Mike Kent Credit: Mississippi Department of Education
The State Board of Education has named Mike Kent to serve as interim state superintendent for the next three months after the Legislature rejected Robert Taylor, whom the state board originally selected last November.
The state superintendent oversees Mississippi’s 870 public schools and is appointed by the Board of Education. Kent will serve in the role through June 30 before a long-term interim superintendent will take over, according to a press release. The board will set a timeline for a search for a permanent superintendent at a later date, according to the release.
Kent has served as an interim deputy superintendent at the Mississippi Department of Education since 2012, working on leadership training for principals and superintendents, overseeing districts currently in state takeover, facilitating school district consolidations, and implementing changes to the accountability model. Prior to this role, he was the superintendent of the Madison County School District for over 10 years.
“Mike Kent has deep roots and experience in Mississippi’s public school system at the state and district level and is respected throughout the state for his wisdom and effective leadership,” Rosemary Aultman, chair of the State Board of Education said in a statement. “The Board is confident he will provide continuity in leadership of the Mississippi Department of Education during this transition.”
Mississippians over the next two years could see a boom in new major road projects after lawmakers agreed to give the Mississippi Department of Transportation an extra $620 million Thursday as legislators worked to finish budget work and end the 2023 session.
For two decades, lack of funding and rising repair costs have forced MDOT to focus mostly on maintenance instead of new projects or major expansions. But under a measure originally offered by the Senate, $450 million over the next two years will go to traffic “capacity” projects to build or expand major thoroughfares that have been on MDOT’s planning list for years.
The agreement also earmarks $100 million for the state’s Emergency Road and Bridge Repair program to help local governments with roads and bridges that have fallen into disrepair. It provides $40 million to MDOT to match federal dollars and provides $30 million for “multi-modal” projects, including $10 million for work at state ports.
Senate Transportation Chairwoman Jennifer Branning, R-Philadelphia, noted that even more road funding is included in other bills passed in the final hours of the legislative session. She said the long-deferred capacity expansion projects are crucial.
“I am really pleased with this focus on infrastructure,” Branning said. “Expansion with these projects is critical. Moving freight and goods is so critical to the success of our state.”
Late in the legislative session, Gov. Tate Reeves held a press conference and called on lawmakers to earmark $1.3 billion for road work, and essentially let him choose which projects to build. Legislative leaders, who were already discussing increased infrastructure spending, viewed it as an election-year campaign move for the TV cameras.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Briggs Hopson said MDOT told him the increased funding “is about all they can handle for right now” to manage large projects. But he said he hopes the Legislature can continue with increased road funding next year.
The funds for highway fund were part of the overall deal legislative leaders reached late Wednesday. The plan was for the Legislature to vote on that agreement Thursday and perhaps end the session. But legislators will be returning for at least Friday.
Despite that, House Speaker Philip Gunn said, “the budget is on track.”
Gunn said it just takes time to write, print and proofread the budget bills. So, instead of waiting until late on Thursday night to take up those bills, lawmakers opted to come back Friday. It is possible that legislators also will have to work Saturday.
The largest budget bill still pending if the approximately $2.8 billion appropriation for kindergarten through 12th grade education. Reaching agreement on that bill has delayed for almost a week an overall budget deal. But Gunn said the deal reached Thursday placing an additional $100 million in the public education classrooms is still in place.
Among the bills passing both chambers Thursday was a proposal to earmark $71 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds for infrastructure improvements for rural water associations. The legislation marks the second consecutive year legislators designated federal COVID-19 relief funds for rural water associations.
There also are some general bills pending for legislators to consider as the session wraps up.
Legislators are working with an unprecedented amount of revenue thanks in large part to COVID-19 relief funds that have poured into the state spurring the economy. Those funds are making it possible to increase funding for transportation, education and for other items.
Finally, the Legislature has come to a conclusion about the state’s next burn center — and they’ve decided not to make a decision at all.
House Bill 1626, which details how much is appropriated to the Mississippi State Department of Health, passed both chambers on Thursday. The bill allocates $4 million toward the state’s next burn center and gives the state health department the responsibility of choosing the burn center’s home.
The bill also includes an additional $1 million to the state’s burn care fund, which pays foruncompensated care for burn victims who receive care at Mississippi’s next burn center, as well as travel expenses to out-of-state burn facilities.
It’s the latest move in a series of approvals and reversals, months after the state’s last burn center shuttered. Merit Health Central in south Jackson closed the state’s only accredited burn center in October, citing challenges related to the pandemic and staffing.
Earlier this legislative session, bills to reestablish a burn center in Mississippi died. In February, the House Appropriations Committee approved awarding the University of Mississippi Medical Center $4 million to create a burn center.
