Mississippi Today reporter Alex Rozier gives an update on the city of Jackson’s third-party water utility system, how the organization’s request to raise the water rates on customers in the capital city is playing out in federal court and if the water system can sustain natural disasters in the future.
Jennifer Allen has wanted to be a teacher since high school. She admired her social studies and English teachers especially. After four years studying elementary education at Delta State University and a full-time teaching position in a local district her senior year, she felt she had cleared all the important hurdles to becoming a certified teacher in Mississippi.
But then came PRAXIS, a series of tests that nearly every teacher in Mississippi must take to become a certified teacher.
“It made me second guess a career that I fell in love with,” she said. “Much of what I learned over the four years of college is not in the practice material.”
She’s not alone. In roughly half of public and private universities with education programs, 50% or more of students do not pass at least one section of the PRAXIS exam on their first try.
Some students even opted for more classes at school to bypass having to take the test, which would mean an additional $1,200 for Allen.
Nearly a quarter of the 1,892 Mississippi test takers walked away after flunking on the first attempt of the most commonly taken PRAXIS Elementary Education exam from 2015 to 2018, leaving fewer teachers to fill a growing list of teacher vacancies in critical shortage areas.
The Board of Education implemented a waiver during the pandemic to allow students to be certified without taking the PRAXIS, but that waiver ended in December 2021. Students graduating as late as December 2023 took advantage of the waiver.
Now university education departments, school district officials and teachers are struggling to re-adjust to a more rigid path to teacher licensure.
“It’s outrageous that effective educators are dismissed by the profession for not passing PRAXIS,” said Clayton Barksdale, a former public school principal in Greenville and executive director of the West Mississippi Education Consortium. “Many prove their impact while on emergency licenses, only to be fired then immediately rehired as a long-term substitute – doing the same work for a fraction of the pay, with no benefits or retirement.”
“We must do better.”
Didriquez Smith has taken the PRAXIS content test three times and spent nearly a thousand dollars. He coaches football at Clarksdale High School and teaches physical education on an emergency license.
He failed just one of the three tests in his past two attempts: Foundations of Reading, which covers reading comprehension and teaching reading.
The Praxis exam has several parts. The content knowledge test covers the subject aspiring teachers want to teach, like biology or elementary English. The Principles of Learning test covers how teachers should prepare lesson plans and approach classroom instruction for different subjects. Students who don’t have at least a 3.0 GPA must also take an Academic Skills for Educators test, which is also called PRAXIS Core.
Per try, the elementary education exam costs $209, and the PRAXIS core test $90. Some of the content tests such as art instruction cost $130.
Smith had to travel nearly 300 miles to Birmingham to take his third attempt at the test because the test wasn’t offered closer at the end of the school year. He is currently saving up enough money to take it again.
He loves his job, particularly informing his community about the importance of healthy habits.
He hopes he can continue to keep students healthy and active at school. In the Mississippi Delta, the obesity rate among children is 29%.
However, if he can’t pass each required PRAXIS test in the next year, he may be out of a job. As much as his boss in the principal’s office may want to keep him in his role, state regulations penalize schools in their annual accountability scores if they have faculty teaching without a license. Schools can also lose accreditation.
Since childhood, Skylar Ball had planned on becoming a kindergarten teacher. She followed her mother into education, even attending the same alma mater of Blue Mountain Christian University.
“Teaching elementary school is like Disney World,” she said. “Elementary students, you can do so much with them. You can make an early impact.”
However, one and a half years after graduation, she remains an assistant teacher, making several thousand less a month than she budgeted for while she saves enough money to take the PRAXIS exam for the third time.
She was two questions shy of passing on her latest attempt.
“I was so blessed to educate 20 amazing kindergartners last school year under an emergency license … I am currently a paraprofessional in an amazing district, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset about not being able to lead a classroom of my own,” Ball said.
She struggled with the Elementary Education exam, a PRAXIS test with the lowest pass rate in the state. Although she was aiming to become a kindergarten English teacher, her test covered kindergarten through sixth grade instruction as well as science, math, art, English, and social studies, among other subjects.
In an analysis conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality, the nonprofit found that Mississippi’s Elementary Education content test has a subpar job measuring whether would-be teachers have the knowledge and skills needed for a career in their classrooms.
“Does this test tell districts if they are prepared to lead an elementary school classroom in this content area? It does not,” said Hannah Putman, managing director of research at the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Universities in Mississippi play an important role in filling teacher vacancies with fresh talent. Pass rates on PRAXIS exams vary among universities with Alcorn State University posting the lowest first-time pass rates, according to the most recent data from 2022-2023 school year. Mississippi Valley State University posted that none of its students took two of the three main PRAXIS exams for the same year.
This data has a smaller sample size of teachers as a majority gained licensure under the COVID waiver.
Mississippi College posted the best results with over 93% of students passing the pedagogy section test and 100% of students passing both the content test and the Foundations of Reading test. Over 90% of University of Southern Mississippi students passed their three PRAXIS exams.
Timolin Howard, a Mississippi Valley State graduate, doesn’t regret enrolling in the school’s masters in teaching program. She believes instructors have given her the tools to succeed in the classroom.
After finding out her test scores were insufficient for licensure, she had a stroke. She also says she received mixed messaging from the state licensure board regarding cut-off scores.
“I found that, while I was well-prepared for real-world teaching, I wasn’t fully prepared for the demands of the certification exams,” she said.
She said she can manage students, build lesson plans and come up with classroom activities that help students master common core competencies. But Howard realized she had gaps in her foundational knowledge when it came to studying for the PRAXIS exams. She reached out to her school for help.
The university cancelled a workshop taught on campus, which was preparing students for the Foundations of Reading exam. It wasn’t the first a PRAXIS preparation workshop was cancelled, Howard said.
“It left me feeling overwhelmed as I tried to catch up, and it significantly impacted my confidence, academic performance and health,” she said.
This year, her Delta school district released her from her contract because she lacked the right licensure.
Mississippi Valley State University’s education department did not respond to comment despite repeated attempts to reach representatives.
For eight years, Adrienne Hudson has led the nonprofit organization RISE, which helps recruit and retain new teachers in Mississippi Delta school districts.
Hudson had already been informally mentoring and tutoring teachers who struggled with the PRAXIS exam and other technical aspects of licensure in her Clarksdale school. She founded RISE to help more.
Hudson takes pride in the start of performance-based licensure in her district. Letting teachers become certified teachers through improving test scores in state-tested subjects will help schools retain talented teachers, said Hudson of the new path to teacher certification.
“Some of the responsibilities are on the university and some are the systems that require the test to be the measuring stick for becoming a teacher,” she said. “We have students getting dean’s list, who can’t pass the test.”
More would-be teachers are going back to school later in life than ever before. Fewer teachers are entering the traditional route, which involves majoring in education as an undergraduate as opposed to the alternate route through a masters. In the 2018-2019 school year, 27% of students getting an education degree went the alternate route in 2022-2023, 45% did.
Tony Latiker, dean of Jackson State University’s school of education, saw a similar trend. He theorizes the reason so many students are going the alternative route is because of the many requirements that await undergraduates at the end of their four years. Alternative route students have fewer testing requirements to meet.
One solution he has found is to have traditional route students take exams closer to when they finish coursework that corresponds. For example, he encourages students to take the Foundations of Reading exam after they complete their early literacy courses, which are offered in some form at all Mississippi universities with an education program.
Jackson State also offers an elective that prepares students for the PRAXIS tests and other technical requirements of licensure. Professors and visiting instructors also host workshops on campus.
“We really should be questioning the exams,” Latiker told Mississippi Today. “I’m not against the exams and testing, but I’m against them being the high stakes tests they are. It should be a part of a more holistic process, incorporating district personnel and university faculty input in classrooms, assessing pre-service teachers and interns at the end of lessons, to see if they’re actually effective.”
For a while Saturday, it looked as if we might be stepping back in time — at least where Mississippi college football is concerned.
Back to 2014.
Remember?
For a while there, both Mississippi State and Ole Miss both ranked among the nation’s top three football teams. State, coached by Dan Mullen, was No. 1. Ole Miss, coached by Hugh Freeze, was No. 3. At one point, both teams were a perfect 7-0. The college football world was astonished. Actually, so were most of us Mississippians. No, it didn’t last, but wasn’t it fun while it did?
Fast forward to Saturday: Ole Miss surely did its part, earning a solid, not-as-close-as-it-sounds 24-19 victory over previously No. 4 LSU to move to 5-0. After a slow start, the Rebels dominated LSU, nearly doubling the Tigers in total offense. In one of the most amazing stats you’ll see this year, the Rebels were penalized for nearly twice as much yardage (109) as LSU was able to gain (59) running the ball.
The Rebels, previously ranked No. 13, soared to No. 4. Trinidad Chambliss should enter the far-too-soon discussions of who might win the Heisman Trophy. And it is not in any way too soon for Chambliss to enter any discussion of the most interesting story in this, or any, college football season. From Division II Ferriss State and the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference to Ole Miss and the SEC. From the D-II national championship to the FBS national championship contention. More on that later.
Meanwhile, in Starkville, Mississippi State did everything but knock off 15th ranked Tennessee. If State isn’t the most improved college football team in the nation, the Bulldogs are in the first sentence of any paragraph written on that subject. Southern Miss might be in the next sentence, and we’ll get to the Golden Eagles, too.
State led for much of the game and battled the Volunteers on even or better terms throughout. Watching the Bulldogs these days, it is hard to fathom that just a season ago they lost 10 games, nine by double digits, and defeated only one FBS team. But then, that’s the way it goes in today’s college football world in which if you have the money — and spend it wisely — you can turn over your roster and turn around your football fortunes in one offseason. State and head coach Jeff Lebby clearly spent wisely.
Same goes for Southern Miss, which spent most wisely, it seems, on Charles Huff, the head coach who last year led Marshall to the Sun Belt Championship and brought with him to Hattiesburg 21 of the players who helped him win it. Clearly, the most critical of those Marshall transfers is quarterback Braylon Braxton, who has thrown for 11 touchdowns and run for another. In Saturday night’s 42-25 pasting of Jacksonville State (which clobbered USM 44-7 a year ago), three for two scores and ran for another and did not turn the ball over.
But let’s get back to Ole Miss, which appears to have all the necessary ingredients to make a run — not only to the FBS playoffs but in the playoffs, as well. Those ingredients include:
The Ole Miss schedule, by SEC standards, is doable. The Rebels don’t have to play Alabama, Texas, Texas A&M, Missouri or Vanderbilt (yes, I just wrote that). They do play both Georgia and Oklahoma both on the road and back-to-back. South Carolina is no gimme and neither is Mississippi State for that matter. But again, in the SEC, it could be a whole lot worse.
The Rebels have a week off, before Washington State, a 59-10 loser to North Texas, visits for homecoming. Then, it’s at Georgia and at Oklahoma, back to back.
Will the bubble burst? Or will Trinidad Chambliss, the best story in college football, add to seemingly tall tale? We shall see.
