the investigation at Gov. Reeves’ request. It submitted a report to Reeves after the investigation that said Cork had been uncooperative with the investigation, and that while no legal violations were found, “Cork’s management style has created a toxic workplace.” Personnel recommended Cork receive a written reprimand and that he complete at least 12 hours of training on workforce harassment, which he completed.

Cork was traveling Wednesday, his office said, and could not be reached for comment. In a Senate Finance confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Cork addressed the report after Sen. Bradford Blackmon asked about it.

Cork said he helped lead “reorganizing and reforming” MDA, resulting in two-thirds of the project management and international teams leaving the agency, and “we had a small cadre of employees that didn’t like what was happening.”

“At the end of the day, the state Personnel Board found I hadn’t done anything illegal, but that I was a tough boss,” Cork said. “Some people find that level of tough and directedness to be a little hostile. None of it was directed at anyone, but when you’re trying to put together a winning team, you just don’t settle for second-place.

“… I don’t apologize for anything I’ve done because I didn’t do anything wrong,” Cork said. “I didn’t cooperate with the investigation because I didn’t do anything wrong, and that’s exactly what that investigation found.”

State Personnel Director Kelly Hardwick said: “Regretfully, (Cork) didn’t cooperate with the investigation, which might have changed our determination. Because he didn’t, we were left with only the testimony of the accusations.”

Hardwick declined to provide details of the allegations against Cork, and his office would not release its report to Mississippi Today, citing public records exemptions for personnel records.

Hardwick said Cork did successfully complete the state workplace harassment training and implemented some of the practices recommended in the training.

“He’s been shown to be successful and there have been no other complaints on him since,” Hardwick said. “From our standpoint he successfully did what we recommended to the governor.”

Both the Senate Finance Committee and full Senate voted unanimously for Cork’s confirmation.

Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins noted the report said personnel board found no legal violations, and that Cork openly addressed the allegations in committee. He said he received recommendation letters for Cork from across the state and country and, “It’s hard to argue with the product MDA has put out in the last few months.”

A spokesman for Reeves praised Cork, said the “old” personnel complaint is not credible and criticized Mississippi Today.

“Bill Cork has gotten better results for the people of Mississippi than almost any other employee of state government in decades,” Reeves Deputy Chief of Staff Cory Custer said in a statement. “… (Cork) opted to make the results of the investigation known, addressed it in detail in his confirmation hearing yesterday, and was then unanimously confirmed. It would not be a surprise to see a biased article that hypes up discredited nonsense, but it would be a disservice to a great, hard-working man.”

Cork has previously served as deputy director and chief economic development officer at MDA. He formerly led the Hancock County Port and Harbor Commission and before that was the CEO of an industrial complex in New Boston, Texas. He is a Marine Corps veteran and received a master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Reeves on Aug. 13, 2021, announced Cork’s predecessor, Rounsaville, would be “stepping down” at the end of that month as MDA director to spend more time with his family and less time traveling. Reeves thanked him for his service and wished him well.

But Mississippi Today reported that sexual misconduct allegations had led to Rounsaville’s resignation, and that Reeves had in July received a personnel investigation report and recommendation Rounsaville be fired. After that report, Reeves said Rounsaville had been put on administrative leave and removed from day-to-day operations at MDA and that his resignation had been tendered Aug. 13 after an investigation into his conduct.

An allegedly intoxicated Rounsaville allegedly made sexual advances toward three subordinate female MDA employees at a bar in Biloxi while attending a business conference.

The post Senate confirms Gov. Tate Reeves’ economic development chief despite report of toxic workplace, claims of harassment appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Supporters of Medicaid expansion would argue that it is wholly appropriate that Leah Hendrix has recently been a featured speaker in rallies at the state Capitol in favor of providing health care coverage for primarily working poor Mississippians.

No doubt, her activism brings symmetry.

Hendrix, a Jackson mother of four and the wife of a physician, is the granddaughter of Alton Cobb, the state’s former longtime state health officer who played a pivotal role in Mississippi opting into the original Medicaid program 55 years ago.

In more recent times, her father, Tim Alford, a Kosciusko physician, was beating the drums in favor of Medicaid expansion longer than almost any other Mississippi health care provider.

“He said he was leaving that to me because no one had listened to him,” she joked in an interview with Mississippi Today this week after one of the Capitol rallies.

Medicaid expansion has become the major focus of a contentious 2024 legislative session, with hundreds of Mississippians, top state business leaders, health officials and even religious leaders publicly advocating at the Capitol for full Medicaid expansion that stands to significantly help the poorest, unhealthiest state in the nation.

For the first time, state lawmakers are earnestly debating expansion. Hendrix has been on the front lines of the fight to get it across the finish line.

“It seems we have been talking about this for more than 13 years,” she said, referring to the fact that the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010 with the provision allowing Medicaid expansion to cover those earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level or about $20,000 annually for an individual. “But it really has been going on much longer than that. When did Al work on that?”

READ MORE: Top Mississippi business leaders endorse full Medicaid expansion

The story of Alton Cobb and Mississippi’s reluctant decision to opt into Medicaid in 1969 is one of an unlikely alliance and political courage by a governor who eschewed his political philosophy to do what he believed was right for the people of Mississippi.

That governor was John Bell Williams. And Cobb, an employee at the state Department of Health who was initially reluctant to take a key position on Williams’ staff, helped the governor reach that decision.

“I didn’t vote for him,” Cobb told Mississippi Today in 2019, recalling when he was approached to work for Williams. “I think he probably knew that.”

But former U.S. Rep. David Bowen, who had joined Williams’ staff, was a friend of Cobb and convinced him of the potential of Williams’ health advisory board.

“I wanted to be part of that,” Cobb said.

READ MORE: Is history repeating itself on Medicaid expansion in Mississippi?

The panel held hearings across the state, listening to health care providers and others. Cobb said Williams attended the meetings, though he seldom spoke. He primarily listened.

At the end of the process, Williams informed his staff he was calling a special session to take up the issue of opting into the Medicaid program. That special session lasted from July 22, 1969, until Oct. 10. In the midst of the long and extraordinary session, Hurricane Camille ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

But by the end, Mississippi opted into the Medicaid program as most other states had already done.

The Williams-backed move was a shock to many political observers. As a U.S. House member prior to being elected governor, Williams had voted against the legislation to create the Medicaid program and had campaigned for governor railing against the excesses of the federal government.

But in a joint session of the Legislature on the first day of the special session, he told members, “In fairness, I must point out that my philosophical reasons for resisting the program as a member of the United States Congress is neither relevant nor applicable to the present issue before us. The program is a reality. It is available to our state and now devolves wholly into a question of whether you, in your wisdom, should determine our participation will be in the best interests of our state and people.”

Back in 1969, Williams’ argument for opting into the original Medicaid program sounded much like the one made today for Medicaid expansion. He said the program would provide health care for a segment of the population that needed it, it would help the state’s health care providers, and it would benefit the whole state by pumping more funds into the economy.

“Al used to love to tell about becoming John Bell Williams’ chief ambassador for starting Medicaid in Mississippi,” Hendrix said. “… After having several meetings, a light came on for Williams.

“… Two opposites politically flew around the state (on the state plane) selling Medicaid,” Hendrix continued. “Al did not like to fly.”

But she added it was “a good example of a politician who did a 180 because it just made economic sense.”

Hendrix said her grandfather, who died in 2021, wanted his support for Medicaid expansion to be included in his obituary.

Hendrix is hopeful that current Mississippi politicians will do as Williams did back in 1969 and set aside their previous political beliefs and do what is right for the people of Mississippi.

“Despite the stereotypes, Medicaid does so much good,” she said. “This is the insurance that helps children who have no other choice. Where are the Beatitudes when our neighbors need them? I will never understand why Mississippi politicians of late have decided we should not expand — turning down millions of federal dollars our state so desperately needs because of politics while we’re all still paying into a system that’s funding states that did expand.”

Perhaps today’s politicians need someone like Alton Cobb to help them reach that decision. Maybe that person is already part of the debate and is advocating for it at the Capitol every day — if only those Mississippi politicians would do like John Bell Williams did in 1969 and listen.

READ MORE: Medicaid expansion negotiators still far apart after first public meeting

The post Her grandfather helped bring Medicaid to Mississippi 55 years ago. Today, she’s pushing for expansion. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Waiting Room appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The family of a Jackson man who died in 2019 days after an interaction with police officers will receive nearly $18,000 in a wrongful death lawsuit settlement. 

That $17,786.25 settlement, according to city council documents, “does not constitute an admission of liability” by the city of Jackson and the three former Jackson police officers who the family say pulled 62-year-old George Robinson from his car and beat him in the Washington Addition neighborhood. 

Robinson died days later on Jan. 15, 2019, and the state medical examiners said his death was a homicide from three blunt head injuries. 

One of the officers, former detective Anthony Fox, was convicted of culpable-negligence manslaughter in 2022, receiving a 20-year sentence with 15 years suspended. Charges against the other two officers, Desmond Barney and Lincoln Lampley, were dismissed in 2021. 

