The state awarded $180 million in matching American Rescue Plan Act funds on Friday for water, wastewater and storm water projects.
The amount includes $35.6 million for Jackson, exactly what the city applied for last month from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, which is administering the match program known as the Municipality & County Water Infrastructure Grant Program, or MCWI.
In total, the $180 million MDEQ awarded on Friday is less than half, 41%, of the $435 million that cities and counties applied for from the fund. The first round of awards leaves $270 million remaining in the MCWI fund. MDEQ clarified that $180 million was the maximum amount it could award in the first round of funding under SB 2822. A release from Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, said that the agency will begin a second round of funding in the spring.
The dollar-for-dollar match gives Jackson, which has said it needs $2 billion to fix its drinking water and wastewater systems, a total of $71.3 million in ARPA money for the following water projects:
• Jackson J.H. Fewell Plant Filter and Transmission Line Project Drinking Water ($8.8 million from MCWI) • Jackson O.B. Curtis Raw Water Pump Replacement Drinking Water ($1.65 million) • Jackson O.B. Curtis/J.H. Fewell Chemical Feed Automation Drinking Water ($1.45 million) • Jackson O.B. Curtis General Filter Upgrade Project Drinking Water ($8.8 million) • