Shuwaski Young, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, announced on Sunday that he intends to withdraw his candidacy from the general election.
Young said he recently suffered a “hypertensive crisis,” which left him with “immediate and continuous” health challenges in the middle of the campaign. He said he initially intended to push past the medical episode and continue his campaign, but he can “no longer take this risk,” according to a statement.
“I am deeply grateful for the outpouring of statewide support I have received throughout this campaign,” Young said.
Incumbent Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson for now will be the only candidate on the ballot in November. State law, however, allows the Democratic Party to substitute another candidate to fill Young’s potential vacancy.
To withdraw his name from the ballot, state law requires Young to submit an affidavit to the State Board of Election Commissioners, a three-member group comprised of the governor, attorney general and secretary state.
The affidavit must spell out a “legitimate nonpolitical reason” for withdrawing his candidacy. If the board accepts the affidavit, they will remove his name from the ballot. The state Democratic Party’s Executive Committee can then put forward a new candidate for the vacancy.
Young worked in the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office under former Secretaries Eric Clark and Delbert Hosemann, where he was responsible for training local election commissioners and working with the state’s public lands.
At a January press conference on the front steps of the Mississippi Capitol, Young said he hoped to lead the agency he once worked for by campaigning for early voting laws and advocating for less restrictive procedures in state elections.
Mississippi’s secretary of state is responsible for administering elections, providing training to local election commissioners, implementing business regulations and keeping records of charities in the state.
Before campaigning for statewide office, Young, a native of Neshoba County, unsuccessfully campaigned for Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District against incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Guest.
In this edition of Mississippi Stories, editor-at-large Marshall Ramsey sits down with the new head of the Two Mississippi Museums, Michael Morris. Morris is a Jackson native and worked with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for seven years. Morris talks about the two museums, some of the plans for their future and how important openly and honestly telling Mississippi’s story is.
Katherine G. Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Credit: Wikipedia
Katherine G. Johnson, a pioneer in space missions, was born in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. She began college at age 15 and became the first Black woman to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown in 1938.
Johnson became a “human computer” for NASA, with work so accurate that when NASA switched to computers, they would have her check the computer’s calculations for errors. She calculated the trajectories for space flights, including the first American in space, Alan Shepard, John Glenn’s orbit of earth, the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and the Apollo 13’s safe return to earth. In fact, Glenn was so concerned about the accuracy of these new computers that he made sure Johnson checked all of the math.
In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Taraji P. Henson portrayed her in the 2016 film, “Hidden Figures”, which told the story of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who worked as “human computers.”
Just months before she died in 2020, NASA dedicated a West Virginia facility in her honor, and Northrop Grumman named its cargo spacecraft “S.S. Katherine Johnson” to recognize her critical contributions to spaceflight. The University of the District of Columbia has created The Katherine G. Johnson Math Teacher Training Institute, which is partnering with the Southern Initiative Algebra Project to implement programs for teachers who teach STEM-related courses in the public schools there.
The governing board of Mississippi’s public universities has formed a task force to study accessibility for possibly the first time since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed 33 years ago.
The initiative by the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees comes at a key moment for disability in higher education. Even before the pandemic, college students have been disclosing disabilities at increasing rates, specifically mental disorders such as depression or post-trauma stress disorder, which are covered by the ADA.
And the U.S. Department of Education is expected to drop new rules this month for a key law that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating against students with disabilities.
It’s also an effort of personal significance for Jeanne Luckey, an IHL trustee from Ocean Springs appointed by Phil Bryant in 2018. Luckey has been in a wheelchair since she was in a car accident 18 years ago.
A ramp provides wheelchair access to the H.P. Jacobs Administration Tower on the campus of Jackson State University. Credit: William H. Kelly, III/Courtesy of JSU
Luckey said that last year she found an article ranking the country’s colleges with the best programs for students with disabilities. She wanted to see Mississippi universities on that list.
“I pay attention to those things maybe a little bit more than everybody else does,” she said. “You only pay attention to things when you need them sometimes.”