Fox’s conviction stood for about two years, until January when the Mississippi Court of Appeals reversed the conviction and issued an acquittal. In a majority opinion, the judges agreed the evidence was insufficient for the verdict and that Robinson’s medical history made it difficult to tell whether his injuries from Fox was the sole contributor to his death. 

The Hinds County district attorney did not support challenging the conviction, while Attorney General Lynn Fitch asked for it to be reversed. 

Fox left prison in February and went back to work for the Clinton Police Department, where he was employed up until his conviction after leaving the Jackson Police Department.
Bettersen Wade, Robinson’s sister who was a plaintiff in the wrongful death lawsuit, is also the mother of 37-year-old Dexter Wade, the Jackson man who died last year and was buried in the Hinds County pauper’s grave, despite having identification and his family calling the coroner’s office and Jackson police.

The post Jackson officials settle lawsuit over George Robinson’s death appeared first on Mississippi Today.

An education company that helps bring free college-level science courses to poor, rural public schools, many in the Mississippi Delta, will lose federal funding after the Biden Administration did not renew its grant last year. 

The Global Teaching Project has received more than $3.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education to support its work offering Advanced Placement science courses to nearly 40 high-poverty schools.

Over 1,000 have enrolled in the project’s classes, according to its founder, former tax attorney Matt Dolan, who says he has put more than six figures into the project since starting it in 2017. Districts could offer AP courses that they never had before. 

Global Teaching Project’s “blended” instructional model — online course content taught by in-class teachers who are supported by virtual STEM tutors from universities such as Harvard — was even praised by school choice and school voucher proponent Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration’s education secretary. Experts have heralded this approach as “the future of education, especially for rural schools,” and the Global Teaching Project has drawn the attention of entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban.

It’s also a model that has the interest of powerful Mississippi Republicans. Senate Appropriations Chair Briggs Hopson told the Magnolia Tribune earlier this legislative session that he hopes to expand virtual learning for schools that struggle to find qualified teachers. 

But the Global Teaching Project’s growth could falter without more financial support when its federal Education Innovation and Research grant expires this summer as, Dolan said, a majority of that funding went to the program costs. The minimum needed to operate this coming year is $1.2 million, Dolan said. 

The Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access, a coalition of rural public school districts, was technically the recipient of federal funds, but Dolan said the Global Teaching Project was the driver of the initiative, a relationship that grant reviewers in 2019 said could be clarified. 

“My guess is they’ve never seen such a thing where somebody not only develops and implements the program, but they provide the money,” Dolan said. “That’s what we told the school districts when we first started in 2017. We said we want to do this, and we’re not asking you to give us a penny.” 

Last year, the Biden Administration awarded more than $275 million in funding to projects in 20 states. Projects in three states — California, Massachusetts and Texas — received almost as much funding as the remaining 17.

Without the project, the Quitman County School District would not be able to offer AP Computer Science, said Baxter Swearengen, a special-education teacher who acts as a “facilitator” for the courses. 

Neither would the Holmes County School District, said Iftikhar Azeem, the science department chair at Holmes County Central High School. He teaches AP Physics and AP Computer Science. 

That’s because these districts, which have a small tax base, can’t compete with other counties and even states that pay teachers much better, or with other science-professions.

“The very fundamental thing is funding,” Azeem said. “I’ve taught several hundred physics students, but nobody came back as a teacher because when they do get a masters in science, they get a better job. … Why should they work as a teacher?”

Both districts struggle to retain college-educated graduates amid population losses since 2010. 

“A place like Holmes County, Mississippi, has fewer residents today than it did when the Civil War broke out,” Dolan said. “That teachers are not moving there is symptomatic of broader issues about exodus from these communities.” 

The Global Teaching Project helps fill this gap, Dolan said, by providing schools with “turnkey courses,” as well as textbooks and workbooks that students don’t have to pay for. And teachers like Swearengen and Azeem are offered stipends for professional development courses. 

“We are paying our teachers, not the other way around,” Dolan said. “We are providing services to our students. They never pay us a penny. Their parents never pay us a penny. We’ve never used a dollar of state or local tax dollars.” 

More than 90% of students who take Global Teaching Project’s classes go to college, though Dolan couldn’t provide the exact number, he said, due to limitations collecting data from public schools. But when students get to college, they are prepared, he said. 

“Where we make a difference, and here I am confident, is where they go to college, how well they do in college, how prepared they are in college, their persistence and scholarships,” Dolan said. 

