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A delegation of major business leaders, including the incoming president of the state’s chamber of commerce and the former commander of the Mississippi National Guard, pleaded with lawmakers on Tuesday to not adjourn their session without passing a bill that fully expands Medicaid coverage to the state’s poorest citizens. 

Jack Reed Jr. the former Republican mayor of Tupelo and the owner of Tupelo-based Reed’s Department Store, spoke on behalf of the business leaders at the state Capitol, where he urged lawmakers to support expansion because of the positive financial impact it would have on the state’s economy.   

“It’s the right thing to do morally,” Reed said of expansion. “Legislators, by virtue of your offices, you are in a position to make it happen. We Mississippi businesses are supporting you.”

Reed, former chairman of the Mississippi Economic Council and leader of the store that’s been an anchor of north Mississippi for over a century, and his family have a storied history of advocating causes that are now considered visionary but were not politically expedient at the time. 

Reed’s father, Jack Reed Sr., served as the MEC chairman in the early 60s when he used his position to urge state leaders to keep public schools open and comply with court-ordered integration. 

The elder Reed unsuccessfully ran as the Republican nominee for governor in 1987, was the inaugural chairman of the State Board of Education and was an early voice to call for state politicians to change Mississippi’s former state flag that featured a Confederate battle emblem. 

Scores of medical and faith leaders have spent weeks at the Capitol advocating for lawmakers to compromise on a plan that expands Medicaid coverage under the federal Affordable Care Act to 138% of the federal poverty level and draws down the full 90% matching rate from the federal government. 

But Tuesday was the first time business leaders have openly spoken out about Medicaid expansion. The MEC, the Mississippi Manufacturers Association and the Business and Industry Political Education Committee have also tacitly endorsed expansion.

Both chambers of the Legislature have passed plans that expand Medicaid coverage to more Mississippians, but the proposals are drastically different. 

The House’s expansion plan aims to expand health care coverage to upwards of 200,000 Mississippians, and accept $1 billion a year in federal money to cover it, as most other states have done.

The Senate, on the other hand, wants a more restrictive program, to expand Medicaid to cover around 40,000 people, turn down the federal money, and require proof that recipients are working at least 30 hours a week. 

Around 10 business leaders also wrote letters to state leaders on Tuesday,  the majority of whom backed the House proposal to expand Medicaid to more Mississippians and draw the full match from the federal government. 

Pat Thomasson, CEO of Philadelphia-based Thomasson Company, is the incoming MEC chairwoman, and she penned a letter to Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, House Speaker Jason White and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves on Tuesday urging them to support expansion. 

“By covering the working poor and accepting the 90% federal match, plus the $700 million incentive program that would fully pay for the program for the first four years, we will have a healthier Mississippi and a better state economy,” Thomasson wrote. 

B & B Concrete CEO David Brevard, CREATE Foundation President Mike Clayborne, Renasant Bank Board Chairman Robin McGraw, Montgomery Enterprises CEO Luke Montgomery, The Taylor Group CEO Lex Taylor, Community Development Foundation CEO David Rumbarger and MINTACT CEO Augustus Collins all wrote letters to state leaders supporting expansion.  

Retired Maj. Gen. Augustus “Leon” Collins is also the former adjutant general of Mississippi and was commander of the Mississippi Army and Air National Guard under former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant. He wrote a letter to Hosemann urging Medicaid expansion.

“Many rural hospitals are suffering and are on the verge of closure,” Collins wrote. “This expansion has the ability to save these hospitals … Mississippi has delayed far too long. The time is now.”

The Tuesday event happened hours before a group of House and Senate negotiators were scheduled to meet at the Capitol to haggle out a compromise on the different expansion plans.  

Speaker White previously told Mississippi Today he was open to adopting a hybrid model of expansion that uses both public and private options to cover additional people. But it’s unclear if  a majority of Republican senators would agree to a plan that fully expands Medicaid. 

Reed told Mississippi Today that he would encourage state senators who are on the fence about supporting full expansion to think about their legacy and consider the full picture of the economic and medical risks at stake for Mississippi, one of the unhealthiest states in the nation. 

“There comes a time in every legislator’s life when he or she has the opportunity to really do something that makes a difference to thousands of their fellow Mississippians,” Reed said. “This is one of those times.” 

The post Former, incoming heads of state chamber, other business leaders endorse full Medicaid expansion appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Ricky Junco was working a low-wage, e-commerce job at Goodwill and volunteering to teach Microsoft Word to kids at a youth detention center in 2018 when he met Vince Jordan, founder of a local tech startup.

