Podcast: Ben Ingram brings the Braves home to Mississippi
The Atlanta Braves are one of baseball’s biggest success stories and radio play-by-play announcer Ben Ingram is a huge success story in his own right. Ingram, a Madison Central and Mississippi College grad, is like many of the current Braves in that he trained for his current job at Trustmark in Pearl and at ballparks around the Southern League. Ingram talks about this remarkable Braves season and the current post-season.
Stream all episodes here.
The post Podcast: Ben Ingram brings the Braves home to Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Will Merit Health Central’s plans to downsize violate its lease with Hinds County?
Merit Health Central, facing a litany of recent struggles, will become a primarily psychiatric facility if the Mississippi Department of Health approves its request to move 50 beds from its Vicksburg hospital to Jackson.
The hospital, which serves majority-Black neighborhoods in south and west Jackson that have high concentrations of people living in poverty, is discontinuing most of its operative services as of this month, including orthopedics, neurology, urology and general surgery, according to hospital officials. It has already closed its burn center —the state’s only accredited program — and moved its cardiovascular services, neonatal intensive care unit and endoscopy to its facilities in the suburbs.
Those in the medical community and county officials have a question: How will the hospital fulfill the terms of its lease agreement with the county without these services?
Health Management Associates leased the former Hinds General Hospital from the county in the early 2000s. Community Health Partners, the Nashville-based company that owns Merit Health Central and eight other private hospitals in the state, acquired Health Management Associates in 2013, thus inheriting the hospital and its lease requirements.
The agreement states the hospital must operate as a “full service general acute care hospital.” It also is obligated to provide medical services for Hinds County Detention Center inmates.
A source familiar with the situation said the hospital has been transferring inmates elsewhere and is not fulfilling the duties of a full service hospital.
Hinds County Administrator Kenneth Wayne Jones said the county is “still investigating” the impact of the discontinuation of services at the hospital on the county. He declined a phone interview but provided Mississippi Today with an emailed statement.
“Our legal team has been in touch with Merit Health and they are reviewing the matter,” Jones said. “Once they have completed their review, we will have more information regarding Merit Health’s presence in Hinds County.”
Officials with Merit Health Central said it is in compliance with lease obligations and will continue to be.
“We have been in contact with county leadership about the lease as well as the challenges Merit Health has with labor costs and staffing challenges facing all healthcare organizations following the COVID pandemic, inflationary pressures and other dynamics, including the state’s decision not to expand Medicaid,” said Jana Fuss, director of marketing at Merit Health. “We will address concerns as they share them with us.”
Merit Health Central incurred just shy of $16 million in net uninsured costs, or the cost of services for which the patient had no insurance coverage, in fiscal year 2022. That is the largest amount of uncompensated care of any Merit Health hospital in the state that year.
When asked about inmates being transferred, Fuss said: “Patients, including inmates, may be transferred to another facility if their medical needs require a higher-level of care or services than Merit Health Central can provide. We are not aware of a situation in which inmates have been transferred to another facility for reasons other than their medical needs requiring it.”
Merit Health Central filed a certificate of need application Sept. 16 with the state health department to move 20 adult psychiatric beds, 10 adult chemical dependency beds and 20 adolescent psychiatric beds from Merit Health River Region in Vicksburg to Merit Health Central in Jackson.
If approved, the hospital will increase from 71 psychiatric beds to 121.
“Access to comprehensive Mental Health Services at the hospital will benefit the health and well-being of Mississippians, particularly those in the central/metro area of the State. With additional capacity in the area, the patients (and their families) in need of these services will be able to more easily access these services thereby improving their health and the well-being of those around them,” the application stated.
Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba and a host of health care professionals wrote letters to the Mississippi Department of Health advocating for the approval of the movement of the beds.
“This is something we recognize great need for, especially while we still face the social implications of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Lumumba wrote.
Community Health Systems determined that moving the services to Jackson and spending money to expand psychiatric services at Central would be a “better use of capital” than upgrading the old River Region building, which will eventually be demolished, according to the application.
The estimated cost of renovating Central to accommodate the new beds is around $6.5 million. The hospital will have to hire two physicians, 36 nurses and a host of other health care professionals, totaling around $2.7 million.
“As we plan for the future, our network is looking at how we can best provide behavioral health services … This proposed consolidation will allow adolescent and adult behavioral health patients to receive treatment in a newer and more central location,” a Sept. 23 letter from Chief Executive Officer David Henry to staff said.
The letter made no mention of the services the hospital has moved or closed.
