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The University of Southern Mississippi broke its silence on its role in the unfolding welfare scandal on Thursday after members of the faculty senate executive committee presented a draft of a blistering letter last week to the new president, Joe Paul, and the interim provost. 

At a meeting Friday, when the senate had been planning to adopt the draft letter, many faculty grumbled about the university’s preemptive statement, calling it a confusing attempt to shift blame in the welfare scandal. Some faculty said they were just as bewildered by the reply from the Mississippi Department of Human Services to that statement. 

“It’s sort of like seeing through the fog, and you can kind of make out some shape but you can’t see all the details,” Max Grivno, a history professor who represents the School of the Humanities on the senate, told Mississippi Today.

As former NFL quarterback Brett Favre and the volleyball stadium continue to make national news, officials at USM have refused requests for comment on the scandal from Mississippi Today and other media outlets like CNN and SM2, the student newspaper. 

USM’s statement Thursday said that the university had “engaged in this agreement in good faith, following thorough due diligence by outside legal counsel, and after multiple assurances from officials at the highest levels of MDHS.” The statement did not say if USM intends to repay the welfare funds, but said it is working on a proposal to allow MDHS to use space on campus to provide programming for the underserved community.

MDHS responded it could not enter an agreement with USM to use the property in lieu of repayment of the funds “because we believe it to be a continued violation of the law and the purpose of the TANF program to help lift needy families out of poverty.”

In response, the faculty senate on Friday decided to hold its statement and amend it at a soon, but yet to be scheduled, emergency meeting. 

At the same time, IHL Board President and billionaire USM alum Tommy Duff is also speaking up, saying USM should pay the money back and that the deal was “stupid,” even if legal, Mississippi Today reported Thursday.

His comments followed an editorial published last month in SM2 that also called on USM to return the misspent welfare dollars. 

“The scandal is killing Favre’s reputation and it’s taking USM down with it,” the editorial states. “It’s hard to understand why Favre completed these actions, however the solution seems simple enough: Someone needs to give back the money.” 

In 2017, Favre and USM officials crafted a deal with the Mississippi Department of Human Services and a welfare-funded nonprofit to use $5 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds to build a volleyball facility on campus – a violation of federal law, according to State Auditor Shad White and state prosecutors. 

White officially questioned the purchase in May of 2020, and while it has resulted in a criminal fraud charge against one defendant in the welfare scandal, neither the state nor federal government has taken further action to claw back the money or hold others accountable.

Mississippi Community Education Center, a nonprofit founded by Nancy New, a key figure in the welfare scandal, paid the athletic foundation to build the volleyball stadium under the guise that the nonprofit would lease university property to provide anti-poverty programming to the area’s underserved community.

USM told Mississippi Today in February of 2020 that the athletic foundation was looking forward to beginning conversations about how to use university property to serve the needy, but nearly three years later, the university says it is only now working on a proposed partnership with MDHS to fulfill this mission, which now appears unlikely given the welfare agency’s recent statement.

The SM2 editorial questioned if the volleyball project, first uncovered by Mississippi Today in February 2020, is an isolated event.

“What other corruption has been swept under the rug by those who are supposed to have good intentions for the university,” the editorial reads. “What other secrets lie below the surface?”

While the volleyball stadium has dominated headlines, it wasn’t the university’s only project supported by welfare dollars. 

By the time USM officials began talking with New about funding the volleyball building in July of 2017, they had already entered a similarly structured lease agreement that funneled $200,000 in federal MDHS grant funds to renovate a space inside the Jim and Thomas Duff Athletic Center called the M-Club Room, an area for student athletes.

In the days after Favre and the welfare officials initially met at USM to discuss funding for the volleyball stadium, USM officials expressed apprehension about taking $4 million in grant funds for the project, according to texts Favre sent Nancy New. But somewhere within the negotiations, texts show, the deal rose to $5 million, including an additional $1 million for improvements to the basketball stadium and facility maintenance costs.

In the aftermath of the scandal, the university has not acknowledged these additional benefits it received from the welfare program or responded to several inquiries about these arrangements.

The forensic audit found that the welfare department also paid USM nearly $840,000 in welfare funds for a “Healthy Choices Program” that violated TANF regulations. Mississippi Today retrieved documents through a public records request that show USM entered TANF grant agreements with both MDHS and Nancy New’s nonprofit from 2016-2019 for this program, called a “Student Development Program.” 

The grant specifically targeted student athletes and beyond funding salaries, scholarships and departmental expenses, the university used the money for things like specialty performance drinks, popsockets and massages, according to Mississippi Today’s review of receipts.

The forensic audit also questioned nearly $1.2 million in welfare funds that New’s nonprofit paid the university to fund “externships” for students in the School of Psychology through a program that provided USM student workers to New’s for-profit school.

USM also received $231,986 through Families First for Mississippi – the name of the nonprofit-operated welfare program during the scandal – with the goal of helping fifth-graders develop healthy eating habits. Auditors did not question this program, called the “RISE program” and funded by nonprofit Family Resource Center of North Mississippi.

The nutrition program shared a name with another program funded by the same nonprofit, former WWE wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase’s RISE Program, which led to federal charges against former MDHS Director John Davis.

At last month’s faculty senate meeting, Wiesenburg, the president, suggested they should write a letter to USM’s administration. At most universities, faculty senators are representative bodies made up of faculty elected by each department. The administration is supposed to seek the faculty senate’s feedback on a range of policies that affect the university from teaching and learning to the search for a new president. This is called shared governance.

Wiesenburg’s suggestion prompted an impassioned speech from Grivno who said he thought the statement should point out that the misspending was “a symptom of a deeper rot” – that the athletic foundation and the administration operate with little faculty oversight. 

Grivno wouldn’t advocate for USM returning the funds to the state, he said, “because they will just give it to another one of their cronies.” 

“We should call attention to the fact that this happened because we had a breakdown of shared governance,” he added. 

