Greenwood Leflore Hospital will lay off as many as 80 employees in an effort to cut costs and keep the hospital open through the end of the year as it continues takeover negotiations with the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
The hospital’s interim CEO Gary Marchand announced the plans in a memo to hospital staff Friday morning. Marchand wrote that the hospital’s administrators decided to maintain current services, including emergency, surgical, inpatient, outpatient diagnostic services, and outpatient treatments including cancer and wound care.
The staff cuts will affect as many as 55 full-time and 25 part-time employees.
“Today we are announcing a further reduction in our staffing so that all remaining services can be adequately and consistently matched to current patient volumes,” Marchand wrote. “While unfortunate, we believe this will allow the best option for current services to continue into early next year.”
Marchand told Mississippi Today Friday afternoon that the layoffs alone will not be enough to stave off closure before a deal is completed.
“These actions will result in a reduction in cash outflows by the hospital and will need to be combined with financial support from the owners to attain the financial stability needed for the hospital to continue to provide services into early 2023,” he said.
The struggling 208-bed hospital employs more than 600 people. It suspended inpatient services entirely in August following a sewage leak, transferring patients to other hospitals in the area. It is currently operating a total of 18 inpatient beds.
The hospital has been negotiating a takeover deal with UMMC since the summer. Marchand told staff last week that negotiations had hit a road block over the hospital’s outstanding debts to Medicare and deferred maintenance costs, together totaling around $9 million. UMMC did not want to assume those debts in taking over hospital operations.
The City of Greenwood and Leflore County last week agreed to put up $4.5 million each to cover the hospital’s debts and deferred maintenance.
Any deal would require approval by the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), which oversees colleges and universities in Mississippi. Because the two parties could not resolve the debt issue in time to finalize documents before the IHL’s last scheduled board meeting of the year on Nov. 17, any deal will likely have to wait until early 2023. Marchand told staff last week that staff cuts and possibly service reductions would be necessary to keep the hospital open.
UMMC could ask IHL to hold a special called meeting to approve any documents as soon as they are ready, but UMMC spokespeople have said there are no plans to do that. They would not explain why.
UMMC did not respond to a request for comment Friday morning.
Greenwood Leflore employees who are being laid off are being notified Friday, Marchand said.
More than half the counties in Mississippi are considered maternity care deserts, according to the new report from the March of Dimes. These counties have no hospitals providing obstetric care, no OB-GYNs and no certified nurse midwives.
Discontinued labor and delivery services and shuttered neonatal intensive care units have dominated headlines in the state in recent months, painting a bleak picture for mothers and babies’ access to care. Greenwood Leflore Hospital closed Leflore County’s only labor and delivery unit on Oct. 15. Over the summer, Ochsner Medical Center in Hancock County did the same.
The trend of reduced access and care for mothers and babies — on the heels of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and is expected to result in 5,000 additional babies in Mississippi alone — does not bode well for a state already plagued by high infant and maternal mortality rates and poor health outcomes.
The state’s chamber of commerce and workforce development office are working together on an ambitious goal: Get more than half of Mississippi’s workforce college-educated by 2030.
The Mississippi Economic Council and Accelerate Mississippi are conducting a statewide listening tour, part of the state’s “Ascent to 55%” initiative, to create a strategic plan to increase the number of college graduates among working-aged Mississippians, considered anyone between 25-64 years old.
Mississippi already seems to be on track to achieve this goal – by 2030, an estimated 59% of the state’s workforce will have a college degree or equivalent certificate, according to a paper commissioned by the Woodward Hines Education Foundation.
The strategic plan will aim to guide policy and marketing so that Missisippians are getting college degrees that meet the varying needs of employers like Nissan in central Mississippi, Ingalls Shipbuilding to the south and Toyota to the north.
The tour began earlier this week and will continue into December.It is being spearheaded by Jean Massey, a former associate state superintendent who MEC hired with grant funds from the Woodward Hines Education Foundation (WHEF).
Massey’s first stop was at Copiah-Lincoln Community College on Tuesday. She said she wants to learn about the needs of business – what degrees do they want the local workforce to have? – and to generate buy-in from public and private leaders needed to achieve the state’s wide-ranging goal.
“We want to hear from the business industry what they need, we want to hear from workforce workers, we also want to hear from the educators in the region to hear what they’re offering and aligns with what’s needed, and we also want to hear from the leaders in the community, government officials,” she said.
Mississippians have long pursued higher education at some of the lowest rates in the country, a fact state leaders have talked about improving for years with little success.
The initiative comes as Gov. Tate Reeves announced on Monday the largest economic development project in state history. It also takes on new urgency as the pandemic has contributed to a decline in the number of Mississippians going to college, said Courtney Brown, the vice president of impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for postsecondary attainment.
“If at any point the data were really right in front of our face about the importance of having more education, the pandemic really shows that,” Brown said. “It really showed the inequities in our society between the haves and the have-nots, and we really have to change that.”
But if Mississippi does increase the number of college degrees in the state, the theory is that it will kick off a positive feedback loop of economic development, leading to bigger business and higher paying jobs.