Dolan said he has partial data on pass-rates on the AP national exams for Global Teaching Project students and that the pass-rate for AP Computer Science tends to be higher than AP Physics. A majority of students do not earn a qualifying score for college credit on the exams, which is a three or higher, Dolan said. 

“By taking this exam, you are part of an elite group,” Dolan tells his students. 

Both teachers said their classes’ exam scores aren’t as high as they wish due to a myriad of factors. 

In Quitman County, students don’t struggle with the curriculum, Swearengen said, because the Global Teaching Project provides tutors from Ivy League schools. It’s more about attention: Swearengen said his students tend to miss class for major athletic events. Cellphones are another distraction. 

But the biggest struggle, Swearengen said, is technology. His district has limited bandwidth. During end-of-year testing, only so many students can use a computer at one time, he said. Sometimes, all nine of his students have to crowd around one computer.

That’s a huge reason his AP Computer Science pass-rate isn’t where Swearengen wants it to be. 

“We have so many students on computers to where the technology person will just shut the entire network off,” he said. 

Still, Swearengen said the Global Teaching Project has benefited his students in ways that can’t be quantified. Through the project, they have an opportunity to experience college-level curriculum and visit campuses like Jackson State University. 

Their self-regard increases, he said. 

“They get to spend a night in a hotel room when they’ve never been,” he said. “They get to go to conferences and eat different food. And talk about computers. It’s just so much. It’s a bigger picture than I think anybody could have imagined.” 

That was Demeria Moore’s experience when, as a junior and senior at McAdams Attendance Center in Attala County, she took AP Physics and AP Computer Science, the latter course she was able to claim college credit for at Holmes Community College. 

Though it was lonely to be the only student in the AP Computer Science course, Moore said participating in the class helped her understand the “why” behind the world. 

“When I look out the window and I see the leaves, how they’re full of chlorophyll and the sun will allow them to have energy, and how that energy can get transferred to me and that just creates the circle of life,” Moore said. “All those little things have some type of science or math attached to it. It all just blew my mind.” 

Moore said the Global Teaching Project also provided a sense of community at her school where teacher turnover is high. McAdams is a junior-senior high school and, by the time she graduated, all her teachers from seventh grade had left.

“I had some really good teachers and even the students who may have just maybe caused a few issues in class, even they would listen to these teachers. And I just wish they would have stayed so everybody could have a better learning experience,” she said. 

Dolan said one of the successes of the Global Teaching Project also comes with irony. His initiative can help teachers become AP certified, which can lead them away from high-poverty school districts to ones that can pay better. 

“We recognize there are certain issues that we cannot affect,” Dolan said. “We don’t determine who is in the building, but we will serve whoever is there.” 

The post Company deemed ‘future of education’ for rural schools to falter without cash infusion, founder says appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi State baseball great Jay Powell won Game 7 of the World Series, among many other career highlights and then had his career ended by one of the most gruesome arm injuries in baseball history. Who better to talk about the alarming rate of pitching injuries in MLB and college baseball than Powell?

Stream all episodes here.

The post Podcast: Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Jay Powell joins the pod to talk baseball. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The special geology of Mississippi is again giving the state a stab at playing a key role in the energy sector, this time for a burgeoning renewable power source called “green hydrogen.”

The company Hy Stor Energy, founded in 2019, is looking to take advantage of the state’s salt domes, which provide valuable underground pockets for gas storage. Hy Stor will store its hydrogen in different salt domes around the state, Chief Executive Officer Laura Luce said, but will primarily operate in Perry and Smith counties. The company is looking to start production by the end of 2026, she said.

“We’re really at the beginning of this green hydrogen revolution,” Luce said. “We really see the next three to 10 years where you’re going to have a lot of infrastructure be brought up and expanded and this industry stood up, and we’re confident that Mississippi is going to be the leaders in that industry.”

The technology behind renewable hydrogen has been around for about a century, Luce explained. The energy source materializes through a process called electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But it wasn’t until the last few years that both the United States and the Europe began heavily investing in the technology. As part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021, the federal government appropriated $9.5 billion for clean hydrogen development. 

In a roadmap the U.S. Department of Energy released in 2023, the agency explained that “clean hydrogen,” as it’s also referred to, can be a key tool in meeting the country’s goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The plan says that clean hydrogen can reduce economy-wide emissions — targeting sectors like transportation, metal production, and fertilizer — by 10% over the next 30 years.