Junco had been looking for ways to strengthen his skills to secure better employment. And Jordan had the solution: a virtual reality programming academy offered by his company, Lobaki. Junco said he was reluctant at first, doubting he’d be able to afford the courses. That’s when Jordan explained he could attend free of charge.

Lobaki’s foundation had recently — and suddenly — received a large grant from the state’s welfare department, Mississippi Department of Human Services, to offer the classes. 

The money didn’t come directly from the state agency, but through a contract with a private entity called Families First for Mississippi, which auditors and prosecutors say facilitated a multimillion dollar fraud scheme between 2016 to 2019.

Junco started training at the academy in the evenings. First, he learned how to design a graphic triangle, then make it 3D, then give it texture, then make it look like concrete, and so on.

Junco and his classmates, some of whom he said were transitioning out of prison, were learning how to design and build “experiences” — the term that describes the immersive worlds that appear inside virtual reality headsets. Junco’s goal was to create a simulation of a welding gun, then the experience of welding at a tall height.

“A big challenge in the oil rig right now is that they’ll spend time training somebody to be a welder, and then they ask her to go on top of the rig, and they find out that she’s hesitant about heights,” Junco said. “So therein lies one of the examples of the value of immersive technology is that you can replicate these things and identify fears and defeat fears as well.”

These programming skills could translate to the entertainment industry, such as animation in video games or movies, or to virtual education and vocational training, such as programs to teach someone how to drive a forklift.

Before its demise, Families First touted its VR capabilities in preparing people for the workforce, though it’s unclear how much of that kind of training actually took place.

Faster than it began, the welfare-meets-silicon valley experiment was over. 

In June of 2019, Lobaki President Kevin Loud said three women whose names and titles he couldn’t remember visited the tech company’s office and pulled Lobaki’s chief operating officer aside.

“She came out with this amazed look on her face, and she says, ‘We gotta be out of here by the end of the week,’” Loud said.

The state auditor had begun investigating widespread misspending and theft within the state’s welfare program after receiving a tip from inside the agency. MDHS seized all of the VR equipment Lobaki purchased under the grant, including two expensive harness stations, devices similar to treadmills used for immersive gaming — a seemingly bizarre purchase for a state welfare office.

Lobaki would soon find itself at the center of one of the biggest scandals in state history. The tech startup was lumped with dozens of other alleged fraudsters and accused of robbing the poorest citizens of the poorest state in the country.

“We felt it was completely unjust and we tried to position ourselves as best as possible, but it was like a wave that just kept coming in on you, you know?” Loud said.

The former state welfare agency director and directors of both nonprofits in charge of Families First pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges — some of which relate to the Lobaki contract — in 2022 and 2023 and are awaiting sentencing.

But to Junco, Lobaki’s function with the welfare agency was the embodiment of the popular “hand up, not a hand out” philosophy. Though Junco and his classmates did not have to be low-income to participate, Junco said that he and plenty of others were, in fact, just the kind of people MDHS purports to serve.

“As a result of that exposure, it did lead to a better lifestyle for me later on,” Junco said. “Because I learned something and it segued to a job opportunity as well. Which is, in my opinion, the classic example of what programs like this should look like.”

After the investigation began, Junco returned to class one night to find the doors locked. He walked down the stairs to another level of the building and peered through the windows of a vacant room where the VR equipment was stashed haphazardly. MDHS owned the gadgets, but the agency didn’t have a use for them, so they would continue collecting dust for years. MDHS eventually disposed of the equipment by sending it to the Mississippi Office of Surplus Property, which sells the public’s unused or confiscated items. MDHS did not answer Mississippi Today’s questions about when this occurred, how much money it may have recouped from any sales, or if those proceeds will be transferred back to the welfare program.

Though Junco said he never received a certificate from Lobaki’s VR academy due to the fallout, the company later hired him to teach programming classes at the Jackson Medical Mall. He now serves as Lobaki’s director of business development. A handful of other employees at the roughly 15-person firm also came from the academy.

Lobaki told auditors that it graduated a total of 60 students at a cost of $13,250 per student. The academy was not an accredited program, but Loud said students took with them design portfolios they could use to entice employers. Student outcomes weren’t well documented. Besides the participants Lobaki hired, one of which eventually left to work for Meta, formerly known as Facebook, Lobaki is aware of two other students who secured jobs in the field, plus one who went back to college and another who entered the military for computer science.

This lack of data collection isn’t unusual: the welfare grant Lobaki operated the academy under is notorious for involving no metrics for tracking program performance.

The public funds Lobaki received came from the federal safety net program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or “TANF,” which is known for providing monthly cash assistance, or “welfare checks,” to very poor families. But Mississippi only uses 5% of the funds this way. States may also use the block grant to “end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits” through workforce development.

Lawyers working to recoup misspent TANF funds for the state argued that Lobaki received the grant through fraudulent transfers, that its program did not align with a lawful TANF purpose, especially since its participants were not necessarily needy, and that it must return $795,000 to the state. 

After waging a legal battle for nearly two years, MDHS and Lobaki recently reached a settlement. Lobaki paid MDHS $10,000 on April 15 and the next day, the judge dismissed charges against the company. Lobaki agreed to pay back a total of $300,000 by 2028, which could be reduced to $240,000 if it pays earlier. In the agreement, Lobaki maintained its denial of the allegations in the suit, saying it only settles “to buy their peace and avoid further cost of defense.”

In Lobaki’s failed 2023 motion to dismiss the complaint against it, the company argued, among other things, that it never made any false statements or misrepresentations to procure the funds. Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson denied the motion and the Mississippi Supreme Court declined to take the case on appeal. 

“We didn’t know the difference between TANF and a frickin’ turnip patch, you know?” Loud said.

But Lobaki’s stated mission of providing unique training that underemployed Mississippians could use to take advantage of better, newly emerging job opportunities sounds like exactly the kind of thing that Mississippi’s conservative welfare agency would support.

“We thought we were doing something good for society,” Loud said. “We thought we were doing it completely along the lines of state regulation.”

In fact, shortly after they launched the academy in downtown Jackson, Loud said he remembered receiving a visit from then-Gov. Phil Bryant, who appointed the now disgraced former director John Davis and oversaw the agency during the years of the scandal.

“He (Bryant) puts on the headsets, and he says, ‘This is exactly what we should be doing,’ you know?” Loud said. “And when you see the governor of the state saying something like that, and then he says to John Davis, he says, ‘How much money are we giving these guys?’ He says, ‘We’ve given them $635,000.’ He (Bryant) goes, ‘Give them some more.’ He (Davis) writes us a check for $160,000 that day.”

“So, I mean, how are you not going to think that you’re not doing something in complete compliance with the state?” Loud added.

MDHS has not named Bryant as a defendant in the civil suit and he is not facing any criminal charges. Bryant’s attorney declined to comment on the former governor’s dealings with Lobaki. MDHS would not comment on the Lobaki settlement, telling Mississippi Today, “Due to the suppression order in the Civil Case, MDHS is unable to comment on the filing.”

Loud said Lobaki first got linked up with the welfare agency in 2018 after Davis read an Fox News article about its efforts to train students in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in video game development. “Virtual reality developers aim to spark tech boom in the Deep South,” the headline reads.

Unlike other defendants in the scandal, Loud noted that MDHS approached Lobaki, not the other way around.

“John Davis sees it, calls up Vince, comes up, tours it. He (Davis) says, ‘I love this, but I want you to do it in Jackson,’” Loud said. “‘You come to Jackson, we’ll set up an academy. I got 58 career development centers across the state. We’ll set these up in all 58 of them.’”

By this point, MDHS had begun pushing tens of millions of TANF funds to the two nonprofits running Families First for Mississippi. Technically, states may define “needy” however they want. For the types of services Families First provided, Mississippi had set the income threshold at 300% of the poverty line, so in 2018, a family of three could have earned $60,000 and still qualified for the program. But no one was checking. The state had written in official plans submitted to the federal government that the Families First centers “have strategically braided all available resources therefore eligibility requirements are waived for families and services are free of charge.” 

This may have been moot anyway because according to emails and notes from a meeting between MDHS and another grantee, MDHS lawyers and Families First had adopted the theory that once the money hit the private nonprofits, the grantee was no longer bound by federal spending regulations. 

Davis instructed the nonprofits running Families First to ink a one-year $635,000 contract with Lobaki to begin Sept. 1, 2018. This itself was a violation of federal regulations, according to the state auditor, because it flouted the competitive bid process. Also, according to contracting rules, once the government issues a contract to a private entity, it cannot then tell that entity with whom to enter subcontracts.

Davis had recently leased expensive offices for MDHS executive staff at a high rise in the middle of downtown Jackson called City Centre, where Lobaki was given space to set up shop. The academy, where students like Junco took classes, was located at the old state-owned building on State Street that previously housed MDHS and where Families First would soon be headquartered.

Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, the nonprofit running Families First in the northern part of the state, paid Lobaki the $635,000 in one lump sum payment at the start of the contract. In January of 2019, Gov. Bryant toured Lobaki, and Mississippi Community Education Center, the other Families First nonprofit, entered an additional contract with Lobaki for $160,000.

