Mississippi’s rape and sexual battery laws still provide a spousal defense that can protect those who commit marital rape, and contain archaic and misogynistic language from the 1800s.
In the 2022 legislative session, Rep. Dana McLean, R-Columbus, authored a bill that would have clarified the definition and elements of rape and sexual assault, replacing passages such as “assault with the intent to forcibly ravish a female of previously chaste character.” It also would have removed the spousal defense from the books.
The bill passed the House overwhelmingly, 119-1, but died without a vote in the state Senate.
McLean said she plans to file her bill again in the 2023 session that starts in January. She said she authored it originally at the request of victims’ rights advocates.
“It’s archaic,” McLean said. “The language is specific to females, which it should not be. It’s also important to me that we remove the spousal defense. It’s still illegal to rape anyone, but that provides a threshold offense, which regardless of the other statutes really needs to be revised.”
McLean’s bill would delete language in the law that says a person would not be guilty of rape or sexual battery if the alleged victim was the defendant’s legal spouse at the time of the offense and the couple is not separated and living apart. It would also change law that said a legal spouse may be found guilty of sexual battery if the spouse engaged in forcible penetration without the consent of the alleged victim. McLean said because current law uses language such as “forcible” and “consent,” this could be used as a defense if a spouse was incapacitated, such as passed out drunk or on drugs.
Although since the early 1990s every state recognizes marital rape as a crime, some including Mississippi still have laws on the books that either provide protection for the perpetrator or lesser penalties. McLean said she believes a lot of prosecutors use the state’s sexual battery laws instead of the rape statute with harsher penalties because the latter’s language is so antiquated.
The bill would also change references to “a female” in the law to person. It would also remove language such as: “It shall be presumed that the female was previously of chaste character and the burden of proof is on a defendant to prove she was not of chaste character.”
This year saw no shortage of news in Mississippi. It began with a pandemic still raging, and summer saw our home state become the focal point of a national conversation about abortion access. From text messages pulled from the state’s largest embezzlement scandal in history to a water crisis that left the capital city without running water, there was a lot to write about.
Through it all, our journalists were there.
This year we kicked off “The Backchannel,” Anna Wolfe’s investigative series which revealed former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the state’s sprawling welfare scandal, which continues to put pressure on the state’s power players.
When a Mississippi law became the center of a landmark legal case about the constitutional right to abortion, our team was there to help Mississippians make sense of it. Our reporters rode in vehicles with one of the last doctors performing abortions in the state days ahead of the Dobbs decision. We published an extended Q&A on the day the decision came down with the author of the 2018 bill that led to the fall of abortion access for much of the nation.
The news never relented as the year unfolded.
In September as the Jackson water crisis worsened, our reporters sprang to action, even while most of them lived through it themselves. Every Mississippi Today staffer played a role in covering the crisis, from getting answers to commonly asked questions from you, our readers, and writing stories — so many stories — to document what was happening across the city. Our coverage spanned the gamut, from why immigrants were scared to go to water distribution sites to a profile about how local activists were frustrated with media coverage, both local and national. Our staff wrote countless stories with information to help Jacksonians navigate the crisis.
This fall, we launched a new project to squarely confront Mississippi’s health care crisis. Our stories probed the concept of Medicaid expansion — what it would do and what our leaders have to say about why they won’t embrace it — and seek to define the extent of the health care crisis in Mississippian’s hospitals, homes and lives. This work will continue.
Our stories provided readers with insight into what is actually happening in the state’s only critical race theory course. A monthslong investigation gave voice to Black Delta farmworkers who faced discrimination at the hands of their employers. We spoke to students in school districts where books are being banned to ask them how it feels to have representation taken away.
Not all our stories were about politics and policy either. Rick Cleveland covered the Ole Miss miracle in college baseball this summer, plus the state’s college coaching madness from all angles: Deion Sanders’ journey at JSU, all the way to the story’s end. The will-he-or-won’t he saga of Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss. The death of an icon at Mississippi State.
