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Our Feb. 28 story “Mississippi’s child abuse pediatrician works between medicine and the justice system. Can he be objective?” has been updated to reflect that former University of Mississippi Medical Center Vice Chancellor Dr. Dan Jones said the reason for hiring Dr. Scott Benton in 2008 was to better protect abused children and parents — not as a result of previous lawsuits the hospital faced.

The article cites a 2017 deposition that Dr. Scott Benton gave in which he said Jones recruited him to UMMC as a direct response to previous lawsuits that the hospital had faced for “failing to recognize child abuse in some cases.”

Jones denies the accuracy of Benton’s assertion.

Jones’ full statement submitted to Mississippi Today after publication reads: “In my role as vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, I was not directly involved in determining the need for a specialist in child abuse evaluations nor in the decision to hire Dr. Benton. I am confident that none of these decisions were driven by anything other than the best interests of the children and parents of Mississippi. I am certain that protecting the medical center against lawsuits would never take priority over the welfare of any of our patients in any decision made by me, those working with me during my time of leadership, nor of any decisions made by my successors in leadership. Any statement by a Mississippi Today journalist wrongfully impugning my character or assuming motives for decisions without evidence is strongly resented.”

At Mississippi Today, we take seriously the power our words can have, and we constantly weigh the responsibility we owe readers in using them. In more than 10 years as a Mississippi journalist, I have closely covered Jones in his various prominent leadership roles and do not have any reason to question his integrity — and that includes when he served as UMMC’s leader when Benton was hired. I can say unequivocally that in the weeks of reporting, writing, editing and fact-checking of the Feb. 28 article in question, no Mississippi Today journalist once intended to impugn Jones’ character.

Two sentences in our original article, however, didn’t clearly attribute Benton’s 2017 deposition as the source of information regarding his recruitment to UMMC. We apologize for that omission and have updated the story to make it clearer who said what and when.

I’d like to use this opportunity to share with readers a little more about our reporting process. Understanding why Benton was brought to UMMC in the first place is critical to contextualizing the questions our reporting raised about his work in later years. We spent weeks exhausting every option available to us to learn more about the exact nature of Dr. Benton’s hiring. Before the story published, Jones twice declined to speak with us on the record about Benton’s statement regarding why he was hired. He referred our inquiries to current UMMC public affairs officials, who subsequently declined to respond to two detailed questions about the nature of Benton’s recruitment.

Additionally, UMMC officials declined several requests for interviews with Dr. Benton and made no other medical center official available for an on-the-record interview. Without comment or an interview to discuss why Benton was hired, we cited what was available to us: Benton’s sworn testimony from the 2017 deposition — a public record and Benton’s own words.

Mississippi Today will continue to be completely transparent with our readers about updates to stories and any necessary corrections or clarifications. And when our reporting is called into question, we will publicly respond as appropriate.

My inbox (adam@mississippitoday.org) is always open for comments, concerns or questions about our reporting.

READ MORE: Mississippi Today’s full “Shaky Science, Fractured Families” series

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The Senate Appropriations committee on Tuesday stripped a sweeping House college financial aid bill of changes that would expand eligibility to adult and part-time students. 

The committee also voted to reduce awards under Mississippi’s only need-based aid grant from full tuition for all four years at in-state institution to $7,274, the cost of annual tuition at the least expensive university, which is Mississippi Valley State University. 

Sen. Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, the chair, read out the changes to House Bill 771 yesterday. No other lawmakers on the committee said anything about the bill. 

“Are there questions?” Hopson asked. Hearing none, he moved to a vote. 

The move signals that the final version of House Bill 711 will likely be worked out in a closed-door conference. At least three competing versions of the bill have been suggested throughout the session. 

As originally introduced by Rep. Donnie Scoggin, R-Ellisville, House Bill 771 would have expanded the Mississippi Resident Tuition Assistance Grant to full-Pell-eligible students and adult and part-time students, and doubled award amounts under the program. The ACT score requirement of 15 or higher would be removed, and students from families that make more than 200% of the state’s median household income would no longer be eligible. 

These changes would lead to 17,000 more students receiving state financial aid, a consulting firm estimated. 

In a more controversial measure, Scoggin’s version also would have reduced awards under the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students so that it no longer would pay full tuition for all four years of college regardless of what institution a student attends. Instead, the first two years of the award would be equal to the average tuition at the state’s two-year community colleges. 

Hopson told Mississippi Today that these changes have sparked a “fairly hearty disagreement” between representatives from the four-year universities and the community colleges who are competing for HELP recipients and HELP dollars.

The community colleges are in favor of this change, because it will incentivize more HELP recipients to attend two-year institutions, and the four-year universities want HELP to stay as it is. By and large, HELP recipients use the generous award to attend four-year universities. 

Hopson said his amendment was an effort to keep HB 771 alive so there can be more discussion. 

“It is a little bit of a compromise, I guess, but this has still got some work to be done,” he said. 

Hopson added that he hopes to bring the universities and community colleges together to discuss the bill before conference. 

“When you deal with these things … you need opportunities to sit down together face-to-face and go over options,” he said. “We typically hear from one group as opposed to the other group and are never really getting those groups together.” 

Last week, the Senate Colleges and Universities Committee voted to make a different set of changes to the bill. That version would have removed any changes to the HELP grant and kept the revisions to MTAG. This change, called a committee substitute, wasn’t uploaded to the Legislature’s website.

But last week’s version of the bill would entail increasing spending on state financial aid. So does Scoggin’s proposal, which would increase the budget for the Office of Student Financial Aid by an estimated $21 million.  

Jennifer Rogers, the director of OSFA, said her office is supportive of Scoggin’s original proposal and comfortable with not making changes to the HELP grant. 

“I very much hope that meaningful changes to the programs can be made to promote effectiveness and efficiency,” she said, “and I am still hopeful that that is a possibility.” 

Education policy experts like Toren Ballard, K-12 policy director of Mississippi First, were chastened by the changes made by the Senate Universities and Colleges. 

Ballard said Hopson’s proposed reduction to the HELP grant is better than Scoggin’s original proposal simply because it is not as large a decrease in awards. Under Scoggin’s bill, HELP recipients at the universities would lose an average of $11,200 in financial aid over the course of four years. Hopson’s proposal means these HELP recipients would lose an average of $6,504 over four years. 

All told, this would save the state roughly $1.4 million million a year in spending on HELP, according to a Mississippi Today analysis. 

“I don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve,” Ballard said, “because the savings are very marginal.” 

Ballard’s other issue with Hopson’s proposal is that it does not make any changes to MTAG, a program he wants to see updated. MTAG has not been significantly amended since it was created in the late 1990s. 

“We have a great opportunity to revise a grant program that doesn’t have any sort of value-add for the state,” he said. “It’s a handout of $500 to $1,000 to middle to high income families that doesn’t give us any return on investment. By scrapping all these changes to MTAG … we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot.”

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A House panel made changes to a Senate bill to put long-term control of Jackson’s troubled water system under a new “regional” authority, keeping the measure alive after a Tuesday-night deadline.

The changes were an effort to appease a special federal court receiver now overseeing the system and Jackson city and legislative leaders who have decried the regional water authority and other measures as a hostile state takeover of the capital city. The city’s water system, suffering decades of neglected maintenance, has routinely left residents with no potable water or at times no water at all.

“The city of Jackson would retain ownership, this makes that clear,” said Rep. Shanda Yates, I-Jackson, who presented the Senate-revised bill to the House Public Utilities Committee late Tuesday. The bill now goes to the full House for consideration, and if passed there would head back to the Senate since the House amended it.

Yates said she and SB2889 original author, Sen. David Parker, R-Olive Branch, met with the federal receiver — who has said he would likely need about five years to true the system — on changes to the bill, some of which were minor tweaks.

The major change is the new authority would possess a “leasehold” on the system’s assets, not ownership as in the original bill. Also, any money obtained by the utility authority beyond what’s needed to operate and maintain the system would be returned to the city.

Yates said she hopes the city and her fellow Jackson legislative delegation will be more open to the measure, but she understands it’s gotten caught up in bitter politics over other “takeover” bills.

“All of them have been balled up into one, ‘We hate it all,’” Yates said. “… But everybody has said there needs to be some governing body other than the city running this system. My goal — I live in Jackson, I work in Jackson, I’m raising a family in Jackson, and I’m representing constituents of Jackson — is that when the third party (federal receiver) is gone, we have something in place, ready to go. I don’t want a year or two to go by with nothing new after they leave and things start to crumble again.”

Public Utilities Chairman Scott Bounds, R-Philadelphia, said he hopes Jackson legislative delegates can offer amendments to the bill when it comes to the full House “to make it more palatable.”

“Hopefully at the end of the day, we can have something to make sure that in the long run we provide good, safe, clean drinking water for the city of Jackson,” Bounds said. “I think that’s what everybody wants.”

READ MORE: Senate passes bill putting Jackson water under state control, House to vote next

Rep. De’Keither Stamps, D-Jackson, a member of the committee, successfully offered an amendment to the bill Tuesday to require one member of the authority board be a water customer from west-south Jackson, and that a well system in that area be maintained as either a primary or backup water system.

Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the amended bill.

READ MORE: State, business leaders consider regionalization of Jackson water system. Local officials hate the idea

Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, on Wednesday said he had not seen the House-revised bill and, to his knowledge, most others in the Jackson legislative delegation had not been consulted.

That’s part of the problem with the regional authority and other Jackson bills this session, Bell said, lawmakers from elsewhere are trying to take over policing, utilities and other governance without consulting lawmakers representing the city.

“No, that usually doesn’t happen,” Bell said. “I can’t come up here and introduce legislation changing things in the Delta and not talk with people from there … It’s a situation of people from outside of the city thinking they know what’s best for the city. That’s part of the issue here.”

Bell said he generally believes, “Jackson should maintain its water system without any board having control over it.” He said he believes interest in taking it over came after about $800 million in federal money was secured to fix it. He questioned how the system would deal with emergencies under such a regional authority board, which he said would make things cumbersome.

The “Mississippi Capitol Region Utility Act” would create a nonprofit authority to control the system that covers Jackson, much of Byram and parts of Ridgeland. The nonprofit board would include four people appointed by the Jackson mayor, three appointed by the governor — one with input from the Byram mayor — and two appointed by the lieutenant governor — one with input from the mayor of Ridgeland. The measure makes clear that neither Byram nor Ridgeland are required to remain in the utility authority.

Some other measures dealing with the city of Jackson faced deadlines for committee action. They include:

READ MORE: Senate panel strips many ‘onerous’ provisions from HB 1020

House Bill 1168, authored by Ways and Means Chairman Trey Lamar, originally would have forced the city of Jackson to spend all the money collected from a special 1-cent sales tax — usually $14 million to $16 million a year — on its troubled water system. But the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday overhauled the bill, to allow the city to do road, bridge, stormwater, water, sewer or any other infrastructure work, as the program was initially intended. The bill would require more stringent reporting of spending by the commission that runs the 1-cent sales tax work, which Finance Chairman Josh Harkins said has become “lax.” Jackson leaders have for years complained that the state created a special commission to oversee the spending of the 1-cent sales tax, as opposed to giving the city authority to spend it.

Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, on Tuesday said: “What we are left with now is a … reporting provision … The House passed a bill to take away road paving and put it into the water department, which is about to have $800 million in the bank … This keeps the money where it needs to be used. I’m glad we are going back to paving streets with this. If there’s one thing in Jackson right now that does have money, it’s the water department.”

The measure heads to the full Senate, and if it passes there, back to the House for consideration of the changes.

HB698, authored by Rep. Shanda Yates, I-Jackson, would prohibit a city basing water bills on a customer’s property values, such as the special administrator providing federal oversight of Jackson’s water system has proposed. The measure remains alive and has passed a Senate committee after amendment, meaning if the full Senate passes it it will return to the House. The administrator has said to a judge that he might sue over any state legislation that prevents him from setting water rates based on property values.

HB1094, authored by Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, would fine the capital city up to $1 million for each “improper disposal” of wastewater or sewage into the Pearl River — a fairly common occurrence with Jackson’s crumbling sewerage. The measure died without a vote on Tuesday night’s deadline in the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee. Opponents had said the measure could bankrupt the city with hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, and that the city is already under a federal consent decree to stop polluting the river.

Correction: An initial version of this story had the incorrect number for the regional water authority bill. The correct number is SB2889.

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Thirty-six basketball games in six days. That’s the task facing Scorebook Live’s Tyler Cleveland this week at the MHSAA State Basketball championships at Mississippi Coliseum. The Clevelands discuss the basketball bonanza that reaches a crescendo with four championship games each on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. There’s also plenty of college basketball and baseball to discuss.

Stream all episodes here.

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PEARL — You could call Mississippi State’s 10-9 baseball victory over Southern Mississippi many things. “Crisp” is not one.

Let’s put it this way: State pitchers walked 11 batters and hit another. State fielders committed three errors, leading to three unearned runs. All that – and State still won.

The Bulldogs, down 9-6, plated four runs in the bottom of the eighth inning to beat their down-state rivals before an announced crowd of 6,542 at Trustmark Park.

State had plenty of help from the Golden Eagles, who walked eight batters and hit five more. Combined, that’s 19 walks and six hit batters. Little wonder the game lasted nearly three and a half hours. Casey Stengel, the Baseball Hall of Fame manager, once said of his 1962 New York Mets, the worst team in Major League history: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

The much more pertinent question on a wonderfully balmy February Tuesday night: “Can’t anybody here throw a strike?”