With powerfully haunting eyes and an enigmatic expression, “Portrait of Frederick,” an image of an enslaved man painted circa 1840, stares out at visitors of the Mississippi Museum of Art.
A little further into the museum is Delia, a Black woman dressed in red and wearing a headscarf who bears a similarly unknowable expression. The pair of portraits are the only known pre-emancipation paintings of enslaved people in Mississippi.
Now, for the first time, they are on display together for the public to see.
“I was mesmerized by the painting,” museum visitor Staci Williams said. “The colors, the expression. His humanity seemed to jump off of the page.”
The portraits evoke questions about who Frederick and Delia were, why they were painted and what went through their minds as their faces were captured stroke by stroke for generations to see.
“We don’t know, for example, if either of these people had the choice to sit for the portrait. We don’t know if they had the choice of what they were wearing when they were painted,” said Betsy Bradley, the Laurie Hearin McRee director of the museum. “They certainly weren’t allowed to own their own portrait.”
The museum bought “Portrait of Frederick” in partnership with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The museums will pass the portrait back and forth, each displaying it for several years at a time.
Bradley said purchasing the portrait brought up complicated feelings. Until emancipation freed him, Frederick was considered property. Now, more than 150 years later, his portrait is property, bought and sold to the highest bidder.
“If it enables us to have important conversations with each other about the human cost of slavery and why it mustn’t ever happen again, then having it in a public place can be meaningful,” Bradley said.
Since the 1860s, “Portrait of Frederick” has been displayed at Longwood, an antebellum mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, that belonged to the family of his enslavers. There, Frederick’s likeness was used to whitewash history.
According to research by the Neal Auction Company, which sold the painting to the Mississippi Museum of Art, tour guides in the 1970s informed the public that Frederick had grown up alongside his enslaver Haller Nutt, and the two were best friends. They claimed Nutt freed Frederick and referred to him by the belittling moniker “Uncle Frederick.”
In reality, Frederick oversaw other slaves on the plantation. He collected data on field production, analyzed growing conditions and acted as a manager. His role was important, and he and his family may have received better living conditions as a result.
Frederick was about 70 when the Civil War ended. He took the surname Baker and became ordained. Prior to emancipation, Black people were not allowed to marry. Frederick conducted weddings for at least 69 couples after it became legal.
Less is known about Delia. Her portrait was painted between 1840 and 1849. She appears to be sewing, which leads some to believe she worked inside her enslavers’ home. Delia’s portrait was kept by the descendants of her enslavers until the Mississippi Museum of Art bought it 2019.
Both portraits are unique in that Frederick and Delia are the sole subjects of the works. Oftentimes, Black people were painted alongside white people, likely as a way of underscoring the white person’s wealth.
Frederick is dressed in regal garb — something he likely would not have worn in his everyday role on the plantation. Both are depicted in a three-quarters composition, which was used for dignified and important subjects.
Upon looking at “Portrait of Frederick,” Williams said she felt a surprising mixture of pride and sadness.
“I wonder about what he’s thinking,” Williams mused. “He doesn’t seem to give anything away.”
House Speaker Jason White says he wants to restore the initiative process to allow citizens to place issues on the ballot.
But at the same time, White apparently does not want people to vote on the important issue of whether the state should expand its so-called “school choice” initiatives, which would provide more public funds to private schools.
His positions on two of what he calls his legislative priorities — restoring the initiative process to allow citizens to vote and expanding school choice options — seem to be incompatible.
White, the Republican House Speaker from West, has established a special committee to look at restoring the ballot initiative process, which allows voters to bypass the will of lawmakers and gather signatures to place issues directly on the ballot.
The state Supreme Court ruled Mississippi’s initiative process void in 2021 because it required a designated number of signatures be gathered from five U.S. House districts to place an issue on the ballot. The Supreme Court pointed out the state has had only four districts since 2000, thus the initiative process was invalid, even though other entities in state government are based on the five congressional districts.
Lawmakers vowed to fix the problem and quickly restore the initiative process. They still haven’t, and there’s no sign of any real movement to seek an agreement.
White has said he believes restoring the ballot initiative is important. But apparently he does not want school choice to be placed on the ballot for a vote of the citizens.
The speaker also has formed a special committee to look at expanding Mississippi school choice. The committee is expected to make recommendations before the start of the 2026 legislative session in January.
Though it may seem logical to do so, the committee does not seem interested in recommending a proposal be placed on the ballot to amend the Mississippi Constitution to repeal language that states explicitly that public funds cannot be provided to private schools.
Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution reads in part: “nor shall any funds be appropriated toward the support of any sectarian school, or to any school that at the time of receiving such appropriation is not conducted as a free school.”
That language is stunningly clear and concise, especially compared to some of the convoluted legalese often found in historical governing documents.
Multiple states have language in their constitutions prohibiting public funds from being spent on religious or sectarian schools. The courts have struck down that language, saying religious schools could not be discriminated against. But only the South Carolina Constitution has language similar to Mississippi’s restricting public funds from being spent on any private school — religious or non-religious.
If White and his special committee were serious about expanding the state’s school choice programs, they would start with amending Section 208. That could be done by the Legislature approving the proposal by a two-thirds vote of each chamber and then placing it on the ballot for voters to approve or reject.
Therein is the problem for the pro-voucher, school choice crowd. They know they cannot garner that two-thirds vote in both chambers of the Mississippi Legislature, and furthermore they cannot convince the public to pass such a proposal.
If they thought they could, they already would have placed such a proposal before the Legislature.
