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Cold weather, long a nemesis to the struggling Jackson water system, once again causes problems. Cold water and brittle pipes don’t make for a good combination.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Leaks appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said Tuesday, a day after issuing a local state of emergency, that the city’s crews were working with contractors in searching for leaks in Jackson’s water system as residents still deal with little to no pressure coming out of their taps.

The city issued a citywide boil water notice, the third one this year, around 10 a.m. Christmas morning. The mayor said Tuesday that pressure had improved the last two days, but is still low because of unidentified leaks throughout the city’s water lines.

Lumumba said there are five crews of workers roaming the city to find those leaks, but also called upon the help of residents, asking Jacksonians not to assume the city already knows the locations of all the leaks.

The boil water notice impacts the over 170,000 people who drink from Jackson’s surface water system. Lumumba clarified that the city’s well system customers should also boil their water.

“We’ve heard from residents who have not had water for days, I’ve spoken to residents who were scrambling to fix Christmas dinner with little to no water,” Lumumba said Tuesday. “I’ve spoken to residents who are tired of apologies.”

The recent calamity comes just days after Congress announced a historic $600 million investment towards the city’s water system, and just a few weeks after the federal government and Jackson reached an agreement over a temporary third-party takeover.

When asked about solutions, the mayor said part of the answer will be adding new gauges throughout the city to help more quickly identify leaks. But he also emphasized the need to weatherize the pipes, as well as the treatment plants.

The O.B. Curtis treatment plant was at the root of the last cold weather shutdown of the city’s water system in 2021, when exposed equipment at the plant broke down in the face of frigid temperatures. The city has since started to cover parts of O.B. Curtis, but the weatherization of the plant is incomplete.

City officials first told residents about the lack of pressure on Saturday, Christmas Eve, and said the city’s crews were working to determine the cause as both plants were functioning. A news release later that night said many parts of south and northwest Jackson had low water pressure, and that some residents reported losing running water altogether.

Officials said Monday that it was getting “more and more” reports of little to no water pressure in west and south Jackson, as well as in Byram.

The cold weather, a constant foe to Jackson’s aging distribution system, dropped as low as 16 degrees on Saturday.

The recent federal aid to Jackson largely came as a result of the last citywide boil water notice, which ended in September after state and federal intervention. While the short-term support helped stabilize the system, Jackson has issued over 50 boil water notices to different parts of the city since then, showing the persisting fragility of its distribution system.

Declaring the local emergency helps the city distribute resources such as potable water as quickly as possible, said Lumumba, who added that he’s requested additional help from the state emergency agency.

To help identify water leaks from ruptured pipes around the city, officials ask that residents report information to 311 or 601-960-1111 during business hours, or 601-960-1875 after business hours.

Residents can refer to the state Health Department’s list of what to do during a boil water notice, which includes using boiled water to brush teeth, make ice, and wash food with.

Lumumba added that residents should stop letting their faucets drip as the weather warms up to help reduce water demand.

Jackson officials are working with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition to distribute water. Elderly or disabled residents can call 311 to have water delivered. The city listed the following sites for water distribution on Tuesday:

South Jackson:

2 p.m.

Candlestick Plaza off Cooper Road, Jackson, MS

Northwest Jackson:

2 p.m.

Corner of Northside Drive and Manhattan Road near Smillow Prep

West Jackson 

2 p.m.

Metro Center Mall near old Dillards Loading Dock

Byram

2 p.m.

Davis Road Park 

2515 Davis Road

For updates on future water distribution, residents can call 311 or 601-960-1875 for information.

The post Jackson declares emergency over Christmas water woes appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The leader of conservative advocacy group Empower Mississippi is launching a new nonprofit news organization in 2023 — and will absorb the assets and work of conservative blog Y’all Politics.

Russ Latino, president of Empower, wrote in a Dec. 27 email to his friends and family that he will launch a new venture, called Magnolia Tribune, which was founded in response to “a significant gap in the current (media) marketplace.”

“Mississippi has a positive story to tell. We will tell it,” Latino wrote. “Faith in traditional media has been undermined by blatant bias and often by careless reporting of complex issues. We will work to restore trust.”

Leaders of the new organization have been developing the concept for months, pitching it to their allies across the political spectrum and in nonprofit circles since the fall. Latino, an attorney who previously worked for the Koch Brothers-funded conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, has never worked in professional journalism.

Latino has long served as a conservative voice at the Capitol and in Jackson. He has advocated for conservative causes at numerous press conferences at the Capitol over the years. In 2021, he was selected by Republican legislative leaders to testify at a hearing in favor of eliminating the individual income tax. He has also served as a fill-in host on SuperTalk Radio, a conservative network that broadcasts across the state.

On a webpage soliciting donations for the news outlet, Latino writes that Magnolia Tribune will be a “non-profit, non-partisan newsroom.” In his Tuesday email to colleagues, he writes that “our commentary will often appeal to conservatives.” Latino did not clarify in his email whether the newsroom will be a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit under IRS guidelines, which bar partisanship.

“The concept is to be an in-state Wall Street Journal, with reliable straight news, unique business and culture coverage, and thoughtful perspective,” Latino wrote to his friends on Tuesday. “Our goal will be to balance the media ecosystem to ensure that all points of view are heard. While our commentary will often appeal to conservatives, we will not shy from providing a platform for divergent viewpoints. We believe that people benefit from hearing the whole story and being able to make their own decisions with good information.”

The new outfit will absorb the assets and work of Y’all Politics, a political blog founded in 2004 by Alan Lange. Lange has boasted his cozy relationships with Republican elected officials, long amplifying their perspectives and even attacking traditional media in the state seen as too critical of his colleagues.

Y’all Politics employs a small staff of reporters who closely cover legislative sessions and major statewide political interest stories. Y’all Politics, Latino wrote on Tuesday, will cease operation in January 2023. While Y’all Politics staff will reportedly move over to the new organization, Lange has told people he’s close with that he will not be directly involved with Magnolia Tribune.

Empower Mississippi, which Latino said on Tuesday he will leave, actively lobbies lawmakers at the state Capitol for conservative causes and champions specific legislation. In recent years, Empower has pushed for increased funding for charter schools and other “school choice” initiatives, tax reforms like eliminating the individual income tax, and criminal justice reforms.

Latino said he is raising money for Magnolia Tribune and will build the team “over the next several months and beyond.”

“The news media serves a vital function in a thriving democracy,” Latino wrote on the fundraiser page. “When healthy, it informs citizens, presents a robust marketplace of diverse ideas, and holds leaders accountable. Unfortunately, upheaval in the media landscape has resulted in news that is often agenda-driven, intentionally negative, and hostile to alternate viewpoints. Mississippi is not immune from this trend. It doesn’t have to be this way, though.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to reflect that Russ Latino will leave Empower Mississippi to launch the Magnolia Tribune. “I formed it separately from Empower and am leaving Empower to run it. This is not an outgrowth, but a new venture,” Latino said.

The post Conservative group leader to launch nonprofit news outlet appeared first on Mississippi Today.

State Senate Medicaid Committee Chair Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, is not the first politician to look to Arkansas as an example of how to provide health care coverage to more Mississippians.

“No, I don’t believe in it,” Blackwell said of Medicaid expansion after a recent legislative hearing on the financial crisis facing Mississippi hospitals and their possible closure. Blackwell was echoing the positions of many Republican politicians in Mississippi who say they oppose Medicaid expansion that would provide health care coverage for primarily the working poor.

But then Blackwell went on to say that “there might be some alternative to Medicaid expansion for the state to consider.”

The alternative that Blackwell described was taking the federal funds the state would receive through the expansion of Medicaid to help Mississippians purchase private health insurance coverage.

The private health insurance route is what was taken in 2014 by neighboring Arkansas. Instead of expanding Medicaid to provide health insurance to primarily the working poor – up to $18,500 per year for an individual – with the federal government paying 90% of the costs, Arkansas draws down those funds to help people purchase private health insurance policies.

At the time the program was enacted, Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe believed the Republican-controlled Legislature would be more willing to go the private insurance route. The program was approved on the federal level by the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama.

The program was left intact by Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and Gov.-elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former spokesperson for President Donald Trump, has given no indication she plans to repeal the program.

As a matter of fact, Hutchinson recently revamped the program to provide additional preventive care for newborns and mothers. The program also includes incentives to try to help recipients reach economic independence.

A 2018 study found that the Arkansas program would be a net gain to the state’s coffers through at least 2021 because of the decrease in the amount of uncompensated care that hospitals had to provide. A search for more recent studies has not been successful.

In Mississippi, Blackwell pointed out information developed by the Hospital Association indicated that a major factor causing the current financial crisis is that hospital costs have skyrocketed because of inflation and other factors and their revenues have not kept pace.

Still, the Hospital Association has said expanding Medicaid either through the traditional route or through the Arkansas model would be a big help to hospitals by significantly decreasing the amount of uncompensated care they provide. The Hospital Association has said their members provided almost $600 million in uncompensated care in 2021 — twice the amount provided in 2010.

Blackwell said he would be willing to consider a program where the state helped to purchase private insurance for those who qualify for Medicaid expansion. But he said he would not consider such options until the 2024 legislative session.

Arkansas is the only state that currently helps its poor citizens purchase private health insurance while 38 other states have taken the more traditional route of Medicaid expansion. Originally, Iowa and New Hampshire were helping poor people purchase health insurance, but changed because officials believed the more traditional Medicaid expansion route was more cost efficient, according to healthinsurance.org.

The post Arkansas plan of insurance for poor more agreeable than Medicaid expansion for key lawmaker appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Alison Lanthrip, a school attendance officer for Webster County, was puzzled when a particular student stopped showing up to school last year.

She wasn’t the typical student to end up on a truancy list. Lanthrip could have sent a letter to her parents and continued through the tall stack of referrals on her desk. Instead, Lanthrip visited the home in person.

When she got there, Lanthrip found that the family’s washing machine had stopped working. The student had gone through all her clean clothes.

“And she didn’t want to come to school with dirty clothes,” Lanthrip said.

Lanthrip connected the family to a local service organization who replaced the washer. “She was in school within a week,” Lanthrip said.

This is how the often overlooked Office of Compulsory School Attendance Enforcement, established to comply with state statute, should ideally function. 

“Our job is to not just enforce that state law that says you have to come to school, but our job is to work with every agency to make sure that the child does have an opportunity,” said April Brewer, the school attendance officer for Lamar County. 

Sitting in a courtroom after bringing a truancy case before the local county court judge, Brewer clutched the intimidating gold metal and black leather attendance officer badge hanging around her neck, as if to hide it. She says she doesn’t usually wear it on student visits. Brewer doesn’t want them to think she’s there to get anyone in trouble. 

“I am there to really help and I really want them to open up because there are lots of reasons why you don’t go to school and I really want to know what the reason is,” Brewer said.

But lately, the office has been in disarray as the workers have been experiencing higher workloads and stagnant pay, according to several school attendance officers who spoke with Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Department of Education, which oversees school attendance enforcement, has systematically understaffed the office, they said, creating unmanageable caseloads, as high as 10,000 students per officer in some counties.

“When you are basically considered a paper pusher, you can’t get in and counsel these students,” Lanthrip said. “… All you have time for is paperwork.”

Lanthrip and Brewer are part of a coalition of school attendance officers who are organizing with the help of the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees workers union to lobby and introduce legislation this coming year for better conditions in their office.