Afterward, back-slapping, high-fiving State players didn’t seem to mind the circumstances. They were pleased with the victory, their third straight, and coach Chris Lemonis perhaps told us why in his opening statement of the postgame press conference.

“You’ve got a really good opponent over there, and it’s rivalry,” Lemonis said. “People say there’s no rivalry in baseball, but there is. We’ve got really good baseball teams in our state and that’s a well-coached team over there. This was exciting.”

Some perspective: State, which won a National Championship in 2021, lost 30 of 56 games last year. The Bulldogs lost three of their first six games this season, but have now won three straight against strong competition. This was no time to be choosy.

“We’re not perfect, but we’re competing,” is the way Lemonis put it. “This gives us some momentum.”

Two portal transfers continue to give the Bulldogs much reason for hope of a bounce-back season. Second baseman Amani Larry, who played last year at New Orleans, slugged a two-run home run and scored three times himself. Samford transfer Colton Ledbetter contributed a triple, two runs scored and three runs knocked in. Granted, it’s a small sample size just six games in, but Ledbetter leads the team with a .400 batting average, three home runs and 19 RBI, while Larry has contributed two homers, 13 RBI and is hitting a robust .371. Said Lemonis: “Those two guys are special.”

Those two guys knocked in five runs and scored five in a one-run victory. Besides special, they were absolutely essential.

Nationally ranked Southern Miss, which got off to an impressive 4-0 start, has now lost three of its last four. Walks are a huge reason. Southern Miss led the nation in strikeouts/walks ratio last year and walked fewer than three batters per nine innings. This season, Eagle pitchers have walked 40 batters in just 73 innings. Big difference.

The Eagles lost five pitchers who could have returned this season in the 2022 Major League draft. Another, Chandler Best, suffered an injury that required Tommy John surgery. Of the five pitchers USM sent to the mound Tuesday night, three were freshmen. Youngsters such as Nick Monistere and J.B. Middleton throw in the mid-90s and have a world of potential. But there’s a learning curve at work here.

Say this for both State and USM. If facing really good competition makes you better, these two teams should improve quickly. State goes to Frisco, Texas, this weekend to face Ohio State, Oklahoma and Cal in the Frisco College Baseball Classic. Southern Miss will host always strong Dallas Baptist for a three-game set. DBU, which swept the Golden Eagles last season, are 7-1, having lost only to No. 10 TCU. Yes, and after that series, the Golden Eagles go to defending national champ Ole Miss for a mid-week game.

Both the Bulldogs and Eagles better buckle up. Even more importantly, they need to throw strikes.

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Mississippians would be prevented from placing an initiative on the ballot to ease or erase the state’s strict anti-abortion laws under the legislation passed late Tuesday by the House Constitution Committee.

Senate Joint Resolution 533, as amended by the House Constitution Committee Tuesday, would not allow citizens to gather enough signatures to place an issue on the ballot regarding abortion.

House Constitution Chair Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, said the decision to prevent addressing abortion via voter initiative came up through consultation with other House members.

“It was decided it would be the House position,” Shanks said. He would not say which legislators were involved in the discussions, but House Speaker Philip Gunn has been a leading anti-abortion advocate during his tenure in the Legislature.

“Regardless of what the issue is, I think people should have the right to have it considered through the initiative process,” said Rep. Bryant Clark, D-Pickens. “It is almost like a dictatorship telling the people they have the right to speak except on this issue or that issue.

READ MORE: Restoring Mississippi ballot initiative process survives legislative deadline

“Regardless of what the issue is, I think the people should have the right to vote.’

Legislation is being considered this session to restore the initiative process that was deemed unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court in a 2021 ruling.

Besides fixing the concerns that led to the Supreme Court declaring it unconstitutional, the proposal changes the old initiative process by allowing voters to bypass the Legislature to add or amend general law instead of changing the Constitution.

READ MORE: Is ballot initiative a ‘take your picture off the wall’ issue for lawmakers?

Both the House and Senate proposals increase the number signatures of registered voters needed to place an issue on the ballot from about 106,000 under the old system to about 240,000.

Disagreement over the number of signatures needed to place an issue on the ballot resulted in efforts to revive the initiative process dying during the 2022 session. While the bill Shanks passed has the same signatory requirements as the Senate bill, Shanks said he still supports the lower threshold, but feared the Senate might kill the proposal at the lower signature requirement. He said he still hopes to get a lower threshold during negotiations on the issue with Senate leaders later in the session.

“We will have to work that (required number of signatures) out in conference,” Shanks said. Conference committees are formed to hammer out differences between the House and Senate versions of legislation.