The 19-person task force comprising representatives from each campus and the Department of Finance and Administration plans to produce a report with recommendations for enhancing accessibility services across the university system by June 2024.
At the top of the agenda, said Alla Jeanae Frank, an IHL assistant commissioner of operations and a co-chair of the task force, is data gathering.
“That’s the main goal,” Frank said.
There is a dearth of data on the number of enrolled students with disabilities, the accommodations they receive, and the rate at which they graduate in Mississippi.
“This is going to be a fact-finding process for us,” said Marcus Thompson, IHL’s deputy commissioner.
That information is available from each university’s disability services office, but each office tracks this data differently, according to records Mississippi Today obtained earlier this year. And it is not reported to IHL, which couldn’t provide the total number of students with disabilities in the university system or their graduation rates.
But that is far from unusual, according to a national expert.
Most colleges across the country do not collect detailed information on students with disabilities because the federal government doesn’t require it, unlike other demographic information such as race or gender, said L. Scott Lissner, the ADA coordinator and 504 compliance officer at Ohio State University and the past president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, a national organization.
Lissner said he’d urge the IHL taskforce to recommend ways the system can collect better data on students with disabilities for two reasons. It shows how much tuition dollars come from students with disabilities, which in turn helps universities budget for accommodations like real-time interpreters versus real-time captioning.
Data collection also makes it easier to identify if accommodations are working to help students with disabilities graduate at similar rates to able-bodied students.
Jackson State University provides assistance canes to students who are blind or visually impaired. Credit: Charles A. Smith/Courtesy of JSU
“The bottom line on whether or not we’ve been nondiscriminatory, equitable and inclusive would be similar graduation rates,” Lissner said. “If those rates are differential, then presumably there’s a flaw in the system some place.”
Also at the top of the task force’s list is improving staffing at disability service offices across the campuses. Some offices have as little as two staff members, Frank said, which can impact response times. Oftentimes, those offices have services available, but students aren’t aware.
“Finances always come up,” she said. “How much do we put into actual funding for our institutions to be equitable?”
The task force will also be looking at possible infrastructure improvements. Frank said that as more students disclose disabilities and receive accommodations such as extended test-taking time, universities are running out of classroom space.
Another issue is ensuring campuses are suited to emotional support animals.
“You’ll hear everybody screaming right now about ESAs,” she said. “You have to have accommodations for the animals, too.”
State funding, which has historically been a barrier to infrastructure projects for the public universities, may be less of an issue this year, as IHL has received more legislative support for real estate projects in recent years.
Thompson said he believes that generally Mississippi universities have successfully used institutional funding to ensure buildings are in compliance with the ADA.
“They’ve done a pretty good job over the last 10 years really working to make enhancements,” he said. “There’s been a lot of talk with curb cuts.”
Luckey agreed. She said she has visited most of IHL’s campuses and has generally found them to be accessible. But she hopes the task force will be able to bring more uniformity to the university system.
The taskforce, Luckett said, is a positive, not punitive, effort.
“It’s not an effort to say you’re doing this wrong or you’ve been slacking on this,” she said. “It’s an effort for us to share ideas and make sure everybody can do it the best way they can.”
The office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch is asking the full U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn an earlier decision that Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of felonies is unconstitutional.
In a surprise decision, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals ruled earlier this month that Mississippi provisions preventing some people convicted of felonies from voting is cruel and unusual punishment.
Now Fitch, through a motion filed by Justin Matheny, an attorney in her office, is appealing to the entire 5th Circuit, which could result in consideration by as many as 20 judges.
Matheny argues in the motion that the felony ban on voting incorporated in the Mississippi Constitution “is a nonpunitive voting regulation … Even if disenfranchisement were a punishment, it is not cruel and unusual.”
Fitch’s court filing points out that in past rulings the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the authority of states to permanently disenfranchise people convicted of felonies.