As always, thank you for reading and engaging with us this year. We know that 2023 will be just as full of stories to tell, and welcome you to reach out with your ideas and suggestions. We are proud to report to you.
The list of applicants for the top job at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, included a familiar name to many Mississippians: Rodney Bennett, the recently departed president of University of Southern Mississippi.
Bennett’s name, along with 20 others, was published by a local newspaper earlier this year on July 14, his second-to-last day in the Dome. The governing board in Arkansas had released the list under the state’s open records law which mandates that the names of all applicants for public office, even unsuccessful ones, are subject to disclosure.
But in Mississippi, Bennett’s replacement was determined through a process that operated almost entirely in the dark.
Here, applicants for the position of college president are considered confidential and therefore exempt from public records requests. At USM, the campus didn’t know who was being considered for the job until late October when the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees suddenly cut the search short and announced it was permanently hiring Joe Paul, the interim president, without advertising the position.
Across universities in the Southeast,Mississippi and Arkansas represent two extremes – total secrecy and complete openness – in the often controversial search process for identifying leaders of public universities, according to a review by Mississippi Today of state statutes, governing board policies and news articles. Arkansas is the only Southern state that has a search process that is entirely transparent, while Mississippi is one of three states that keep secret all applicants but the sole finalist.
Judith Wilde, a professor at George Mason University who studies presidential searches, described searches like this: “It’s sort of like in the ‘Wizard of Oz:’ At the end they raise the curtain, and there is one person.”
The review found that of 16 Southern states, a plurality (7) have statutes or policies in place that permit universities to announce multiple finalists for president. In practice, however, universities often flout those rules by claiming they can only announce one finalist – because the others withdrew their names from consideration.
Even though the University of Florida was supposed to name multiple finalists under a new state law, the board announced only one, saying that out of the dozen candidates interviewed, all “requested complete confidentiality unless they were named as the sole finalist,” according to the Tampa Bay Times and Open Campus.
In Louisiana, applicants for public office are public record but in 2015, a judge ruled that Louisiana State University only needed to turn over the names of four applicants who were interviewed or withdrew their names from consideration.
And in some states, each individual university board can determine how secret the process is going to be. In Oklahoma, for example, Oklahoma State University’s board has maintained that it "must hold in strictest confidence the identities of applicants" while Northern Oklahoma College announced multiple finalists for president last year.
Wilde said that when university presidents are selected in secret, the community doesn’t get a chance to determine if they’re qualified for the job even though the position is among the highest paid in every state.
“Many of them are making more than a $1 million now, and yet there is no other public executive who is hired in secret,” Wilde said. “The president of the United States – they go through sometimes as much as a year of being vetted.”
At public universities, presidential searches are mainly led by governing boards – it is often considered a board’s most important function – but the process used to be more collaborative. Wilde said that in many states, boards used to form search committees of students, faculty and staff who would write and post ads, interview candidates, deliberate in public and invite finalists to meet the whole campus community.
Now, secrecy is the norm. In 2000, Mississippi was one of seven Southern states that allowed public universities to keep presidential applicants’ names confidential, according to an analysis by the National Association of College and University Attorneys. As of this year, that’s permitted by all but two states.
Wilde attributes this trend to governing boards’ increased reliance on executive headhunting firms that often require confidentiality in their contracts — to their benefit.
“When things are secret, the search firm can use the same candidates over and over again,” Wilde said, “without having anybody know that.”
Though headhunting firms often charge governing boards hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct searches, only about half provide background checks beyond the references that candidates provide, according to research by Wilde’s colleague at George Mason, James Finkelstein.
Many universities say that confidentiality is necessary to attract the best candidates who won’t want to risk inviting ire at their current jobs by publicly applying elsewhere. But research by Frank LoMonte, the director of UF’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, found that closed searches didn’t result in more candidates from highly ranked universities than open searches. His research, conducted in 2017, compared Georgia’s secret process to those in Tennessee and Florida which had more open searches at the time.