The post Will Merit Health Central’s plans to downsize violate its lease with Hinds County? appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Brett Favre on welfare scandal: ‘I have done nothing wrong’
Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre, who has become a central figure in Mississippi’s ongoing welfare scandal, broke his months-long silence in a statement to Fox News on Tuesday.
Favre has been a subject of Mississippi Today and national reporting this year for being the inspiration behind at least $8 million in welfare misspending. While the former quarterback has not been charged with a crime, he had been ordered to pay back $1.1 million in welfare dollars he received.
Earlier this month, Favre hired Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann as his lead counsel. And in recent weeks, several sponsors have reportedly distanced themselves from the the Hall of Fame quarterback and native Mississippian.
“I have been unjustly smeared in the media,” Favre said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “I have done nothing wrong, and it is past time to set the record straight.”
Among the welfare expenses Favre inspired was a $5 million payment to University of Southern Mississippi, his alma mater, for a volleyball center. The planners of the project called the building a “wellness center,” claiming the building would serve needy families in the Hattiesburg area.
When Mississippi Today asked Favre in 2020 if he had discussed the volleyball center with then-Gov. Phil Bryant, who oversaw the state welfare agency, Favre said, “No.” But text messages uncovered earlier this year and published in Mississippi Today’s “The Backchannel” investigation show Favre had several conversations with Bryant about the project.
In his statement to Fox News this week, Favre said he did not know that project was funded with welfare dollars, and that attorneys vetted the project before it was approved. But he did acknowledge in the statement that the funding came from the government, and he admitted he took money from Mississippi Community Education Center, the nonprofit that facilitated much of the misspending, calling it a “charity.”
“No one ever told me, and I did not know, that funds designated for welfare recipients were going to the University or me,” Favre said. “I tried to help my alma mater USM, a public Mississippi state university, raise funds for a wellness center. My goal was and always will be to improve the athletic facilities at my university.
“State agencies provided the funds to Nancy New’s charity, the Mississippi Community Education Center, which then gave the funds to the University, all with the full knowledge and approval of other State agencies, including the State-wide Institute for Higher Learning, the Governor’s office and the Attorney General’s office.”
Mississippi Today and other outlets have reported for years the fact that the Attorney General’s Office and the Institutes for Higher Learning board approved the Wellness Center agreement.
READ MORE: ‘You stuck your neck out for me’: Brett Favre used fame and favors to pull welfare dollars
Separate from the USM volleyball center, Favre also solicited and received welfare funding to launch a pharmaceutical company called Prevacus, which purportedly aimed to develop drugs that would prevent concussions. Favre’s statement to Fox News this week did not allude to this aspect of the welfare scandal.
While Favre has previously said he didn’t know the funding he received was from a program that is supposed to help the poor, text messages published in our “The Backchannel” investigation show he knew he was dealing in government grants. Favre has not been accused of a crime within the scheme and declined to interview with Mississippi Today.
In 2020, Favre told Mississippi Today that the Prevacus project was “about economic development plain and simple!!!” But text messages revealed that Favre had personal motives at heart.
The week Prevacus was supposed to receive its first round of funding from New, Favre texted his partner of top welfare officials: “This all works out we need to buy her and John Davis surprise him with a vehicle I thought maybe John Davis we could get him a raptor.”
Minutes later, Favre followed up: “Honestly give me your thoughts on what you think all this means … When we will make money.”
Favre also once texted: “Call me crazy but my goal is to take home 20 million.”
Text messages also show Favre also briefed Bryant on when the company began receiving funding from the state and that Bryant agreed to accept stock in Prevacus after he left office – until State Auditor Shad White’s early 2020 arrests derailed the arrangement.
Bryant explained to Mississippi Today that he didn’t read his texts carefully enough to appreciate what the men were saying or asking of him.
Editor’s note: Mississippi Today Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau’s mother signed off on the language of a lease agreement to construct a University of Southern Mississippi volleyball stadium. Read more about that here.
The post Brett Favre on welfare scandal: ‘I have done nothing wrong’ appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Black Americans are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted
Eddie Lee Howard Jr. and Sherwood Brown each spent 26 years on Mississippi’s death row for murders they did not commit — only to walk free last year.
They are far from alone. They are two of 23 Black Mississippians who have been exonerated in recent decades. Four other exonerees were white.
A new study by the National Registry of Exonerations shows that Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes.
Howard’s lawyer, Chris Fabricant, said police picked up his client “because he was Black and because he had a record.”
Howard and Brown were the fifth and sixth exonerated Mississippians who were convicted as a result of the work of forensic odontologist Michael West of Hattiesburg, who has repeatedly testified he found bite marks on victims and then linked those marks to suspects identified by law enforcement.
Those wrongfully convicted in those cases served a combined 107 years in prison — more than half of them on death row.
In examining more than 350 DNA exonerations across the U.S., the Innocence Project found that 45% of these cases involved the misapplication of forensic science through such unreliable methods as bite marks.
“With notable exceptions, prosecutors and law enforcement are not going out of their way to convict innocent people,” said Fabricant, the author of Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System.
What happens instead, he said, is once authorities have a target, the prosecutor tells forensic experts something like, “Here’s the guy. We really need the match to tighten this up.”
Experts in that situation are going to make the match because “our minds are programmed to match patterns,” he said. “And once you suggest a pattern, it’s easy to match.”
Junk science is hardly alone in leading to wrongful convictions. Mistaken eyewitness identifications make up about 70% of DNA exonerations. And 18% of these cases involve false or misleading testimony by informants.
‘It really constituted deliberate indifference’
Kennedy Brewer and Lavon Brooks each spent more than 15 years behind bars for murders of toddler girls they never committed.
Mississippi pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne performed autopsies on the two slain 3-year-olds in Noxubee County. He saw marks on the bodies and called in his friend, West, who identified 19 marks that Brewer “indeed and without a doubt” inflicted on the body of the victim he was charged with killing. He gave almost identical testimony in Brooks’ case.
The trial judge permitted West’s expert testimony in Brewer’s 1995 trial, despite the fact West had been the first member ever suspended by the American Board of Forensic Odontology. In 1994, an American Academy of Forensic Sciences committee suspended West, who was forced to resign in 2006.
DNA later cleared the two men and fingered the real killer, Justin Albert Johnson, who confessed that he raped and killed the two girls before throwing their bodies into ponds. Experts said what West identified as bite marks were actually insect bites.
“Michael West was so reckless with his pronouncements that non-human marks on people’s skins came from innocent people’s teeth that it really constituted deliberate indifference, which in many states you could be prosecuted for,” said Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which represented Brewer and Brooks.
On the day the pair were exonerated in 2008, Neufeld spoke to the Black Mississippians gathered in the courthouse in Macon. “They told us that was the first day in their lives they felt they had a presence in the courthouse, and they felt the courthouse was theirs,” he said.
That was revelatory, he said. “Steven Hayne was part of the machine that sent poor people of color to prison without due process.”
Even after their exonerations, West insisted Brooks and Brewer had bitten the girls.
West has made his mark as a self-proclaimed expert in many fields. In courts, judges in at least 10 states have permitted him to testify as an expert in shoes, footprints, fingernail scratches, trace metals, gunshot residue, crime scene reconstruction, blood spatters, wound patterns, and “liquid splash patterns.”
He believed so strongly in his expertise that he once bragged to a lawyer that his error rate was “something less than my Savior, Jesus Christ.”
He claimed to have matched a footprint on a slain child’s face to an athletic shoe found in a neighbor’s apartment, according to the ABA Journal. He claimed to have matched a bruise on a slain child’s abdomen to a suspect’s shoe.
He claimed to have matched the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich to the primary suspect. He also claimed to have found bite marks on bodies using ultraviolet light — something no other expert was able to replicate.
100th Black American since 1973 exonerated from a death sentence
In Brown’s triple homicide case, West wrote prosecutors: “The wound on the left wrist of Sherwood Brown is a human bitemark. It is a bitemark of great severity and is consistant [sic] with the time of the attack. The bitemark pattern is highly consistant [sic] with the dentition of Evanlie [sic] Boyd.”
The prosecution used West’s conclusion as evidence against Brown as well as the testimony of a jailhouse informant who claimed Brown confessed to the murders. At trial, prosecutors told jurors the blood found on the sole of Brown’s shoe came from the victims.
A jury sentenced Brown to death for the murder of 13-year-old Evangela Boyd. He also received two life sentences for the murders of her mother and grandmother.
But DNA tests eventually done told a different story: the bloody footprints in and around the murder scene contained only female DNA and the blood spot on Brown’s shoe contained only male DNA. No evidence, including hair and DNA, connected Brown to the crime scene or the body. None of his fingerprints was found at the scene.
On Aug. 24, 2021, a circuit judge freed Brown at the request of the district attorney, who said his office lacked the evidence to prosecute. Brown was the 100th Black American since 1973 to be exonerated from a wrongful conviction and death sentence.
As for Howard, he was convicted of the 1992 rape and stabbing death of 84-year-old Georgia Kemp of Columbus. She had been beaten and stabbed to death, and the trauma to her body suggested she had been sexually assaulted. A rape kit found no semen.
Six days later, authorities charged Howard, a sex offender just released from prison, with the crime.
The judge allowed Howard to represent himself at trial, even though he suffered from mental illness, and the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a new trial.
At the second trial, his former girlfriend testified that he sometimes bit her during sex.
The only evidence that linked Howard to the crime? West’s testimony that he found three bite marks on the victim’s body that matched Howard’s teeth.
But West didn’t stop there. He even claimed he could tell from the bite marks that Kemp was “fighting for her life” when she was bitten.
In his closing statement, then-District Attorney Forrest Allgood praised West as a visionary.
“The progress of mankind has been carried forward on the backs of people like Michael West,” he said. “The church threatened to burn Copernicus (actually Galileo) because he dared to say that the planets didn’t revolve around the earth. So it was with Michael West.”
The jury convicted Howard, and once again, an innocent man was sentenced to death.
In a 2016 hearing, Howard’s attorneys showed that none of his DNA had been found at the crime scene or on the murder weapon. (Another man’s DNA was found there.) There was also no DNA on the claimed bite marks or on the victim’s clothing, body or bed sheets.
Three forensic odontologists found the three bite marks West claimed to have found aren’t visible in autopsy photographs, “nor were the alleged bite marks visible by the naked eye or noted in the autopsy report.”
After winning a new trial, Howard saw all his charges thrown out on Jan. 8, 2021, after the district attorney concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.
In 2009, Brewer sued Hayne and West for $18 million, but a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, saying qualified immunity protected the pair. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision in 2017.
For his wrongful conviction, Brewer received $500,000 from the state of Mississippi.
Tucker Carrington, co-author of a book about Hayne and West, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, said he believes there are other innocent people behind bars because of the pair’s testimony.
“After Brooks and Brewer were exonerated, we tried to identify as many cases as we could,” he said.
In addition to Brown and Howard, “we found a host of other cases that were problematic,” he said. “They were cases where I thought the facts were egregious involving Hayne or West or both, but we were unable to win, because the cases had lingered too long or the merits weren’t sufficient to prevail.”
Jimmie Duncan remains on Louisiana’s death row for the 1993 death of 3-year-old Haley Oliveaux. West claims he found bite marks on the child’s cheek, but a video shows no marks on her cheek until after West jammed a mold of teeth into the child’s cheek.
In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences reported that “imprecise or exaggerated expert testimony has sometimes contributed to the admission or erroneous or misleading evidence.”
The report concluded there was no basis in science for forensic odontologists to conclude someone is “the biter,” excluding all other suspects. The American Board of Forensic Odontology changed its guidelines to bar such testimony.
In 2011, West admitted the very methods he used to put so many behind bars were invalid. “I no longer believe in bite-mark analysis,” he said. “I don’t think it should be used in court. I think you should use DNA. Throw bite marks out.”
As for Hayne, there have been six Mississippians exonerated from prison related to his testimony.
In 2018, Jeffrey Havard was removed from death row after Hayne reversed himself, saying shaken baby syndrome wasn’t the cause of death as he originally ruled.
At Havard’s original trial, Hayne went along with the district attorney’s suggestion that there had been a sexual assault, but Hayne reversed himself on that issue, too, saying he didn’t believe such an assault took place.
Despite those reversals, Havard remains behind bars. Hayne has since died.
Under the Law of Moses, false witnesses received the same punishment as those guilty of the crimes.
While that principle doesn’t appear in American jurisprudence, a police officer in California can be convicted of a felony for making a false statement in a report.
Mississippi has no such law.
Email Jerry.Mitchell@MississippiCIR.org.
You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
This story was produced in partnership with the Community Foundation for Mississippi’s local news collaborative, which is independently funded in part by Microsoft Corp. The collaborative includes Mississippi Today, MCIR, the Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Advocate, Jackson State University and Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
The post Black Americans are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Poor People’s Campaign to file Fair Housing complaint over Jackson water
Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Rev. William Barber II announced Monday that his organization would be filing a Fair Housing Act complaint against the state of Mississippi for failing to provide clean drinking water to Jackson residents.
Barber announced the news at a Monday evening rally in downtown Jackson. In his return to Jackson after hosting another protest in late September, the reverend marched alongside about 100 city residents from the Smith Robertson Museum, walking a half mile or so to a stage set up outside the Governor’s Mansion.
“The Fair Housing law says you cannot refuse to give people what they need in their private housing, in their rental housing, or in their federally owned public housing, what they need to have a decent life,” Barber told the crowd on Capitol Street. “And we believe that when you deny people access to clean water, you are violating their fair housing rights.”
Barber cited that the federal law protects against discrimination in housing based on a number of factors, including race. Jackson, the largest city in Mississippi, is 83% Black. The federal government created the law as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
The Poor People’s Campaign also echoed other activists speaking out against the possibility of privatizing Jackson’s drinking water system.
“Understand that if you privatize the water of Jackson, everything else is up for grabs,” Barber said. “If you privatize the water they’ll take the economic resources.”
Mississippi Today reported in August that state lawmakers had met to consider new options for managing the city’s water system, including privatizing. It’s unclear, however, what the state’s role will be as the federal government steps in. Last week, the Jackson City Council voted to enter a confidentiality agreement with the Department of Justice in discussing a settlement over the water system, WLBT reported.
The post Poor People’s Campaign to file Fair Housing complaint over Jackson water appeared first on Mississippi Today.
State GOP leaders boast banning critical race theory. Experts say they didn’t
Mississippi lawmakers spent more than seven hours in early 2022 debating a bill that they said would ban the teaching of critical race theory. They passed it after brushing off the emotional objections of every Black lawmaker and the fact that no state K-12 classroom taught the academic theory.
On the campaign trail and during recent speaking events, several Republican officials have since boasted their hard work and focus on the issue.
But the recently updated Mississippi Code, the state’s book of laws which reflect bills passed during the 2022 legislative session and will soon be distributed across the state, does not include the term “critical race theory” — or even language banning its teaching, experts say.
The new law’s language reads no university, community college or public school “shall direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm” that “any sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin is inherently superior or inferior or that individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, ethnicity, religion or national origin.”
Gov. Tate Reeves, Speaker Philip Gunn and others have touted that Senate Bill 2113, passed during the 2022 session, prohibits the teaching of critical race theory. The bill created a new section of law at 37-13-2 in the legal code. A general index for the legal code does say, “Critical race theory, prohibition,” and then cites the code section. But the code section itself does not use the term “critical race theory.”
“This law does not prohibit critical race theory, and courts generally are not looking to the index to interpret a statute,” said Yvette Theresa Butler, a professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law and the only person in the state who focuses an entire class on critical race theory.
READ MORE: Inside Mississippi’s only class on critical race theory
At the Neshoba County Fair earlier this year, Reeves proclaimed to the generally conservative crowd, “Here in Mississippi we are leading the way and we are driving the conservative movement. We have banned critical race theory, and we have banned vaccine mandates.”
In response to questions about critical race theory not being in the code, Cory Custer, the governor’s deputy chief of staff sent a statement: “Mississippi Today has consistently missed the point on this issue. You’ve been so focused on the label ‘critical race theory,’ that you’ve totally failed to understand that the legislation prohibits teaching the core tenets of this radical indoctrination. It’s almost like you have blinders on. Passing legislation that simply states critical race theory is banned isn’t enough.
“This legislation goes beyond labels and targets the discriminatory teaching that is the foundation of critical race theory – that students are inherently superior or inferior because of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.”
But Butler said the language of the controversial law “actually prohibits the exact opposite of what CRT explores. CRT is just another theoretical method that is used to explore the law’s role in perpetuating and remedying inequality.”
“CRT explores the ways the law has been and is still used (even if written in a neutral – non-discriminatory – manner) to perpetuate racial inequality,” Butler said. “Consequently, it is factually inaccurate to say that anyone teaching CRT directs or compels students to adopt a belief that any race (sex, religion, etc.) is inherently superior or inferior.”
Critical race theory has generally been taught as a graduate level class on the university level and is designed to explore the impact of race on various aspects of society. When the bill was being debated earlier this year, state Department of Education officials said no public kindergarten through 12th grade school in the state was offering critical race theory classes.
A critical race theory class will again be offered at the Ole Miss Law School in the 2023 spring semester, Butler said.
Every African American member of the Legislature opposed passage of the bill during the 2022 session. In the Senate, all 14 African Americans walked out before the final vote in an unprecedented move.
While many Black legislators argued that the language of the bill is meaningless, they still voted against it saying they feared that it could make some educators afraid to teach the true history of the state.