Instead, if the Legislature ever passes a proposal expanding school choice to private schools, they are counting on the Mississippi Supreme Court ignoring the plain language of the state constitution and ruling that public funds can be spent on private schools.
Of course, another option would be for the Legislature to finally restore the initiative process in Mississippi and allow voters to place a proposal on the ballot to repeal Section 208 language banning public funds from being spent on private schools.
But that is not likely to happen even if the Legislature restores the ballot initiative, which is also not likely to happen.
Editor’s note: This essay originally published in the Admissions Project, a nonprofit that launched in October 2019 to publish stories from alumni of the 1970s-era segregation academies, founded at the time of school integration. Ellen Ann Fentress, editor of the Admissions Project, will speak Oct.1 at the History is Lunch program at the Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Building.
The flight back to Jackson that night in June 2023 was full. I was then serving as an interim pastor in the city after a lifetime away.
I had already boarded the plane and was settled into my seat when a young Black man in sports coat and tie carrying a huge trophy over his head came down the aisle. The trophy was at least four feet tall. About the time he got to my row, a middle-aged white man wearing a cord coat turned around and took the trophy and placed it in an overhead bin. They looked like student and teacher. Or maybe debater and coach. I had been on the debate team in high school and college. It had been a long time ago. But the wardrobe looked the same.
He took his seat opposite mine on the aisle. Due to plane noise on the small jet and a chatty neighbor next to him, I didn’t have a chance to speak to him until we landed and were standing in the aisle ready to deplane.
“Nice trophy.”
He won it that morning at a national debate tournament in Phoenix. He was beaming. He should be. I asked where he went to school. He said Jackson Prep. Wow.
I was part of the Jackson Prep class of 1973. I never went to a national debate tournament. No one from Prep did back then. In college I had teammates who did. But I never went. There were no Black students at Prep in my days there. The only Black people on campus then were the maintenance and custodial staff.
Through the years my mother and I talked about changes that happened in Mississippi and the world. She would often end the conversation by saying: “But look how far we have come.”
My parents were always concerned that I get a “good education.” It was a mantra for them. I think they meant they wanted my brother and me to develop critical thinking and communication skills. But it was otherwise undefined.
When I was a public Bailey Junior High School seventh grader in 1967, I assumed I’d eventually be at Jackson’s flagship Murrah High School. A Murrah Mustang.
My parents took me and my brother to Murrah football games. They had awesome teams in the late 1960s. A neighbor played for the Mustangs and went on to Georgia Tech to play, or so I was told. I attended the student musicals at Murrah. My parents were friends with the principal and his wife. We had cookouts at each other’s homes along with other friends from church. That was the way it was supposed to be. But it did not last.
Things changed in the 1969-1970 school year. I’m not sure when I first learned about Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that ruled “separate but equal” for schools was unconstitutional. There was another case, Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, decided in 1969 that ordered no further community stonewalling. But it was a long time before I knew the name of that case. While it charted my path away from public Murrah High School to private all-white Jackson Prep, it was not a foreordained path.
Talk about “good education” was everywhere in my white world. I recall my parents sharing their concern with me. They and their friends were concerned that the “new” teachers would not have the necessary skills and attributes to provide the “good education” they wanted for my brother and me. But most of these “new” teachers came from “other” schools. Schools where the students were Black. The teachers were as well.
As a ninth grader at Bailey, I did not know about these court cases. I heard my parents and other adults talk about the “Court” but did not know specifics. The talk was that schools would be closed after Christmas break (never “winter break” in those days) for three weeks while some plan was drawn up for school attendance in the spring of 1970 and into the next year. There was even a chance I would not finish the year at Bailey. But I did.
But the high school arrangement would be different. Murrah was paired with Brinkley High School, one of the all-Black high schools in the Jackson Public Schools. On the street where I lived, we said there were five high schools: Murrah, Central, Provine, Wingfield and Callaway. Those were the historically white ones. We didn’t count the “others.” Didn’t compete against them. Didn’t know anyone who went to them. Couldn’t have gotten to them by ourselves. Didn’t know the names of these schools. So they did not exist in our little bubble of the world.
But they did exist. Brinkley, Jim Hill and Lanier, schools created for the purpose of segregating Black students, all existed. There were real students who attended, real teachers who taught, real parents concerned about their children’s “good education.”
I know that growing up my parents taught me the importance of respecting individuals for who and what they were. My father made a medical mission trip to the Eku Hospital in Nigeria in 1968 during the civil war there. My mother was deeply involved in the Women’s Missionary Union at Woodland Hills Baptist Church. They received and entertained missionaries from around the world. It was always understood that racial epithets, slurs and characterizations were not accepted in our home.
But one evening a group of their church friends came over. A comedian/evangelist had recently spoken at church and sold copies of his LP album: Laughin’ With ‘Em. There was a second album too. My parents bought them. After dinner the guests gathered around the new Fischer stereo console and played the albums. The comedian spoke in dialect. The punch line of each yarn made fun of the Black folk in each story. Just like Amos N’ Andy. Everyone in the room laughed. I was listening from the hallway. No doubt I laughed, too. This form of racism was in the air we breathed and the water we drank on my street in the “Closed Society.”
My parents were “good people” and respected “all” people. But not accepting that a teacher was capable of providing a “good education” to me or my brother because that teacher was Black was racism. It still is.
The search for a “good education” took me afield from Mississippi. My parents did not want to give in to the private school bonanza that spread like wildfire in 1970. My mother stopped us from visiting her brother and his family in the early 1960s. She was disturbed by the racist reading material from the John Birch Society that she found everywhere at their house. But they were not prepared in any way for the tidal wave of change that broke in the wake of the Alexander v. Holmes decision. Good intentions and family disagreements take on a different meaning in the eye of a hurricane landmark court case.