The ruling by the three-judge panel finding Mississippi’s felony voting ban unconstitutional was a 2-1 decision. While there is court precedent allowing lifetime voting bans, the majority opinion of the three-judge panel said the nation is evolving on the issue just as it did on allowing minors to be executed, which is now prohibited.
The majority said Mississippi is among about 10 states still imposing a lifetime ban.
The majority said, “By severing former offenders from the body politic forever, Section 241 (the lifetime ban provision of the state Constitution) ensures that they will never be fully rehabilitated, continues to punish them beyond the terms their culpability requires and serves no protective function to society. It is thus a cruel and unusual punishment.”
The case eventually could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. If so, it would be the second case dealing with felony suffrage in Mississippi to go before the Supreme court this year.
In June the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear another case seeking to find Mississippi’s lifetime felony voting ban unconstitutional. That case sought to have the felony voting ban declared unconstitutional because it was originally adopted as part of the 1890 Constitution in an attempt to prevent Black Mississippians from voting.
The framers at the time admitted they placed the lifetime ban in the Mississippi Constitution as a tool to keep African Americans from voting. Those crimes placed in the constitution where conviction costs a person the right to vote are bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy and burglary.
Under the original language of the constitution, a person could be convicted of cattle rustling and lose the right to vote, but those convicted of murder or rape would still be able to vote — even while incarcerated. Murder and rape now also are exclusionary.
In the 5th Circuit ruling, the majority pointed out that the state constitution granted the Legislature the authority to restore voting rights, presumably, to ensure that white Mississippians were not permanently banned from voting. In modern times, the Legislature usually restores voting rights to a handful (usually no more than five people) each session.
The lawsuit that was addressed by the three-judge panel was filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and others on behalf of Mississippians who have lost their voting rights.
Oak Grove coach Drew Causey congratulates his Warriors on their 49-0 victory. Credit: Tyler Cleveland
HATTIESBURG — Back in my earliest days of sports writing, back in the dark ages, Oak Grove was a sleepy little country school, a few miles from Hattiesburg just across the Lamar County line.
The Warriors, as they were called then and now, played in the smallest classification of MHSAA football. To be nice, they were not particularly proficient at the sport. Indeed, they were often the other team’s homecoming opponent. Petal, Purvis, Bassfield and Collins were the Pine Belt’s small-town high school football powers. Oak Grove? The Hattiesburg American newspaper, for which I worked, rarely even sent a staff reporter to cover their games. We had an Oak Grove correspondent, who brought in his stories written in long-hand. He often struggled to make 35-0 defeats sound like valiant efforts.
Rick Cleveland
That was then. This is now: The 2023 Oak Grove Warriors opened their season Thursday night with a resounding 49-0 victory over perennial power Wayne County. The drubbing was worse than it sounds. Oak Grove, with several big-time college prospects on display, led 42-0 at halftime and rested starters in the second half, which was played with a running clock.
This is also now: Kickoff was postponed one hour, back to 8 p.m., because of the blasphemous heat wave we are experiencing. Even so, the temperature was a humid 93 at kickoff and 84 at game’s end. There were mandatory water breaks midway through each quarter. The water boys were especially busy. Didn’t seem to bother the Warriors – or the visiting Wayne County War Eagles for that matter. I noticed one player limp off the field with cramps. Otherwise, the game was played without heat-related incident, a credit to the conditioning of both squads.
So much about high school football has changed over the decades. The players are so much larger and yet faster. The backs now are bigger than the linemen then. They throw the ball much more often. They play on plastic, not grass. The Oak Grove football stadium is double-decked on the home side. And, of course, the teams – and the stadiums – are integrated.
The westward migration of Hattiesburg into Lamar County has made Oak Grove into one of the state’s largest public schools. The Warriors play in the MHSAA’s new and largest Class 7A. Clearly, they are a force to be reckoned with, and we can measure just how good they are next Friday night when they play at Alabama powerhouse Hoover in Birmingham.