Then, in a surprising reversal, the full House of Representatives voted to name Mississippi Baptist Medical Center — where the former medical director of the burn center at Merit Health Central practices — as the home of the state’s next burn center.
However, the bill died in the Senate because it was not passed by a key deadline. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said at the time that the issue could come up later in an appropriations bill.
Now, at the end of the session, lawmakers are washing their hands of making a decision at all.
Both Baptist Medical Center and UMMC have submitted applications for burn center designation to the state health department.
Mississippi Today previously reported that even though UMMC officials publicly said they were recently treating pediatric burns, internal emails revealed otherwise.
Spokespeople from the Mississippi Department of Health did not answer questions by press time.
Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, adopted daughter of the late civil rights and voting rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer, died March 27, 2023, at the age of 56. Credit: Chromatic Black/Special Mississippi Today
Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, the last living child of civil and voting rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer, died this week and will be buried April 8 in Ruleville.
Flakes, who died March 27 at the age of 56 in her hometown of Ruleville, had been traveling and speaking about her mother’s legacy. She had just returned from an engagement at a museum in Seattle.
Flakes, who had been battling breast cancer, was admitted to North Sunflower Medical Center on March 24 after complaining of weakness.
Ruby McWilliams, who helped raise Flakes and her older sister, Lenora, after Hamer’s death, said in a news release that doctors sent her home on hospice and “friends and family were in and out to see her.”
Hamer and her husband Pap adopted Flakes, whom they nicknamed “Cookie”, and her sister Lenora, known as “Nook”, when their mother, Dorothy Jean, died in May 1967 of a cerebral hemorrhage six months after Flakes was born.
The Hamers had also adopted Dorothy Jean, Fannie Lou’s niece, when she was an infant and the then-6-month-old Virgie Lee 10 years later.
Hamer, who worked throughout the Deep South as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to help poor Black Mississippians register to vote, died of hypertension and breast cancer in 1977 and Pap Hamer died in 1992.
Flakes attended Ruleville High School and Mississippi Delta Community College. She worked as a relief dispatcher for the Ruleville Police Department and later the Sunflower County Sheriff’s Department. She moved to Michigan in 1997 where she also worked as a dispatcher. She returned to Ruleville in 2009 and in 2015 went to work at city hall as the water clerk, replacing her sister, Lenora who retired after 26 years. Lenora died in July 2019.
When Virgie Ree died in 2017, Flakes stepped in as spokesperson for her mother’s legacy. In 2021, she was interviewed for the documentary film, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America”, produced by her cousin and Hamer’s niece, Monica Land. The following year, Flakes published a book about her mother, “Mama Fannie,” by Concierge Publishing Services.
In June, she spoke in Winona, where a historical marker was unveiled at the jail site where Hamer and several others, including two teenagers, were beaten in June 1963.
Flakes has two sons, Shadney and Trenton.
Visitation will be from 4-6 p.m. April 7 at Byers Funeral Home in Ruleville. Services will be at 2:30 p.m. April 8 at New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church with burial at Mount Galilee Cemetery, both in Ruleville.
Mississippi Today and two other news outlets have allied to oppose former Gov. Phil Bryant’s effort to block the public from viewing emails and text messages that could shed new light on an ongoing investigation involving the misuse of federal welfare dollars.
In a Thursday filing in Hinds County Circuit Court, Mississippi Today, the Daily Journal, and the Mississippi Free Press have moved to protect the public’s right to access government records.
The news organizations, which are represented by the Mississippi Center for Justice and the Center for Constitutional Rights, want to argue before a court that documents relating to communications from Bryant’s time as governor should not be kept secret if they surface in the course of civil lawsuits that are ongoing over the welfare scandal.
“Although these records relate to one of the largest governmental abuses in this State’s recent memory, Bryant seeks to keep them hidden from the public,” argued the news organizations in Friday’s court filing. “The public in Mississippi has an interest in these records and what they could disclose about the scandal.”
In a joint statement, the editors of the news organizations said that the press has an obligation to fight on behalf of the public’s right to access government records and the correspondence of public officials.
“One of the basic duties of a free press is to hold public officials accountable and ensure that the government remains as open and transparent to the people it serves as possible. We are taking action in court as part of our ongoing efforts to get at the truth of one of the largest public scandals in our state’s history,” said Adam Ganucheau of Mississippi Today, Sam R. Hall of the Daily Journal and Donna Ladd of the Mississippi Free Press.
The state of Mississippi has sued numerous individuals and organizations in an effort to recover welfare funds that were allegedly misspent. Some of the targets of these civil lawsuits have also pleaded guilty in state and federal court to crimes linked to their use of public welfare dollars. None has served time to date.