Loud said the first red flag surrounding Lobaki’s relationship with MDHS came in early 2019 when Lobaki was seeking support from another state agency, the Mississippi Development Authority. MDA asked Lobaki for a copy of its office lease. It didn’t have one. By June of 2019, the state was kicking Davis out of office and stripping Lobaki of its academy.

Bryant left office in January of 2020 and auditors office agents arrested Davis and Mississippi Community Education Center founder Nancy New in February of 2020. Loud said Davis’ fall and the revelations around the funding devastated Jordan, Lobaki’s founder, who eventually left the company to join a VR education consultancy in Florida.

Before that, though, Lobaki brought on Glenn McCullough, who had just left his post as director of MDA under Bryant, as a board member in March of 2020.

A couple months later, State Auditor Shad White released his single audit, which first questioned the payments to Lobaki “due to the known conflict of interest, and inability to determine if these contracts were reasonably priced due to lack of procurement and the lack of arms-length bargaining,” the audit reads.

Despite the audit finding, Gov. Tate Reeves distributed $800,000 in Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) funds to Loabki for online learning in early 2021.

Later that year in October of 2021, independent forensic auditors commissioned by MDHS confirmed that the welfare payments to Lobaki were unallowable under federal regulations. The audit said the VR academy failed to align with federal TANF rules because it did not impose eligibility requirements on participants. But while the program violated federal rules, it did appear to adhere to the state’s own rules since the state plan had suspended income requirements for Families First clients.

“The work performed by Lobaki Foundation appeared to align with its contractual obligations,” forensic auditors wrote.

After the forensic audit, White sent demands for repayment to more than two dozen people or companies, which he referred to the AG’s office. Lobaki was not one of the entities White recommended for prosecution.

By April of 2022, Nancy New and her son Zach New were pleading guilty to charges of fraud against the government and wire fraud for the payments they made to the VR academy. Zach New admitted to paying $500,000 to construct a virtual reality center at the downtown high rise and disguising the payment as a “lease.” There is a strict prohibition on using TANF funds for brick and mortar construction.

Represented by outside counsel Brad Pigott, a former U.S. Attorney, MDHS filed its first civil suit in May of 2022, but the complaint did not name Lobaki. MDHS fired Pigott shortly after he filed the suit and replaced him with law firm Jones Walker, which filed the amended complaint that added Lobaki to the suit in December of 2022. McCullough left Lobaki shortly after that but maintains stock in the company, Loud said.

Loud said he’s caught up with White since Lobaki’s legal troubles began.

“I said, ‘Shad,’ I said, ‘You recommended a lot of people over to the AG to be prosecuted. Why didn’t you recommend Lobaki?’ He said, very simply, he says, ‘Because you guys didn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘Well, thanks. Can you stop this litigation?’” Loud said with a laugh.

As White has stated repeatedly, the state auditor and his investigators are not prosecutors and do not determine who will be charged criminally or civilly.

“We did not serve a demand letter on Lobaki because the evidence we’d seen suggested they performed the services they were hired to perform,” White said in a statement to Mississippi Today. “It’s similar to the newspapers that had been paid in welfare money to run ads, and then they ran those ads. Performing the service would possibly give a vendor a good faith vendor defense under the law, though the ultimate call about whether to sue anyone in this case who did not receive a demand is made by the attorneys representing the state, not us.”

The attorney general’s office has partnered with MDHS’s counsel on the civil suit, but Gov. Reeves has indicated that as the authority over MDHS, his office is leading the litigation and ultimately selected who to hold culpable.

Loud estimates Lobaki has spent $100,000 or $150,000 in legal fees. That’s a lot for a young company like Lobaki, Loud said, whereas the state of Mississippi has seemingly unlimited resources, especially since it’s dipping into its large TANF pot to pay for the lawsuit.

Since the state has tightened up spending in light of the scandal, it has amassed an unspent balance of $146 million in TANF as of 2022 — money that the state could direct towards fighting poverty. When Lobaki received the welfare grant in 2018, the state was serving roughly 4,500 families through the traditional cash assistance program and reported a TANF application approval rate of about 20%. Today, as the welfare civil suit enters its third year, MDHS is serving just 1,600 families and approves roughly 9% of monthly applicants, according to 2023 data.

“It’s just kind of ironic that the attorneys opposing us are getting funded from TANF funds. And one of the things that they’re accusing us of is using TANF funds incorrectly,” Loud said. “But the attorneys wrote the law, so the attorneys wrote that it was fine for them to get paid out of it.”