Together we found the Darlington School for Boys in Rome, Georgia, where I attended 10th grade as a boarding student. Isn’t it ironic that to avoid going to a segregation academy, I chose to go to an all-white school almost 400 miles away from home?
There were a number of boys from Mississippi whom I met that year. I don’t recall talking about why we were there, though I am sure we did. And I would hazard a guess that it would revolve around “good education.” Of course. There were no Black students at Darlington that year. Irony abounds.
Once I went to the hallway bathroom eager to relieve myself. Standing at the urinal, I looked down on a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. I just left it there. I knew this racist act was wrong. But I lacked the courage to remove it. And I knew the Black custodian could be counted on to clean it up.
Most of my psychic energy during 10th grade at Darlington was used to figure out how to return “home.” Would I attend Murrah as I had always planned? Another option presented itself: Jackson Prep had emerged from the primal slough of the segregation academies. Or at least that’s what those in prosperous, professional northeast Jackson told itself. The rationale was that this school would be different from an academy. A couple of founders were world renowned physicians on the University of Mississippi medical school faculty. This certainly impressed my father and mother. And me as well.
Many prominent businesspeople and professionals had organized the school. As I recall, each student family purchased “stock” which provided capital for the school. On top of that, tuition was paid for each student. As if to emphasize the distinction, the name of Prep did not include “academy.” It was as if the organizers were trying to create distance between Prep and the reality of the time.
“People” said that Jackson needed a “real” option that was a “college preparatory school.” And Jackson Prep was meant to deliver that. I believed it. At least, I wanted to believe it.
But somehow it rang hollow. There was a gathering of student leaders from around Jackson at the Mississippi Fairgrounds my senior year. Public and private schools sent groups. Another Prep student made a speech that attempted to demonstrate that students, regardless of the school attended, had more similarities than differences. I was moved by his persuasiveness. But his argument was empty rhetoric.
The exodus to private schools I was part of had been prompted by fear of the “other.” The eloquent oratory of a classmate could not stave off the trauma we all were living with. That we all continue to live with.
Many of the “best” faculty from Murrah moved to Prep. The English and drama teacher I had in 11th and 12th grade was one of them. The football coach and most of the white players came to Prep. There was a sense that Prep was a continuation of pre-integration Murrah. I don’t recall talking about the why’s or how’s of that happening. It just was.
I was glad to be back “home.” There were many students who would have been my classmates at Murrah had we not opted out. Did we talk about this obvious fact? I don’t remember if we did. But I do remember driving by Murrah often as it was on the way to my grandmother’s apartment in Belhaven. The question of what had happened hung in the air. Unspoken. But very real.
When I look back, I see how careful and intentional a lot of our silences were. We Prep transplants wanted to believe we were a cut above academy “rednecks.” In our DNA, though, Prep was as white and as new as the other estimated four thousand white-flight private schools that popped up in the South at the time of integration.
I joined the debate team and participated in dramatic productions; signed up for the Key Club; found a group who played the board game Risk; went to most football games; had my first rum and coke. I wanted to think of myself as an “academic.” Actually, I was a pseudo-intellectual. Or maybe, I was just an awkward teenage boy in a shifting white world.
All of our parents were middle and upper class. I don’t know what the “stock” buy-in was, nor the amount of tuition, but the costs were considerable. I knew the cost kept some from attending. I heard somewhere that maybe, one day, there would be a Black student at Prep. Maybe. One day. When a Black student had the potential to be a star athlete or win a national debate tournament was found. Then.
There was something Prep offered that Murrah could not. Murrah drew from a set city attendance zone. As a private school, Prep took in white students from beyond northeast Jackson and even outlying towns. The sectional divisions of north, south and west Jackson were quite real. Even among the white population, there was economic and class messaging for each section. In more recent years, a couple of my non-north Jackson classmates told me how awkward they felt due to the weight of class and Jackson social strata. But all of us were white.
My journey took me to college in Alabama before returning to Ole Miss for grad school. I don’t know when, or even if, I decided I’d become a Mississippi ex-pat. It just happened. There was an invitation to enroll in an Auburn Ph.D. program, a job in North Carolina and then seminary in Kentucky.
I honed an interest in church history, especially how what is said correlates with what is actually done. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, that’s what I’m examining in my own school history here. That focus also led to my book, Religion & Race: Southern Presbyterians 1946-1983 and some published articles on religion, race and faith.
Along the way my father retired. My parents moved to North Carolina. I found my way back to North Carolina and then to Georgia, where I’ve resided longer than I lived in Mississippi. Yet it is Mississippi, not Georgia, that has always been on my mind.
I wondered if there was a “call” for me to serve as a pastor in Mississippi. There were some conversations and interviews when our sons were school age. No offers were made. Even so the topic my wife and I often turned to in those times was how to provide our children with a “good education.”
As it happens, I did return to Jackson for a season. I served as the interim pastor of Fondren Presbyterian Church for 18 months. So much had changed. There I found white folk who had stood firm for public schools back in that day. They seem to have found the “good education” my parents sought.
As my mother would say: “Look how far we have come.”
I would respond: “And look how far we have to go.”
The Rev. Joel L. Alvis Jr., a Jackson native, is a retired Presbyterian PC(USA) minister and author. He lives in Dunwoody, Georgia. He has served in a variety of pastoral roles and denominational leadership positions.
Police officer Robert Williams puts on a pair of highlighter blue gloves before reaching for a chair, its leather ripped and peeling, discarded in the woods of McRaven Road in west Jackson.
