We’ve got a huge week in Mississippi sports coming up. Ole Miss, State and Southern Miss all have huge conference football games and the three schools are hosting a huge college tournament at Fallen Oak on the coast this weekend and Monday.
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Barring last-minute intervention, the state of Mississippi is set to execute Charles Ray Crawford Wednesday evening.
For decades, the 59-year-old has pursued appeals across state and federal courts challenging his death sentence as well as a separate aggravated assault and rape case. As of midday Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court had not announced whether it would hear Crawford’s case and stay the execution.
Crawford was convicted of capital murder in 1994 for taking 20-year-old Kristie Ray from her family’s Tippah County home to a wooden cabin where he handcuffed and raped her and stabbed her in the chest.
As of this year, 37 executions have been carried out around the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Crawford’s planned execution will be the third in the U.S. this week, following Tuesday executions in Florida and Missouri. Six more are scheduled through the end of the year.
Ray’s mother, Mary Ray, told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal after years of waiting, she is glad that Crawford’s execution will happen.
“We are not vengeful people; we just want justice for our daughter,” she said.
Over the years and the days leading up to the execution, her mother, family and friends shared pictures of Kristie on social media and set them as their Facebook profile pictures.
On Monday, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves denied Crawford clemency because of the nature of the crime and because he had never claimed innocence. This execution will be the fourth Reeves has declined to block since he’s been in office: one in 2021, another in 2022 and the last in June of this year.
“Mississippi is praying for Ms. Ray and her family,” Reeves said in a Monday statement. “Justice must be served on behalf of victims. In Mississippi, it will be.”
At the time of the killing, Crawford was out on bond and days away from another trial for the rape of a teenage girl and assault of another one in the same county. Members of his family and a former attorney testified how they contacted law enforcement because they feared Crawford was committing another crime, which led to his arrest in Ray’s death.
Crawford has said he didn’t remember the killing and that he experienced blackouts. But after his arrest, he showed law enforcement where to find Ray’s body. He said he experienced similar blackouts for the earlier assault and rape.
In a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, Crawford’s attorneys argued his trial attorney conceded his guilt to the jury and told jurors during the closing arguments that he was “legally responsible” for the crimes and “still dangerous to the community.”
They argued it was a Sixth Amendment violation of the accused’s right to defense because the attorneys made the concessions against Crawford’s repeated objections, according to court records.
After the nation’s high court declined to take up his case in 2014, the Mississippi attorney general’s office asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution. But the justices did not set one because Crawford was appealing his rape conviction, which prosecutors considered an aggravating factor when pursuing the death penalty.
In post-conviction motions, he argued that reversing the conviction would invalidate his death sentence and require him to be resentenced.
Crawford has been part of a few lawsuits challenging the use of certain drugs in executions. The most recent and ongoing lawsuit filed in July of this year is a federal class action with four other death row inmates challenging the Mississippi Department of Correction’s three-drug lethal injection protocol.
In a separate federal lawsuit challenging the drugs used in Mississippi, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate allowed the executions of two of the plaintiffs to proceed: that of Richard Jordan and Thomas Loden.
Starting Wednesday afternoon in the hour before the execution, death penalty opponents plan to stand in front of the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson and some will demonstrate outside the main gate of Parchman.
Anti-death penalty organizations circulated petitions against Crawford’s execution that together have received over 1,000 signatures. Death Penalty Action’s petition was delivered to the governor’s office Tuesday.
Last week, Mississippi prison reform advocate Mitzi Magleby and the Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser to death row prisoners, spoke out in front of the Mississippi Supreme Court to call on Gov. Reeves and the state to stop pursuing executions, which they said are part of a system built on vengeance.
They said Crawford should be held accountable for Ray’s death, but that can be done by having him serve life without parole. Both have spoken with Crawford and said they have found a changed man who works a prison job and has stayed out of trouble during his incarceration.
“We are not God,” Magleby said about carrying out death sentences. “Mississippi is not God. We are humans who are not supposed to kill other human beings … The death of Charles Crawford will do nothing to heal anyone. It will do nothing to make the state of Missisisppi any safer than it is now.”
Scott Colom of Columbus, a Democratic candidate running against Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, says he has raised nearly $600,000 since launching his campaign.
Colom’s campaign shared with Mississippi Today ahead of Tuesday’s campaign fundraising reporting deadline that he has over $580,000 in cash on hand, a sizable amount for a first-time Senate candidate. The campaign said this was the largest amount a Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi has ever raised in its initial three-month period.
The campaign did not share the itemized list of contributions, making it unclear what the largest source of donations is, though it did say that Colom received donations from more than 3,400 individuals. More information on who gave to the Colom campaign should be available later Wednesday when the reports are filed with the Federal Election Commission.
If Colom, the current district attorney in the Golden Triangle area, wants to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Mississippi since the 1980s, raising the money necessary to topple an incumbent Republican will be crucial.
Hyde-Smith’s latest fundraising numbers are not yet available. From January to June, she reported to the Federal Election Commission raising around $1.2 million and having around $1.4 million in cash on hand.
Mississippi’s party primaries for 2026 federal elections are March 10.
Thanks to a new partnership between the Mississippi Department of Education and Mississippi Public Broadcasting, students across the state will be getting new teachers this year.
But those teachers won’t be in classrooms, sitting behind desks. They’ll be on the screen.
The REACH MS program, also called the Mississippi Virtual Synchronous Learning Initiative, funded by a $2.2 million appropriation from the Legislature, is a response to the teacher shortage afflicting swaths of Mississippi schools.
There are thousands of vacant teaching posts in Mississippi, according to a recent MDE survey. While the virtual-teacher program doesn’t replace recruitment efforts, said associate state superintendent Bryan Marshall, it’s one of the state’s latest attempts to address the teacher shortage. Those include a revamped teacher recruitment website and increased funding to pay tuition and licensure expenses for college students who commit to teaching in “critical shortage areas.” That’s a category that 56% of Mississippi school districts fall into.
Participating districts that are struggling to staff core subjects can get a virtual teacher through the program. All they have to do is make sure special-education students are accommodated, enter grades and attendance, provide a classroom, in-person facilitators and reliable internet.
Five districts — Hinds County, Yazoo County, Yazoo City, Claiborne and West Point — are part of the pilot program, as well as three certified teachers and three teacher assistants who are college students on the cusp of finishing their teaching degrees.
In this way, Marshall says the initiative addresses the state’s teacher shortage in two ways: staffing hard-to-teach subject areas and strengthening the teacher pipeline.
“The idea is that we would keep the student teachers for a period, and then they would go on into the classroom, and we’d bring on a new set,” Marshall said. “We’re trying to provide resources to districts without taking teachers away from them.”
It’s clear the agency is proud of the new program and optimistic about what it can accomplish. State Superintendent Lance Evans has been publicly championing the initiative for the past year — at Capitol hearings, board meetings and press events. A powerpoint about REACH MS claims each teacher has the capacity to serve up to 450 students.
Post-pandemic, though, it’s hard not to wonder if the program is promising more than it can deliver. Research shows that when education is online, student learning, focus and engagement suffer.
But the agency — and students — argue that this initiative, with its classroom setting and in-person facilitators, is different.
Teenagers in red-collared shirts and khaki pants peer over their laptops at their teacher, Caitlin Perkins. She’s at the front of the Yazoo City High School classroom, giving a lesson on how to write thesis statements.
In actuality, she’s about an hour away at the Mississippi Public Broadcasting offices in Jackson, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the students.
They’re engaged, paying rapt attention to their on-screen teacher and even answering her questions out loud. Another teacher, on what’s supposed to be her planning period break, walks around as an in-person facilitator, keeping students quiet and passing out worksheets.
It’s pretty close to what Sametra Brown, assistant superintendent of federal programs, imagined when the agency reached out about the district’s participation in the virtual teacher program.
“In a critical teacher shortage area, these are certified teachers,” she said. “We felt that this would be a wonderful opportunity for our students to still have a highly qualified certified educator in front of them, but give them that virtual experience.”
Yazoo City Municipal School District has struggled for a long time, in general.
The district was merged with Humphreys County School District in 2019, creating Mississippi’s first Achievement School District. The partnership created a single state-run district in an effort to turn the low-performing schools around. The districts divorced this summer but remain under state control.
While the state education department reports that there are almost 3,000 open teaching jobs across Mississippi, teacher shortages disproportionately impact schools with high rates of poverty and larger minority student populations.
More than a third of children under 18 in Yazoo County live in poverty, 2020 Census data shows. Data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows the 2023 median household income in Yazoo County was $42,434.
Yazoo City, which dropped from a C grade to an F in the latest district rankings, currently has 10 open teaching positions, administrators said. Three of those are at the high school, with two in core subject areas. Staffing challenges, ample national research shows, directly impact student achievement.
The program, Marshall said, was created for districts such as Yazoo City.
“Many people are not going into education now, so that’s a challenge,” Brown said, of the district’s staffing struggles. “We have to be creative in how we attract and retain teachers … Rather than our students having a substitute teacher in the classroom that has maybe no credentials, this was an opportunity for them to get live instruction.”
The virtual teacher came as a shock to Rodrianna Drain, Mikeria Brown and Devin Gibbs, three of the 14-year-olds in Perkins’ ninth-grade English class. They’re among some of the top students in the high school. School leaders chose the cream of the crop, they said, for the pilot program to better prepare them for online college classes and an increasingly virtual world.
But now that the surprise has worn off, Brown actually prefers the virtual element over her other classes. She largely does classwork online, and typing out answers to writing prompts gives her time to think through her responses instead of immediately answering out loud.
It makes sense that the set-up is appealing to this generation of students, who spent a chunk of their education learning at home during the pandemic.
However, another vestige of pandemic-era learning is throwing some wrenches into the program: Technology problems.
Perkins’ lesson buffered a little, her face momentarily frozen while her class waited patiently. The students noted that occasionally the computers are slow and the Wi-Fi sometimes goes out.
Those issues are usually quickly resolved and the kinks are worth it, they said. The three students really like Perkins, one of the program’s student teachers, describing her as a dramatic storyteller when she reads out loud which makes it easier for them to engage with the text.
“We’re not just writing more, but we’re actually understanding more about it,” Drain said. “She talks to us like she’s one of us.”
Before she logs off, Perkins confirms the students don’t have any more questions. Then they wave goodbye, and the screen goes black.
Much of what makes the virtual teacher program stand out compared to pandemic virtual learning, Marshall said, are eGlass systems.