Grivno also noted the faculty senate’s exclusion from the presidential search process that led to Paul’s appointment. He noted that IHL’s search advisory group, which was stacked with administrators and high-level donors, did not include a single faculty senator. 

“People scratch their heads and go, ‘how did this happen?’” Grivno continued. “It’s not an accident, it’s not an oversight. It was intentional. It’s offensive because it was meant to give offense. We can at least squeal like a stuck pig and say, ‘this wasn’t right.”

For nearly three years, university and IHL officials have been virtually mum about the volleyball controversy – a primary reason for the faculty letter. USM has not responded to several emailed requests for an interview or for comment on its welfare-funded projects since Mississippi Today first reported on the project in February of 2020.

The new, state-of-the-art volleyball stadium was the brainchild of Favre, whose daughter played the sport at USM. He began discussing the project with USM officials as early as 2016. During the years Favre was working to get the volleyball facility built, The Athletic reported that the athletic foundation took $130,000 in donations from Favre’s charity, Favre4Hope, which says its mission is to serve needy or disabled children and breast cancer patients.

By mid-2017, Favre was in touch with Gov. Phil Bryant, Bryant’s appointed welfare director John Davis and New, who was given authority to spend millions of federal welfare funds, about funding the volleyball stadium.

USM’s legal counsel and the welfare department decided that despite the federal prohibition on using welfare funds for brick and mortar construction, they could structure the payment as a lease between the athletic foundation and New’s nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center.

USM, owner of university property, would lease its athletic facilities for a five-year period to the athletic foundation for $1, and the athletic foundation would turn around and lease the property to the nonprofit for $5 million. The leased property included the to-be-built volleyball facility, where the nonprofit said it would staff resource offices.

“It’s very difficult to make that argument in hindsight because the volleyball court had not yet been built,” White said in a September interview with ESPN. “So they were leasing a volleyball court at a very, very high rental rate before the volleyball court was built. That is not a lease. That is building something with welfare money, which you cannot do.”

USM sent the lease between USM and the athletic foundation, with the attached sublease between the athletic foundation and Mississippi Community Education Center, to Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, which has the final say over university contracts of $250,000 or more. IHL legal counsel from the Attorney General’s Office and IHL’s Board of Trustees then approved the lease.

In May of 2020, Mississippi Today retrieved meeting minutes showing that the IHL Board of Trustees approved a lease for the purpose of building the volleyball stadium – what officials called a “Wellness Center” – knowing, according to meeting minutes, that “MCEC’s funding for this project is via a Block Grant from the Mississippi Department of Human Services.” 

Tom Duff, who sat on IHL’s board and now serves as its president, told Mississippi Today Thursday that he did not know about the volleyball project even though he voted on it, because it had been placed on the consent agenda – a block of agenda items that the trustees vote on all at once and often don’t read. 

“The funding from MCEC shall be prepaid rent to the Foundation in the amount of Five Million Dollars ($5,000,000) for the leasing of certain USM athletic facilities including but not limited to the to be constructed Wellness Center, Reed Green Coliseum and additional athletic space as agreed upon by USM and the Foundation,” the minutes state.

Mississippi Today attempted to get IHL to respond to the revelation in 2020, but officials insisted that IHL only approved the $1 lease between the university and the athletic foundation, not the $5 million sublease between the athletic foundation and the nonprofit that was attached to it.

The implication was that IHL was not involved in the transfer of welfare funds between the nonprofit and the athletic foundation, even though the plan to use MDHS money to build the volleyball stadium was outlined in the minutes IHL approved.

After attempts from IHL and the university to obscure that fact, Mississippi Today sent an email to both entities stating, “Southern Miss knew and allowed Human Services funds to be used to construct its volleyball center. It did this by letting the foundation rent University property for $5 million. It’s in the October 2017 IHL meeting minutes and neither of you have disputed this.”

IHL Communications Director Caron Blanton doubled down.

“Given that you are determined to print inaccurate information, we are prepared to respond appropriately,” Blanton wrote. “The IHL Board gave USM the authority to lease land to the USM Athletic Foundation, a separate entity with its own board, for $1, period. If you are ‘comfortable’ reporting inaccurate and verifiably false facts, that is certainly your journalistic prerogative.”

“You have not disputed anything I am preparing to write,” Mississippi Today responded. “The IHL board gave USM the authority to lease land to the USM athletic foundation with the understanding that the foundation would then lease it to MCEC for $5 million in MDHS block grant funds to build a volleyball stadium. Therefore, the University and IHL knew that block grant funds would be used to pay for the facility.”

Blanton forwarded Mississippi Today’s email to IHL Commissioner Alfred Rankins, who replied, “There is no need to respond to (Mississippi Today) again regarding this issue,” according to an email the news organization obtained.

IHL never explained what was inaccurate about Mississippi Today’s interpretation of the meeting minutes, nor did it respond to the published story as warned. IHL did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The volleyball stadium is the single largest known welfare expenditure within the scandal. Nancy New’s son Zach New pleaded guilty in April to defrauding the government for funneling welfare money to the project and disguising it as a lease. But the state chose not to include the volleyball stadium in its civil lawsuit filed in May that attempts to clawback the money.

After the scandal broke and the auditor officially questioned the volleyball stadium purchase in May of 2020, Duff, then an IHL board member, asked a lawyer friend, Joel Johnson, a member of the athletic foundation, to research events surrounding the project’s approval. 

“Joel is very upset about the situation with the Mississippi Community Education Center and the lack of transparency with the USM Athletic Foundation and its members,” Duff wrote in an email to Commissioner Rankins. “What these minutes indicate to me is that there was no details of the transaction nor a vote on same. There is zero reference to a lease in this agreement.”

Duff and Favre are listed on the university’s website as honorary members of the athletic foundation’s board of directors, along with Hattiesburg lawyer Bud Holmes, who was representing Favre in the state’s civil case until Favre hired former Donald Trump attorney Eric Herschmann. The most recently available public IRS tax forms for the foundation, which are from 2020, also list Zach New as a member of the athletic foundation board.

Johnson declined to discuss the project with Mississippi Today, citing ongoing litigation.