“If we raise our attainment level, our workforce becomes more valuable, industry wants to be here, and we can attract more people,” Massey said.
The goal of increasing college degrees or credentials in Mississippi goes back to 2010 under Gov. Haley Barbour’s administration, when the Legislature created the Education Achievement Council (EAC) to measure the progress made by community colleges and universities in terms of degrees awarded, graduation rates and research dollars.
That same year, the EACset a postsecondary attainment goal of reaching the national average by 2025. In 2019, Mississippi’s educational attainment rate was 44% – the fourth lowest in the nation, according to Lumina – putting it on track to miss its original goal of 52%.
Two years ago, the EAC revised its attainment goal by committing to the Ascent to 55% initiative. Then WHEF – which is funding the listening tour with a four-year, $1 million grant – put out a request for proposal which it granted to MEC.
MEC’s strategic plan would mark the first time that Mississippi has created a plan to increase the state’s number of college degrees and certificates, said Jim McHale, the president and CEO of WHEF, which has long advocated for a strong attainment goal.
“Ascent to 55% is our north star, and everything needs to lead up to that,” McHale said.
The strategic plan, though, is only for MEC, and it’s unclear if or how it will call on state lawmakers to pass legislation to support educational attainment. Their participation would be needed to achieve such a wide-ranging goal, according to higher education experts.
“You need everybody at the table,” said Brown from Lumina. “Higher ed can’t solve this alone.”
A state’s postsecondary education attainment is a reflection of a number of non-education policies, namely social services, said Iris Palmer, an education policy director at New America. Relying on higher education as a pathway to the middle class, Palmer said, isn’t a substitute for social welfare programs.
“If (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) actually worked, if all the states expanded Medicaid, if we had a world where there was enough cash assistance for people to be able to live while they’re in school, we wouldn’t have to be pathworking these things through our educational system,” Palmer said.
In Mississippi, the lack of social services is accompanied by few state resources for adult and low-income college students. The rules for Mississippi’s three college financial aid programs by and large exclude adults. Students from low-income families are less likely to complete college than students from wealthier families. As race tracks highly with income in Mississippi, Black students are much less likely to complete college than white students, even though they start college at the same rate.
On brightly-colored fliers, MEC and Accelerate Mississippi have touted the benefits of more Mississippians going to college – not just to businesses and the economy, but to the state government’s bottom line.
“Every increased percentage point to Mississippi’s attainment rate has the potential to net the state $20 million through reduced social service spending and increased state and local taxes,” one handout says.
The source for that data point, a 2021 paper by research firm ITHAKA-S+R, strikes a slightly different tone. Titled “It’s Complicated: The Relationship between Postsecondary Attainment and State Finances,” the report posited that increased educational attainment would help states spend less money on Medicaid and welfare – as college graduates typically need less social services – and generate more revenue in the form of increased property and income taxes.
Mississippi, the report found, would see some of the smallest savings in the country on welfare with increased educational attainment. Eliminating the state income tax – which Reeves pledged to do at this year’s Hobnob, where MEC distributed these fliers – would also significantly reduce the potential savings.
“The revenue coming from income tax is quite significant and definitely the majority of the tax revenue that the state is deriving,” James Ward, who co-authored the paper, told Mississippi Today. “To eliminate that would definitely take a big hit in terms of the potential benefits of increasing attainment because attainment is linked to those higher salaries where you’re getting that additional income tax.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers haven’t expressed interest in policies that research has shown will support more postsecondary attainment, such as increasing need-based financial aid and expanding college financial aid to adult learners.
Massey anticipates the strategic plan will be finished before the middle of next year and is still sorting out what metrics the plan should measure. She hopes to build a database the public can use to track the state’s progress.
“I think the key is that we all work together, and we understand this is not going to happen overnight, but it’s absolutely vital that we do increase our attainment rate,” she said.
Editor’s note: Woodward Hines Education Foundation is a financial supporter of Mississippi Today.
COLUMBUS – Denisha and Amber Glenn saw a whole future inside an abandoned Tuesday Morning.
The shuttered retail store was the perfect home for the sisters’ business venture: Holistika. In their vision, Holistika would be one of Mississippi’s first medical marijuana dispensaries.
The sisters already had success as founders of their own small human resources company. With cannabis, they did their homework.
“We started the planning process back in 2020,” said Amber Glenn. “We were looking at properties, putting together a business plan. With us being Black women, we knew there’d be challenges … so we have – since day one – done everything correctly and by the books.”
They visited out-of-state expos, toured leading dispensaries, and studied the state’s Medical Cannabis Act, which outlined the burgeoning program. They met early with a city inspector, ensuring their shop’s architect plan accounted for every plumbing and electrical requirement.
They were two self-made business women, regular Mississippians, navigating an industry largely dominated by white men and deep-pocket partnerships. A 2017 survey from Marijuana Business Daily found that less than 20% of marijuana business owners are minorities.