Williams is one of two members of the Jackson Police Department’s neighborhood enhancement team, or NET. Formed in early 2024, the team leads efforts to clean up illegal dump sites across the city.
The duo performs daily patrols around Jackson, surveying common locations where people dump their trash, such as Shaw Road or Greenhill Place in southwest Jackson. Williams said in recent months, he’s noticed that a larger number of people who have been charged with dumping are traveling from outside of the city to dump sites in Jackson. They choose areas that are low-traffic without visible streetlights or cameras.
“It’s secluded,” Williams said, as he steered one of the team’s patrol vehicles down a road overgrown with weeds. “This is the perfect spot for them to come and take three to five minutes, dump some stuff and keep it rolling.”
On Aug. 12, the Jackson City Council unanimously approved an ordinance that created additional penalties for illegal dumping, including stiffer jail time, a minimum of 32 days, and the immediate seizure of the vehicle used for dumping.
“This is not just about punishing offenders; it’s about protecting our people, our neighborhoods and our pride. We want a Jackson that’s cleaner, brighter, and safer, and today’s vote is a step toward that vision,” Ward 4 councilman and council president Brian Grizzell said in a statement after the meeting.
Officer Gloria Blue, the other half of NET, said they collect a wide range of debris from the streets, such as mattresses, bookshelves, carpets and paint materials.
“Anything you can renovate, anything you can take out of a house, they dump,” Blue said.
In recent months, Blue said she’s seen a decrease in large items, such as furniture, they’ve had to pick up. Hinds County supervisors and the police department have placed cameras on streets in south and west Jackson, such as Glen Erin Street or Lindbergh Drive, deterring would-be offenders from dumping.
“It has really slowed down. Now, we’ll probably have one or two couches every couple weeks, but it used to be every single day,” Blue said.
One initiative JPD has implemented is the Clean Sweep Program, allowing people who are caught dumping the opportunity to clean up the mess they made and reduce their fines. Many people who receive fines aren’t able to pay them, Williams said. One of the JPD neighborhood enhancement team’s main goals is to prosecute people who are guilty of illegal dumping.
“We investigate to make arrests,” Williams said. “We don’t just do clean-up. We investigate.”
NET also works in collaboration with the city of Jackson to enforce ordinances surrounding dumping and eyesores in the community, such as hoards of items in a yard or rubber tires piled high.
“We have to call Solid Waste and code enforcement for anything that we can’t get that’s on private property,” Blue said.
She said that while NET does respond to tips from concerned residents, many of the sites they clear are from their dedicated surveillance of the city.
“Every now and then, we may get a call about something new,” Blue said. “But it’s an everyday cycle.”
For more information or to report an illegal dump site, call constituent services at 601-960-1111.
Jackson resident Britanny Denson says that in 2014, “I was left for dead among some other people.”
Now in long-term recovery, Denson on Thursday helped distribute naloxone, a life-saving medication that reverses opioid overdoses. She thinks that if the people she was around back then had had some doses available, they could’ve brought her breathing back.
“They might have rather used this than immorally just leaving me like I was at the time,” she said.
On Thursday, volunteers across Mississippi distributed free boxes of naloxone during Save a Life Day in an effort to combat stigma.
Denson is the operations coordinator for Grace House, a recovery residence for women in Hinds County. She is also a peer navigator for Mississippi Harm Reduction Initiative and one of the Hinds County organizers for Save a Life Day. She and a crew of volunteers handed out naloxone, fentanyl testing strips, free pizza and other resources outside of St Luke’s United Methodist Church in Jackson.
One volunteer was Glen Watt, who is in recovery and originally from Crystal Springs. He offered to help because he wanted to give back to the community.
“It’s an ongoing epidemic. It’s not just something you sweep under the rug,” he said.
From his experience, many people in Mississippi don’t know about naloxone. He said he used to be in that group. Watt said someone in his family still struggles with addiction, and he hoped to take some naloxone to them.
In Rankin County, Pearl resident Emilee Shell planned to distribute naloxone, drug test strips and more.
Shell is the Save a Life Day county organizer for Rankin County, programs director for Mississippi Impact Coalition and director of Grace House. She is in long-term recovery. She used to work at a treatment center and said she has lost several loved ones to overdoses.
Though she was not participating on behalf of the Mississippi Impact Coalition, she said Save a Life Day aligns with her organization’s mission.
“Oftentimes, our communities are left without support or resources. So carrying naloxone and offering harm reduction, it’s not just public health,” she said. “We believe it’s public love.”
Originating in West Virginia, Save a Life Day is a national effort created by community organization SOAR WV. In Mississippi, an estimated 30 volunteers across 10 counties intended to distribute at least 500 kits.
Jason McCarty is the other county organizer for Hinds County, as well as a state co-coordinator with Denson. McCarty is the program development strategist for United Way of the Capital Area and for years has been advocating for those impacted by the opioid crisis. He said he sees naloxone as a tool for saving lives and helping people recover from addiction.
“We cannot get people into treatment and into a recovery life if they are dead,” he said.
Distributing naloxone kits is a popular form of harm reduction, a set of strategies and practices aimed at reducing harm to those who abuse drugs. It does not treat drug addiction as a moral failing and seeks to reduce stigma, increase education, save lives and support communities.
Naloxone, or narcan, temporarily reverses an opioid overdose. The drug wears off after 30 to 90 minutes, so someone who receives a dose needs to be monitored and get immediate medical attention. It is harmless to people who aren’t on opioids.