In his email to Duff, Johnson said the only person to mention Nancy New’s nonprofit to the foundation was USM Athletic Director Jon Gilbert, who attended the July 2017 meeting about the project with Favre and Davis. Gilbert has declined interview requests from Mississippi Today since 2020.

“Shad White and I are having a conversation,” Duff wrote to Rankins in the same email more than two years ago, “and then I am visiting with US Attorney Mike Hurst to learn, if possible the state and federal response.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Rankins responded.

In an interview with Mississippi Today, Duff said he could not recall the specifics of his conversation with Hurst who left the Department of Justice in early 2021. Duff said he thinks he contacted Hurst before the scandal was public. 

“If I remember the conversation, I think I just said, ‘Mike, I don’t know what is going on about this, but the athletic foundation was not aware of it, the IHL was not aware of it, and perhaps somebody needs to check into it,’” Duff said. 

Duff said he is still trying to understand how the misspending happened but that the “key statement” is he thinks the athletic foundation was not aware of the sublease with Nancy New’s Mississippi Community Education Center.

The sublease with MCEC was signed by Athletic Foundation President Leigh Breal.

“You’re dealing with the foundation, you’re dealing with USM, you’re dealing with IHL, you’re dealing with the state,” Duff said. “I can be wrong in some of my specifics, that’s why I’m trying to couch myself. Something that I think is a fact might not be a fact. Basically me saying USM should pay back something – probably the foundation is the one that got the money, it’s just USM ended up with the building.” 

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau’s mother signed off on the language of a lease agreement to construct a University of Southern Mississippi volleyball stadium. Read more about that here.

The post As USM speaks on welfare scandal, students and faculty ask ‘what other secrets lie below the surface?’ appeared first on Mississippi Today.

University of Mississippi Medical Center officials on Friday said negotiations to take over the struggling Greenwood Leflore Hospital have ended, and an agreement is not possible. 

Without an agreement with UMMC, the hospital could close before the end of the year. 

“Despite the best efforts of all parties involved, it has become clear to us that an agreement between the University of Mississippi Medical Center and Greenwood Leflore Hospital will not be possible,” said Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs at UMMC. 

He said an agreement is not possible due to several factors, the primary one being “the current realities of health care economics that all health systems are facing in this challenging environment.” 

Greenwood City Council President Ronnie Stevenson told Mississippi Today that UMMC’s decision came as a shock when he learned about it around lunch time on Friday. 

UMMC and Greenwood Leflore had been in talks over a potential partnership agreement since the summer. Greenwood Leflore’s interim CEO Gary Marchand told staff last week that any agreement would not be ready before early 2023, despite earlier hopes of completing the process by the end of the year. 

The Greenwood City Council and Leflore County Board of Supervisors, the joint owners of the hospital, voted last week to put up nearly $10 million to cover outstanding Medicare debts and deferred maintenance costs that UMMC said it did not want to shoulder if it took over operations. 

“I am very disappointed in their decision,” Stevenson said. “They have held us up for months, thinking this was going to go through, and we as a city and a county met all their demands or agreed to meet all their demands, and for them to pull out at the last minute, leaving us dry like this — it’s just difficult to digest right now.”

Stevenson said local leaders are not aware of another potential partner to operate the hospital. 

“We did not have a Plan B,” he said. “But we’ve got to go find one.”

In the meantime, the hospital will likely have to keep cutting jobs and services in an effort to keep the doors open as long as possible, he said. 

Leflore County Board of Supervisors President Robert Collins said in a statement that the supervisors had “always been concerned” that a deal between UMMC and the Greenwood Leflore Hospital would not go through. 

“Understanding that we are not healthcare experts we have retained the consulting services of Samuel Odle and (sic) experienced healthcare executive,” the statement said. “Mr. Odle’s role is to view the situation and advise the Supervisors and Community on feasible options for maintain (sic) healthcare in our community.”

Odle, a senior policy advisor at Bose Public Affairs Group previously led hospitals in Indiana, where he is based.

Marchand told employees on Friday morning that the hospital would lay off up to 80 employees to reduce costs as negotiations with UMMC continued. The memo contained no indication that the partnership agreement had been taken off the table. 

A press release from Greenwood Leflore Hospital suggests the decision came as a surprise to hospital officials. 

“Although we certainly can understand and appreciate the challenge of providing healthcare services in the post-pandemic era, this decision was not expected based on the progress that had been made regarding a lease transaction,” the statement said. “The financial realities of providing healthcare services are impacting both organizations.” 

When asked whether the state would step in to help the hospital, Lt. Gov. Hosemann said he is disappointed the parties couldn’t reach an agreement.

“The financial issues facing healthcare are becoming universal in our state. We need a universal plan to address them,” he said in a statement to Mississippi Today. 

Speaker of the House Philip Gunn did not immediately respond Friday afternoon. State lawmakers traveled to Jackson this week for a special session to pass a $246 million tax incentive deal to help an out-of-state corporation expand operations in the state. Gov. Tate Reeves, who focused his public comments this week on the project’s job creation, did not include policies for rural hospital closures or any other pressing needs the state faces in his special session call.

Officials from both hospitals said they will continue discussing physician services in Greenwood and Leflore County, including UMMC’s operation of a general pediatrics clinic and an OB-GYN clinic. UMMC will soon also run an internal medicine and primary care clinic in the area. 

“We will continue to evaluate other opportunities as they arise in order to maintain some health care services in the community,” said Jones. 

Stevenson said the hospital is critical to Greenwood and Leflore County. 

“This community needs a hospital,” he said. “We don’t want to have to rush to Jackson … We want to save lives here, and having a community hospital will save lives.”

More than half of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are at risk of closure, new data from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform shows. The state has the largest number of rural hospitals at immediate risk of closure in the nation at 24. 

Since 2005, five rural hospitals in Mississippi have closed.

State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney alluded to the ongoing threat to Greenwood Leflore Hospital during the state board of health meeting last month, when he described health care infrastructure in the Delta as “very fragile” and said at least six hospitals in the region are facing dire financial challenges. At the time, negotiations between UMMC and Greenwood Leflore appeared to be on track. 

“Despite what’s been reported in the media, currently there are no solutions for those hospitals,” he said. “No one’s coming to the rescue.”

Editor’s note: Kate Royals, Mississippi Today’s community health editor since January 2022, worked as a writer/editor for UMMC’s Office of Communications from November 2018 through August 2020, writing press releases and features about the medical center’s schools of dentistry and nursing. 

The post ‘We did not have a Plan B’: UMMC won’t save struggling Delta hospital appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The state awarded $180 million in matching American Rescue Plan Act funds on Friday for water, wastewater and storm water projects.

The amount includes $35.6 million for Jackson, exactly what the city applied for last month from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, which is administering the match program known as the Municipality & County Water Infrastructure Grant Program, or MCWI.

In total, the $180 million MDEQ awarded on Friday is less than half, 41%, of the $435 million that cities and counties applied for from the fund. The first round of awards leaves $270 million remaining in the MCWI fund. MDEQ clarified that $180 million was the maximum amount it could award in the first round of funding under SB 2822. A release from Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, said that the agency will begin a second round of funding in the spring.

The dollar-for-dollar match gives Jackson, which has said it needs $2 billion to fix its drinking water and wastewater systems, a total of $71.3 million in ARPA money for the following water projects:

• Jackson J.H. Fewell Plant Filter and Transmission Line Project Drinking Water ($8.8 million from MCWI)
• Jackson O.B. Curtis Raw Water Pump Replacement Drinking Water ($1.65 million)
• Jackson O.B. Curtis/J.H. Fewell Chemical Feed Automation Drinking Water ($1.45 million)
• Jackson O.B. Curtis General Filter Upgrade Project Drinking Water ($8.8 million)
• Jackson J.H. Fewell General Pump Repair and Replacement Drinking Water ($2.75 million)
• Jackson West Bank Interceptor Sewer Line Repair and Rehabilitation Project Wastewater ($7.5 million)
• Jackson Mill Street Sewer Basin Reconstruction Wastewater ($4.7 million)

Horhn said on Friday that “we are looking for the state to do more once the regular session begins in January.”

Overall, 130 projects around the state received funding: $93 million went to 76 wastewater projects, $47 million went to 36 drinking water projects, and $35 million went to 18 storm water projects.

Rankin County received the most money for a single project, getting $14.5 million for its “watershed protection and restoration program.” Meridian received the next highest project award with $8.9 million to improve its wastewater system as required in a federal consent decree.

See the table below for a full list of awarded projects:

Editor's note: This story has been updated to include a clarification from MDEQ and a full list of projects receiving funding.

The post State awards $180 million in ARPA water and sewer funds, includes $36 million for Jackson appeared first on Mississippi Today.

When news broke in 2020 that the new volleyball stadium opening on University of Southern Mississippi’s campus that year had been built with federal welfare funds, university officials said it would work to use the facility to help needy families.

“Southern Miss Athletic Foundation is looking forward to initiating conversations with the appropriate state agency and leaders about how its athletics facilities, including the Wellness Center, can be used to the benefit of Mississippi families and individuals in the spirit of the original agreement,” USM spokesperson Jim Coll told Mississippi Today in an February 2020 email.

Nearly three years later, that hasn’t happened. Now, in response to mounting pressure from its own faculty, public officials and the media, USM continues to ignore the idea of returning the funds, saying instead in a statement Thursday morning that it is working on a proposal to allow the welfare department to utilize space on campus to provide programming to the underserved community.

But within hours, that proposal was apparently dead. The Mississippi Department of Human Services released its own statement Thursday afternoon saying it believed such an arrangement would be against the federal laws that govern the funds in question, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant.

“As noted in prior audits, use of TANF funds for the construction of brick and mortar building projects has never been authorized by law,” reads the welfare department’s statement. “MDHS cannot accept USM’s offer to utilize the building constructed with TANF funds in lieu of repayment of the funds, because we believe it to be a continued violation of the law and the purpose of the TANF program to help lift needy families out of poverty.”

USM did not respond to a request for comment regarding the MDHS statement and has declined to speak further on the welfare scandal, including whether it plans to return the funds.

The volleyball stadium is not included in MDHS’s ongoing civil lawsuit, which currently attempts to claw back roughly $24 million in welfare funds from 38 individuals or organizations. Though MDHS Director Bob Anderson has alluded to the possibility of pursuing the volleyball project, the agency’s recent statement is the most unequivocal on its stance about the illegality of the expenditure.

Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy director for policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy and national TANF expert, told Mississippi Today that even if a building were to benefit needy families — low-income housing development, for example — the use of TANF funds on construction is strictly prohibited by federal law.

“So even if Mississippi wanted to reach and try to argue that providing tennis lessons to teens from families with low incomes would keep them busy and prevent unplanned pregnancies, they could only use TANF funds to pay usage fees and not for construction of the facility,” she said in an email.

Federal regulations around welfare spending are otherwise notoriously lax, allowing states to use the money on a variety of programs they say will reduce or prevent poverty. But Lower-Basch, who has worked on TANF and other safety net policies for over 25 years, said she has not seen another state use TANF funds in quite this way before.

“Mississippi should not try to justify its past misuse of the TANF program and instead commit to using TANF funds for their intended purpose – helping parents raise their children with the economic security they need to thrive,” Lower-Basch wrote.

MDHS also said it was unable to comment further because of ongoing investigations. It did not answer whether it now plans to add the athletic foundation, which received the funds to build the facility, in the civil suit. The agency fired the private attorney, former U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott, it initially hired to bring the civil suit after he subpoenaed the athletic foundation for its communication with various figures, including former Gov. Phil Bryant, in an attempt to get to the bottom of how welfare money was funneled to a volleyball court. Defense attorneys have also made the stadium an issue of the case, subpoenaing Bryant himself for records related to the deal.

Retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre, whose daughter played volleyball at Southern Miss, was the inspiration behind the new stadium. Text messages show he pushed various officials, including Bryant, for funding for the project in 2017.

After a meeting at USM between Favre, welfare officials and athletics department officials in July of 2017, MDHS and USM legal counsel negotiated a lease agreement that would allow a nonprofit founded by Nancy New to pay $5 million in welfare funds to the Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation to rent university athletic facilities that it would use to conduct programming. The facilities were used for just one event, a Healthy Teens rally, according to records retrieved by Mississippi Today. Nancy New’s son, Zach New, pleaded guilty to fraud for using TANF money on construction, disguising it as a lease agreement.

None of the six people arrested in connection with the welfare scandal in February of 2020 is expected to have a trial. Five defendants — Nancy New, Zach New, former MDHS Director John Davis, former professional wrestler Brett DiBiase and nonprofit accountant Anne McGrew — have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the prosecution. A sixth defendant, former MDHS procurement officer Gregory “Latimer” Smith, entered a pre-trial diversion program in October. No one else has been charged criminally, but officials have said the investigation is ongoing.

The post Welfare department rejects USM volleyball amends appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Greenwood Leflore Hospital will lay off as many as 80 employees in an effort to cut costs and keep the hospital open through the end of the year as it continues takeover negotiations with the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

The hospital’s interim CEO Gary Marchand announced the plans in a memo to hospital staff Friday morning. Marchand wrote that the hospital’s administrators decided to maintain current services, including emergency, surgical, inpatient, outpatient diagnostic services, and outpatient treatments including cancer and wound care. 

The staff cuts will affect as many as 55 full-time and 25 part-time employees.

“Today we are announcing a further reduction in our staffing so that all remaining services can be adequately and consistently matched to current patient volumes,” Marchand wrote. “While unfortunate, we believe this will allow the best option for current services to continue into early next year.”

However, later on Friday morning, the hospital announced that its COVID-19 vaccination and testing clinic would be permanently closing.

Marchand told Mississippi Today Friday afternoon that the layoffs alone will not be enough to stave off closure before a deal is completed.

“These actions will result in a reduction in cash outflows by the hospital and will need to be combined with financial support from the owners to attain the financial stability needed for the hospital to continue to provide services into early 2023,” he said.

The struggling 208-bed hospital employs more than 600 people. It suspended inpatient services entirely in August following a sewage leak, transferring patients to other hospitals in the area. It is currently operating a total of 18 inpatient beds. 

The hospital has been negotiating a takeover deal with UMMC since the summer. Marchand told staff last week that negotiations had hit a road block over the hospital’s outstanding debts to Medicare and deferred maintenance costs, together totaling around $9 million. UMMC did not want to assume those debts in taking over hospital operations. 

The City of Greenwood and Leflore County last week agreed to put up $4.5 million each to cover the hospital’s debts and deferred maintenance. 

Any deal would require approval by the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), which oversees colleges and universities in Mississippi. Because the two parties could not resolve the debt issue in time to finalize documents before the IHL’s last scheduled board meeting of the year on Nov. 17, any deal will likely have to wait until early 2023. Marchand told staff last week that staff cuts and possibly service reductions would be necessary to keep the hospital open. 

UMMC could ask IHL to hold a special called meeting to approve any documents as soon as they are ready, but UMMC spokespeople have said there are no plans to do that. They would not explain why. 

UMMC did not respond to a request for comment Friday morning. 

Greenwood Leflore employees who are being laid off are being notified Friday, Marchand said.

The post Struggling to stay open, Delta hospital to lay off dozens appeared first on Mississippi Today.

More than half the counties in Mississippi are considered maternity care deserts, according to the new report from the March of Dimes. These counties have no hospitals providing obstetric care, no OB-GYNs and no certified nurse midwives. 

Discontinued labor and delivery services and shuttered neonatal intensive care units have dominated headlines in the state in recent months, painting a bleak picture for mothers and babies’ access to care. Greenwood Leflore Hospital closed Leflore County’s only labor and delivery unit on Oct. 15. Over the summer, Ochsner Medical Center in Hancock County did the same. 

The Mississippi Delta’s only neonatal intensive care unit closed in July. A few months ago, the NICU at Merit Health Central in south Jackson also shut down, raising concerns about disruptions in care for high-risk moms and babies.

The trend of reduced access and care for mothers and babies — on the heels of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and is expected to result in 5,000 additional babies in Mississippi alone — does not bode well for a state already plagued by high infant and maternal mortality rates and poor health outcomes.

READ MORE: Mississippi's maternity care desert: A look inside

The post Data Dive: Access to maternity care in Mississippi, by county appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The state’s chamber of commerce and workforce development office are working together on an ambitious goal: Get more than half of Mississippi’s workforce college-educated by 2030.

The Mississippi Economic Council and Accelerate Mississippi are conducting a statewide listening tour, part of the state’s “Ascent to 55%” initiative, to create a strategic plan to increase the number of college graduates among working-aged Mississippians, considered anyone between 25-64 years old.

Mississippi already seems to be on track to achieve this goal – by 2030, an estimated 59% of the state’s workforce will have a college degree or equivalent certificate, according to a paper commissioned by the Woodward Hines Education Foundation. 

The strategic plan will aim to guide policy and marketing so that Missisippians are getting college degrees that meet the varying needs of employers like Nissan in central Mississippi, Ingalls Shipbuilding to the south and Toyota to the north.

The tour began earlier this week and will continue into December. It is being spearheaded by Jean Massey, a former associate state superintendent who MEC hired with grant funds from the Woodward Hines Education Foundation (WHEF).

Massey’s first stop was at Copiah-Lincoln Community College on Tuesday. She said she wants to learn about the needs of business – what degrees do they want the local workforce to have? – and to generate buy-in from public and private leaders needed to achieve the state’s wide-ranging goal. 

“We want to hear from the business industry what they need, we want to hear from workforce workers, we also want to hear from the educators in the region to hear what they’re offering and aligns with what’s needed, and we also want to hear from the leaders in the community, government officials,” she said. 

Mississippians have long pursued higher education at some of the lowest rates in the country, a fact state leaders have talked about improving for years with little success. 

The initiative comes as Gov. Tate Reeves announced on Monday the largest economic development project in state history. It also takes on new urgency as the pandemic has contributed to a decline in the number of Mississippians going to college, said Courtney Brown, the vice president of impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for postsecondary attainment. 

“If at any point the data were really right in front of our face about the importance of having more education, the pandemic really shows that,” Brown said. “It really showed the inequities in our society between the haves and the have-nots, and we really have to change that.” 

But if Mississippi does increase the number of college degrees in the state, the theory is that it will kick off a positive feedback loop of economic development, leading to bigger business and higher paying jobs. 

“If we raise our attainment level, our workforce becomes more valuable, industry wants to be here, and we can attract more people,” Massey said. 

The goal of increasing college degrees or credentials in Mississippi goes back to 2010 under Gov. Haley Barbour’s administration, when the Legislature created the Education Achievement Council (EAC) to measure the progress made by community colleges and universities in terms of degrees awarded, graduation rates and research dollars. 

That same year, the EAC set a postsecondary attainment goal of reaching the national average by 2025. In 2019, Mississippi’s educational attainment rate was 44% – the fourth lowest in the nation, according to Lumina – putting it on track to miss its original goal of 52%.

Two years ago, the EAC revised its attainment goal by committing to the Ascent to 55% initiative. Then WHEF – which is funding the listening tour with a four-year, $1 million grant – put out a request for proposal which it granted to MEC. 

MEC’s strategic plan would mark the first time that Mississippi has created a plan to increase the state’s number of college degrees and certificates, said Jim McHale, the president and CEO of WHEF, which has long advocated for a strong attainment goal. 

“Ascent to 55% is our north star, and everything needs to lead up to that,” McHale said. 

The strategic plan, though, is only for MEC, and it’s unclear if or how it will call on state lawmakers to pass legislation to support educational attainment. Their participation would be needed to achieve such a wide-ranging goal, according to higher education experts. 

“You need everybody at the table,” said Brown from Lumina. “Higher ed can’t solve this alone.” 

A state’s postsecondary education attainment is a reflection of a number of non-education policies, namely social services, said Iris Palmer, an education policy director at New America. Relying on higher education as a pathway to the middle class, Palmer said, isn’t a substitute for social welfare programs.

“If (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) actually worked, if all the states expanded Medicaid, if we had a world where there was enough cash assistance for people to be able to live while they’re in school, we wouldn’t have to be pathworking these things through our educational system,” Palmer said.

In Mississippi, the lack of social services is accompanied by few state resources for adult and low-income college students. The rules for Mississippi’s three college financial aid programs by and large exclude adults. Students from low-income families are less likely to complete college than students from wealthier families. As race tracks highly with income in Mississippi, Black students are much less likely to complete college than white students, even though they start college at the same rate. 

While the EAC has committed to this goal, state lawmakers are pursuing policies that either impede educational attainment or hamper the economic benefits. 

On brightly-colored fliers, MEC and Accelerate Mississippi have touted the benefits of more Mississippians going to college – not just to businesses and the economy, but to the state government’s bottom line. 

“Every increased percentage point to Mississippi’s attainment rate has the potential to net the state $20 million through reduced social service spending and increased state and local taxes,” one handout says.

The source for that data point, a 2021 paper by research firm ITHAKA-S+R, strikes a slightly different tone. Titled “It’s Complicated: The Relationship between Postsecondary Attainment and State Finances,” the report posited that increased educational attainment would help states spend less money on Medicaid and welfare – as college graduates typically need less social services – and generate more revenue in the form of increased property and income taxes. 

Mississippi, the report found, would see some of the smallest savings in the country on welfare with increased educational attainment. Eliminating the state income tax – which Reeves pledged to do at this year’s Hobnob, where MEC distributed these fliers – would also significantly reduce the potential savings. 

“The revenue coming from income tax is quite significant and definitely the majority of the tax revenue that the state is deriving,” James Ward, who co-authored the paper, told Mississippi Today. “To eliminate that would definitely take a big hit in terms of the potential benefits of increasing attainment because attainment is linked to those higher salaries where you’re getting that additional income tax.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers haven’t expressed interest in policies that research has shown will support more postsecondary attainment, such as increasing need-based financial aid and expanding college financial aid to adult learners. 

Massey anticipates the strategic plan will be finished before the middle of next year and is still sorting out what metrics the plan should measure. She hopes to build a database the public can use to track the state’s progress.

“I think the key is that we all work together, and we understand this is not going to happen overnight, but it’s absolutely vital that we do increase our attainment rate,” she said. 

Editor’s note: Woodward Hines Education Foundation is a financial supporter of Mississippi Today.

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COLUMBUS – Denisha and Amber Glenn saw a whole future inside an abandoned Tuesday Morning.

The shuttered retail store was the perfect home for the sisters’ business venture: Holistika. In their vision, Holistika would be one of Mississippi’s first medical marijuana dispensaries. 

The sisters already had success as founders of their own small human resources company. With cannabis, they did their homework. 

“We started the planning process back in 2020,” said Amber Glenn. “We were looking at properties, putting together a business plan. With us being Black women, we knew there’d be challenges … so we have – since day one – done everything correctly and by the books.” 

They visited out-of-state expos, toured leading dispensaries, and studied the state’s Medical Cannabis Act, which outlined the burgeoning program. They met early with a city inspector, ensuring their shop’s architect plan accounted for every plumbing and electrical requirement. 

They were two self-made business women, regular Mississippians, navigating an industry largely dominated by white men and deep-pocket partnerships. A 2017 survey from Marijuana Business Daily found that less than 20% of marijuana business owners are minorities. 

“We’d want to meet with companies – white men – and they would talk to us on the phone, but when they saw us in person, they’d totally disappear,” Denisha Glenn said. 

The snags kept coming. 