“We’d want to meet with companies – white men – and they would talk to us on the phone, but when they saw us in person, they’d totally disappear,” Denisha Glenn said.
The snags kept coming.
When they couldn’t find a local land surveyor to take them as a client, they tracked down one willing to travel from two hours away. They were meticulous, desiring a bullet-proof application ready to upload the moment the state opened the online portal.
None of it was enough. A competitor down the street uploaded their application materials faster. And in the battle for dispensary licenses across Mississippi, speed took precedence.
The first wave of licenses went to some of the budding market’s biggest spenders – an attorney who teamed up with an industry insider from leading cannabis state Colorado; a man who owns a private plane charter company; people who have invested millions already on cultivation sites and to launch their own empires, applying for several dispensaries at once.
The Glenn sisters said they were only aware of one other Black woman in Mississippi working to get a dispensary license. There’s likely a small number overall, but the state’s public list of licensed dispensaries doesn’t specify an owner’s race.
Losing out on the license stung. But it was the months of application limbo and unanswered questions that really hurt, the sisters said. They expected a swift rejection so they could move on and apply for another location. Instead, they say, it took months for Holistika to get a formal rejection and its $40,000 in fees returned so they could try for a new location.
“No matter the position in life, the public will like you more if they have access to you,” said Denisha Glenn, reflecting on more than two months it took to get Holistika’s first application rejected so she and her sister could apply for another store. “But it just seems like it’s a lack of personnel and a lack of training.”
In a statement to Mississippi Today, the Mississippi Department of Revenue said it responds “timely to all inquiries, including those from the personal and legal representatives” – including Holistika – “usually within one business day.”
The Mississippi Department of Revenue has issued 139 dispensary licenses since it began accepting applications at the beginning of July. The department says it processes the applications in the order they were received.
“The application portal licensing software time stamped the receipt of each application out to the 100th millisecond,” MDOR spokespersonwoman Lexus Burns said in a statement.
Milliseconds counted when applications first flooded into MDOR’s portal. With Mississippi’s law dictating no dispensary could be within 1,500 feet of each other, staking territory was vital.
Using the first-come-first serve system is normal within the industry, said Jackson-based cannabis attorney Slates Veazey.
“I struggle to figure out a more fair way,” he said.
But the law also says applicants should be issued licenses within 30 days of receiving an application. The same, in theory, goes for those being rejected.
“That’s important information to have,” Veazey said. “If you are getting rejected you need to look for other properties. You know you can move on. And the law gives applicants a short time period to challenge a license determination.”
Denisha and Amber Glenn said they lost valuable time that could have meant the difference between nailing down another property before a dispensary competitor edged them out for a second time.
Tucked next to her existing bakery, Nicole Huff has a roughly 1,200-square-foot space she’s working to open as Wildflower dispensary. It’s about 1,300 feet down the street from where the Glenn sisters hoped to open inside the old Tuesday Morning space.
“July 5, 8 o’clock, I was here,” Huff said from the desk in her bakery’s office, “dragging and dropping everything into (the portal).”
Thirteen days later, Huff was told her application was approved. But first there was a formatting issue with her land survey; she had 24 hours to have it redone. She wound up among the first people in the state to be issued a dispensary license.
“I’m so proud of the State Department of Revenue,” Huff said. “They’re crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i.’”
She said she cashed out her 401(k) and sold her stocks to fund her dispensary business. While her contractor filed construction permits, Amber and Denisha Glenn scoured Columbus for an alternative location.
“We wanted a back-up for the back-up,” Denisha Glenn said.
They spent $8,500 on land surveys to determine that any hopeful locations were the right distances from churches, schools, daycares and Wildflower.
But landing on the right new spot still didn’t solve their problems. Their first application was still at a standstill.
Denisha Glenn said it was an October call to the media spokesperson at the state Department of Health – which handles the licenses for cultivation, doctors, and patients – that finally got her in touch with the right people, including Cannabis Program Director Kris Jones Adcock.
“Once we got connected to the right people who could make those decisions, they were very kind and very helpful,” she said.
If an applicant’s bid for a license is denied because another dispensary was approved for license in their zone in the period after they applied, they are able to get the $40,000 in application fees returned.
“The Mississippi State Department of Health understands the complexities and challenges of starting this type of program,” said spokesperson Liz Sharlot, who assisted the Glenn sisters. “We are gratified for all of the support and cooperation of the Department of Revenue. The Agency is happy to assist applicants of all types to ensure a smooth process for everyone.”
With their fees returned, on Oct. 14, the sisters applied for a new license. It also meant letting go of the Tuesday Morning spot. They ended their lease.
The new spot is closer to where they grew up in Columbus.
“I think our new location is a godsend,” Denisha Glenn said. “It puts us closer to our community.”
In late October, the sisters got the news: Their new location was approved.
STARKVILLE — Tom Duff, the president of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, said in an interview Thursday that the University of Southern Mississippi should repay $5 million in welfare funds used to construct a volleyball stadium.
Though the state has, so far, opted not to include the volleyball stadium – the single largest known purchase in the sprawling welfare scandal – in a civil suit that attempts to claw back the funds, Duff said he thinks the federal government will make the state recoup the money.
“I could be wrong, that might not happen,” he said. “But that’s probably what should happen, because USM did it incorrectly.”
Appointed by former Gov. Phil Bryant, Duff has served on the IHL board, which governs Mississippi’s eight public universities, since 2015. Duff, a billionaire, is also one of USM’s most prominent alums and a high-dollar donor to universities across Mississippi.
Duff said that when he and other IHL board members signed off on the lease agreement that provided the funds in 2017, they did not know that they were approving the construction of the volleyball stadium because the project was listed as an item on the consent agenda. Trustees typically approve consent agenda items in one fell swoop; sometimes, Duff admitted, without reading them.
“They should’ve, and I probably should’ve, but I didn’t see it,” he said.
Duff went on to say that he didn’t know the volleyball stadium – a pet project of former NFL quarterback Brett Favre – was under construction in Hattiesburg until he drove past it one day.After he learned about the new facility, he said he reached out to then-U.S. Attorney General Mike Hurst and State Auditor Shad White.
“I live there, and I didn’t even know the building was built until I drove by and said, ‘What is that?’” Duff said. “We didn’t approve a building, we didn’t know about a building. It all got done kind of around everybody – and improperly.”
“It’s not something that should ever have happened,” he added.
The comments came hours after USM announced in a five-paragraph statement that the university engaged in the lease agreement “in good faith.” It also announced that it would make the volleyball stadium, known as the Wellness Center, and other unspecified campus facilities available for the Mississippi Department of Human Services to provide services in south Mississippi for an initial five-year period.
In 2017, the University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation signed a lease with the Mississippi Community Education Center, Nancy New’s nonprofit, for proposed programming and services that USM now acknowledges were never provided.
“Although MCEC shared projections of planned programming with the University, its actual utilization of the facilities did not align with those projections,” USM said in the statement.
USM did not say in the statement if it intends to repay the welfare funds. Despite repeated requests, university officials have not granted interviews to Mississippi Today regarding the use of welfare dollars for the volleyball stadium.
Duff said he saw the university’s statement, but did not finish reading it, as he was flying to Starkville for the opening of a new music building at Mississippi State University.
“When it started off with all the legalese, I glazed over,” he said. “Right’s right, and wrong’s wrong. That’s just the way I look at it.”
A subsidiary of IHL, USM must seek board approval for contracts worth more than $250,000.
After much back and forth between officials from USM, Mississippi Department of Human Services, Nancy New and Brett Favre, USM’s former president, Rodney Bennett, brought the lease agreement before the IHL board.
IHL had already approved a $1 lease between USM and the Athletic Foundation, but this lease was different, because it had the $5 million sublease between the foundation and Mississippi Community Education Center attached to it.
The Attorney General’s Office reviewed and approved the amended lease for IHL before it was placed on the agenda.
“Everything has an attorney general opinion, but that doesn’t mean it’s smart or what you’re supposed to do,” Duff said. “I don’t care what the attorney general said, this was a stupid thing to do.”
The IHL trustees approved the amended lease at its October 2017 meeting.
The board’s meeting minutes state that the nonprofit’s funding for the project would come “via a Block Grant from the Mississippi Department of Human Services.”
The trustees who served on the board’s finance committee, Duff said, should have known about the project. Duff now chairs that committee, and he said the volleyball project didn’t go through IHL’s typical “expense checks.”
“The finance committee should’ve known about the expenses but see, it didn’t go through any expense checks that we saw,” he said. “It went through the foundation. And the $5 million from Nancy went in and went out, I guess, to the contractor.”
Duff’s comments are the most candid from IHL since the scandal broke.
In 2020, IHL commissioner Alfred Rankins previously told the state auditor that trustees only approved the lease between USM and the athletic foundation, not the $5 million sub-lease from MCEC,Mississippi Today reported. Rankins called White’s audit inaccurate.
“IHL cannot claim ignorance of this fact,” White responded. “That assertion flies in the face of your own minutes. If IHL objected to the arrangement with MCEC, then the time to voice that objection was when the matter came up for a vote, not after the State Auditor pointed it out.”
Had USM gone through the proper channels, Duff said that IHL would have funded the construction of the volleyball stadium. He drew a connection between the volleyball stadium and the new music building at MSU as he left for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“I’m glad they (MSU) can build the building,” he said, “which they built legitimately.”
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.
Mississippi students have lost three-quarters of a school year in math instruction since the start of the pandemic, according to a new report released last week.
The Education Recovery Scorecard, produced by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, looks at learning loss at the district level across the country using a combination of state and national test scores.
Every state is required to administer annual standardized tests, but the results cannot be easily compared because they are not required to test for the same content or use the same grading scale. To prepare the report, researchers took state test data from 29 states and standardized the scoring systems using the results from the 2022 National Assessment for Educational Progress.
The report measured learning loss in terms of the percentage of a school year that students are behind, compared to the amount of learning that would typically occur during a single school year.