Rather, LoMonte found that closed searches tend to correlate with universities hiring from inside their system.
“Excluding the public from participation in the hiring process appears to accrue primarily to the benefit of ‘insider’ candidates,” he wrote in an op-ed published by the American Association of University Professors.
The Mississippi Legislature will begin the 2023 session on Jan. 3 with a mind-boggling $3.9-billion surplus, according to information compiled by the staff of the Legislative Budget Committee.
To put the surplus in perspective, it is little more than half as large as the overall state-support budget of $7.9 billion for the current fiscal year. State support refers to the funds derived primarily from general taxation, such as the sales tax on retail items and the income tax. The state also has other special fund agencies, which receive taxes or fees designated solely to run their agency, such as the fee barbers pay for their regulatory board or the motor fuel tax to operate the Transportation Department.
The state has an overall budget, including all state and federal funds appropriated by the Legislature, of $26 billion for the current fiscal year with 45% of the total funds being provided by the federal government.
By any metric, the surplus the state has is unprecedented.
These funds fall into different categories with different guidelines of how they can be appropriated by the 2023 Legislature. But it should be stressed that in most cases the Legislature can vote to change those guidelines and it is almost a certainty the Legislature will not appropriate all the surplus funds this session.
Here are the categories of the surplus and, in general, how they can be spent:
Capital expense fund: $1.6 billion. This is the accumulation of unspent revenue from past sessions. These funds are not considered recurring, meaning the Legislature will strive to spend them on non-recurring expenses, such as construction projects or major purchases, such as computer systems. Providing rebates to taxpayers as some have proposed also would be a one-time expense.
General fund: $1 billion. These are tax collections and other revenues collected above the amount projected at this time to be appropriated by the Legislature for the next fiscal year beginning July 1. These funds are considered recurring and can be used for any purpose.
Working Cash Stabilization Fund or rainy day funds: $579.4 million. These are funds that have been placed in reserves for emergencies, such as a downturn in state revenue collections. The rainy day fund currently is at its legal cap of 10% of the total general fund budget.
Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund: $298.1 million. These are federal funds provided to deal with COVID-19 related issues. The federal government places guidelines on how the funds can be appropriated. A portion can be used for recurring expenses, but for the most part must be spent on one-time items, such as water and sewer repair and construction, broadband and for pandemic relief.
The 2% set aside: $150.4 million. By law, the Legislature is only supposed to appropriate 98% of the projected state tax collections. The 2% rule is in place because projecting tax collections is an inexact science. In recent years revenue has significantly exceeded projections, resulting in the large reserves in the capital expense fund. In bad economic times, legislators have changed the law to spend the 2% set aside, but that will not be necessary this session.
Gulf Coast Restoration Fund: $124.2 million. Money from the settlement of lawsuits related to the 2010 BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. These funds are earmarked for Gulf Coast projects.
Education Enhancement Fund: $78.9 million. The state collects a 1% sales tax on retail items designated solely for education projections. Like with the overall tax collections, revenue, from the 1-cent sale tax has exceeded expectations resulting in the surplus in the Education Enhancement Fund
Health Care Expendable Fund: $43.1 million. The state receives a payment annually from the tobacco companies as a result of the 1990s-era lawsuit filed by former Attorney General Mike Moore against the cigarette-manufacturers. Money in the fund is normally designated for health-related issues.
BP Settlement Fund: $12.3 million. Money from the BP oil spill settlements reserved for one-time projects in areas outside the Gulf Coast counties.
Jackson’s water pressure had begun to recover as of Wednesday morning, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said at a press conference later that day, adding that the “far reaches,” such as south and west Jackson, are still experiencing low levels from their taps.
Lumumba said the city’s “ambitious” goal is to have the boil water notice lifted by Saturday, which means restoring the pressure and then testing samples to assure the water is safe for consumption. He said that pressure at the plant is around 75 PSI, or pounds per square inch.