Until recently, MDE hadn’t even been providing paper, ink and stamps in order to send the required letters, they said, forcing the officers to pay out of pocket for materials. Because of the conditions, there is too much turnover, contributing to the understaffing. Officers also said MDE has failed to approve their travel and mileage reimbursement, discouraging them from making home visits.

“If you’re not able to do that and get in those households like that, you don’t know what resources they need to try to help these families,” Lanthrip said.

And some haven’t received a pay raise in over a decade.

Terri Hill from Jones County has been working as a school attendance officer for 26 years. After taxes, she takes home about $28,000. She said her last raise was about 15 years ago.

“It’s ridiculous and everybody looks over us,” Hill said.

Brewer, a mom of 7, has been at the job for 11 years, but with a $30,000 salary, she’s had to consistently work two additional jobs.

The bill they drafted would raise baseline pay by about 70%, bringing the floor up from $24,500 to $41,500 – exactly the current starting pay for public school teachers in the state. The 2023 legislation does not yet have a sponsor, but they say at least four lawmakers have expressed interest.

School attendance officers must have at least a bachelor’s degree and their salaries are set in statute. After 17 years, an officer with a bachelor’s degree can earn $31,182. With a master’s degree, they can start out making $26,000 and cap out at $37,000 after 21 years. These state workers were left out of the realignments and teacher pay raises that the Legislature has passed in recent years.

Mississippi Department of Education officials denied that the department has deprived the officers of resources, but acknowledged concerns about the stagnant pay.

“We’ll keep working at it to make sure that we hear the voices of our attendance officers to try to address their needs and work alongside our districts to make sure that if there are things there that help our school attendance officers better serve students, then that is 100% what we’re focused on,” Kim Benton, interim state superintendent of education, told Mississippi Today.

Hill estimates she’s responsible for overseeing between 4,000 to 5,000 students.

“It makes you just wanna pick up your purse and clock out and go home,” Hill said. “… The workload has increased, as far as getting referrals. Like in our county, Jones County, we used to have four PIN numbers (budgeted positions) and they took one away from us, so now there’s only three of us working this county instead of four.”

At one point, there was a cap in the law that allowed for caseloads of no more than 2,500 students per attendance officer. But lawmakers removed that requirement when they rewrote the law in 1998. Now, MDE is authorized to employ a set number of 153 attendance officers. The state currently has 125 filled positions and 20 vacancies, Mississippi Department of Education told Mississippi Today.

The proposed new legislation would remove the limit on attendance officers and reinstate a student-officer ratio of no more than 2,000 students to one officer.

The officers are supposed to make contact with students after 5, 10 and 12 unexcused absences. At 12, the officer may choose to petition the court. These cases are handled differently across the state. Some counties utilize the county and youth courts while others take the cases to justice court, where the parents can face fines or even jail time in severe scenarios. 

Lamar County Court Judge Brad Touchstone, a former lawmaker, said he aims to take the less punitive route and uses court hearings oftentimes to check in on the progress of students far after their initial truancy. He said school attendance officers like Brewer play a critical role in child welfare.

“They’re another layer of protection that we have out there to identify kids that are in crisis. I’ve had children come in here that, at first blush, you just think they don’t want to go to school, but then you identify there’s a lot deeper issues there, depression, a whole host of issues that we need to know about,” Touchtone said. “And we don’t always get a CPS report every time there’s a kid in crisis. So April is able to sometimes identify these kids so we can put services in the home to address the real root problem, which is not truancy. It’s that the child’s in crisis.”

Just recently, Touchstone had a case where the student on his docket brought her school-aged friend to support her during the hearing. Touchstone recognized that if the second girl was there in court during the school day, she was absent, too. The court eventually identified the girl as a runaway from a foster family and “were able to secure her and get her back where she needed to be,” Touchstone said.

Last year, one of the schools Brewer covers called her to tell her that one of the students she had been working with – “she had been doing so well,” Brewer said – had not shown up to school.