Nationally, the study found the average student lost the equivalent of half a year of math instruction and a quarter of a year in reading. In Mississippi, it was three-quarters of a year of math instruction and a quarter of a year in reading.
Thomas Kane, director of the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research, said the goal was to give educators and parents nationally comparable information about learning loss in their local district.
The interactive graphs in the report show no districts in Mississippi surpassed their 2019 performance in math or reading, but the severity of achievement loss varied widely by district.
Credit: Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University
“This is a large increase in educational inequity,” Kane said in reference to the graph of changes in math achievement in Mississippi. “It’s not just saying ‘High poverty districts have always scored lower than low poverty districts.’ This is saying that those gaps, which existed in 2019, have gotten a lot wider.”
He added most states saw this pattern, but varied in the degree to which they widened.
Since 90% of federal pandemic relief funds are being spent at the district level, Kane said it was important to have high quality district-level data to inform those spending decisions.
“What we hope is that states and districts will use these data to revisit their recovery plans,” Kane said. “The districts that lost more than a year’s worth of instruction should be thinking ‘Do we have enough tutoring, double doses of math instruction, (and) summer school to make up for these losses?’”
The magnitude of federal recovery dollars currently available gives him hope that these learning losses can be adequately addressed, Kane said, if districts are willing to make adjustments now that they know the full scope of their losses.
Kane added that these results should be alarming not just for educators, but for mayors and community organizations that can also play a role in helping students catch up. He pointed out that the learning losses are likely not the result exclusively of what happened in schools, but of many other community factors like broadband connectivity, hospitalization rates, and whether parents were able to work from home.
“It won’t be just what schools do or don’t do that determine whether or not Mississippi students catch up,” he said.
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality announced Thursday it was awarding $7.3 million from a 2016 Volkswagen settlement to emissions-saving transportation projects around the state.
Most of the money, $5.4 million, will go to a dozen public school districts and one private school for lower-emitting diesel buses, electric school buses and charging stations. Specifically, that money will help pay for 42 lower-emitting diesel buses, 12 electric buses, and 10 charging stations.
The Jackson County School District is getting the largest award amount, $1.5 million, for six electric buses and six charging stations.
In total, Mississippi received $9.87 million out of the $2.7 billion Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust, a fund established through legal settlements after the Environmental Protection Agency found that the car manufacturer had intentionally programmed their vehicles to cheat emissions tests. The purpose of the money is to offset excess emissions of nitrogen oxides from Volkswagen’s cars.
“The goal of the mitigation projects is the reduction of diesel emissions, specifically nitrogen oxide pollutants, which have been linked to increased ozone levels and air contaminants,” said Chris Wells, MDEQ Executive Director.
All 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia are beneficiaries of the fund. States were allocated money largely based on how many affected Volkswagen cars were registered in each state, according to the EPA.
About half of the remaining $2 million is going to three companies: Waste Management, Sysco in Jackson, and Pan Isle Inc., also known as Ship Island Excursions. Waste Management is receiving $570,000 to replace 13 diesel garbage trucks with clean natural gas vehicles.
The Meridian Airport Authority is receiving $430,435 for new electric ground support devices.
Another $330,00 is going to build 18 charging stations in seven locations around the state.
The money MDEQ awarded Thursday is in the form of a rebate, and can account for up to 70% of the project’s cost. To access the funds, the recipients must complete the projects by September, 2025, and then request reimbursements.
Use the table below for a full list of projects MDEQ awarded money to on Thursday:
Ray Guy, the best athlete these eyes have ever witnessed, died Thursday morning in Hattiesburg following a long illness. He was 72.
Many times over the years, readers have asked: Who’s the best pure athlete you ever covered?
Ray Guy, I always answer. When it comes to all-around athleticism, Guy was the best.
A punter, some will invariably ask with incredulous looks?
Rick Cleveland
Yes, Ray Guy was the greatest punter who ever lived and the standard by which all punters are forever judged. But Ray Guy was so much more than a punter. There was nothing with a ball — any ball — Guy could not do. I have so much to say about Ray Guy, the problem is this: Where to begin?
Let’s start with the first time I ever heard of him. This was 1969, and Hamp Cook was the offensive line coach at Southern Miss. He and Doug Barfield, who would later be the head coach at Auburn, had recruited Guy out of Thomson, Ga., near Augusta, steering him away from the likes of Bear Bryant at Alabama, Vince Dooley at Georgia and Major League Baseball. Guy was broad-shouldered, slender-hipped, long and limber. Yet he possessed the agility of a gymnast.
“You won’t believe this kid,” Hamp Cook told my father and me. “The stadiums aren’t big enough. He kicks the ball out of sight.”
The Southern Miss pitch to Guy was this: If you go to Alabama or Georgia, you’ll just be the kicking specialist. If you come here, you can do it all. And he did. P.W. Underwood, the head coach, took one look at Guy and then told his coaches, “The first one of you who tries to coach him about punting or kicking is fired.”
Ray Guy boomed his NFL punts for the Oakland Raiders.