City workers, alongside Jackson’s contractor UCI, have identified 20 to 25 active leaks and are still looking for more breaches.
Lumumba added that there was a significant leak found on the well side of the system, and that the goal is to also have service restored for those customers by the end of the week.
Ted Henifin, the city’s new third-party water system manager, said he believed that much of the recovery on Tuesday came from residents turning off their faucets after letting them drip during freezing temperatures, Lumumba said.
“We need to continue to conserve water where we can to accelerate the recovery process,” the mayor said. “We’re still looking for the public to report leaks.”
Asked about the progress of infrastructure projects that began earlier in the year — a new 48-inch water line to improve pressure in south Jackson, and a cover structure to help weatherize the membrane side of the O.B. Curtis water treatment plant — Lumumba said both are nearing completion, but didn’t have a specific timeframe. He stressed that those projects alone won’t create a resilient and sustainable system.
“Essentially all components of the plant (such as its chemical room) need to be weatherized,” he said. “And then we need to find out how we better protect our pipes and distribution system.”
Other nearby cities also saw interruptions to their water service from the recent cold weather. Memphis, for instance, is also under a boil water notice because of water line breaks, and is telling residents to conserve water. The city’s utility said Monday it may be another four or five days before it lifts the advisory.
To report leaks in the system, Jackson residents should call 311 or 601-960-1111 during business hours, or 601-960-1875 after business hours.
Lumumba added that Commissioner of Agriculture & Commerce Andy Gipson had reached out and is making non-potable water — intended for uses like flushing, but not for consumption — available to Jacksonians at the state fairgrounds everyday from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m.
For drinking water, below are the city’s distribution sites posted for Wednesday:
West Jackson:
2 p.m.
Metro Center Mall near old Dillards Loading Dock
South Jackson:
5 p.m.
Candlestick Plaza off Cooper Rd, Jackson, MS
Northwest Jackson:
5 p.m.
Corner of Northside Drive and Manhattan Rd near Smillow Prep
Elderly or disabled residents who are unable to travel to a distribution site, should call 311 or 601-960-1875. Provided by Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition and City of Jackson.
For updates on future water distribution, residents can call 311 or 601-960-1875 for information.
The Mississippi court system is training multilingual court interpreters to ensure equal access to justice for people whose primary language isn’t English.
“If a litigant comes into a courtroom and doesn’t speak English, then there is no access to justice without a qualified court interpreter,” said Deenie Miller, language access coordinator for the state’s Administrative Office of Courts. “Their job is to put someone on equal footing as someone who speaks English as a native language.”
Court interpreters also help judges administer justice by helping them communicate with a person who isn’t proficient in English, she said.
About 105,500 Missisisppians – nearly 4% of the population – speak a language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Spanish is the top requested language for court interpreting, Miller said, and that need is growing in central Mississippi.
Other top languages requested include Vietnamese, Mandarin and French, she said.
Patricia Ice, legal project director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, has worked with people needing court interpreter services in state and federal court. She agreed that language access is necessary for someone to access justice.
Before the Administrative Office of the Courts began training, certifying and recruiting interpreters, it could be difficult to find one for clients, Ice said.
Sometimes she found interpreters from the court’s roster, and other times it was more of a challenge to get someone who spoke an indigenous or less common language.
“It’s important that the court system be sensitive to the languages that people are hearing and speaking in the courts,” she said.
Miller is looking to build a roster of court interpreters certified to speak in various languages to work in circuit, county, chancery and justice courts around the state. She can also receive referrals if someone on her roster can’t interpret for a requested language.
So far, there are 26 people on the court’s roster who can interpret in Arabic, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish, according to an interpreter search page through the Administrative Office of the Courts.
“You never know what part of the world someone will be from,” Miller said. “The need is great for qualified court interpreters.”
Miller, who became the language access coordinator in July, is in charge of recruiting, training and certifying language interpreters and working with judges, attorneys and court staff about requirements to provide interpreters for those with limited English proficiency.