Last month, the DOE announced up to $500 million in funding for a “green steel” project, which would include producing iron in Perry County using clean hydrogen from Hy Stor. That facility, which would be operated by Swedish company SSAB, would then send the iron to Iowa to be made into steel. While the agency is still negotiating an exact award amount, the DOE projected that the project would create 540 permanent jobs as well as 6,000 construction jobs.

Hy Stor plans to use energy from other renewable sources, like solar and wind, to produce the green hydrogen, Luce said.

“The sun and the wind, even though they’re tremendous resources, they’re not available 24/7,” she said. “They’re available on an intermittent basis. So by taking those and converting them to hydrogen, now I have something that is dispatchable on minutes notice.”

Luce said the “epicenter” of Hy Stor will start out by a salt dome in Richton, near the proposed SSAB facility, with a pipeline connecting down to Port Bienville in southwest Mississippi.

An array of political leaders in the state have backed the project in letters to the DOE, including Gov. Tate Reeves, the State Oil and Gas Board, and the Mississippi Public Service Commission.

Even before Hy Stor, Mississippi’s geology has opened up the state to a number of energy sector investments. For instance, companies have long used the state’s salt domes to store natural gas. Mississippi has also recently positioned itself to become a hub for carbon storage, something that could be especially abundant in Gulf states because of the spaces between subsurface rocks.

The cost of the green hydrogen project will be steep, though. Luce said that the first phase of the project will cost over $10 billion, and that Hy Stor will look to enter into 10-, 20- or 30-year agreements with industrial customers to finance the operation. So far, she added, Hy Stor hasn’t received any federal or state government funding, but it will look for potential support from the DOE as well as renewable energy tax credits.

As far as who will buy the green hydrogen, Luce said Hy Stor’s initial customers in its first couple years of operations will include plastic, maritime and other transport companies, in addition to the proposed green steel project.

The post ‘Green hydrogen’ company looks to make Mississippi a leader of new renewable venture appeared first on Mississippi Today.

More than a decade ago, Celia Sims sat in a room with parents whose precious children had died while at day care. Most had been neglected by their caregivers. Some died from injuries, others in their sleep. 

Most of the children attended licensed facilities, and at the time, their parents believed that licensing meant providers were safe, that unqualified workers were screened out. But they weren’t. 

In the early 2010s, there was no federal requirement that child care providers undergo background checks. Fewer than a dozen states required a comprehensive check of criminal, child abuse and sex offender registries — most of the others only checked one, if that. Once these children died, police investigations revealed that providers at their care centers had past convictions for crimes like manslaughter and sexual abuse, Sims said. These people, the parents said, should not have been working in child care, period. 

The parents were outraged — and rightly so, Sims remembers thinking. It seemed so unnecessary. So preventable. 

“After that, you can’t just close your eyes and walk away,” said Sims, who was then a senior staffer for former Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. She got to work. 

Burr and then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, worked with members of the child care advocacy community to draft bipartisan legislation that would, for the first time,  establish national safety standards for child care. It would ultimately make its way into the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the national funding mechanism. States use the money they receive from the grant to reduce the cost of care for low-income children and improve that care by implementing safety and licensing requirements. But to get the money — at least in theory — states must abide by CCDBG rules.

And those rules would be stricter than ever. The reauthorization introduced eight background check requirements that state agencies must run on child care job applicants: two federal checks, of the FBI fingerprint and sex offender registries. Three state ones, of the criminal history, sex offender and child abuse registries. And three more interstate checks of the same state registries in any state where a provider lived during the previous five years. All of these checks were meant to screen out people with a history of crimes like child abuse, assault or endangerment. As part of the new CCDBG rules, states would also be required to post inspection reports online and collect data on serious incidents. It was a statement of values: The government was saying that this was the nation’s standard for child care, no matter where a program was located. 

States had until 2018 to come into compliance.

But 10 years after the law took effect, many states are still failing to uphold at least one of its components. 

According to a 2022 report to Congress analyzing the issue, at that time 27 states failed to conduct at least some, if not all, of the checks and hiring practices required by the law. Nineteen allowed staff to start working with children before background checks were completed. Nearly all of the states had been hampered by old technology systems, state bureaucracy and databases that range from incomplete to downright inaccurate.

It’s unclear where states stand today. The federal Office of Child Care, the regulatory agency that is meant to oversee states’ progress on fixing these problems, told The 19th that only three states had updated some of their policies since the report was published (New Hampshire, for example, no longer allows staff to start work before checks clear), but all 27 remain out of compliance because they do not yet conduct every required check. Yet several states disputed the agency’s determination and provided detailed documentation on their background check procedures, opening the possibility that even the regulatory agency can’t say for certain where states are falling short. 