You should know that besides being USM’s first consensus Division I All-American as a punter, Guy also shares the school’s pass interception record. He was the team’s emergency quarterback and could throw the ball 80 yards, seemingly with no great effort. Once, when USM was playing Memphis, a Tiger wide receiver ran a pass pattern over the middle. Guy lowered his shoulder and hit the poor fellow just as the ball arrived, breaking up the pass and knocking the receiver out cold. It took several seconds to revive the poor Memphis receiver and then a search ensued in the grass around him. They were looking for the guy’s teeth.
As a punter, he was other-worldly. In 1972, he launched a punt from seven yards deep in his own end zone at then-Hemingway Stadium. Incredibly, the ball sailed far over Ole Miss return man Bill Maloof’s head and eventually rolled into a chain-link fence beyond the opposite end zone. It was almost comical. Maloof took one look at the punt, turned and sped the other way. He couldn’t catch it. The ball traveled about 117 yards total. I also saw him kick a 61-yard field goal during a snowstorm at Utah State.
Guy controlled games with his kicking. In 1970, he kicked a 49-yard field goal just before halftime to give Southern Miss a 17-14 lead over No. 4 ranked Ole Miss in a game Southern would win 30-14. But his punting is what won the game. Said Archie Manning, “Every time we got the ball we were inside our own 10, looking at 90 or 95 yards of field. Ray killed us.”
Once, against Louisiana Tech, Guy punted from his own 40 out of bounds at the Tech 5. But Southern Miss was penalized and had to kick again from the 35. Guy punted again, this time through the end zone. But Southern was penalized again, so Guy punted from the 30. There was no penalty the third time. Guy kicked it out of bounds at the Tech 1.
Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders noticed. He made Guy the first kicker ever drafted in the first round. Davis and his coach, John Madden, believed Guy was the missing link to help the Raiders win the Super Bowl. With Guy, the Raiders won three. Once in the Pro Bowl at the Louisiana Superdome, Guy punted a ball into the gondola and video screen high above the field. My brother, Bobby, was on the field taking photos that night. “Ray told me he was gonna do it right before he did it,” Bobby said. “‘Watch this,’ he said. And then he launched it. That damned ball hit the screen on the way up.”
I could go on and on. Indeed, I will. Once, Guy was crossing the intramural fields at USM and ran into school’s intramural track and field meet. They were contesting the softball throw. “Am I eligible?” Guy asked. Yes, he was told. He threw the ball nearly 340 feet. It’s still the school record.
Guy took up ping pong while he was at USM and was the only guy who could beat the Chinese exchange students.
He was drafted as a pitcher three times by three different Major League Baseball teams. He routinely threw gems for Southern Miss. Ron Polk once told me Guy had the best slider he had ever seen in college baseball. His fastball velocity reached nearly triple digits. And he hit the longest home run I ever saw at the old USM baseball park – not only far over the left center field fence but all the way across West Fourth Street. The ball traveled at least 500 feet. That was back when they used wooden bats.
I played golf with Ray one of the first times he ever played. The first hole at the old B.O. Van Hook Golf Course was a 282-yard part 4. Guy, without hitting any practice shots, took out his 3-wood and hit a perfect draw, pretty as you please, onto the green.
The first hole at the Hattiesburg Country Club is a 375-yard, par-4, a dogleg to the left. Once, on a cold, wet day, I saw Guy launch a 3-wood over the towering pine trees that guard the left side of the fairway and onto the green. He made a 2.
Guy wasn’t one to brag about any of his athletic skills. He just went out and did it.
In high school, he was a quarterback and never lost a game his junior and senior seasons. He was also an all-state basketball player and the best baseball player in the state. The only bad thing about his baseball prowess was that he didn’t get to participate in track and field – except for one memorable meet his junior season when the state meet did not interfere with the baseball playoffs. Paul Leroy, his high school football coach, once told me the story.
“We had a great track team except for the field events, so we had Ray come out and try the discus,” Leroy said. “Well, he threw it further than anybody, so we took him to the meet and he won it.”
That’s not all. On the way to the track meet, they taught Guy the steps to the triple jump in the aisle of the bus. And you know what happened next. “He won the triple jump, too, the first time he ever tried it,” Leroy said.
“I’ll never coach another athlete like Ray Guy,” Leroy said. “Nobody will.”
YAZOO CITY — Jamara Johnson knew something was wrong when she went into labor with her third baby early in the morning of Aug. 30.
She was 38 weeks pregnant and had been in pain the night before. She attributed it to overextending herself while cleaning her apartment in Yazoo City – “nesting,” she said. When her water broke around 5 a.m. – a greenish color she’d never seen with her first two babies – she realized she needed to get to a hospital as quickly as possible.
Johnson lives in a county defined in a new report as a “maternity care desert” — there have not been any labor and delivery services in Yazoo County since the early 1990s, and there are no practicing OB-GYNs. Many women go to the Federally Qualified Health Center about a half hour away in Canton, while others, like Johnson, see the doctors at an OB-GYN group in Flowood, more than an hour away from her home.