They’re also partially what makes the program so pricey (in addition to the technology and infrastructure needs of districts and employee salaries). All of the equipment required for the futuristic contraptions, which the company describes as “illuminated transparent lightboards” that have a camera to monitor the classroom, costs about $3,000.
Marshall said the lightboards are essential because they’re interactive and allow teachers to teach in real time. Leslie Hebert, one of the teachers in the program and the education program development specialist for K-12 literacy at MPB, said while the program is less hands-on, the lessons are more in-depth because of the technology.
“This is not your normal sit-and-get-lectured style of teaching,” Marshall said. “When the pandemic was here, it was really that the teachers talked and the kids listened and that was it … This is almost like having a real person in the classroom. When you couple it with a facilitator to keep kids on task, that’s a game changer.”
Right now, the program uses two eGlass systems and offers English I, English III, Algebra I and Algebra II classes. About 150 students are involved across the five districts, but the program has the capacity for 5,400 students, six teachers and six assistants when it’s fully scaled up.
They’ll be adding math and science classes to the program in the spring, Marshall said, and 12 more eGlass systems are on the way. The initiative started small because the agency’s appropriation wasn’t finalized until late in the summer due to legislators bickering over the state budget.
And Evans is pushing for more resources. He said recently that he’s asking the Legislature to continue funding the program next year to expand it.
The more students, the better, Hebert said. The program is helping her reach more students than she used to teach in a traditional classroom setting. The medium matters less.
“At the end of the day, it’s about teaching children,” she said.
KILN – In the days leading up to the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Hancock County emergency director Brian “Hooty” Adam recalled an eerie moment, one he fully recognizes sounds made up.
Trudging through a pile of debris in the woods, Adam stumbled upon an opened book. Staring up at him, he said, were pages from the Book of Genesis telling the story of Noah’s Ark, in which God forewarns of a catastrophic flood.
“If I hadn’t witnessed it, people would probably have never believed it,” said Adam, who took over as director two years before Katrina flooded his county with a nearly 30-foot storm surge.
In 2005, he rode out the storm of biblical proportions in the county’s old emergency office, a defunct bowling alley near the shore in Bay St. Louis. Adam, sporting a full mustache and a red polo, now works in a state-of-the-art, bunkered operations center in Kiln, about 10 miles north.
Proudly walking through the new stronghold, he explained the progress Hancock County and the rest of the Mississippi Gulf Coast made over the last 20 years, such as adopting modern building codes, updating their emergency plans and elevating construction in flood prone areas.
But while the Coast is spearheading resilience in Mississippi, it also exemplifies an economic dilemma creeping into all corners of the region and country as a whole.
“The biggest remnant of Katrina that is still causing a disaster is the insurance,” said Rhonda Rhodes, president of the Hancock Resource Center.
Vandy Mitchell, a retired state employee in Biloxi, said he could throw a dart at the city’s map and find someone with home insurance problems, whether they’re worried about their policy being renewed or their premiums skyrocketing.
Katrina was a major turning point in the insurance market. Before the storm, Mitchell said the premium for his 1,400-square-foot home was about $900 a year. Now, he said, he pays $4,200 a year, a 360% increase over 20 years. That’s more than he pays for the mortgage on his house, Mitchell added.
“That’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” he said. “It’s getting harder and harder to justify living in this area.”
Home insurance is the primary way homeowners can secure their shelters and belongings in case of a natural disaster. Those with little or no insurance have to rely on donations or hope the disaster is large enough to secure a federal declaration, something that is difficult in small, rural areas such as those throughout Mississippi.
Even if a declaration does come, the Federal Emergency Management Agency as of 2023 capped housing assistance payments at $42,500 – far below most homes’ value. Moreover, as The Associated Press reported, the government is taking longer than before to issue declarations, extending the limbo for uninsured storm victims.
In Mississippi, nearly a quarter of homeowners pay less than $100 a year in home insurance, which, as experts told NBC News last year, means they have such scant coverage they’re essentially uninsured. Only two states, West Virginia and New Mexico, had a higher percentage.
Within Mississippi, though, several counties have much higher rates. In Jefferson County, where more than 1 in 4 lives below the poverty line, 48% of homeowners lack meaningful insurance.
Across the country in places with increasing disaster risk, insurance companies are both hiking premiums and pulling out altogether. David Krenning, an insurance agent in Ocean Springs, said large carriers such as Allstate and Progressive have stopped writing wind and hail policies on the Coast in Mississippi.
Coast residents often are left with policies from either the “wind pool” – a state-funded program – or an “unadmitted carrier.” The Mississippi Insurance Department allows unadmitted, or unregulated, carriers to work in the state to bridge the gap left by larger companies. But those options come with higher costs for the homeowner and less regulation by the state.
Living on the Coast, Krenning said, is becoming tougher for blue-collar families who have been there for years. He said it’s common to see houses for $250,000 – just over the area’s median value – to have $5,000-$6,000 annual premiums just for wind and hail policies.
“It’s tough for folks who lived here their entire life, they paid off their home,” said Krenning, who grew up around his family’s insurance business. “For a long time, people were coming here because the cost of living was so cheap. But the continually rising insurance costs could really hinder some areas of the Coast.”