Brewer went out to the home to find that the family’s electricity had been cut off. The mom had lost her job and didn’t seek help, fearful that she would have Child Protection Services called. 

“She was scared that that would make them take the children into custody. And I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘We’re here to help you. I will help you,’” Brewer said. 

After some dead ends, Brewer found an agency that would pay to return power to the home.

“Now what if I didn’t go out and do the home visit?” she asked.

When kids went virtual during the pandemic, it only increased the challenges for attendance officers.

“Because of the pandemic in 2020, thousands of children across the state did not return to school resulting in an exceptionally large number of “missing children,’” the officers said in a letter to lawmakers in support of two bills during the 2022 legislative session. “SAO’s (school attendance officers) spent many hours, on top of their regular duties, to locate these children and ensure they were enrolled in school and receive an education.”

One of the bills would have raised attendance officer pay in statute, while the other would have removed the officers from MDE, placing them at the individual school districts. 

Both died last session after receiving little attention. The chairmen of the house and senate education committees did not respond to Mississippi Today’s request for comment.

For Brewer, who spent her youth in foster care, the work is especially personal. 

“This is not just a job to me,” Brewer said. “I come from a very rough background with foster care and everything. I learned when I was about 14 or 15 that education was my way out. I see this job as an opportunity to reach kids that were basically me.”

“I try to be for them what somebody should have been for me,” she said.

The post State truancy officers face stagnant pay and ‘unmanageable caseloads’ appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Gun and domestic violence research at the University of Mississippi Medical Center is seeking to better understand the causes of both and find ways to help those scarred by their impact.

Two federal grants awarded in September totaling $7.5 million from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are funding the research. 

“Each grant will enhance the other,” Dr. Lei Zhang, professor and associate dean in UMMC’s School of Nursing, said in a statement. “Gun violence and intimate partner violence are deeply interconnected.” 

Mississippi has the highest firearm mortality rate in the country (28.6 per 100,000 population), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the highest prevalence of domestic violence, based on data from 2009-2015 collected through the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. 

One grant will establish the Mississippi Violence Injury Prevention Program at UMMC to address gun violence involving 11 investigators from multiple departments, including emergency medicine, psychiatry and preventative medicine. 

Zhang said the program represents a mindset change in how gunshot victims are treated. The focus will be more holistic and community based and on prevention. 

Dr. Matthew Kutcher, an associate professor of surgery, trauma and critical care, said another focus is addressing underlying conditions that lead to violence such as poverty, structural racism, housing insecurity and more. 

“(W)ithout addressing the root causes that keep our state at the top of the list for gun violence, we’re chasing the problem from behind,” Kutcher, the co-principal investigator, said in a statement.

Examples of community-based resources can include the dispatch of credible messengers to prevent violence retaliation, mentorship from community members who have experienced violence and treatment for post traumatic stress disorder. 

Rukia Lumumba,  executive director of People’s Advocacy Institute and community outreach organizer of the program, said hospital-based violence intervention programs have been proven to improve public safety. 

The oldest such program was developed in Oakland, California, in 1994. A 10-year evaluation by Giffords Law Center found that participants in the program were 70 percent less likely to be arrested and 60 percent less likely to have criminal involvement than a control group and produced a cost savings to hospitals of $1.5 million annually.

The next grant will train substance use disorder providers about domestic violence and how those issues intersect during pregnancy and after birth.

Mississippi has the highest prevalence of physical domestic violence before pregnancy and the second highest during pregnancy, according to the PRAMS data. 

Dr. Michelle Owens, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said one of the goals is to strengthen the ability of providers to identify and help people who are at risk of domestic violence or are experiencing it. 

She said an integrated approach and community partnership will help bridge gaps and provide wraparound support for survivors of domestic violence and substance use disorder. 

The goal is to “(empower) them to take the steps to secure their health, safety and a better future for themselves and their families,” Owens said in a statement. 

The Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence is a partner on UMMC’s grant and will develop training, said Executive Director Wendy Mahoney.  