More than half the counties in Mississippi are considered maternity care deserts, according to the new report from the March of Dimes. These counties have no hospitals providing obstetric care, no OB-GYNs and no certified nurse midwives.
Discontinued labor and delivery services and shuttered neonatal intensive care units have dominated headlines in the state in recent months, painting a bleak picture for mothers and babies’ access to care. Greenwood Leflore Hospital closed Leflore County’s only labor and delivery unit on Oct. 15. Over the summer, Ochsner Medical Center in Hancock County did the same.
The trend of reduced access and care for mothers and babies — on the heels of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and is expected to result in 5,000 additional babies in Mississippi alone — does not bode well for a state already plagued by high infant and maternal mortality rates and poor health outcomes.
Dr. Rachael Morris, assistant professor of maternal fetal medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, travels the state training emergency responders, nurses and providers in small, rural hospitals in obstetric emergencies and caring for pregnant and recently delivered mothers who may have complications or life-threatening problems.
The state’s problems did not happen overnight, she said.
“But it’s really only getting worse. The nature of this problem, it’s additive at this point,” she said. “We have a very complex, medically diverse, underserved population with a lot of high-risk patients, whether it’s diabetes, obesity, hypertension — this is a lot of our mothers in Mississippi. So when you have that baseline complexity, that creates a very high-risk population for pregnancy.”
The unhealthy population in Mississippi, a leader nationally in chronic disease, means women of childbearing age are already behind the starting line. When emergencies come up – as they will do in high-risk pregnancies – access to nearby care is critical.
“When you’re talking about a baby and a pregnancy and a delivery, minutes matter for that mom’s health and that baby’s health,” said Dr. Anita Henderson, president of the Mississippi chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Minutes mattered for another Yazoo City woman with eerily similar circumstances as Johnson: Tamara Stuckey was also pregnant with her third child and was a patient at the same OB/GYN group in Flowood as Johnson. On Aug. 28, 2019, the 32-year-old Stuckey was 35 weeks pregnant and taken by ambulance from her home in Yazoo City to St. Dominic Hospital, according to a lawsuit filed by her fiance and the father of her other two children.
She was complaining of constant and sharp abdominal pains, and her medical records indicated Stuckey, who had given birth by cesarean section for both previous babies, was at high risk for postpartum hemorrhage. Her OB-GYN ordered a fetal ultrasound but did not investigate her complaints of “uterine irritability,” or mild contractions, and pain in her right shoulder, according to the complaint. She was discharged that evening and sent back home — an hour away.
That same night, her fiance called emergency medical services again. Stuckey reported a pain level of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, the complaint states, and was again transported to St. Dominic. She arrived at the hospital around 1:18 a.m. Her baby, a little boy they planned to name Daxton, was already dead. The complaint says medical records indicate the last fetal heart tones detected were at 1:01 and 1:02 a.m.
Within 30 minutes of arriving at the hospital, Stuckey went into cardiopulmonary arrest. Her baby was delivered stillborn early that morning, and the next day, Stuckey died.
“The maternal autopsy report revealed massive intrapartum hemorrhage, with the abdominal cavity containing four liters of free blood,” the lawsuit complaint states.
Stuckey’s fiance Damien Sanders and his attorneys declined to be interviewed for this story.
In their response to the complaint, Women’s Health Associates and Dr. David Waddell, Stuckey’s OB-GYN, denied the allegations and agreed only to the basic facts listed in the document. St. Dominic Memorial Hospital and St. Dominic Health Services both said in their responses that the injuries and damages to Stuckey “resulted from medical conditions, events or the acts or omissions of persons or entities other than St. Dominic.”
Baptist Medical Center – Yazoo in Yazoo City, Mississippi. The hospital offers no obstetric services. Credit: Kate Royals
Johnson didn’t want to risk her baby’s life by waiting.
She called her doctor’s office immediately when her water broke, and a nurse said to get to St. Dominic as quickly as possible. The discoloration meant the baby was at risk for meconium aspiration, which can occur when the baby passes his first stool (meconium) while in the womb. Aspiration can occur when the newborn breathes in a mixture of meconium and amniotic fluid (the liquid that surrounds the baby in the womb).
The condition can cause difficulty breathing, pneumonia, and at worst, death.
In the bathroom early that morning, Johnson weighed her options: she could wait for who knows how long for an ambulance to come to her apartment, or she could go to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Yazoo, where she would then be transferred via ambulance to Jackson.
Or, since she wasn’t having contractions yet, she could get in the car and drive.
She had made this same game-time decision less than a year before when she went into labor with her second child on Sept. 20, 2021. She drove with the child’s father to the Yazoo City hospital but didn’t bother getting out of the car when they saw there was no ambulance there, so they decided to take their chances.
Less than an hour after leaving the hospital, Johnson called 911 and they pulled over in Sullivan’s Grocery in Flora. Minutes later, Johnson gave birth in the back of an ambulance in the grocery store parking lot at 1:45 a.m.
“If I was still in Yazoo City, I would’ve had to wait on that same ambulance (that met me in Flora) to come, so I just went on and took my chances,” Johnson said of her decision.