When they couldn’t find a local land surveyor to take them as a client, they tracked down one willing to travel from two hours away. They were meticulous, desiring a bullet-proof application ready to upload the moment the state opened the online portal. 

None of it was enough. A competitor down the street uploaded their application materials faster. And in the battle for dispensary licenses across Mississippi, speed took precedence. 

The first wave of licenses went to some of the budding market’s biggest spenders – an attorney who teamed up with an industry insider from leading cannabis state Colorado; a man who owns a private plane charter company; people who have invested millions already on cultivation sites and to launch their own empires, applying for several dispensaries at once. 

The Glenn sisters said they were only aware of one other Black woman in Mississippi working to get a dispensary license. There’s likely a small number overall, but the state’s public list of licensed dispensaries doesn’t specify an owner’s race. 

Losing out on the license stung. But it was the months of application limbo and unanswered questions that really hurt, the sisters said. They expected a swift rejection so they could move on and apply for another location. Instead, they say, it took months for Holistika to get a formal rejection and its $40,000 in fees returned so they could try for a new location. 

“No matter the position in life, the public will like you more if they have access to you,” said Denisha Glenn, reflecting on more than two months it took to get Holistika’s first application rejected so she and her sister could apply for another store. “But it just seems like it’s a lack of personnel and a lack of training.” 

In a statement to Mississippi Today, the Mississippi Department of Revenue said it responds “timely to all inquiries, including those from the personal and legal representatives” – including Holistika –  “usually within one business day.” 

The Mississippi Department of Revenue has issued 139 dispensary licenses since it began accepting applications at the beginning of July. The department says it processes the applications in the order they were received.

 “The application portal licensing software time stamped the receipt of each application out to the 100^th millisecond,” MDOR spokespersonwoman Lexus Burns said in a statement. 

Milliseconds counted when applications first flooded into MDOR’s portal. With Mississippi’s law dictating no dispensary could be within 1,500 feet of each other, staking territory was vital. 

Using the first-come-first serve system is normal within the industry, said Jackson-based cannabis attorney Slates Veazey. 

“I struggle to figure out a more fair way,” he said. 

But the law also says applicants should be issued licenses within 30 days of receiving an application. The same, in theory, goes for those being rejected. 

“That’s important information to have,” Veazey said. “If you are getting rejected you need to look for other properties. You know you can move on. And the law gives applicants a short time period to challenge a license determination.” 

Denisha and Amber Glenn said they lost valuable time that could have meant the difference between nailing down another property before a dispensary competitor edged them out for a second time. 

Tucked next to her existing bakery, Nicole Huff has a roughly 1,200-square-foot space she’s working to open as Wildflower dispensary. It’s about 1,300 feet down the street from where the Glenn sisters hoped to open inside the old Tuesday Morning space. 

“July 5, 8 o’clock, I was here,” Huff said from the desk in her bakery’s office, “dragging and dropping everything into (the portal).” 

Thirteen days later, Huff was told her application was approved. But first there was a formatting issue with her land survey; she had 24 hours to have it redone. She wound up among the first people in the state to be issued a dispensary license. 

“I’m so proud of the State Department of Revenue,” Huff said. “They’re crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i.’”

She said she cashed out her 401(k) and sold her stocks to fund her dispensary business. While her contractor filed construction permits, Amber and Denisha Glenn scoured Columbus for an alternative location. 

“We wanted a back-up for the back-up,” Denisha Glenn said. 

They spent $8,500 on land surveys to determine that any hopeful locations were the right distances from churches, schools, daycares and Wildflower.

But landing on the right new spot still didn’t solve their problems. Their first application was still at a standstill. 

Denisha Glenn said it was an October call to the media spokesperson at the state Department of Health – which handles the licenses for cultivation, doctors, and patients – that finally got her in touch with the right people, including Cannabis Program Director Kris Jones Adcock. 

“Once we got connected to the right people who could make those decisions, they were very kind and very helpful,” she said. 

If an applicant’s bid for a license is denied because another dispensary was approved for license in their zone in the period after they applied, they are able to get the $40,000 in application fees returned. 

“The Mississippi State Department of Health understands the complexities and challenges of starting this type of program,” said spokesperson Liz Sharlot, who assisted the Glenn sisters. “We are gratified for all of the support and cooperation of the Department of Revenue. The Agency is happy to assist applicants of all types to ensure a smooth process for everyone.” 

With their fees returned, on Oct. 14, the sisters applied for a new license. It also meant letting go of the Tuesday Morning spot. They ended their lease. 

The new spot is closer to where they grew up in Columbus. 

“I think our new location is a godsend,” Denisha Glenn said. “It puts us closer to our community.”

In late October, the sisters got the news: Their new location was approved.

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STARKVILLE — Tom Duff, the president of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, said in an interview Thursday that the University of Southern Mississippi should repay $5 million in welfare funds used to construct a volleyball stadium. 

Though the state has, so far, opted not to include the volleyball stadium – the single largest known purchase in the sprawling welfare scandal – in a civil suit that attempts to claw back the funds, Duff said he thinks the federal government will make the state recoup the money. 

“I could be wrong, that might not happen,” he said. “But that’s probably what should happen, because USM did it incorrectly.” 

Appointed by former Gov. Phil Bryant, Duff has served on the IHL board, which governs Mississippi’s eight public universities, since 2015. Duff, a billionaire, is also one of USM’s most prominent alums and a high-dollar donor to universities across Mississippi.

Duff said that when he and other IHL board members signed off on the lease agreement that provided the funds in 2017, they did not know that they were approving the construction of the volleyball stadium because the project was listed as an item on the consent agenda. Trustees typically approve consent agenda items in one fell swoop; sometimes, Duff admitted, without reading them. 

“They should’ve, and I probably should’ve, but I didn’t see it,” he said. 

Duff went on to say that he didn’t know the volleyball stadium – a pet project of former NFL quarterback Brett Favre – was under construction in Hattiesburg until he drove past it one day. After he learned about the new facility, he said he reached out to then-U.S. Attorney General Mike Hurst and State Auditor Shad White. 