The Administrative Office of the Courts held a language court interpretation training and certification test in November in Jackson.
Thirteen participants from around the state and beyond received an introduction to court proceedings, the role of a language interpreter, ways to interpret, ethical requirements and credentialing requirements.
The office has held language court interpreter training several times a year for nearly a decade. Miller is hoping to revamp the seminar and host it four times a year alongside exams for people to become certified interpreters.
In addition to recruiting interpreters, Miller is working on ways to ensure language access in courthouses, such as having forms and signs available in Spanish and other languages.
She also would like to secure funding to fund interpreters so the expense doesn’t always have to come from the county or a judge. Miller doesn’t want money to be the deciding factor of whether a person can access an interpreter.
Court interpreters are independent contractors who negotiate their own rates with the court, a county or an attorney, she said.
Miller worked as a paralegal for over 20 years before becoming the language access coordinator. Although she is new to language access work, Miller said she is passionate and looks forward to what she can do in the role.
The Administrative Office of Courts has requested funding for her position for several years, she said. As the population of people with limited English proficiency has grown in the state, the Legislature recognized the importance of having someone in the position full-time, Miller said.
“This position was fought for and I’m excited to be the office’s first language access coordinator,” she said.
The Cleveland boys put a bow on another incredible year of Mississippi Sports by counting down the top 10 Mississippi sports stories of 2022. From Frank Gore Jr. to Mike Leach to Deion Sanders, it was a wild one.
To reach Gunnison, Mississippi, from Cleveland, the quickest path – though not the route with the best-paved streets – takes you off Highway 8, down miles of narrow roads slicing through some of the most fertile land on earth. In early December, the fields are still but not empty. Silvery water pools in gashes in the dirt, and cardinals settle on shoots of electric green gleaming in the gray light of winter.
When you reach Highway 1, you’ve arrived in Gunnison, with a population of 425 and only two businesses: a gas station and Healthy Living Family Medical Clinic, opened by Gunnison native Wyconda Thomas in 2019. The squat brick building is decorated for the season, with a wreath on the door and letters out front spelling “Merry Christmas.”
When Thomas decided to open her own practice, she chose the place where she saw the greatest need, which also happened to be the community that raised her.
Despite the town’s small population, the clinic is full every day.
“The statistics– it pointed to these areas,” Thomas said. “The Delta, the lack of resources– if you look at who suffers the most, it’s always these areas. That’s the place you should be treating.”
No region of the state has been harder hit by the decimation of Mississippi’s health infrastructure than the Delta. Kings Daughters Hospital in Greenville closed in 2005, and Patient’s Choice Medical Center in Belzoni followed in 2013. Now, Greenwood-Leflore Hospital is scrambling to find funding to stay open through the legislative session, when it hopes to persuade lawmakers to help.
Kings Daughters Hospital in Greenville on Wednesday, November 9, 2022. The hospital closed in March 2005. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Even if the money comes through, there is no long-term plan to ensure Delta residents have access to health care. The predominantly Black region is one of the poorest in the country, and like the state as a whole, it has high rates of diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Earlier this year, state health officer Dr. Daniel Edney said the region’s health infrastructure is “very fragile” and six Delta hospitals are at risk of closure.
“No one’s coming to the rescue,” he said.
No one, that is, except for Thomas and people like her: Delta natives who have chosen to open their own small clinics close to home. People like Mary Williams, who runs Urgent and Primary Care of Clarksdale; Juliet Thomas, Antoinette Roby and Desiree Norwood of the mobile clinic Plan A; and Nora Gough-Davis, who operates clinics in Shaw and Drew.
They face policies that seem almost designed to punish them for trying. Nurse practitioners are reimbursed by Medicaid just 85% of what physicians receive for providing the same services. State regulations require them to have a collaborating physician, to whom they must pay a monthly fee that can reach over $1,000. The state’s failure to expand Medicaid means more of their patients lack insurance, and they may never see a penny for treating them.