Bryant has neither been charged criminally nor sued. Still, several defendants in lawsuits have asked him to turn over emails and text messages as part of an effort by those defendants to claim the former governor allegedly directed them to perform unlawful acts.
Bryant has denied these allegations and asked a judge to find that he doesn’t have to provide copies of text messages, emails, and other responsive records. Bryant has selectively released some of his own text messages in a court filing, but does not want to release more, as a pending subpoena could require him to do.
If Judge E. Faye Peterson does force the former governor to turn over more of his communications to the court, he has asked the judge to place them under a protective order that would block the public from examining the documents.
In Thursday’s motion, the three news organizations asked Peterson to allow them to present arguments in opposition to Bryant’s request for a protective order.
“Transparency is the path to meaningful accountability in a functioning democracy, and Mississippians are owed both,” said Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice. “When reporting on this landmark case, our news outlets should not be prevented from reviewing relevant records created by elected officials while in office.”
Decades of state court cases have upheld the right of the press to step into ongoing litigation where matters of public access are in question, even when a news organization is not a party to that litigation.
Editor’s note: Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, is a member of Mississippi Today’s board of directors.
When Alvin Ailey and other young, modern Black dancers performed at New York City’s 92nd Street Y, it was meant to be a one-night event. Instead, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company introduced the world to the discovery of what Black dancing could be, performing for audiences in 71 countries, including kings and queens.
Ailey grew up in Texas, “glued to my mother’s hip. Sloshing through the terrain. Branches slashing against a child’s body. Going from one place to another. Looking for a place to be. My mother off working in the fields. I used to pick cotton.”
In 1960, Ailey debutedRevelations, regarded as a masterpiece. Through his dances, he sought to show “dark deep things, beautiful things inside me that I’d always been trying to get out.” And when his friend, fellow choreographer Joyce Trisler died, he created a dance to honor her —a dance that illustrated both loneliness and celebration.
“I couldn’t cry,” he later confessed, “until I saw this piece.”
In 1988, he received Kennedy Center Honors, with legendary broadcaster Walter Cronkite introducing him as “a choreographer who helped free Blacks from the cage of tap-dancing.”
Dying of AIDS, Ailey passed on his company to Judith Jamison, who said, “Alvin breathed in and never breathed out.” She continued: “We are his breath out.”
A 2021 documentary details his journey, and the Ailey school remains the largest place in New York City dedicated to training dancers.
The Mississippi Legislature, finally reaching a budget accord, worked late Wednesday night to pass that agreement with hopes of ending its 2023 session on Thursday.
A key peg in that deal is an agreement between House and Senate leaders to provide an additional $100 million for local school districts. The agreement will be divvied out to schools based on student enrollment with the understanding the money cannot be used to provide pay raises for administrators.
A key obstacle in the prolonged budget stalemate that began before last weekend was the desire of the Senate to place an additional $181 million in the funding formula in state law that provides for the basic needs of local school districts.
The Senate plan was to make minor adjustments in the Mississippi Adequate Education Program formula, and fully fund it for an additional $181 million for the first time since the 2007-08 school year.
But House Speaker Philip Gunn and other members of his leadership team opposed placing additional money in MAEP. They have been advocates in the past of scrapping or overhauling the program.
Gunn stressed late Wednesday the additional $100 million will not go into the formula. But it will be provided to the schools, like the MAEP is, based on student enrollment. And while school districts will not have as much discretion as with MAEP in how the funds are spent, they still will have significant leeway in expending the funds.
Overall, Gunn said he is pleased with the agreement.
“We are going to make significant progress tonight and probably finish up on Thursday,” he said. “We are grateful to the Senate for working with us.”
The agreement also will include additional funds to deal with the devastation caused by last week’s tornadoes that ripped through the Delta and north Mississippi killing at least 21. Final details of the amount of money that will be set aside for storm relief was still undecided late Wednesday.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said the amount of funding “will be a significant amount of money.”
The agreement will take shape in multiple appropriations bills that must be passed by both chambers. Additionally, a handful of general bills — some controversial — still are pending to be taken up.
House Bill 1020 is perhaps the most controversial. In its original form it created a separate judicial district in the white and more affluent areas of Jackson where the judges would be appointed instead of elected by the Black majority population of the city.
A version of that proposal is still alive and expected to be taken up on Thursday.
Another measure, Senate Bill 2343, would give Capitol Police, under direction of the state Department of Public Safety, jurisdiction to patrol within the entire city of Jackson.
But efforts to restore the state’s initiative process where citizens can gather signatures to place issues on the ballot for voters to decide was not part of any agreement. That proposal is dead for the session unless an additional agreement is reached overnight. The state had an initiative process until May 2021 when the state Supreme Court ruled it invalid because of a technical flaw. At the time, legislative leaders vowed to fix the concerns of the Supreme Court and restore the process. But for the past two sessions, legislative leaders have been unable to agree on a fix to restore the process.