The winding, chaotic path towards fixing these issues has baffled child care advocates. “I have not been able to understand why, in some states, this hasn’t been a big deal,” said Sims, who went on to found The Abecedarian Group, a child care and education consulting agency.

But it is a big deal.

Background checks are a critical safety requirement in most jobs, but especially when it comes to safeguarding small children who may not be able to express when something has gone wrong. Yet the haphazard enforcement of these rules means that, in some states, barriers to child care jobs are too high, while in others they are not high enough. States with the most stringent requirements have made it more difficult for day care providers to hire workers, and for people to join a workforce of much-needed caregivers. That’s creating additional barriers for in-home care providers, who are disproportionately women of color and are often the most accessible caregivers in low-income communities.

In states where the systems to run the checks are still not meeting federal standards, difficult questions remain about whether the screening mechanism meant to shield kids from injury, abuse and even death is functioning as it should.

A decade later, no one can yet quite say what the right balance is between protecting children and protecting the child care sector.

“You never want a child to be hurt on your dime — it is a terrible, terrible thing. If we didn’t do everything possible to protect every child, we have fallen down on our job,” said child care expert Danielle Ewen. “If you don’t have the systems in place to keep kids safe, who are you actually protecting and who are you hurting?”

For example, in 2014, interstate checks were added as a commonsense safeguard. Policymakers wanted to ensure caregivers didn’t hop from job to job in different states, evading screening along the way, particularly in areas like Washington D.C. and Virginia, where workers may live in one state but work in another. But over time, those checks have come to illustrate why the system itself is broken. 

Eleven states didn’t run interstate checks at all, the 2022 report found. Nine didn’t respond to other states’ requests. Some checks can’t be run because of simple — and mystifying — bureaucratic reasons: One state accepts credit card payments and the other doesn’t, for example. 

States also have differing laws about what information they can share across state lines, and with what agencies. After a request is submitted, states can decide whether to provide all the records they hold on a person, only conviction information, or simply to give a “yes” or “no” determination as to whether that person is eligible to work in child care based on their local laws. 

That matters because states have different thresholds for what constitutes an offense that would prohibit someone from working with children. For example, a teenager who gets arrested for urinating in public might be considered a sex offender in one state, but not another. When that teenager applies for a job in a new state, their background check might indicate that yes, they have been arrested for a sex offense — but not give any context about what it was.

Tribes are also subject to the requirements of CCDBG, but none of them was given legal authority through the 2014 law — or any other, for that matter — to independently run federal background checks. To get around that, some tribes have had to ask states to submit requests on their behalf, creating the same problem: Child care workers may be disqualified based on state rules instead of tribe rules. 

Much of the information in the abuse registries is also incomplete or unreliable. The 2022 report to Congress, which was put together by an interagency task force, found that some states include unsubstantiated abuse cases as well as substantiated ones. That means people could be disqualified from working even if the allegations against them were found to have had no merit. 

Domestic violence survivors have particularly suffered as a result. In some states, they show up in registries not because they caused the abuse, but because an investigator determined that they failed to protect a child from the perpetrator or from witnessing the violence. “Consequently, victims of domestic violence can remain on [abuse] registries for years, regardless of whether the individual themselves would be unsafe to provide care in a child care program,” the report found. 

Experts have also questioned the racial and economic biases of the registry system, especially when it comes to flagging child neglect. About 75 percent of all child welfare cases are the result of neglect, not violence, and about half of states define neglect as a failure to provide basic needs. Caregivers living in poverty, the majority of whom are people of color, may get flagged simply because they’re unable to find affordable housing, for example. 

“How much do we trust the gatekeeping mechanism to be fair and equitable?” asks Gina Adams, a child care expert at the Urban Institute who has studied the racial disparities inherent in background checks for child care. “The challenge is that, to the extent that it finds true situations of child abuse or child risk, it is an important mechanism to protect children — so I strongly support that.”  

“However,” Adams continued. “I worry that because of inequitable policing, it may be also keeping out a whole bunch of people who should not be kept out.”

Just last year in New York City, a 1-year-old died of a fentanyl overdose at a day care that was a front for a drug operation. The providers had passed background checks. Reports also revealed the city had a backlog of 140 child care background checks at the time. 