Rhodes, of the Hancock Resource Center, said rising premiums are preventing homeowners from making improvements to better storm-proof their houses. The effect, she said, is translating to renters, too.
“We have apartment complexes that were built after Katrina, and they’re having issues because they have capital improvement needs.” Rhodes said. “But they can’t keep the housing affordable and make those improvements with the cost of insurance looming over their head.
“The frustrating thing is, it’s been 20 years (since Katrina), and we’re still paying for insurance like it was last year.”
After hurricanes Zeta and Ida – in 2020 and 2021, respectively – Jackson County received about $18 million in federal disaster grants, and is now developing what officials there say is the state’s first resilience plan. Part of the plan includes improving drainage in the low-lying, flood-prone city of Moss Point.
Moss Point Mayor Billy Knight said flooding has become so common in the city that during a heavy rain, residents elevate couches and beds inside their homes onto blocks to keep them dry.
“It’s just become a normal thing,” he said.
Like other parts of the Coast, Moss Point sits in a swampy, wet ecosystem, and early developers didn’t always consider drainage when planning new housing, Knight said. Now, increasing rainfall is overwhelming the city’s aging stormwater system.
Most of East Moss Point sits in a “high-risk” flood zone, which means mortgage lenders require homeowners there to have flood insurance. Residents in the city pay on average about $1,300 a year in flood insurance premiums and fees, federal data show.
But East Moss Point, where the median household income is $26,000, is also the poorest part of the city. Many of the city’s low-income families settled there, Knight explained, because that’s where the cheapest property is.
“People have to go to where they can afford,” Knight said. “Sometimes they don’t realize why the houses are not as much as on the other side of town. They’re cheaper because you’re in a flood zone.”
Insurance experts agree that as climate volatility continues to trend upward, the cost of protecting disaster-prone homes will only grow.
“It’s really strange to say, but the insurance industry was one of the first industries talking about the impact of climate change,” said Chip Merlin, an attorney who specializes in insurance claims and who worked with Katrina survivors in Mississippi. “If you go back 20, 30 years ago, it was some of the largest multinational insurance companies saying, this is going to be a problem, and it seems to be getting worse.”
Those on the Coast, such as Krenning and Rhodes, fear rising premiums are already pushing lower- and middle-income families away from what used to be blue-collar communities.
In Alabama and Louisiana, lawmakers fund incentives encouraging homeowners to mitigate their roofs using “FORTIFIED” standards, a program through the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. The grants provide up to $10,000 per house.
A study this year by the University of Alabama found, during Hurricane Sally in 2020, FORTIFIED homeowners in the state filed fewer than half as many claims as everyone else. Upgrading the roofs for every home, the research said, would have slashed total damage costs by about two-thirds.
Policy and planning experts point to mitigation grants and statewide, uniform building codes as key avenues towards climate resilience at the local level. Mississippi lacks both.
“The only way we’re going to lower (insurance) rates on the Gulf Coast is through mitigation, building a stronger home,” said Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney.
Mitchell, the Biloxi resident, said he would love to upgrade his roof, especially if it means chopping down his insurance bill. But doing so costs thousands of dollars – close to $20,000 for a 2,000 square-foot home, according to Habitat for Humanity. It’s so expensive that he joked it’d almost be easier if a storm came and blew his roof off for him.
“I think we’re long overdue for that in Mississippi,” Krenning said of a state-funded mitigation grant.
Rhodes, whose nonprofit has worked to improve housing in Hancock County since Katrina, said outside of insurance issues, the Hancock County community has “bounced back beautifully.” Waveland was decimated by the hurricane and is finally starting to see new development arrive, she said, although businesses there now have to navigate costs to elevate their buildings.
“They’re going to get there, it’s just a little slower,” Rhodes said. “The people who live here, the ones who were here during Katrina, it’s enough of a memory in their mind now that we can appreciate all the good that’s come from it. I do think the people’s spirit and attitude is resilient.”
Getting ready to retire after 22 years as the Hancock County emergency director, Adam recognized not everyone wants to relive the horrifying events of Hurricane Katrina that took 238 lives in Mississippi. But for him, he said, it’s a duty to impart whatever knowledge will help others learn, calling those lessons a “blessing in tragedy.”
“Here’s the thing: People are not going to want change,” Adam said, describing stricter regulations on the Coast. “They didn’t want change when (Katrina) happened. But it’s inevitable. As long as I’ve been in this, if I don’t change and I don’t learn, I shouldn’t be in this job.”
The death toll is now 10 in the spate of shootings at high school and college homecoming events Friday and Saturday, where more than a dozen other people were wounded.
The latest victim is Cayus Stevens, who died as a result of wounds he suffered in Heidelberg, the third fatality from that shooting. Friends and community members on social media identified him as a graduate from the Heidelberg High School Class of 2018.
A Friday shooting in the Delta city of Leland claimed the lives of six people in what is the deadliest mass shooting in the country this year. Shootings were also reported after a South Delta High School football game in Anguilla in Sharkey County on Friday and at two university homecomings on Saturday, resulting in one death at Alcorn State University.
“This kind of senseless violence has no place in Heidelberg or anywhere in Mississippi,” Heidelberg Police Chief Cornell White said in a statement.
The other victims killed in the Heidelberg shooting were another graduate, Mikea McCray, 28, of Laurel, and Chris Newell, 35, of Laurel.