Democratic state Rep. Robert Johnson of Natchez, the House minority leader and longtime attorney, agrees with Butler’s interpretation of the law. The law threatens to cut off funding to any school that violates its conditions, though Johnson said there is no enforcement mechanism in the proposal.
“This law does not prohibit the teaching of critical race theory,” Johnson said. “It does not prevent teachers who are brave and want to challenge their students from doing so.”
The bill lawmakers passed earlier this year did not include the term “critical race theory” in its text. The only mention was at the bottom of the final page of the bill where in nondescript type it reads “ST: Critical Race Theory: prohibit.” The Mississippi Legislature’s website also displays what is known as the short title of the bill “Critical Race Theory, prohibit” if the bill is called up.
Various right wing groups and politicians have argued that critical race theory attempts to create racial strife and attempts to place undue burdens on young white children. Butler said that is not the case.
“Unfortunately, I’ve had many students in my Civil Rights class at the law school who are behind,” Butler said. “They received very limited formal education (as did I) about the antebellum era, the causes of the civil war and secession, the reconstruction era, and the civil rights movement. A civil rights class in law school is meant to discuss civil rights statutes and case law and how to use them to address legal injustices.
“While some civil rights history is covered in law school, it is not a substitute for a history class. I am concerned about what the last two years of messaging will do to students’ understanding of, not only history, but the valiant struggle by advocates of many races, sexes, genders, and religions to strengthen our conceptions of democracy, liberty, and equal protection.”
The post State GOP leaders boast banning critical race theory. Experts say they didn’t appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Jackson schools, on verge of state takeover just 5 years ago, earns ‘C’ rating
The Jackson Public School District received a “C” rating in the new accountability grades released last week, marking the first time it is not considered low-performing since 2014.
At the school board meeting last week, principals from dozens of Jackson schools were recognized for their efforts in improving grades or receiving top marks.
“I am just completely full,” said JPS board member Cynthia Thompson. “As a parent of Jackson Public Schools and six of my babies graduating, and fighting through the madness that our children were not. They are, always have been, and I saw it from the beginning, and I just thank God that now the world can see it and celebrate with us.”
The district, the second largest in Mississippi, narrowly avoided state takeover in 2017 after several years of being rated an “F.” The state Department of Education had recommended that then-Gov. Phil Bryant declare a state of emergency in the district, but Bryant declined, instead opting to form a new oversight commission.
Across the state, schools have not received new grades since 2019 due to pandemic disruptions. Assessments did not occur in the spring of 2020, and while tests were administered in 2021, no accountability grades were given for student performance.
Proficiency scores for reading and math returned to pre-pandemic levels in Jackson’s school district. History proficiency scores significantly surpassed previous scores, mirroring a statewide trend. Science proficiency scores conversely dipped below 2019 levels, also following statewide trends.
The most significant improvements were seen in growth scores, which measure improvements in student performance year-over-year. The district also saw a 10 percentage point increase in the graduation rate.
Every high school in JPS saw improvements in both their proficiency and growth scores, while many elementary schools only saw improvements in their growth scores.
The district also celebrated Barack Obama Magnet Elementary School being ranked the #1 elementary school in the state.
“Have we arrived?” asked Errick Greene, superintendent of the Jackson Public School District, during a press conference. “Absolutely not. We’re not even close. As proud as we are of what we’ve achieved, we’re not even close to where we will be as we continue our trek toward excellence. But our commitment to excellence is definitely paying off.”
Multiple district officials spoke at the board meeting about the goal to become a B-rated district next year, discussing plans to make it a reality.
Greene, in an interview with Mississippi Today, acknowledged that this new accountability rating is fueled, in part, by improved growth scores, which may be higher than normal as students rebound out of pandemic learning declines. He pointed out that the district anticipated this and that they already have a roadmap to continue improving student achievement.
When discussing how the district reached this point and their strategies moving forward, Greene pointed to new K-8 curriculum, benchmark assessments, ensuring teachers cover every component of a standard to help students reach proficiency, making sure that concepts build on one another, and emphasizing coaching and feedback for teachers and leaders at all levels.
“We hadn’t achieved this previously, so I desperately want to use this level of improvement as proof positive for the community, but also for our team, this is not beyond us,” Greene said. “We’re showing and proving to ourselves and to others that this can be accomplished, so I want to use this time and increased performance as the launching pad for the next.”
The post Jackson schools, on verge of state takeover just 5 years ago, earns ‘C’ rating appeared first on Mississippi Today.