Those who experience trauma and coercion from domestic violence often turn to substance use as a coping mechanism, she said. 

“(The research) is a great thing because of the intersectionality of domestic violence,” Mahoney said. “It intersects with almost every aspect of life. I don’t think people look at it that way, but the intersectionality is quite vast.”

She said it is great that this research is happening in the state, and she hopes to see others look into other ways domestic violence intersect with other issues including gun violence, housing, other health issues and mental health. 

The post UMMC researchers join fight against gun and domestic violence appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Bo Eaton of Taylorsville says he still has the swizzle stick that he drew after his tie election with Mark Tullos of Raleigh in their 2015 bid for the House District 97 post. Eaton drew the winning stick in the unusual process that is spelled out in state law to decide tie elections, but the Republican majority seated their fellow party member, sending Eaton a five-term House veteran home. Eaton catches up on politics with Mississippi Today political reporters Geoff Pender and Bobby Harrison.

The post Podcast: Bo Eaton reflects on his infamous tied 2015 election appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Armed teachers, keycard locks, and lockdown buttons — these are just a few of the ideas and facility updates school districts are exploring as a way to protect campuses from the rising threat of school shootings.

School shootings have been on the rise nationally over the last decade, with 93 incidents in the 2020-2021 school year. Mississippi’s most notable school shooting occurred in 1997 at Pearl High School. More broadly, the Clarion Ledger reported there have been at least 25 incidents involving guns and students in Mississippi over the last 40 years. 

Government officials and school leaders interviewed by Mississippi Today agree that additional school resource officers are one of the best ways to respond to this threat, but acknowledge that without the funding to do so, arming educators could be a worthwhile secondary solution. At least nine states — Idaho, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming — have a provision or program for arming educators, a list that some in Mississippi hope to join.

A recent survey by Mississippi Professional Educators showed 64% of its members supported having properly trained educators or school staff respond to active shooter situations, a proposal that was also suggested by the governor in his recent legislative budget recommendations. 

Gov. Tate Reeves proposed the creation of a “Mississippi School Safety Guardian Program” that would train and arm nominated school employees through the Department of Public Safety. The program was developed with recommendations and input from the newly formed School Safety Alliance. 

Borne of concerns regarding student mental health and the frequency of school shootings, Mississippi Department of Education officials convened a group, launched in July of this year, to review existing school safety law and make recommendations for updates. The group consists of representatives from the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Attorney General’s office, local school district employees and several advocates. 

Earlier this year, the State Board of Education voted to update its weapons policy to conform with state law, which allows enhanced concealed carry permit holders to carry weapons on school campuses. Once the policy was adopted, MDE Director of Safe and Orderly Schools Brian McGairty said districts had concerns about the added liability of more guns on campuses and struggled to find an insurance carrier who would be willing to take it on, leading to discussions about creating a standardized guardian program. 

READ MORE: Guns have been allowed in Mississippi schools (for some people) since 2012

While the training required to receive that enhanced permit is “very credibly issued,” McGairty said it “… doesn’t take into account that you may have rounds being fired back at you when you’re forced to make those decisions.”

“You may have moving targets that are not the offender coming towards you. When you have 25 kids running down a hallway, can you make that shot?” McGairty said.” 

Erica Jones, president of the Mississippi Association of Educators, said teachers have voiced concerns about the training process and the possibility of the gun ending up in the wrong hands. 

“Many of our educators do not want this added responsibility,” she said. “They feel as if they have enough duties as it is.”

 For districts that opt-in to the potential guardian program, Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell is proposing a two-week training academy that specifically focuses on responding to active-shooter situations. The training will cover how to use firearms, self-defense, and communications training. The two week academy would also include background checks and mental health assessments, and the certification granted by this program would need to be reauthorized once a year. 