White extended his condolences to the families of the victims and asked the public to keep them in their thoughts and prayers. He also thanked a coordinated response and assistance from local and state law enforcement.
Four have been arrested and charged in the Heidelberg shooting.
Tylar Goodloe, 18, is charged with two counts of capital murder and possession of a weapon on educational property. A judge set his bond at $2 million cash.
The others arrested are Damarin Starks, 19, charged with accessory after the fact and tampering with physical evidence; Jadarius Quartez Page, 19, charged with accessory after the fact; and Jabari Deshaun Collins, 19, charged with possession of a deadly weapon on educational property.
White said the investigation continues and the police department will do everything in its power to receive justice for the victims and their families.
This week, the FBI Jackson office announced five people are in custody and charged in the Leland shooting: Morgan Lattimore, 25, capital murder; Teviyon L. Powell, 29, capital murder; William Bryant, 29, capital murder; Terrogernal S. Martin, 33, capital murder; and Latoya A. Powell, 44, attempted murder.
It was not immediately clear if those arrested have attorneys. An FBI spokesperson said additional arrests are pending.
The suspects arrested Monday had first appearance hearings in Washington County, the justice court clerk’s office confirmed, but bond information was not immediately available.
Martin’s bond was set at $1 million cash, the FBI confirmed, but a spokesperson did not immediately confirm in which court they appeared.
The Washington County coroner identified the Leland victims as Oreshama Johnson, 41; Calvin Plant, 19; Shelbyona Powell, 25; Kaslyn Johnson, 18; Amos Brantley Jr., 18; and JaMichael Jones, 34.
Less than an hour away, another shooting happened Friday night outside a football game in Anguilla. In a statement, Sharkey County Sheriff Herbert Ceaser said one person was shot and taken to a local hospital.
Ceaser said two people have been arrested in the shooting but did not identify them. The sheriff said violence will not be tolerated.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the victim’s family during this incredibly difficult time,” Ceasar said in the statement. “We ask the community to come together in support and remain positive as the investigation continues.”
Brekyra Fisher, 29, of Vicksburg, died at Alcorn State. The university said Fisher was not a student.
A child who was shot in the abdomen in a tailgating area near Jackson State’s stadium was taken to the hospital. Suspects have not been announced for either shooting.
Mississippi has bemoaned its lack of technology startups and venture capital since the first dot-com boom in the mid 1990s.
Innovate Mississippi believes it might have a solution. It is providing funding and training to seven Mississippi tech startups through a 12-week program.
Alex Bucklew and Johnathan McAdory had an idea for a product that would find the best price for prescription drugs by aggregating discounts from a variety of sources. Their company, SimpleScript, is their first try at starting a business. For Bucklew and McAdory, Innovate Mississippi’s accelerator has taught them how to grow their business.
”Especially something that’s scalable to the level (SimpleScript) is, it can be difficult to figure out what to do next. We needed some counsel on how to get from point A to point B.” said Bucklew. “From working with CoBuilders we will be ready to get funding.”
Mississippi has a nascent tech scene and state leaders have struggled with how to grow it. Innovate Mississippi is a nonprofit organization trying to connect entrepreneurs with investors and other resources across the state.
“With 3 million people in Mississippi, we’ve gotta do a lot of work just to find the business that needs the mentor three hours away, that needs the accounting person,” said Tony Jeff, the CEO and president of Innovate. “We connect those dots.”
Jeff says that without this connection, founders would turn to other states for funding and resources.
CoBuilders, Innovate’s 12-week startup accelerator, mentors and trains Mississippi entrepreneurs on how to get their company and product ready to show to investors. Innovate, which is funded through a mix of public and private money, also invests $25,000 into each company.
This year’s cohort of seven companies has been refining its products to pitch to investors on Nov. 11. On pitch day, they’ll be looking to raise upwards of $100,000 each. Unlike other small businesses, startups are focused on rapid growth and capturing a large share of a market.
To support this they usually rely on raising money from outside investors. In the early stages of a startup, companies often look to “angel investors,” wealthy individuals or groups that invest a small amount in a company.
Jeff said it’s not enough for founders to have a polished pitch, they need to have researched their competitors and received feedback from users.
Leta Palmiter’s company, Vertical Take-Off Reading, is currently in its third pilot round and has over 130 students using it.
The software she created with co-founder Ben Stasa, measures students’ oral reading skills. As a speech therapist and executive director of a nonprofit that serves dyslexic students, Palmiter saw students needed one-on-one help with reading that teachers just didn’t have the time for. She looked for a tool to help her measure her students’ ability to read out loud but couldn’t find anything. So she decided to do it herself.
Vertical’s program can be used in a classroom or at home on any device with a microphone. A child reads out loud while the app records it then creates a report for the teacher to measure the student’s progress.
Reading out loud helps with comprehension and is especially important for students with dyslexia. Palmiter says that Vertical is designed to complement teaching, not replace it.
“ We know that it’s doing a great job measuring that accuracy at that sound level and that kind of data will drive instruction,” said Palmiter.
She met Stasa, a doctoral student in computer science at the University of Southern Mississippi, who was tackling the same problem. Palmiter said that working together helped bring the product to market.
Mississippi’s colleges are playing an active role in growing the startup pipeline, funding research and fostering new ideas. Innovate works with universities to host pitch competitions and connect to founders.