The issue banning abortion initiatives had not been publicly discussed this session until Tuesday’s Constitution Committee meeting.  But after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this past summer there is no national right to an abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade, laws banning most abortions in the state went into effect.

Since then, the issue of abortion has been on the ballot in six states. In each of those elections, the citizens voted in favor of maintaining or expanding abortion rights.

Gunn and other politicians always have maintained Mississippi is an ardent anti-abortion state. But in 2011, Mississippi voters overwhelmingly rejected a so-called personhood amendment that would have defined life as beginning at conception.

The Supreme Court ruled Mississippi’s initiative invalid in 2021 because it required signatures of registered voters to be gathered equally from five congressional districts as they existed in 1990. In 2000, the state lost a congressional district based on the results of the U.S. Census. The new proposal just requires the signatures to be gathered equally from the congressional districts regardless of how many there are.

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Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law Tuesday a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans minors in Mississippi, calling it part of “a war on objective scientific truth” and “basic biology.” 

Effective immediately, Mississippi’s estimated 2,400 trans children will no longer be able to receive gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormone therapy from in-state providers. The legal risk for trans children and their families seeking care out of state is unclear. 

House Bill 1125, called the “Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures (REAP) Act, would strip doctors who provide this care of their medical license and tort claim protections. Anyone who aids and abets this care for trans children could be liable for civil damages for up to 30 years after a child receives gender-affirming care. Insurers and Medicaid would be prohibited from reimbursing families for this care. 

Reeves cast the law as a way to protect Mississippi’s children but during a press conference would not say if he had spoken with a single child in Mississippi who had been harmed by gender-affirming care. 

“I’m not going to reveal private conversations that I’ve had, but I will tell you that I don’t have to,” he said. “I think it’s just intuitive to them that it’s happening here, and if you listen to some of these children that allow themselves to go through this and talk to them five years later, talk to them 10 years later, what you’re going to find is, it has been harmful to them in ways.” 

Gender-affirming care is evidence-based and research has shown it significantly reduces suicidality in trans youth who receive it. 

Advocates and providers like Stacie Pace, a nurse practitioner who owns the only clinic in the state that provided gender-affirming care to trans kids this year, have warned that HB 1125’s passage will harm the mental health of trans youth in Mississippi. 

“The number one thing, if this bill goes into effect? A lot of dead kids,” Pace told Mississippi Today earlier this month. “This law goes into effect, it is, in my opinion, the direct cause of youth suicide.” 

HB 1125 is part of a wave of anti-trans legislation this year in Mississippi and across the country. It was one of more than 30 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced by lawmakers this session. Its signing makes Mississippi the third state to ban gender-affirming care for minors this year after Utah and South Dakota. 

Similar legislation passed in Arkansas and Alabama has been stayed by the courts. It’s unclear if there will be a legal challenge to HB 1125 in Mississippi. 

“To trans youth in Mississippi, we love you, I love you, you have support,” said Jensen Luke Matar, a trans activist who joined a small protest on the steps of the Walter Sillers Building. “Don’t give up. Be strong. Be exactly who you are, because you are beautiful and perfect.” 

Reeves was joined at the press conference by Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh, who gave a short speech, as well as several Republican activists and representatives from the Alliance Defending Freedom and Madison County Moms for Liberty. 

Walsh said he was encouraged to see Mississippi join the national movement that he has helped build against “gender ideology madness.” He said the ban on gender-affirming care is similar to other accesses that American society denies children, like alcohol, credit card accounts and mortgages.  

“The kids cannot choose any of this,” he said. “They cannot consent to it. They can’t understand what they’re doing, and what the long-term effects or even short term effects are gonna be.” 

Reeves echoed Walsh later in the press conference about the importance of age restrictions.

“I’m highly against 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds getting these types of surgeries, but the Libertarian in me kind of says if that’s what you want to do to your body, okay, but not to children,” he said. 

The ban on puberty blockers for trans children, Reeves said, will likely apply even in cases in which a trans child needs medication for a non-gender-dysphoria related condition like precocious puberty. Reeves did not speak in detail when asked by a reporter if it will now be more risky for doctors to prescribe puberty blockers to any Mississippi child simply because they might be trans. 

Also in attendance were the co-authors of the bill, Rep. Gene Newman, R-Pearl, Rep. Nick Bain, R-Corinth, and House Speaker Philip Gunn. Sen. Joey Fillingane, who handled the bill’s passage in the Senate, joined the press conference in time to take a photo with Reeves and other lawmakers. 

READ MORE: Mississippi lawmaker cited trans teen surgeries that never actually happened

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