The Mississippi State Department of Health’s website has more information on how to help someone who is overdosing and how to order naloxone.
In 2024, 68% of all suspected overdose deaths in Mississippi were opioid-related. That was down from about 77% in 2023. More than 4,600 non-fatal overdoses have occurred in Mississippi in the first six months of 2025, according to the state health department.
Emergency medical service members across Mississippi administered naloxone 2,655 times in 2024. In Hinds County, it was 257, one of the highest numbers in the state. Rankin County had 113.
At Tuesday’s Jackson City Council meeting, Mayor John Horhn declared Thursday as Save a Life Day in the city. The council also voted to enter an agreement between the city and United Way of the Capital Area to place and maintain a “Leave Behind” narcan box inside the Warren Hood Building near City Hall. It won’t be paid for with the city’s opioid settlement money.
This proclamation came a day after Horhn said Jackson planned to use future opioid settlement funds for violence prevention. He said it was possible some of the money could go toward preventing drug deaths.
A Mississippi Today investigation found that Jackson spent $117,734 of the $546,664 it received on moving offices, installing fiber optic cables and a new shelving system.
At the council meeting, McCarty thanked the mayor and council members for their help, but implored the city to spend opioid settlement funds on overdose prevention. He said 10,000 Mississippians have died because of opioids since 1999.
“This opioid settlement money was for them,” he told the council members. “Please, we need to spend this money on opioid prevention, and the United Way of the Capital Area is here to help you do that.”
Horhn did not directly address the settlement funds at that meeting, but did “urge all citizens to participate in activities that support overdose prevention, increase awareness and promote the use of naloxone to save lives.”
Save a Life Day volunteers also faced pushback from those who see distributing naloxone as enabling drug addiction.
Shell said an employee at Pearl City Hall who handles special event permits was “giving me a hard time.”
“She disclosed that she was not a fan of the idea or narcan distribution. She questioned where I got the narcan and if it was legitimately from a pharmacy,” Shell said. “She acted as if I was trying to distribute drugs to the community and completely disregarded the fact that it is a harm reduction tool to actually save lives.”
Shell also said that when she called Pearl Police Chief Nick McLendon to ask about permits, he said that while he supported her efforts, the police department would not be partnering with her because he didn’t want the community to think they were supporting illegal drug use.
McCarty said he requested a meeting with Pearl’s mayor and police chief to do stigma education for the mayor’s staff.
Mississippi Today reached out to McLendon, the employee in question and the Pearl’s mayor’s office. Neither the employee nor the mayor’s office responded in time for publication.
The police chief confirmed his response.
“Our police department has it, our firemen have it. We use it to save lives, but at the same time I’m not going to go publicly encourage illicit drug use,” McLendon said. He said he did not know of any meeting that was requested with him and the mayor.
Denson said that she heard from other volunteers who got pushback from people in authority.
“I know that there have been a few times where we have tried to look for locations, not in Jackson specifically, but … just the feedback from them, saying a representative of their town is saying that they don’t want to draw that image to them,” Denson said.
Shell compared the stigma that comes with addiction to a grey cloud hanging overhead.
“Whether you’re in recovery or not, people only want to remember what you used to be and not what you’re trying to do today,” Shell said.
Despite the challenges, Denson said she is committed to helping others.
“I don’t fault anybody for not knowing it, but I think there’s a proper time and place for everything, and I’m just honored to be the one to be able to educate somebody or share my experience,” said Denson.
“I don’t want this to sound negative, but I think narcan should be like that change that is left in your cupholder,” she said. “You never know when you need it.”
The Mississippi Department of Human Services is seeking input from older Mississippi residents and their communities to guide the next four years of state services for aging people.
Older adults, their families and caregivers can complete a survey online or participate in a virtual public listening session to share suggestions.
“The community’s input is critical as we develop the next four years of services for Mississippi’s older adults,” KenYada Blake-Washington, director of the MDHS Division of Aging & Adult Services, said in a press release. “We want to hear from the community about what matters most to them and their families.”
The State Plan on Aging is the “blueprint” for the division, which provides services to people 60 and older, Blake-Washington told Mississippi Today. The agency crafts a new plan every four years.
The plan aims to improve services for older Mississippians and identify barriers that prevent them from accessing those services.
“It’s a call to action, improvement, resource alignment and allocation,” Blake-Washington said.
The Aging and Adult Services division works with 10 area agencies on aging on a range of services, including nutrition and meal programs, transportation, case management, legal assistance and caregiver support.
The state plan will fuse input from the area agencies on aging, federal requirements, state-level goals and input from Mississippians.
The state’s population is swiftly aging. Between 2010 and 2020, Mississippi saw a 34% increase in people 65 and older.
Older adults, their families and caregivers can complete an online survey to provide suggestions. The survey’s deadline is Oct. 30.
The Division of Aging and Adult Services will hold three virtual public listening sessions for input. The first two are next week: 4-5:30 p.m. Monday and 9-10:30 a.m. Wednesday. The third session is 10-11:30 a.m. Oct. 14.
Lawmakers selected to study school choice proposals in Mississippi made good Thursday on their promise to hear from both sides of the debate.
What resulted was a dizzying day of conflicting arguments, punctuated by a lunch break that divided the differences in opinion.
In the morning, a school superintendent from the Gulf Coast and an education policy expert argued against expanding such programs in Mississippi, citing education’s worth as a public good.
But the afternoon speakers — a school choice advocate from Florida and an education researcher — instead referred to the education system as a business and centered their argument around the superiority of private schools.