With her third delivery, she felt even more pressed for time: she needed to get to a hospital capable of treating her baby in case there was something wrong. She called her aunt Summer Brokman, who lived about five minutes away, and asked her to go with her to the hospital. The two started the drive with their hazard flashers on. About 30 minutes into the hour-long drive, Johnson was stopped again — but this time, it was in Pocahontas, and it was for a different reason.
A Highway Patrol car had pulled the two over on Highway 49.
Brokman told her to try and be calm and not make any sudden movements. But Johnson, who had been driving until that point, was starting to have contractions and was in pain.
The officer asked for Johnson’s license and registration, and Brokman pleaded with the officer.
“I was like, ‘Sir, look, she’s having a baby. She’s in labor, she delivered her last baby on the side of the road … can you follow us to the hospital?’” Brokman recalled. “And he was like, ‘License and registration.’”
The two were shocked, but Johnson produced her driver’s license, and they sat on the side of the road while the officer ran it through the system. More than 10 minutes later, they said, he came back and issued Johnson two tickets: one for speeding and the other for not having insurance.
“He’d asked me for insurance and I told him I couldn’t — I was in too much pain to search for it,” Johnson remembered.
Brokman looked for it but couldn’t find it, she said.
The trooper finally let the two go, and Brokman took over driving. They made it to Jackson, and Johnson’s son was born around 9 a.m. — about two hours after the trooper had written her the ticket.
Criss Turnipseed, director of public affairs at the Mississippi Highway Patrol, said they have no official protocol as to how to handle medical emergencies, and it is “left to the Trooper’s discretion.”
“Our first preference for those instances is always to call 911 first. There is no ‘official’ protocol for how a Trooper should proceed with someone claiming there is a medical emergency on a traffic stop other than based on his observations and the severity he is authorized to request an ambulance to the scene himself,” Turnipseed said in an emailed statement to Mississippi Today.
Turnipseed said he had no comment on what happened to Johnson and Brokman.
Now, more than three months later, Brokman and Johnson can’t help but think of all the things that could have gone wrong that day. They say they commonly hear stories about women in Yazoo City giving birth on the side of the road — like Johnson did in 2021 — and they were glad they made it to a hospital.
“My momma used to always tell me when I was young: ‘When you’re having a baby, you’re closer to death than you’ll ever be in your life,’” Brokman said. “Death is at your toes.”
That statement is especially true in Mississippi, which leads the nation in maternal and infant mortality. And it is even truer for Black women and babies, who are significantly more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts.
The pregnancy-related mortality ratio was 33.2 deaths per 100,000 live births between 2013 and 2016 — nearly double the national average of 17.3 deaths per 100,000 births.
The same is true for babies: the state has the highest rate of infant mortality in the nation, and the rate of death in Black infants is twice that of white babies.
For Black women in Mississippi, the rate was about three times the rate of white women at 51.9 deaths.
The state also has one of the highest rates of uninsured people in the country – a problem the March of Dimes report highlights when discussing the importance of quality care before having a baby, during pregnancy and after.
“Continuous high quality health care in all three time periods can lead to better health outcomes for both mom and baby,” the report states. “… Stalled progress to improve pregnancy outcomes has, in part, pointed towards inconsistent health interventions before pregnancy.”
Greenwood Leflore Hospital, which permanently shuttered its labor and delivery unit as the hospital fights to cut costs and stay open, welcomed just over 2,000 babies into the world over the last five years.
But now, any babies born at the hospital will be born in the emergency room, where interim CEO Gary Marchand said the hospital has relocated labor and delivery equipment.
The closest hospital with labor and delivery services is in Grenada — a 45-minute drive or more for some in the area.
Providers and community members worry more women in Leflore County will have experiences like Johnson and Stuckey’s. Dr. Terry McMillin, an OB-GYN who has practiced in the Greenwood area for more than 20 years, said the closure of the unit is “devastating.”
“In the short term, are you going to have potentially some bad outcomes? I can’t predict that, but certainly it only increases that likelihood,” he said.
The hospital now only has “limited obstetrical call available” — or several obstetricians who retained their privileges and can assist ER physicians if the situation warrants and they are available.
“The March of Dimes report just illustrates that we have to find ways to provide access and health care to moms even in the midst of some of those maternity deserts, and having more and more labor and delivery units closing is just the wrong direction,” said Henderson, the head of the Mississippi pediatrician group.
The March of Dimes report ended with several policy recommendations, including expanding Medicaid for individuals who make less than 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $30,000 annually for a family of three.
Mississippi remains one of 12 states not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act — and one of 21 states not to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage for new moms beyond 60 days to 6 months or a year, another recommendation of the report.
Although my faith teaches me that road construction is something that only occurs in Hell, I figured Heaven would give Dick Hall a warm (but not that warm) and familiar welcome. I’ll miss the Commissioner Hall. I always enjoyed drawing him and his reactions to those drawings. My heart goes out to his wife Jennifer and all who loved him.