In Washington state, provider Susan Brown has been wrestling with this question after 35 years in the child care business. As part of the federal law, prospective staff who pass a fingerprint check — either of the federal FBI registry or the state criminal history registry — are allowed to start working while their other checks are being completed. But Washington is more restrictive: Nobody can work until they pass the five federal and state checks. For Brown’s employees, the drive to just get their fingerprints taken can take hours roundtrip. The entire background check process can take up to a month, she said. Why would a worker wait that long when they can get a job tomorrow at a fast food restaurant and get paid about the same wages?

“Child care providers can’t afford to pay them until they’re in the classroom,” said Brown, the president and CEO of Kids Co., a chain that provides child care services across Seattle. And she pointed to another problem: Day cares have been short-staffed since the pandemic, and that’s limiting how many classrooms can be open and how many students can be enrolled. “Now with the crisis being what it is, because no one has any extra staff, you can’t even enroll kids to cover the wages of the person.”

Brown also questions why so many requirements have been imposed on child care providers, and not people in similar professions, like teachers. “We’ve had, over the years, the situation where we tried to hire public school teachers and they didn’t pass the background check,” Brown said. (In Washington, teachers need to only pass two checks — an FBI check and a state patrol check.)

The racial disparity is undeniable, Brown said. Women of color are overrepresented in the child care workforce and also face more scrutiny to enter jobs that are among the lowest paid in the country. Meanwhile, the majority of the teaching workforce is White women. 

In a January letter to the state, signed by more than 300 child care providers, Brown wrote: “This disparity is not only unjust, but perpetuates systemic racism within our regulatory framework. Washington State’s current background check process magnifies the inequity by removing the possibility of beginning supervised work after completing a fingerprint background check, as outlined in federal requirements.” 

In Washington, the state performs the five federal and in-state background checks together. Changing the process to do just the fingerprint checks first, so workers can start sooner, “would take a lot of resources and time to develop,” because all the results are currently submitted as one package, said a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families. “We made the decision to comply with federal regulations by requiring the completion of all background check components for this reason.” It takes about eight days on average to complete the checks once fingerprints are submitted, according to Washington state’s most recent 2024 data. 

Home-based providers feel the inequity of these checks most directly, because not only do these workers need to be background checked, but so does every adult who lives in the home. 

In-home child care is for many low-income families the only viable option, and it’s often run by women of color — women whose families are more likely to live intergenerationally and to come into contact with the criminal justice system or the immigration system. 

“It deters folks from becoming licensed,” said Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, which works to improve home-based child care. “They perceive risk.” 

That was the problem the congressional task force was meant to help solve. Previous reports from 2022 and 2021 had concluded that numerous states fell short of requirements. But the task force’s version, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, was the first to try to quantify which states were out of compliance, and why. The Office of Child Care then took on studying each state’s individual challenges and creating a plan to fix them. 

Some states do seem to be lagging. Mississippi, for example, doesn’t check the national sex offender registry, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health told The 19th. Still, the state refutes the 2022 report, which noted that Mississippi did not have policies in place to conduct any of the checks as required by the 2014 law. The Mississippi spokesperson said that  the information was dated.

When The 19th asked the Office of Child Care whether any of the information in the 2022 report was outdated, it listed only three states as having made improvements since the report was published, though it considers all 27 to still be out of compliance. Mississippi was not on the list. (The states were New Hampshire, Alabama and Washington.)

In fact, several states disputed the Office of Child Care’s determinations. The 19th reached out to officials in five states that had significant issues flagged in the 2022 report, and which the federal agency still considers to be out of compliance. Many said those issues had either been partially or completely rectified.

For example, according to the report, West Virginia only runs one of eight required checks. But Whitney Wetzel, a spokesperson for the West Virginia Department of Human Services, told The 19th that determination “should not be considered current.” 

Wetzel said the department “is confident that it is compliant with all statutory and regulatory background check requirements,” and provided a list of the checks performed, including the FBI fingerprint check and national sex offender check, as well as the in-state criminal, sex offender and abuse registries. 

New Jersey was flagged in the report for failing to run checks on a sub-group of providers, those who are license-exempt, but a spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services confirmed to The 19th that it has been running checks on those providers since mid-2021.

Other states are in more of a gray area. According to the agency, Alabama only recently created policies to run in-state, federal and interstate checks, and remains out of compliance with other aspects of the background check law. However, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Human Services told The 19th: “All checks required under the Child Care and Development Fund rules are performed,” and the discrepancy is only in how the federal office would like the state to structure the process. Alabama is in the process of updating its background check procedures, but the current system “still covers all the required checks,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Vermont was the only state flagged in the 2022 report for allowing staff to start working with children unsupervised before fingerprint background checks were cleared. But the deputy commissioner for the state’s child development division, Janet McLaughlin, told The 19th that while the state does allow new staff to start working before those checks are finalized, that work is supervised. That is, however, still out of compliance with the federal rule.