What’s worse for the company, Loud believes Lobaki has lost roughly $8 million in work with entities who were turned off by its association with the TANF scandal. In 2023, Lobaki secured a $300,000 line item appropriation in Mississippi’s K-12 budget proposal for a VR pilot program. Before state lawmakers passed the budget, they found the appropriation to Lobaki tucked away in the bill. No lawmaker would admit to making the addition and they removed it before passage. 

Lobaki did, however, quietly receive $74,500 from the American Rescue Plan Act, the coronavirus pandemic relief fund, for a program with the Mississippi National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Academy in 2023.

The company also hired powerful lobbying firm Capital Resources in 2023 to lobby for VR funding on the federal level and offer public relations advice, but that contract has since ended. Lobaki’s current lobbyist, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, is Allan Cole.

Loud and the rest of the staff hope the recent settlement means Lobaki can begin repairing its reputation.

On April 15 after delivering the $10,000 check to MDHS, Loud said he ran into the agency’s director Bob Anderson — a former unit director at the Attorney General’s Office appointed by Reeves to run MDHS in 2020 — at Martin’s restaurant, a popular lunch spot in downtown Jackson. They’d never met in person. Loud went up to the former prosecutor, stuck out his hand and introduced himself.

“I said, ‘I didn’t think you could get blood out of a turnip, but you did a pretty damn good job,’” Loud said. “He said, ‘We just wanted a little bit of blood.’”

The post ‘A little bit of blood’: Mississippi tech company settles welfare scandal suit appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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A group of business leaders from northeast Mississippi, one of the most conservative areas of the state, recently wrote a letter to House Speaker Jason White encouraging lawmakers to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor. 

The letter, signed by influential Itawamba County business owner and Republican donor Luke Mongtomery, thanked White for pressing forward with Medicaid expansion legislation and called it “the most important legislative issue for the 2024 session.” 

“As this bill now goes to our legislators appointed to the conference committee for consideration, I have faith that a workable solution will be developed that is agreeable among House and Senate leaders,” Montgomery wrote. “Legislation that is good for our future and for all Mississippians.”

Montgomery wrote the letter on behalf of Mississippi Hills Leadership PAC, a committee of north Mississippi business leaders who regularly donate to statewide politicians and dozens of conservative legislative candidates.

Montgomery is the current chairman of the PAC, while Dan Rollins, CEO of Tupelo-based Cadence Bank, serves as the vice vice chairman and David Rumbarger, CEO of Lee County’s Community Development Foundation, serves as its treasurer.

The PAC last year donated $50,000 to White’s campaign, $50,000 to a PAC White controls, $50,000 to Hosemann and thousands of dollars to lawmakers, according to campaign finance reports with the secretary of state’s office. 

Business and civic leaders in northeast Mississippi such as Jack Reed Sr., George McLean, Hassell Franklin and Bobby Martin, all of whom have since passed away, had a longstanding history of advocating for political causes in the region. 

But in modern times, business leaders from the area are careful to wade into political issues beyond the typical scope of local business interests.

Montgomery told Mississippi Today in a statement that the PAC’s leaders support White, a Republican from West, and Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, for realizing the importance of passing expansion legislation. 

“The Mississippi Hills Leadership PAC fully supports our House and Senate leaders as they work together to develop a responsible healthcare expansion plan that takes full advantage of available federal support for the benefit of our hospitals, our people, and our future,” Montgomery said.

The letter comes in the middle of House and Senate leaders attempting to hammer out a compromise in a conference committee to resolve the different expansion plans the chambers have proposed.  

The House’s expansion plan aims to expand health care coverage to upwards of 200,000 Mississippians, and accept $1 billion a year in federal money to cover it, as most other states have done.

The Senate, on the other hand, wants a more restrictive program, to expand Medicaid to cover around 40,000 people, turn down the federal money, and require proof that recipients are working at least 30 hours a week. 

Montgomery’s letter did not endorse a specific plan, but it did call the House’s plan, which expanded coverage to the full 138% of the federal poverty level under the Affordable Care Act, “a reasonable and responsible proposal.” 

A potential compromise is for the two chambers to agree on a  “MarketPlus Hybrid Plan,” which health policy experts with the Center for Mississippi Health Policy and the Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County estimate could save the state money in the long-term. 

Speaker White previously told Mississippi Today in an interview that he believes he can hold a bipartisan group of more than 90 House members, a veto-proof majority, together in support of a compromise expansion package. 

But the coalition of support in the 52-member Senate is more fragile. The Capitol’s upper chamber only passed its austere expansion plan by 36 votes, with only one vote to spare for the two-thirds threshold needed to override a governor’s veto. 