“You have to give yourself,” said Gough-Davis, who trained Thomas and 25 other Delta nurse practitioners at her clinics. “It’s really like community service. We have patients with low, low health literacy. So our typical visit is going to require much more education than a visit with someone who doesn’t have health literacy issues. Education takes time.”
And payment structures don’t account for that time.
“It never comes close” to full compensation, Gough-Davis said of the typical reimbursement.
Owning her own practice, Thomas has had to learn how to handle paperwork and billing and dealing with reimbursement from Medicaid and insurance companies. She works from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. most days, and spends weekends and evenings attending trainings and seminars. She sees everything from the flu and COVID-19 to anxiety and depression to birth control requests.
WIth the health department presence in Bolivar County shrinking and hospitals closing, clinics like Healthy Living are under pressure.
“The struggles are there,” she said. “Everything is being put onto family practice now.”
And yet Thomas struggles to imagine working anywhere else.
“The people here get me and I get them,” she said. “It’s rewarding to make a difference and to do this. I feel like I have God’s favor because of that.”
Nurse Practitioner Wyconda Thomas prepares to see a patient at her clinic, Healthy Living Family Medical Clinic, in Gunnison, Miss., Thursday, December 8, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
‘A personal connection to her patients’
Just before 9 a.m. on a recent Thursday, Thomas prepared to see her first patient of the day: a 3-year-old boy at the clinic for a well-child exam.
She wore black scrubs, with a matching scarf and shiny shoes, and a tidy red manicure. The clinic’s rooms radiated the same warmth and cheerful competence that she did: In the lobby, posters advertise free sports physicals and family planning services. A Christmas tree was decorated with hot pink ornaments.
Clutching a clipboard, Thomas walked into the first exam room to see her patient, accompanied by his mom and grandfather.
“Come on, hop up here,” she said to him, gesturing to the table. “I think he might need some help.”
She lifted him up and he sat calmly on the table, his hands folded in his lap and his sneaker-clad feet dangling several feet off the floor.
Thomas told his family that he needed to be in a booster seat and wearing a helmet when riding a bike. She confirmed he had recently seen a dentist, and would need a vision screen today.
“How’s his diet?” Thomas asked. “Does he eat a lot of foods like rice, cereal, cheeseburgers?”
“That’s about the only thing he’ll eat,” his mom answered.
Thomas laughed. She checked the boy’s ears. He gazed calmly around the room, never fidgeting or whining.
“You such a good little patient!” she exclaimed.
She told his family that he had some fluid in his ears, so she would send a prescription over to their pharmacy.
Then her time with the boy was over. The visit hadn’t been complicated, but Thomas had been able to confirm the 3-year-old was healthy and growing well, and his vision was good – a particularly important finding as he approached kindergarten, which most Mississippi kids reach without ever having had a developmental screening.
A few hours later, a 57-year-old woman named Arlesia Mobley sat in a different exam room. She complained of a headache and dizziness.
“Been around anybody sick?” Thomas asked.
“My grandbaby,” Mobley said. “She had the flu.”
Nurse Practitioner Wyconda Thomas, left, examines Arlesia Mobley at her clinic, Healthy Living Family Medical Clinic, in Gunnison, Miss., Thursday, December 8, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Thomas checked her ears and saw fluid, which she explained was probably causing Mobley’s dizziness. She asked a nurse to conduct a flu swab but went ahead and ordered Tamiflu for her patient. She advised her to drink plenty of fluids, eat chicken noodle soup, and rest as much as possible.
A few days later, Mobley said she was feeling better, but still drained.
She had had to find a new doctor earlier this year because of her insurance. She lives in Rosedale, so Thomas was close by. She already feels like Thomas knows her.
“When she step into the room, she’s got that smile,” Mobley said later. “When she pass by you and you (are) sitting out in the waiting room, she got that smile. That makes me feel good, ‘cause I mean most doctors… especially in the waiting room, their mind wouldn’t be on you nowhere. But it seem like she got a personal connection to her patients.”