Those who haven’t followed the Oak Grove story over the last half century might ask: How did such a tiny country school become such a large school powerhouse? The migration is part of it. Mississippi Coaches Hall of Famer Nevil Barr is another. Barr, who played football at Purvis and then Southern Miss, coached at Sumrall and then Petal before taking the Oak Grove job in 2001. He instituted the spread offense back when few other high school teams were running it. His teams threw the ball over the field. All that passing and scoring coincided with Hattiesburg’s westward migration. Victories and championships followed.
Drew Causey, who played for Barr at Petal and then served him first as a line coach and then as offensive coordinator at Oak Grove, now heads the Oak Grove football juggernaut. Again, he could have named the score Thursday night against a Wayne County teams that annually is among the state’s Class 5A powers. My guess is – and I can’t confirm it – the 49-0 defeat is the most lopsided since Wayne County schools consolidated in 1988. The War Eagles aren’t nearly as bad as Oak Grove made them look Thursday night. (Last season, Oak Grove needed a last-second field goal to beat Wayne County.)
“We’ve got a really good football team, we’re excited,” Causey said. “And Wayne County’s a whole lot better than they looked tonight. They had five turnovers, we didn’t have any. They’ll win some games.”
Oak Grove has stamped itself as one of the favorites to win the first Mississippi Class 7A championship. The Warriors are loaded. Start with senior quarterback A.J. Maddox, who has committed to Texas A&M and plans to enroll there in January. Tall and muscular, he is the step-grandson of Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Reggie Collier and has a Collier-like throwing arm. His 39-yard dart of a touchdown throw to fellow senior Damari Jefferson began the onslaught. With a lineman in his face, Maddox threw perfectly into tight coverage, a big-time throw.
A.J.’s brother, junior Andrew Maddox, already a four-star recruit, teams with Southern Miss commit Caleb Moore to give the Warriors a fearsome interior defensive line that is as dominant as you will see in high school football. They could have qualified for homestead exemption in the War Eagles’ backfield.
There is speed everywhere you look on the Oak Grove team, especially at the offensive skill positions and in the defensive secondary. As always, Causey’s team is fundamentally as sound as can be.
On top of all else, senior Oak Grove kicking specialist Luke Stewart was stupendous with both placekicks and punts. He was seven-for-seven on extra points, eight-for-eight on touchbacks on kickoffs and his breathtaking punts threatened to bring badly needed rain. Stewart will be kicking for somebody at the next level.
It was all so impressive, especially for an observer who remembers the Oak Grove of old.
The number of COVID-19-like illness visits has been on the rise since June. August is the first time the number has gone over 1,000 since March, and it hasn’t been this high since late January.
While the state Health Department no longer reports daily coronavirus cases, the agency uses syndromic surveillance, or the number of COVID-19-like illness visits at hospitals and urgent care clinics throughout the state, to track coronavirus prevalence. The chart is typically updated every Friday.
Interim State Epidemiologist Dr. Kathryn Taylor said the increase is likely related to school and colleges starting classes again, in addition to the record high temperatures forcing people indoors more often.
Other nearby Southern states, including Tennessee and Louisiana, are seeing similar increases in recent COVID-19 hospitalization.
Taylor said an increasing number of coronavirus hospitalizations could put further burden on Mississippi’s health care system, which was financially decimated by the pandemic. The state agency is monitoring hospital and ICU capacity.
She said Mississippians should remain vigilant against COVID-19 and protect themselves and their families.
The state health department’s overall recommendations safeguarding against coronavirus have not changed: Stay up to date on COVID-19 vaccines, practice good hand hygiene, stay home if sick and get tested as needed. People at higher risk of severe outcomes might consider wearing a mask in public spaces, Taylor added.
“Mississippians should continue to be aware that COVID-19 is a concern,” she said.
COVID-19 vaccinations and testing continue to be available at the county health departments, according to Taylor.
Parents requested nearly 680 religious vaccine exemptions in the first weeks they were available in Mississippi, something health department officials said has slowed in recent weeks.