In addition to Hosemann, the PAC has donated money to the following senators: Kathy Chism, R-New Albany; Rita Potts Parks, R-Corinth; Daniel Sparks, R-Belmont; Chad McMahan, R-Guntown; Hob Bryan, D-Amory; Ben Suber, R-Bruce; Dean Kirby, R-Pearl; Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg and Josh Harkins, R-Flowood. 

Jack Reed Jr., the former Republican mayor of Tupelo and the CEO of Reed’s Department Store, an economic anchor of downtown Tupelo, is also expected to be at the Capitol on Tuesday morning to advocate for expansion. 

The post North Mississippi business leaders urge Legislature to pass Medicaid expansion appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Archie “The Gunslinger” Cooley, the most unconventional of football coaches, has died at the age of 84, and, frankly, I don’t even know how to begin to describe him. 

So let’s begin like this: There will never be another one. Cooley, which is how he referred to himself so often in the third person, was an original. In the mid-1980s, in Mississippi, he wrestled the college football spotlight away from Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Southern Miss and Jackson State, his alma mater, and shined it ever so brightly on Mississippi Valley State.

He was a sports writer’s dream. Need a column? Call Cooley. He always delivered. He wore a cowboy hat, usually with a feather in it, and that hat covered a brain that was years and years ahead of all others when it came to offensive football.

Back when most college football teams were running “three-yards-and-cloud-of-dust” offenses, Cooley’s MVSU Delta Devils were spreading the field, never huddling, and throwing the ball on every down and then throwing it some more. The stuff you see big-time college and NFL offenses doing now, he was doing then.

The only thing the Valley Delta Devils had more of than passing plays were nicknames. Cooley was The Gunslinger. Jerry Rice was World, short for All World. Willie Totten, the quarterback, was Satellite. The offense was The Satellite Express. The offensive line was known as Tons of Fun. Vincent Brown, the great linebacker, was The Undertaker. Together, they were a blast.

The first time I saw then in person was Sept. 24, 1984, when they came to Jackson to play one of W.C. Gorden’s terrific Jackson State teams. Valley had scored 86 points in its opener and 77 points in its second game. Rice was catching about 20 passes and four touchdowns a game. Totten’s passing stats were so gaudy that the NCAA chief statistician accused Valley sports information director Chuck Prophet of making them up. Prophet sent the NCAA the game films and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong.” He wasn’t.

So Valley came to Jackson, drawing a crowd of more than 50,000, and on the first offensive play, the Devils flanked four wide receivers in single file to the left side and one wide receiver, the one wearing jersey number 88, to the far right. No. 88 was Jerry Rice and Jackson State had only one defensive back to cover him. 

Well, you know what happened next. Rice ran right past the defender, Totten lofted a pass down the field, which Rice caught and gracefully ran to the end zone a good 10 yards ahead of the defender.

Valley won 49-32. During the game’s final minutes, Cooley paraded up and down the Valley sideline, waving a green and white Valley banner. Valley had not defeated JSU in 30 years. Afterwards, he led the Valley players in a victory lap around the Memorial Stadium. “We’ve done the impossible!” Cooley, a former Jackson State All American center and linebacker, shouted.

“Now I know how they’ve been feeling for the last 30 years,” Cooley said, and he said a lot more.

“Jackson State said they had to score 30 points to win,” he said. “Ha! They would have had to score 50 because we scored 49. I’m gonna talk now because they have to live with it for a year.”

Cooley could ever more talk. He could brag and he could back it up. He was from the old Dizzy Dean school of boasters: “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.” 

Cooley could do it and did.

He was a Laurel native, a graduate of tradition-rich Oak Park High School, also the alma mater of such famous Mississippians as Olympic long jumping champion Ralph Boston and world renowned opera soprano Leontyne Price. Cooley grew up with next to nothing. “A lot of times, growing up, I’d open the refrigerator for something to eat, and the only thing in there was water,” Cooley told me. “So, I’d drink a glass of water and go out and play football.”

He played center and linebacker at Jackson State. He was a defensive coordinator for years at Tennessee State before taking the job at Valley. He said all those years as a defensive coach, he kept a notebook of plays other teams used that he knew he wanted to use when he became a head coach. Clearly, most were passing plays.

And, yes, it helped to have a receiver like Rice and a quarterback like Totten, both now in the College Football Hall of Fame. But Cooley called the shots and he brought the cameras and microphones to Itta Bena, which is Choctaw for “Home in the Woods.” I remember trying to give driving directions from Jackson to Itta Bena to a reporter from The New York Times. He said I lost him at “turn right at the cotton gin.”