Tindell said in the legislation his office is drafting, the firearms would be issued to school employees by DPS and would be standardized across the state, and the “guardians” would receive a $500 a month stipend. He added the department hopes the bill will have liability protections for districts and teachers in the case that an active shooter event does occur to help get buy-in from insurance companies.

READ MORE: School chiefs prepare for possibility of facing active shooter

Officials from the Department of Education and the Department of Public Safety agreed that having a school resource officer on every campus would be the best solution, but that sometimes the funding or local personnel may not exist to make that happen.

“I know some people are very wary of teachers carrying guns, but under the (policy) changes, they can do this anyway, and all we’re trying to do is provide an additional level of training … to give (districts) more comfort in the choice their making,” Tindell said. 

Phillip Burchfield, Director of the Mississippi Association of School Superintendents, agreed that the guardian program could be a good substitute measure in districts that can’t get a school resource officer on every campus, but he is still concerned about the additional liability and stress it places on teachers. Burchfield also said he is not convinced the program is more cost effective than just hiring school resource officers once supplies, training time, and increased liability costs are factored in. 

Some districts are also modifying their facilities to make them safer, should an active shooter event occur.

Fred Butcher, superintendent of the Natchez-Adams School District, said the district placed keycard locks on the exterior fencing at the newly renovated high school. Buildings were also renovated so that students don’t have to go outside as often to move between classrooms. The district has also added more cameras and created a lockdown feature that will shut down the campus in sections at the push of a button. 

In Covington County, a federal grant allowed the district to install an access control system, which placed keycard locks on exterior doors, and cameras similar to Ring doorbells that secretaries can use to buzz in parents. Only staff have the keycards to open exterior doors from the outside, but a motion sensor on the inside of the door unlocks it for any person exiting. 

“You don’t want to ever have a situation where a school is not welcoming, so it’s a really fine line and a balancing act,” said Superintendent Babette Duty. 

Duty said she prefers school resource officers to the guardian program — she hired two more resource officers when she first became superintendent, and she would like to add more to ensure there’s one on every school campus. 

“If you fully fund (the Mississippi Adequate Education Program), I can make decisions to keep our kids safe without somebody having to have a pistol,” she said. 

“That person chose law enforcement. That is their field and that’s their skill set, and so that’s the person that I feel most confident about carrying a gun on campus rather than an educator.”

Clarification 12/26/22: This story was updated to clarify that government and school officials touted the benefits of the additional resource officers.

The post How is Mississippi responding to the threat of school shootings?  appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Tens of thousands of residents in south and northwest Jackson woke up without running water Christmas morning after several days of sub-freezing temperatures burst water lines and strained the capital city’s main water plant.

Leaders announced late Christmas morning that crews were searching for multiple water line breaks but had not yet identified them all. The water pressure could be remain low or zero, they said, until more breaks were identified and repaired. They gave no timeline for this work.

Officials on Sunday also implemented a citywide boil water notice.

“We understand the timing is terrible,” the city said in a press release on Christmas morning. “Please hate that we hate to issue the notice during the Christmas holiday.”

FULL COVERAGE: Jackson water crisis

Management of the aged, crumbling Jackson water system was taken over by the federal government in late November after the system collapsed in late August. The current Jackson water woes come after decades of deferred maintenance, gutted funding from the federal and state levels, and an exodus of taxpaying residents and businesses in the city.

The current crisis is most directly attributed to problems at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Facility, which provides running water to a majority of the city’s residents. Late Saturday night, crews slowed production at the plant in order to identify many of the leaks that are causing the loss in system pressure.

The city’s residents, forced for generations to struggle through water outages and boil water notices, got good news last week. Congress, in their stopgap budget measure, appropriated $600 million to the city for water system repairs. Those needed repairs, overseen at least in the short-term by the federal government, could take years.

READ MORE: Why Jackson’s water system is broken

The post Thousands in Jackson lose running water on Christmas after freezing temps strain system appeared first on Mississippi Today.