In April, a federal judge ruled that parents can opt out of vaccinating their children for school on account of religious beliefs. U.S. District Judge Halil Sul Ozerden of the Southern District of Mississippi issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit, filed last year by parents who said the vaccination requirement violated their First Amendment rights.
Under the newly created process, which went into effect July 17, parents must complete the form on the Mississippi Department of Health’s website and make an appointment with their county health department to submit it. At the appointment, parents are shown an educational video about vaccination and are informed that if an outbreak occurs, their child will not be able to attend school or day care until it is resolved. The form is then processed by the health department.
Health department officials said that parents can apply for a religious exemption at any point, but schools are required to have proof of vaccination or an exemption form on file within 90 days of the start of school.
Dr. Jana Shaw, a childhood vaccination researcher and professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University, said Mississippi’s process is more stringent than several other states.
Of those who applied for a religious exemption in the first two and a half weeks, over 80% requested exemption from all eight of the vaccines required for child care or school entry. Those vaccines protect against hepatitis B; polio; diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis; haemophilus influenzae type b; pneumonia and meningitis; measles, mumps and rubella; and chickenpox.
Prior to the court ruling, Mississippi led the nation in childhood vaccinations as one of six states without a religious exemption for vaccines. It’s unclear exactly what impact this new exemption will have, but researchers have generally found a decline in childhood vaccination rates when a religious or personal exemption is added.
Vaccine requirement opponents have been unsuccessfully lobbying the Legislature for a religious exemption provision for years. Mississippi hasn’t had a religious exemption for child vaccinations since 1979.
“This is the … one thing that I did not have to hang my head in shame about,” said State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney, referencing Mississippi’s poor health outcomes, in a July 20 interview with SuperTalk.
Shaw said these types of policies in other states have led to a decline in childhood vaccination rates, but the size of that decline varies. An annual report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows nearly 10% of kindergarteners received exemptions in Idaho in the 2021-22 school year, while only 1% did in Massachusetts.
When discussing that decline, Shaw said state-level statistics are limited in their usefulness because they can disguise pockets of unvaccinated children in specific communities that can “easily start and fuel outbreaks.”
Of those who requested exemptions in the first few weeks, five counties had over 30 forms submitted: Jackson, George, Pike, Lincoln, and Madison.
Shaw also said religious exemptions are rarely actually about religious beliefs, as none of the major religions object to vaccination.
“Religious exemptions are often used, or abused, by those who do not want to vaccinate their children and use it for their personal objection to vaccination,” she said.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch admitted in her filings for this lawsuit that the compulsory vaccination law, considered on its own, would violate parents’ rights, something the judge cited in his ruling.
“For a federal judge to overturn it (the compulsory vaccination law), he pretty much had to – the attorney general conceded the point, threw us under the bus, (and there) wasn’t much else that could be done,” Edney said in his SuperTalk interview.
Edney and the Health Department have continued to emphasize the importance of childhood vaccinations and encouraged parents to vaccinate their children, including hosting a series of walk-in vaccination clinics at county health departments.
“Vaccines are victims of their own success,” Shaw said. “Parents don’t see (these diseases) anymore, so they don’t fear them.”
A program aimed at increasing doctors in rural Mississippi communities isn’t effective enough, a new report from the state auditor’s office says.
As health care worker shortages continue, the program’s success could be crucial to improving the state’s persistent health care crisis.
The Mississippi Rural Physicians Scholarship Program, established in 2007 by the Legislature and administered by the University of Mississippi Medical Center, awards money to medical school students for tuition or student loans. In exchange, recipients must spend one year practicing in Mississippi for every year they accept the money. A similar program focused on incentivizing dentists to practice in rural Mississippi followed in 2013.
Ideally, the programs would help close the state’s health care gap — half of all Mississippians live in medically underserved counties, according to a 2021 assessment from the state Health Department. Eighty of Mississippi’s 82 counties are federally classified as Health Professional Shortage Areas in either primary or dental care.