The Office of Child Care did not respond to The 19th’s requests to clarify the discrepancies between its records and the states’ assertions. But an official from the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the agency, told The 19th that the agency worked with state child care agencies and their partners to create plans to identify what staffing, technology and infrastructure investments they’d need to come into compliance. 

The agency went through an intensive process to document each state’s background check policies, the official said, and that study revealed gaps. 

But now, because of the disagreements between states and the agency,  it is hard to say how close each has come to filling them.

The more time that goes by, and the longer states have been out of compliance, the more states have also started to question whether what is being asked of them is even doable, Ewen said. She was the director of the Child Care and Early Education team at the Center for Law and Social Policy when the CCDBG rules were being crafted. 

“If you have a system where people start to believe that you can’t achieve the end goals, they are not incentivized to try. They’re more incentivized to try and go to Congress and say, ‘This doesn’t work’ instead of going to their state leaders and saying, ‘We’re gonna get dinged for this in an audit,’” Ewen said. 

Linda Smith, the former executive director of Child Care Aware, the advocacy organization whose research was critical to the creation of the safety standards, said the federal government has long been too lenient with the states. In her view, it’s past time that the issue be resolved.

“These are some of these things that if you want to do it — you do it,” Smith said. “I don’t think there was ever any excuse for not doing them. We are talking about the basic safety of children who can’t talk.”  

Yet the 2022 report — and the fact the Office of Child Care has not credited any state with coming into full compliance since it was issued — pointed out some uncomfortable truths. Yes, some states have delayed compliance. And yes, some tried but faced truly significant challenges. It’s also clear by now, a decade later, Sims said, that “we got some things wrong in the statute.” 

The abuse registries were a “mess,” she said. And some of the things that seemed commonsense, like interstate background checks, turned out to be much more complicated than anyone had realized. 

Grace Reef, then the chief of policy at Child Care Aware who conducted the initial research on the issues with background checks, said the intention behind the law was sound: “to help protect kids and give parents some peace of mind,” she said. 

But they were operating with limited information about the quality of the data in the registries and the state laws that would make it difficult, in practice, to conduct all the checks they felt were important. “We had trouble trying to figure out how to structure language,” she recalled. “You do the best you can.” 

This year, for the first time, states will be required to answer detailed questions in their state child care plans regarding the remaining obstacles they face with background checks. Each state needs to submit their plan, a roughly 300-page document that outlines how its system works, by July 1. 

At the state level, advocates like Lorena Garcia, the CEO of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, are working to ensure her state narrows the list of offenses that would disqualify someone from working. Garcia works with what are known as family, friend and neighbor providers: registered but unlicensed in-home providers who also need to undergo checks, but might be hesitant to do so because they live with people who have some kind of criminal record or because they are in mixed immigration status households. She wants to make sure only offenses that would affect the safety of children are counted. 

To address the interstate checks, Cindy Mall, the senior program director of the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, sees the National Fingerprint File as the most obvious solution. Twenty-four states participate in the FBI-maintained fingerprint database, which makes performing interstate checks a relatively simple experience. If all states were a part of it, more could come into compliance, Mall said — including California, which the report currently lists as out of compliance on performing the national sex offender registry check and the three interstate checks.  

For her, the issue comes down to a question of resources. It’s not enough to say something is a priority without the support to make it happen. In 2022, President Joe Biden tried to pass a $400 billion child care plan that would have given states funding they could have used to improve their systems and increase staffing. But that effort ultimately failed after Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, withdrew support from the package saying it was too costly and expansive.

The task force that studied the background checks came to a similar conclusion. Even if the states followed every recommendation the group laid out, they wrote, “full implementation of the current array of checks is unlikely without major additional fiscal investment and changes to state laws not addressed in this report.” 

“It comes down to money,” Mall said. “Money is staffing, money is resources, money is databases.” 

It also comes down to political will. Burr and Mirkulski have since left the Senate and few champions remain. But the problems linger. Since the pandemic, child care as an industry has been on life support, kept alive through a one-time federal investment that allowed states and programs to get the resources they needed to improve their systems. 

But that money was temporary — the needs aren’t. Safety remains as important as ever.

“Ten years into this,” Reef said, “we ought to have sufficient information in a bipartisan way, not to make it a partisan issue, but to make sure the law works as intended by commonsense approaches. I think that’s what’s needed.” 

This story has been republished in partnership with Mississippi Today.

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