That 1984 Valley team was undefeated at the same time SWAC rival Alcorn State was undefeated through mid-October. They were scheduled to play in November in Itta Bena. A young Jackson sports columnist – this one – wrote a column that the game should be moved to Jackson where 50,000 more people could see it. So, they moved it to Jackson and played it on a Sunday. More than 64,000 people attended, which made it the biggest pay day in the history of either school. Marino Casem’s Alcorn State Braves won 42-28 in a game never to be forgotten by anyone who was there.

Cooley would leave MVSU after the 1986 season and go on to coach at Arkansas Pine Bluff, Norfolk State and Paul Quinn College in Dallas. His teams never again rose to the prominence of those Valley teams when CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated all found their way to Itta Bena, where they told the story of the highest scoring college football team in history and their leader, the self-proclaimed Gunslinger.

The post Remembering ‘The Gunslinger’ of college football, Archie Cooley appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The two legislative committee leaders responsible for criminal justice measures say they will move bills forward to restore suffrage for individuals, raising the prospect that some Mississippians will have their voting rights restored. 

House and Senate Judiciary B Chairmen Kevin Horan and Joey Fillingane announced Friday that they will have hearings on Monday to consider the suffrage bills. 

The House earlier in the session passed a substantial restoration bill that would have automatically restored suffrage to people convicted of nonviolent felony offenses, but Senate Constitution Chairwoman Angela Burks Hill killed it without bringing it up for debate.

Lawmakers, however, can still consider individual bills to restore suffrage to people who have been convicted of disenfranchising felony offenses, though only a small number of those bills typically survive the legislation process.

Horan, a Republican from Grenada, said the House will not restore suffrage to people convicted of violent offenses or those previously convicted of embezzling public money. Additionally, Horan said people must have completed the terms of their sentence and not have been convicted of another felony offense for at least five years to be considered. 

Fillingane, a Republican from Sumrall, said the Senate also will likely only restore voting rights to people previously convicted of nonviolent felony offenses – not violent crimes such as murder or rape. 

The Lamar County lawmaker also said the amount of time after someone has completed their sentencing terms is not a major factor in his decision to advance a suffrage bill out of committee or not. 

“The further out the better, but the time since completing the sentence doesn’t really matter,” Fillingane said. 

Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of any of 10 felonies — including perjury, arson and bigamy — lose their voting rights for life. Opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office have since expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 23.

READ MORE: ‘If you can’t vote, you’re nobody:’ Lawmakers hear from rehabilitated felons who still can’t exercise right

About 55,000 names are on the Secretary of State’s voter disenfranchisement list as of March 19. The list, provided to Mississippi Today through a public records request, goes back to 1992 for felony convictions in state court. 

The state constitution gives lawmakers the power to restore suffrage to citizens, but the process is burdensome. It requires two-thirds of lawmakers in both legislative chambers to vote in favor of restoring suffrage in individual cases. 

“We have a process in the Legislature that helps to restore individuals’ voting rights, but it is a terrible process,” Democratic Rep. Zakiya Summers of Jackson said on Wednesday. “And it’s a cumbersome process. And there really is no easy way to navigate it.” 

The Legislature last year did not pass any suffrage restoration bills, but a willingness from both of the relevant committee chairs to push some of the bills forward could mean lawmakers will approve some bills this year.

Lawmakers have until the final days of the session to vote on suffrage bills, and legislators are coming to the end of their regular session, but it’s unclear when they will adjourn. 

Legislators still have major items they can consider, Medicaid expansion legislation, addressing the public retirement system and rewriting the public K-12 funding formula. 

The post Legislative panels will consider restoring some Mississippians’ voting rights appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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“Bought sense is better than borrowed sense” lives in my memory, rent-free. I’ve always cringed at it because, at every stage of life, some lessons have been costly to learn.

At the Alluvial Collective, we show up to the office, on the screen, or in a community with one overarching challenge: to create or deepen the connections that will support collective thriving.  That is our “For what.”  We get to show up with wisdom purchased over our organization’s last 25 years of work and with wisdom borrowed from many generations and traditions.  In most traditions, self-reflection and stories reveal the path to where we should go and how we should travel.

As you engage in the National Week of Conversation, here are a couple of stories and a few thoughts to help you show up for each other, our communities, and our country.

What Do You Need

The first story emerges from a book called “Getting To Yes,” about negotiating.

Two people were arguing over an orange, and after some time, they decided to split it in half, feeling that equal parts were fair, like in elementary school. Before splitting the orange, they never asked each other the reason the other wanted it. As it turns out, one wanted the orange peel to flavor a cake, and the other wanted the orange’s “meat” to eat.