It was the second meeting of the House Education Freedom select committee, which was created by Republican House Speaker Jason White to weigh pros and cons of a robust school choice program. So far, neither of the select committee’s meetings has been streamed online.
“Education freedom,” the moniker that Republicans prefer to describe school choice ideas, refers to a myriad of policies that either disburse money to families to pay for education services, including private school tuition, or allow families to move their children to different schools, regardless of type or location. The issue has gained traction under the Trump administration, and White and other state leaders have repeatedly indicated their support for the issue, which is expected to headline the legislative session that starts in January.
Kim Wiley, education policy analyst at the Mississippi Center for Justice, kicked off the meeting with a warning.
Over the course of an hour, she reminded legislators of the academic gains that have landed the state in a national spotlight and cautioned against turning the “Mississippi Miracle” into a “Mississippi Mistake.”
Around 55,000 students in Mississippi attend private schools, while another 22,000 are homeschooled, she said. One of the options state leaders are exploring — education savings accounts or ESAs — would award families vouchers in the amount of their state-funded student allocation to spend on their education however they see fit. Wiley said it could potentially bankrupt the state, costing upward of $500 million.
In other states, voucher programs have been grossly underestimated. Wiley used Arizona as an example, which is common among school choice opponents. The state expanded the program quickly and without many guardrails, resulting in huge, unexpected costs. Wiley said if something similar is passed in Mississippi, it would come at the detriment of funding to other important issues such as public safety, health care and rural schools.
With federal pandemic relief funding ending and the elimination of the state income tax, Wiley said expanding school choice is a brewing “fiscal storm.”
She offered recommendations that — if school choice were to be expanded — she said would “lessen the harmful impact,” including establishing income limits for eligibility and requiring that voucher applicants have previously attended a public school.
Wiley was grilled by Republican representatives who asked her for examples of neighboring states where expanding school choice was “disastrous,” as she put it. While it’s true that Mississippi is surrounded by states with some version of universal school choice, many of those programs are in their first year, so it’s hard to say what the effects have been.
Rep. Jansen Owen, a Republican from Poplarville who co-chairs the select committee, told Wiley, “We’re not doing what Arizona did. Let’s get that out of the way.”
Rep. Gregory Holloway, a Democrat from Hazlehurst, asked Wiley who was behind the recent school choice push.
“Defunding public schools has become a priority for some,” she responded. “I think that there are those private interests who realize this is a cash cow. This is a way that they can sort of game the system.”
Owen said later Thursday that he was disturbed by her assertion.
Biloxi School District Superintendent Marcus Boudreaux followed Wiley with a passionate argument against expanding school choice and one that firmly centered schools as the bedrock of communities.
His presentation against expanding school choice policies ran the gamut, arguing they would worsen the teacher shortage and lead to school closures.
He said there was no demand for the policy in his community, where the public district is consistently top-rated. Boudreaux said expanding school choice would create two separate publicly-funded education systems, one without the same level of accountability as the other.
Boudreaux suggested he was supportive of an open enrollment program that would allow students to transfer between public school districts. But he acknowledged that letting students leave schools where they live would worsen the financial and academic disparities between districts, creating “have” districts and “have nots” as money follows students.
“I honestly see it as a return to segregation,” he said. “Not necessarily racial segregation — economic segregation.”
When Rep. Trey Lamar, a powerful Republican lawmaker from Senatobia, asked Boudreaux what he would say to children in Greenwood who have limited options outside of their struggling school district, unlike in Biloxi, Boudreaux’s response was succinct.
“I don’t say it to the children,” he said. “I say it to their state. It’s time to invest in public education everywhere.”
Boudreaux said earlier in his presentation: “All Mississippi children deserve the best.”
After a lunch break, legislators heard from Erika Donalds, a school choice activist and wife of Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds.
She described her sons’ different experiences in public school, which eventually led her to enrolling one in a private school despite struggling to pay his tuition. Donalds later helped found a network of charter schools and campaigned her way onto the local school board, which is where she realized the public school system wasn’t responsive to parents, she said.
Interrupted by frequent applause from supporters, Donalds described classrooms where students were spending the majority of their days being taught by teachers whose values didn’t align with those of the students’ families. She cited polls from pro-school choice organizations that showed parental support for the policy, and added that education was the only “industry” that allowed monopolies in the form of the public school system.
Donalds also had a warning for lawmakers: If school choice isn’t expanded, companies boasting innovative education programs and technologies would be less inclined to come to Mississippi.
“Put these decisions in the hands of parents,” she said. “Give them the education freedom that they deserve, and watch the economy of education in Mississippi flourish.”
House Education Committee Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville, asked Donalds if expanding school choice would harm school districts — a fear of parents who have reached out to him. She responded that high-performing, wealthy districts tend to “beef up,” while less-resourced districts are the ones that are hurt.
Responding to Wiley’s earlier claim, Donalds said she didn’t know anyone — charter school founders, private school leaders or advocacy group staffers — that was “in it for the money.”
“Running schools is a difficult way to do that,” Donalds said, despite describing herself as an “education entrepreneur.” It was reported this summer by a news outlet, the Florida Bulldog, that Donalds’ education companies have garnered millions in charter school contracts.
Donalds emphasized to leaders that their decision to expand school choice would be supported by President Donald Trump, echoing a sentiment repeatedly shared by federal education leaders at the first Education Freedom select committee meeting in August.
Thursday’s meeting concluded with Patrick Wolf, a researcher who serves as the Endowed Chair in School Choice in the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform. He presented a litany of studies — many authored himself — that connected enrollment in school choice programs with higher rates of high school and college diplomas.
It’s not clear if or when the House committee will meet again.