State Auditor Shad White speaking at the Neshoba County Fair, Thursday, July 28, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
But according to State Auditor Shad White, the programs aren’t producing doctors and dentists fast enough. A former participant of the program, however, says it was never intended to solve the shortage entirely – the problem is too big and complex.
Data in the report show that the percent of need met for primary and dental care in Mississippi’s neediest communities has decreased over the past decade, despite more money being infused into the programs.
Fletcher Freeman, a spokesperson for the State Auditor’s office, said the programs, as they stand, are too small to be effective.
But participants like Dr. Jonathan Buchanan who moved home to Carthage in 2017 to practice family medicine said the programs are making significant changes in the communities they serve, despite the fact they are not solving the entire problem.
“I was the first physician to come back to this area in 26 years — that’s a generation’s worth of time,” he said. “Our program is currently somewhere in the 70 range of people graduated from the program and practicing, and if you asked each of those physicians, they’d say they’re making a tremendous impact on the quality of health care that rural Mississippians are receiving.”
The report takes issue with several things in particular: the programs’ definition of “rural” is too broad, and the commissions running the programs should maintain better oversight of them.
“We just don’t have the definition of ‘rural’ down,” Freeman said. “We’re using definitions when it’s convenient to potentially place doctors in Flowood.”
Though no participants have been placed in Flowood, the rules for the program allow for the Jackson suburb to be considered “rural” because of its small population. Currently, 10% of scholarship recipients practice in areas that the federal government doesn’t consider “rural.”
The report recommends adopting the federal definition of “rural” to ensure participants are placed where they’re most needed.
However, when the Legislature created the programs, they established commissions to oversee them. Those commissions decide how the programs work, including the definitions under which they operate.
Natalie Gaughf, assistance vice chancellor of academic affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center Credit: Courtesy of UMMC
Dr. Natalie Gaughf, the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs, said “it has been determined that the federal designation of ‘rural’ is not adequate” to meet the state’s needs, and what’s currently used is based on an “understanding of Mississippi’s current and historic health care landscape.”
Mississippi towns that have a population of less than 15,000 and are located more than 20 miles from a “medically served” metropolitan area are eligible for graduates to be placed for work, she said, and every practice location request is reviewed individually.
Students who aren’t from rural areas are also eligible to receive a scholarship, though Gauphf said that all of the program’s recipients have “substantial ties” to rural communities.
Additionally, the report found that a quarter of rural physician scholarship recipients and 14% of dental scholarship participants have breached their contracts.
That can mean students did not complete their commitment requirements, or they chose a non-primary care field of medicine or chose to practice in a non-rural part of Mississippi or out of the state entirely.
Breaching the contract should result in the scholarship being converted into a loan with interest. However, the report found that the scholarship programs’ offices do not accurately monitor this data. Gauphf did not expand on the challenges associated with tracking these numbers.
According to Gaughf, 49 medical school graduates have breached their contract from the time the program was created to the fall of last year.
Freeman couldn’t say what provoked the first-time review of the programs, aside from gauging their general effectiveness and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are being put to good use.
Since the program’s inception, more than $33.5 million in state dollars have gone toward it.
“This report was meant to highlight basically efficiencies and inefficiencies in the program to maximize every dollar they receive,” he said.
Freeman said if the offices use the report to address the programs’ deficiencies, perhaps they’ll receive more money and be able to make more of an impact. According to Gauphf, changes based on the report have already been made, including at least one new form used to track individuals who breach their contracts.
The Legislature has recently expanded both programs, putting $2.17 million into the rural physician scholarship program and $420,000 into the dentists’ program in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, according to the report.
“It’s a good program that’s effective at producing doctors,” Freeman said. “Just not at the rate we need them.”
Still, it’ll be hard for the program to keep up with the rate physicians and dentists are choosing to leave the state or retire, which Gauphf said is “faster than the programs can produce graduates.”
Buchanan, the scholarship program alumnus practicing in Carthage, sees the state’s health care worker crisis as multifactorial and not something that can be solved through a single program.
“We just don’t have enough physicians, period,” he said. “But I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.”