In another story, an arriving house guest is deeply offended by their host’s demand that they remove their shoes upon entering their family home. The visit goes off the rails and probably off the porch, too.

Each of these stories reminds you of tensions and dilemmas that are all too familiar in our families, towns, and – for me – our leadership discourse.  We have notions about what the other person, or people, want, but at critical points, we need more humanizing insight into what makes it essential to them.

The Cost of Wisdom

In the second story, the home’s foyer had a large rug on its floor that had been in the family for generations.  Understanding that, I would have offered to remove my shoes.

We benefit from being curious about the interests, the “for what” the other person engages with, rather than just the “what” or their position. It may seem inefficient, but it pales compared to the value curiosity brings to relationships. Good relationships are win-win; our team leans on telling and hearing stories to build relationships. They are the wellspring of “for whats” and “whys.”

The truthful stories that your neighbor or coworker tells to you and themselves comprise reality as they see it.  Your stories teach your in-laws and teammates history from your the learned or experienced vantage point. Dialogue and stories make our actions and attitudes make sense.  This is where trust begins to form.

Dialogue over Debates and Diatribes. 

As you begin your week, remember that how we engage matters as much as why.  Diatribes and speeches don’t make us good neighbors, and debates require someone to lose.  We like authentic connections and hearing familiar themes in the stories of others.  This week, open and honest dialogue is the strategy; to thrive together should always be the goal. We’ve paid too much for everything else.

Talk more; proclaim less. It’s one of our mottos here at The Center for Practical Ethics (TCPE). Put another way, we might say our goal is to foster conversations rather than diatribes. This task is more difficult than most realize. What we know as ethicists is that merely having conversations isn’t enough. There’s a wide variety of skills needed for fruitful dialogue to take place, and some are harder to come by than others. 

The ideal conversation partner is curious and humble, able to actively listen, knowledgeable about his or her own positions, familiar with basic principles of logical argument, charitable when interpreting claims, and—most importantly—willing to be wrong. Our work centers around equipping students with these skills and helping them navigate the complex ethical issues within our society’s most contentious disagreements. 

This year, National Week of Conversations (NWoC) coincided with Ethics Week here at the University of Mississippi (UM). Many of our events are conversation-based because dialogue is the best way to evaluate the ideas of others and open ourselves up to new information and interpretation of facts, while gaining a better understanding of our own views. 

Two of our events in particular are worth examining more closely to see why NWoC and the work we do at TCPE are critical for sustaining civil society and the myriad public goods we all take for granted. First is our signature Just Conversations event. Students are placed in small groups and given a couple of ethical dilemmas to discuss. Trained student moderators guide the discussion to point out important aspects of the dilemmas, such as logical fallacies, analysis of stakeholders, ethical concepts and assumptions, and varying methods to achieve goals. Students often discover they agree with others—on the dilemma outcome and the details—far more than they expected.

Second, we have invited free speech scholar Sigal Ben-Porath to give a talk about her new book Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy. Ben-Porath contends that universities are laboratories of democracy where students must learn to engage with disagreement. If the university is to be a place where truth is discovered, it must take seriously its historic social and educational obligation to train students in the skills needed for civil discourse and critical thinking. Her work is especially relevant in our ever more polarized times. 

What these events demonstrate is that conversations—that is, engaged and fruitful conversations—must take place at all levels. Students must learn to talk to students just as much as faculty must learn to talk to faculty and administrators to administrators. What’s more, these groups must talk to each other because while each of us have a role within academia (faculty, staff, student, dean, vice chancellor, etc.), we are also all citizens who work and live together.

Policies must be made, votes cast, businesses founded, churches attended, friendships established, and life lived. TCPE focuses on the skills of civil discourse by providing opportunities to cultivate those skills through Ethics Week, and highlights conversations that ask us to reflect on the role of universities as part of the NWoC.

Join the conversation.

Join us at Noon on Friday, April 19 for a VIRTUAL lunch and learn session exploring tools to make us better listeners, and in turn, better equipped to engage in meaningful conversations across differences.

The session will be led by Dr. Graham Bodie, professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Media and Communication in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi.

This event is free and open to the public. Register to receive more information.

REGISTER FOR FREE

The post Look for the “why” when engaging in disagreement appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Lawmakers and advocates regularly refer to Mississippians without health insurance who are in the “coverage gap.” But what is the coverage gap, why does it exist and how does it relate to Medicaid expansion?

The post Q&A: Explaining the health care coverage gap appeared first on Mississippi Today.