“ There’s a lot of resources that the schools and universities help support tech entrepreneurs,” said Ricky Romanek founder of ClaimTra, a healthcare analytics tool for hospitals and clinics to recover insurance claims.
Jeff says that students regularly tell him that they plan on leaving Mississippi because it lacks good job opportunities for them. While it’s a small slice of the economy, Jeff thinks the tech sector could play a role in addressing Mississippi’s brain drain problem.
“ There are a slice of Mississippians that these are the best and most exciting ways for them to stay here, be gainfully employed, and even move people here,” said Jeff.
It can be difficult finding the right companies for the accelerator. They need to be innovative companies, often in the tech sector, that are early in development and have high growth potential.
“It is very obvious we have more money chasing deals than we have deals. So we’ve got to get everything we can to make every startup qualified for that money,” said Jeff. That’s where Innovate comes in, nurturing home-grown companies and attracting new companies to Mississippi.
Romanek has brought Innovate “ a couple other crazy ideas” before and is excited to contribute to Mississippi’s tech industry.
Romanek said: “ I think there’s a huge startup potential in Mississippi that’s untapped. There’s a lot of great ideas. I don’t think they’re aware of all the resources that are available.”
Joseph “Joe” Dera managed publicity for Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, David Bowie, Elton John, B.B. King, The Who and ZZ Top and other stars, and his love of music and show business took him around the world.
The love of the blues, historic homes and his wife, Madison native Suzanne Case, brought him to Mississippi, where he moved full-time after he retired in 2016. The veteran publicist Dera died Friday in Bentonia. He was 74.
“A list of everyone he worked with would probably be 20 pages long,” said Chris Roslan, a former business partner of Dera’s.
Dera “always had a real fascination with old houses,” including one from the 1700s that he had in New York and the home where he an Case were living in Bentonia, Roslan said.
“He also loved blues music, so I think that also drew him to that area,” Roslan said.
In his five-decade career Dera represented marquee stars and entertainment brands.
Dera eventually started his own company, Dera & Associates, and his clients also included Billy Joel, Queen, Robert Palmer, UB40, Clint Black, Duran Duran, Foreigner, Ray Davis, Pink Floyd, The Band, Alabama, Les Paul and Rick Springfield. He did public relations work for big events, including Live Aid and Woodstock ’99.
Dera served as former Beatle Paul McCartney’s spokesman for over 20 years. He also represented the National Geographic Society, Dick Clark Productions, the American Music Awards, the History Channel and Gibson Guitars, among many others.
Dera was born in the Netherlands, son of a Dutch coal miner who moved the family to New Jersey.
His first foray into music was interviewing Robert Palmer for his community college newspaper. Dera would later become Palmer’s press agent and Palmer helped Dera start his own firm years later.
After retiring, Dera and Case moved to the historic Bradshaw House in Yazoo County, where he provided free PR counsel to local businesses. He and Case were active in rescuing and caring for abandoned dogs.
In a 2017 interview with the Clarion Ledger, Dera said he had many fond memories from his career, albeit in a dog-eat-dog industry often full of outsized egos.
“Even those with tough reputations are real sweethearts,” Dera said. And he said living in Mississippi had been “fun.”
“I don’t miss the snow,” Dera said then. “It’s all summer weather here.”
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
The Trump administration’s obsession with sending National Guard troops hither and yon brings back memories of the time I spent as a member of a mobilized Guard unit.
It was 63 years ago on Sept. 30, and yes, it did coincide with the admission of James Meredith as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. I was a senior journalism student at Ole Miss and a part-time reporter for The Oxford Eagle. I also had another part-time job as a member of the Mississippi National Guard, one I had held since high school.
All three came together in the last week of September 1962. I covered Lt. Gov. Paul Johnson, who was in Oxford to deny Meredith’s enrollment because Gov. Ross Barnett’s flight was fogged in at Jackson and could not be there himself to turn Meredith away. Things got even more interesting that weekend.
On Saturday, Sept. 29, Gov. Barnett called up the National Guard to go to Oxford to stop the U.S. Justice Department from enrolling Meredith on Oct. 1. A contingent of federal officials, including U.S. marshals and Department of Justice officials, had flown in from Memphis with Meredith and placed him in a highly guarded dormitory.
My unit, B Troop of the 108th Armored Cavalry Regiment was based in Pontotoc, 30 miles from the university. After a night and the next day rounding up troops, we were ready to go. We soon heard, however, that we had a new boss. President John F. Kennedy had federalized the Mississippi National Guard, taking away Barnett’s biggest club.
We heard that a crowd was gathering on campus. There had been an Ole Miss football game in Jackson the night before, where Barnett had vowed to keep Meredith out of Ole Miss. Students returning to campus found a phalanx of U.S. marshals and other assorted federal officers surrounding the Lyceum, the administration building. Students and outsiders, egged on by former Gen. Edwin Walker, soon were throwing bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails at state Highway Patrol officers, U.S. marshals, other law enforcement officers and the contingent of the news media that had gathered.
The federal security was not large, and defenses became even weaker when the state Highway Patrol pulled away from the lines and refused to help the Feds.