Opening a clinic in her hometown
Thomas is a daughter of the Delta, raised in Gunnison and Rosedale. Her parents both coached basketball, and she grew up in the gym. She was a star player at West Bolivar High School and then played for Delta State.
Her mom and dad, both Bolivar County natives, too, had high expectations for their daughter.
“When she was growing up, she couldn’t bring no C’s into my house,” said her mother, Will Ethel Hall. “I don’t want nothing but A’s, but we’ll talk about a B, because you was playing sports and maybe you didn’t get it that way. No C’s were allowed, and she knew that.”
“I was real hard on her,” said her father, Willie Thomas, who coached her at West Bolivar.
A few weeks ago, he ran into a woman in the store who was remembering how he had pushed his daughter. Thomas told her that looking back, he felt it had been too much, and he would do things differently if he could.
“She said, ‘Look how she turned out,’” Thomas said. “I said, ‘You right. I’d do it the same.’”
After college, she spent a year teaching biology before deciding she wanted to go into nursing and going back to school. She knew she’d like to open her own practice eventually, so she made a point of working in as many areas as she could – postpartum care, pediatrics, nursery, neonatal intensive care unit, home health and intensive care.
“You own your own practice in the Delta, you gotta be everything – resources are very, very limited, you know,” she said.
The Greenville NICU where Thomas trained closed earlier this year, leaving the Delta with no NICUs at all.
As soon as Thomas became a nurse practitioner in 2015, she started working on plans to open her own clinic. Her grandfather had owned the little building in Gunnison that had once been a county health facility, and the family left it to her for her business.
When she approached Gunnison leaders about opening a clinic there, they were elated.
“Our area is really underprivileged, and we just needed a clinic here in town to help our citizens,” said Mayor Frances Ward, who has known Thomas since she was born. “A lot of them don’t have transportation, and they had to pay people to carry them to Cleveland to the doctor. It’s really a blessing that she is here. And we’re very proud of her being from Gunnison, to come back and help her fellow people.”
Thomas opened Healthy Living on Jan. 2, 2019.
Gunnison residents like 70-year-old Ruby Hall, who works for Thomas as a nurse at the school-based clinics she runs in Rosedale, can’t recall a doctor or nurse coming back to the town in the last 60 years.
Tina Highfill, executive director of the Mississippi Association of Nurse Practitioners, said that’s a common trajectory for Mississippians in their field.
“Even though I had moved to several other parts of the state, when I came back to open a clinic it was in my hometown,” she said. “Those NPs have already established relationships… And so the patients know them, they trust them.”
And Thomas knows her patients, often personally as well as through her work. That’s part of what drives her.
Her mother remembers missed lunch appointments because the clinic was so busy, and detours during drives to check up on patients at their homes or drop off medicine.
“It’s just a tie that I have here,” Thomas said. “They need me so bad. At least I feel like they do. That makes me stay here.
Gunnison, Miss., Thursday, December 8, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
From 13 county health department clinics to one
At the only other business in Gunnison, Bassie’s Service Station, Charlette Brady slices cold cuts, makes sandwiches and rings up bottles of soda and beer.
“Really don’t much go on here,” she said.
The opening of Thomas’s clinic was a rare event. Before, Brady and her children traveled to Cleveland for doctors’ appointments. Now, the whole family goes to Healthy Living.
Inside the lobby of the clinic, a plaque commemorates the building’s history. Preserved in the cinderblock wall, the black sign with silver lettering reads: “Bolivar County Branch Health Center. Gunnison, Mississippi. 1960.”
The plaque also hints at how rural Mississippi’s health care resources have shrunk over the last several decades, because the Gunnison county health department site closed sometime in the 1980s. Before Thomas opened her clinic in 2019, it served as a polling location and a small restaurant before sitting vacant for years.
Bassie’s Serv. Station in Gunnison, Miss., Thursday, December 8, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
In 1975, Bolivar County boasted 13 satellite clinics in addition to the main county health facility in Cleveland.