The Senate rejected the nomination of Robert Taylor for state superintendent of education on Wednesday.
Taylor was most recently a deputy state superintendent for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction before starting his role here on Jan. 17. A native of Laurel, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Mississippi and has worked in North Carolina schools since 1992.
Robert Taylor, a native of Laurel. Credit: Mississippi Department of Education
The state superintendent oversees Mississippi’s 870 public schools and is appointed by the State Board of Education. Once the board makes a selection, that person must be confirmed by a nominations subcommittee and the Senate Education Committee before being approved by the full chamber with a vote. Taylor’s nomination passed through the first two steps before failing the Senate vote 21-31.
Senators expressed concerns during the Senate Education Committee vote on Tuesday that Taylor had worked outside of Mississippi for most of his career, citing that this was the same reason they had just rejected Gov. Tate Reeves’ nomination for the State Board of Education. Taylor’s predecessor Carey Wright is not a Mississippi native and took the position after working in District of Columbia Public Schools.
“This is nothing personal with me, but it’s absolutely what this Capitol needs (sic) to stay consistent with your votes, and I will be staying consistent with mine,” said Sen. Michael McLendon, R-Hernando.
Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory responded to these concerns both in committee and on the Senate floor, arguing the state doesn’t take this stance with many other positions as not to limit the options.
“I don’t understand the notion that we only want people from Mississippi, I thought we wanted people from other states to come here,” Bryan said.
Sen. Chris Johnson, R-Hattiesburg, chaired the education nominations subcommittee and was one of five Senate Republicans who voted in favor of Taylor.
“We talk about brain drain – well here was a chance to bring someone back,” Johnson said. “In conversations I had with him, I thought he answered things well. He praised what Mississippi has done with education in the last 10 years and said he wants to continue that trend. I thought he had a great knowledge of education and what’s going on here.”
Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, expressed frustration with lack of transparency in the hiring process, saying on Tuesday he was “disgusted” with the way it was handled. This concern was also discussed at the March 15 hearing to interview Taylor and State Board of Education Chair Rosemary Aultman, where Aultman answered questions about the hiring process from senators.
The Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) reviewed the hiring process at the request of legislators, finding the board lacked a standard scoring method for evaluating candidates and the selection process “lacked transparency,” as finalists for the position were not shared publicly despite the consulting firm proposing to do so.
Aultman responded to these concerns, saying applicants for the position asked to remain anonymous, and the board chose to honor the request. Aultman also explained the board developed a list of attributes an ideal candidate would have and judged applications based on how well they matched the list. For finalists, while they were not scored by a rubric, Aultman said each board member did rank the four options.
Aultman reiterated this support for Taylor and the hiring process after Taylor was rejected by the Senate in a statement from the Mississippi Department of Education.
“The State Board of Education conducted a fair, competitive and rigorous application process to select the most qualified candidate to fulfill the duties of state superintendent of education,” she said. “The search firm we hired was helpful in giving the board direction, and we are confident we selected the best candidate.”
Sen. Daniel Sparks, R-Belmont, also raised concerns on the Senate floor that the school district Taylor led in North Carolina did not significantly improve under his nearly 10-year tenure. Between 2015 and 2019, the years for which data is publicly available from the North Carolina School Report Cards website, the Bladen County School District did see more schools meeting their growth targets, as well as the number of C-rated schools rising from four to seven. D-rated schools had fallen from eight to three between 2015 and 2018, before jumping back up to six in 2019. This data does not represent all of the years that Taylor led the district.
Taylor has previously said at State Board of Education meetings that assisting low-performing districts was one of his top priorities, and had visited all but one of them in his first two months on the job to learn about their needs.
“It is our duty and responsibility to be able to get in and work with those districts before they end up on the list being over by the state,” Taylor said at the March 15 committee hearing. “We don’t have the capacity to take over ten or eleven districts, but we do have the ability to be able to get into those districts and help them build capacity.”
Dennis DeBar, R-Leaksville, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said he voted against Taylor for multiple reasons, but most specifically because he “wanted to see someone with a better resume on low-performing schools.”
Taylor would have also been the second Black state superintendent after Henry L. Johnson, who also came to Mississippi from North Carolina in 2002. Some have raised concerns that race placed a role in this rejection.
“Any time you put politics and partisanship and race ahead of serving the state of Mississippi, we do our citizens a great disservice,” said Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson.
The State Board of Education said in a press release that they will schedule a special-called board meeting in the coming days to name an interim and begin a new search process.