It was soon obvious that things were out of hand. National Guard Troop E of the 108th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Oxford was the first unit onto the campus. Capt. Murry Falkner, nephew of novelist William Faulkner, was the commander. Falkner was hit by a chunk of concrete, sustaining a broken arm, but led his troops into the fray. Troop E only had 67 soldiers. Soon, the Water Valley National Guard was brought in.
Pontotoc’s Troop B was next, and we loaded into our jeeps and troop trucks and headed west on U.S. Highway 6 to Oxford. On the 40-minute drive we were constantly being passed by cars heading to the same place as we were, but not for the same reason. Most did not know that Kennedy had taken the Guard away from Barnett and were shouting “let’s go get him,” (not the exact quotes).
By the time we got on University Drive heading onto the campus, it was obvious things were going to be rough. As we went into the circle around the Grove, where the rioters were massed, we saw cars burned. One belonged to my professor Samuel Talbert, chair of the Journalism Department. We did not have time to think about what we were seeing.
Suddenly, someone threw a Molotov cocktail firebomb from the Grove, striking the tailgate of our troop truck and fortunately falling back on the street and not torching us. Rocks and bottles pelted the side of our truck. Every obscenity known to man and newly concocted ones were yelled at us.
We finally got in front of the Lyceum, jumped from our vehicles and began taking positions. We shined the lights of the vehicles into the Grove where the rioters were congregated, hoping that would help us spot trouble better.
We found out the next morning that might not have been our best move. One of our officers, Lt. John Fox, and I stood behind a jeep for a while observing the turmoil. The next morning Lt. Fox told me to look at the front of the jeep. I did and saw bullet holes in the windshield, around the headlights and on other parts of the jeep.
The rioters were not happy with the headlights and were trying to shoot them out. Fortunately, they did not hit us as we took shelter behind the vehicles.
The situation got worse after midnight when the word passed down the line that the U.S. marshals were running out of tear gas. That rather obnoxious gas was what was keeping the mob at bay. As the marshals fired their canisters fewer apart, the rioters moved close and closer to our lines in front of the Lyceum.
Things were becoming dangerously catastrophic. We had weapons and ammunition but not enough for the situation. We were attentive when we heard a “tromp, tromp, tromp” coming down toward the football stadium. Soon a line of soldiers from 503rd Military Police Battalion Airborne at Fort Bragg, wearing riot gear and carrying rifles with bayonets, marched up the street and took up positions. Kennedy had sent in the trained regular Army riot dispersers.
I will never forget the gravelly-voiced sergeant who ordered his troops to “Right face,” so they would be facing the Grove. Then he said, “Fix bayonets!” Then he said, “Lock and load, one round.” The metallic ring of the bayonets and the click of the rifles being loaded obviously made an impact. Rioters were already running away before the sergeant ordered his troops into riot formation and they fanned out across the Grove.
The real danger was over but there were skirmishes the next morning with Guardsmen and the MPs chasing scattered bands of dispersed rioters and troublemakers around the university campus and the city of Oxford.
Two people were killed in the riot, many injured and there was looting, destruction of property and hijacking of cars. Besides the students who took part in the rioting, there were outsiders who came in from around the state and from surrounding states to preserve their sacred institution of segregation.
One Mississippi television station even encouraged people to go to Oxford to stop Meredith from enrolling. Gov. Barnett did not discourage anyone from going.
Why rehash “The Oxford Incident” as the Feds called it, or “Operation Rocky Road” as the Mississippi National Guard termed it?
It might be worth considering the circumstances as President Donald Trump seems intent on using the National Guard for his endeavors. Let us consider the situations in Los Angeles and Washington. No signs of rioting, people being killed by rioters, no looting, no extensive burning or property destruction. I did not see two Guard members standing behind a jeep for safety and finding bullet holes in it the next day.
In D.C., I saw Guard troops standing around national monuments, chatting with tourists and having their pictures taken with them. I saw Guard personnel stationed in front of federal buildings in Los Angeles with little activity around.
After college, as a reporter for United Press International, I covered a few other disturbances that involved the use of National Guard troops. There was always credible evidence for their use.
There seem to be more plans for such far-fetched actions. Trump is trying now to send the Guard to other cities, like Chicago and Portland. He seems to have a gleam in his eye for New York City.
We have heard claims that there is serious trouble in all those cities, but the Trump minions have not brought any evidence to contradict relative scenes of peace.
Force was needed at Ole Miss. There was rioting, looting, killing, property destruction and defiance of federal court orders. Force used to quell dangerous and catastrophic situations can be necessary.
Force used for personal whim and for personal political advantage without cause are a travesty against our democracy and Constitution. The Trump administration opts for the latter.
Bio: Terry Wooten is a native of Pontotoc who studied journalism at the University of Mississippi. He worked as a reporter for the then-Tupelo Daily Journal and United Press International in Jackson and Charlotte, N.C. At UPI, he covered the race story in Mississippi and North Carolina. He was also a foreign correspondent and news executive in London and Europe for Futures World News for seven years and was managing editor/commodities for Dow Jones Newswires in New York.
Deep South Today, the nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News in New Orleans, Louisiana, and The Current in Lafayette, Louisiana, announced Tuesday that it will create a new regional investigative reporting center in collaboration with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.
The Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center will launch in early 2026 with a lead investigative editor, dedicated full-time investigative and data reporters, and New York Times Local Investigations Fellows at Mississippi Today and Verite News. It will also include support from Big Local News, a program at Stanford University that empowers journalists with data, tools and collaborations. As the Deep South Today network of newsrooms continues to grow, the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center will add capacity in its new newsrooms with dedicated reporters and fellows.
“The Deep South Today newsrooms are already publishing impactful and award-winning investigative reporting, and our new Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship will dramatically expand the breadth and depth of that work,” said Warwick Sabin, President and CEO of Deep South Today. “We developed Deep South Today to provide the infrastructure to sustain and grow local journalism in a region that is under-resourced and underserved, and this critically important initiative will advance our mission.”
The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship is committing substantial resources in addition to the fellowship positions. Deputy Editor Chris Davis will manage the Deep South Today investigative team and the work will be co-published by Deep South Today newsrooms and The Times, and made available to local news organizations for co-publication. The Times will also lend staff time to help Deep South Today recruit, hire and train the editors and reporters who will be a part of their new investigative reporting center, as well as edit the stories being produced. Support from the Times will help fast-track Deep South Today’s ambitious goals to produce local beat coverage and investigative stories of importance to communities across the region. Additionally, the Local Investigations Fellowship will continue working with other newsrooms across the U.S. to produce original accountability journalism.
“Deep South Today has big ambitions for robust coverage of the South and building an investigative team is vital to that mission,” said Dean Baquet, former Executive Editor of The Times who now leads the Local Investigations Fellowship program. “We’ve already worked with Mississippi Today to much success and we look forward to doing more.”
Across the Deep South, the capacity of local and state newsrooms to produce resource-intensive, in-depth investigative reporting that exposes injustice and holds the powerful accountable is scarce. Local journalism is under attack on numerous fronts, and this initiative is being launched at a critical time when access to public information in the public interest is increasingly being restricted and accountability reporting is more challenging than ever to produce.
“This collaboration will redefine what’s possible for local journalism,” said Adam Ganucheau, Deep South Today’s Executive Editor and Chief Content Officer and a native Mississippian. “By combining the familiarity and trust of Deep South Today’s newsrooms with the resources and expertise of The New York Times, we’re building something truly unprecedented — a regional force for accountability and change. Together, we’re proving that the future of investigative reporting starts here, in communities that need it most.”
By working with The Times to launch and build out a new investigative reporting center, Deep South Today will position an upstart investigative team alongside some of the most prominent editors in the journalism industry. This initiative builds on the success that Mississippi Today already established with The Times and Big Local News: A joint investigation by those organizations about corruption and abuse by Mississippi sheriffs was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting and led to expanded federal investigations and legislative reforms in the state. Mississippi Today also separately won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2023 for its investigative series “The Backchannel” and The Local Investigations Fellowship won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 2025 in collaboration with the Baltimore Banner and Big Local News for an investigation into the deadly opioid crisis.
“This collaboration is about more than just investigative journalism — it’s about building power through reporting in communities that have long been overlooked and where local newspapers are struggling to survive” said Terry Baquet, Verite News Editor-in-Chief and a Louisiana native. “We’re not just working together on stories; with The New York Times, we’re building a new model for how serious journalism can thrive in the South. It’s deeply personal to me, and I believe it is the future of local journalism.”
Integrating data journalism into the investigative teams and providing mentoring and training in computational methods with the support of Big Local News will level up the capacities of the Deep South Today newsrooms to uncover hidden patterns, provide sophisticated investigative coverage, and lower the cost of accountability reporting through better use of tools and algorithms.
“These resources mean Big Local News will be able to provide data journalism support to the Deep South reporters and editors that will further equip them to find and report out critical investigative stories,” said Cheryl Phillips, Founder and Co-Director of Big Local News. “I hope this work in the Deep South can serve as a model for how to scale local news.”
This initiative was made possible through a grant from Arnold Ventures, and Deep South Today and The Times view it as an opportunity to create a new sustainable, replicable model for building strong regional investigative teams that can produce high-impact local, state and regional stories in underserved communities.
All of the new positions for the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center will soon be posted on the Deep South Today website at: https://deepsouthtoday.org/careers
ABOUT DEEP SOUTH TODAY
Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News and The Current.
Founded in 2016, Mississippi Today is now the largest newsroom in the state, and in 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Verite News launched in 2022 in New Orleans, where it covers inequities facing communities of color. The Current is a nonprofit news organization founded in 2018 serving Lafayette and southern Louisiana.
With its regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding and re-energizing local journalism in communities where it had previously eroded, and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.
ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES
The New York Times Company is a trusted source of quality, independent journalism whose mission is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. With more than 11 million subscribers across a diverse array of print and digital products — from news to cooking to games to sports — The Times is a diversified media company with curious readers, listeners and viewers around the globe.
ABOUT BIG LOCAL NEWS
Launched in 2020 as a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative, Big Local News helps reporters better use data in service of accountability journalism. Big Local News shares data and reporting recipes for journalists to localize stories at biglocalnews.org. It also provides news detection tools that monitor a wide variety of data and information streams. The goal: make it easier for journalists to find the stories that matter at the local level.
Big Local News regularly supports and mentors journalists in computational methods, including the New York Times Investigative Reporting Fellows, and was integrally involved with a collaborative project with The Times and The Baltimore Banner, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting earlier this year.