“We try, especially in the Cleveland office, to offer general health services every day of the week,” county health officer Dr. Dominic Tumminello, a Gunnison native, told the Clarion-Ledger that year. “When a person walks into our health clinic, we want to serve that person.”
The county health department building in Rosedale, a 10-minute drive away, closed in February 2016, along with eight other such facilities around the state. Today, there is only one county health department site in Bolivar, in Cleveland, and it is open only four days a week, with limited walk-ins and family planning services requiring a call ahead of time.
Rosedale’s pharmacy closed recently, too, when its owner retired.
The nearest hospital is 30 minutes away, in Cleveland.
The Delta’s population is declining and has declined dramatically since 1940– part of the reason why large hospitals built early in the 20th century are struggling.
The Bolivar County Health Center in Rosedale, pictured on Dec. 8, 2022, closed in February 2016, part of a wave of cuts at the state health department. Since 2015, 11 county health department sites have closed, though every county except Sharkey-Issaquena still has a county health department. Credit:Isabelle Taft
The combination of poverty, lack of insurance, serious health needs and a small, spread-out population makes health care in the Delta a puzzle that is only becoming more complicated.
Yet Thomas has found a way to make it work, by winning federal and state grants that allow her to offer services on a sliding scale, so that patients without insurance can still afford to see her. Healthy Living Family Medical Center was designated a Rural Health Clinic by the health department, which means the federal government reimburses the clinic for primary care services. Thomas also offers family planning services through the Title X grant, participates in a tobacco cessation program through the Institute of Minority Health, and offers free COVID-19 testing and vaccines.
Her husband, Jervis McGee, sees how hard she works, taking calls from patients after hours and reading up on health issues in her free time.
“A lot of people forget that she’s a normal person, too,” he said.
For Thomas, it feels critical to offer as many services as possible to a community that needs them. But it’s also exhausting to participate in so many programs, each with its own paperwork requirements, and to try to develop expertise in so many areas.
She noticed that many of her patients struggle with anxiety and depression, though they don’t always use those labels for their symptoms. She tries to refer them to psychiatrists, but availability is limited. Efforts to bring a psychiatric nurse practitioner to the clinic one day a month or to offer telemedicine haven’t panned out. So now she’s planning to go back to school to earn certification as a psychiatric nurse practitioner.
Nora Gough-Davis, the nurse practitioner and clinic owner who helped train Thomas, said operating an independent family practice clinic is no easy task. After a decade in business, Gough-Davis is hoping to sell the clinics and focus on her work teaching nursing at Delta State. She wants to make sure any buyer keeps them open.
“I’m tired,” she said. “I want to make sure that access doesn’t leave.”
And all around independent family practice owners in the Delta, the walls are closing in, as hospitals flounder and county health departments cut hours and offices.
One of Thomas’s patients that Thursday was a woman named Jennie Usry. Usry has had headaches and memory loss ever since a fall on the job in June, and she needs to see a neurologist. A specialist in Clarksdale didn’t take her insurance. And when she tried to make an appointment at Greenwood Leflore, she told Thomas, it was impossible.
“The hospital closing down, so they not taking new patients,” Usry said. “But you a doctor, so you call, it might be different.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I don’t know if that will… but I will try.”
(A spokesperson for Greenwood Leflore said the hospital’s neurology clinic is still open and accepting new patients. During negotiations with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the clinic did not make new appointments because it was unclear whether any deal with UMMC would allow neurology services to continue. Negotiations have ended with no deal and Greenwood Leflore hopes the legislature will approve funding that will allow it to stay open.)
Nurse Practitioner Wyconda Thomas, left, examines Jennie Usry at her clinic, Healthy Living Family Medical Clinic, in Gunnison, Miss., Thursday, December 8, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
This article originally misstated the last name of Tina Highfill, executive director of the Mississippi Association of Nurse Practitioners. It has been corrected.