“I live there, and I didn’t even know the building was built until I drove by and said, ‘What is that?’” Duff said. “We didn’t approve a building, we didn’t know about a building. It all got done kind of around everybody – and improperly.”

“It’s not something that should ever have happened,” he added. 

The comments came hours after USM announced in a five-paragraph statement that the university engaged in the lease agreement “in good faith.” It also announced that it would make the volleyball stadium, known as the Wellness Center, and other unspecified campus facilities available for the Mississippi Department of Human Services to provide services in south Mississippi for an initial five-year period. 

In 2017, the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation signed a lease with the Mississippi Community Education Center, Nancy New’s nonprofit, for proposed programming and services that USM now acknowledges were never provided. 

“Although MCEC shared projections of planned programming with the University, its actual utilization of the facilities did not align with those projections,” USM said in the statement. 

USM did not say in the statement if it intends to repay the welfare funds. Despite repeated requests, university officials have not granted interviews to Mississippi Today regarding the use of welfare dollars for the volleyball stadium.

Duff said he saw the university’s statement, but did not finish reading it, as he was flying to Starkville for the opening of a new music building at Mississippi State University. 

“When it started off with all the legalese, I glazed over,” he said. “Right’s right, and wrong’s wrong. That’s just the way I look at it.”

A subsidiary of IHL, USM must seek board approval for contracts worth more than $250,000. 

After much back and forth between officials from USM, Mississippi Department of Human Services, Nancy New and Brett Favre, USM’s former president, Rodney Bennett, brought the lease agreement before the IHL board.

IHL had already approved a $1 lease between USM and the Athletic Foundation, but this lease was different, because it had the $5 million sublease between the foundation and Mississippi Community Education Center attached to it.

READ MORE: ‘Timeline: How an NFL star, state officials and a university funded the USM volleyball stadium’ 

The Attorney General’s Office reviewed and approved the amended lease for IHL before it was placed on the agenda. 

“Everything has an attorney general opinion, but that doesn’t mean it’s smart or what you’re supposed to do,” Duff said. “I don’t care what the attorney general said, this was a stupid thing to do.” 

The IHL trustees approved the amended lease at its October 2017 meeting. 

The board’s meeting minutes state that the nonprofit’s funding for the project would come “via a Block Grant from the Mississippi Department of Human Services.”

The trustees who served on the board’s finance committee, Duff said, should have known about the project. Duff now chairs that committee, and he said the volleyball project didn’t go through IHL’s typical “expense checks.” 

“The finance committee should’ve known about the expenses but see, it didn’t go through any expense checks that we saw,” he said. “It went through the foundation. And the $5 million from Nancy went in and went out, I guess, to the contractor.” 

Duff’s comments are the most candid from IHL since the scandal broke.

In 2020, IHL commissioner Alfred Rankins previously told the state auditor that trustees only approved the lease between USM and the athletic foundation, not the $5 million sub-lease from MCEC, Mississippi Today reported. Rankins called White’s audit inaccurate. 

“IHL cannot claim ignorance of this fact,” White responded. “That assertion flies in the face of your own minutes. If IHL objected to the arrangement with MCEC, then the time to voice that objection was when the matter came up for a vote, not after the State Auditor pointed it out.”

Had USM gone through the proper channels, Duff said that IHL would have funded the construction of the volleyball stadium. He drew a connection between the volleyball stadium and the new music building at MSU as he left for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. 

“I’m glad they (MSU) can build the building,” he said, “which they built legitimately.”

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau’s mother signed off on the language of a lease agreement to construct a University of Southern Mississippi volleyball stadium. Read more about that here.

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Mississippi students have lost three-quarters of a school year in math instruction since the start of the pandemic, according to a new report released last week. 

The Education Recovery Scorecard, produced by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, looks at learning loss at the district level across the country using a combination of state and national test scores. 

Every state is required to administer annual standardized tests, but the results cannot be easily compared because they are not required to test for the same content or use the same grading scale. To prepare the report, researchers took state test data from 29 states and standardized the scoring systems using the results from the 2022 National Assessment for Educational Progress.

The report measured learning loss in terms of the percentage of a school year that students are behind, compared to the amount of learning that would typically occur during a single school year. 

READ MORE: Mississippi students see decline in reading and math on national exam

Nationally, the study found the average student lost the equivalent of half a year of math instruction and a quarter of a year in reading. In Mississippi, it was three-quarters of a year of math instruction and a quarter of a year in reading. 

Thomas Kane, director of the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research, said the goal was to give educators and parents nationally comparable information about learning loss in their local district.

The interactive graphs in the report show no districts in Mississippi surpassed their 2019 performance in math or reading, but the severity of achievement loss varied widely by district.

“This is a large increase in educational inequity,” Kane said in reference to the graph of changes in math achievement in Mississippi. “It’s not just saying ‘High poverty districts have always scored lower than low poverty districts.’ This is saying that those gaps, which existed in 2019, have gotten a lot wider.” 

He added most states saw this pattern, but varied in the degree to which they widened. 

Since 90% of federal pandemic relief funds are being spent at the district level, Kane said it was important to have high quality district-level data to inform those spending decisions. 

“What we hope is that states and districts will use these data to revisit their recovery plans,” Kane said. “The districts that lost more than a year’s worth of instruction should be thinking ‘Do we have enough tutoring, double doses of math instruction, (and) summer school to make up for these losses?’”

The magnitude of federal recovery dollars currently available gives him hope that these learning losses can be adequately addressed, Kane said, if districts are willing to make adjustments now that they know the full scope of their losses. 

READ MORE: How much pandemic relief funds has your school district spent?

Kane added that these results should be alarming not just for educators, but for mayors and community organizations that can also play a role in helping students catch up. He pointed out that the learning losses are likely not the result exclusively of what happened in schools, but of many other community factors like broadband connectivity, hospitalization rates, and whether parents were able to work from home. 

“It won’t be just what schools do or don’t do that determine whether or not Mississippi students catch up,” he said. 

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