For the first time in more than 68 years, the statue of Theodore Bilbo will not be in the Mississippi Capitol when the Legislature convenes its 2023 session on Jan. 3.

The bronze statue of the diminutive demagogue who ran for and won two elections for governor and three for U.S. senator by spewing racial rhetoric and opposing anti-lynching laws has been banished from the Mississippi Capitol.

Some believe the monuments of two other racist figures from Mississippi’s past should be the next to be removed — but not from the state Capitol, but from the U.S. Capitol.

Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, the Mississippi Senate minority leader, has requested legislation to be drafted that he will author in the upcoming 2023 session to remove the statues of Jefferson Davis and James Zachariah George from the U.S. Capitol. Davis, of course, was president of the Confederacy. The lesser known George was one of the architects of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution that was a blueprint for other Southern states to follow on how to discriminate against African Americans and prevent them from voting.

While George and Davis represent Mississippi in the U.S. Capitol, interestingly neither are native Mississippians. They were selected by the Mississippi Legislature in 1924 to represent the state in the nation’s Capitol.

Each state is allowed to select two monuments to be displayed in the U.S. Capitol. Mississippi is the only state where both of its statues, supposedly representing its people and its beliefs, are so directly linked to a racist past and the Confederacy.

The mothballing of the supposedly life-size bronze statue of Bilbo continues a trend that Simmons hopes to continue with the removal of Davis and George. The trend began in 2020 when the Mississippi Legislature surprised onlookers by voting to retire and replace the state flag that incorporated prominently in its design the Confederate battle emblem.

Legislators did not vote to remove Bilbo, but in a sense acquiesced in the mothballing. In late 2021, House Clerk Andrew Ketchings, who was elected by House members to oversee the day-to-day operations of the chamber, took it upon himself to quietly remove the statue from a key House Committee room where it has been exhibited since the early 1980s.

“Because of everything he stood for, I think this should have been done years ago,” Ketchings said in February 2022.  “It was way past time to do it.”

The Mississippi Legislature passed a resolution in 1948 soon after Bilbo’s death to place a statue of him “in a prominent place on the first floor of the new Capitol building.”

PHOTOS: Segregationist’s statue leaves Capitol for Two Museums’ basement

The statue was unveiled in April 1954, according to newspaper accounts. In the early 1980s then-Gov. William Winter had the sculpture removed from the 1st floor rotunda to what was then a little-used room in the Capitol. But in more recent years the room — 113 — has been used for House committee meetings, including by the Legislative Black Caucus. Members would use the outstretched arm of Bilbo as a coat rack.

Ketchings hid the statue, estimated to weigh about 2,000 pounds, in a Capitol storage room. It was recently moved to storage underneath the Two Mississippi Museums. Archives and History Executive Director Katie Blount said recently there is no plan to exhibit the Bilbo statue.

Simmons said he is filing legislation to remove the monuments from the U.S. Capitol because “we should continue the progress we made in 2020 when we replaced the state flag by removing symbols that divide us.”

Federal guidelines give the authority to each state Legislature to determine the statues to be exhibited in the U.S. Capitol.

In 2021, an effort was made to pass federal legislation to remove the two Mississippi monuments from the U.S. Capitol. All members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation opposed the federal legislation except 2^nd District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s lone Democrat and only African American member of Congress.

Thompson said he voted for the legislation because “statues of those who served in the Confederacy or supported slavery or segregation should not have a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol.”

Mississippi’s Republican members of Congress said they believe it should be up to states to decide the monuments representing them in the U.S. Capitol.

Simmons said he intends to give Mississippians, through their elected representatives, an opportunity to vote on the removal of the two statues.

Simmons said his legislation would reassemble the board that was put in place in 2020 to lead the effort to select a new flag for the state and give it the responsibility for selecting who would represent Mississippi in the U.S. Capitol.

If Simmons is successful, perhaps Bilbo would have company from Jefferson Davis and J.Z. George in the bowels of the Two Mississippi Museums.

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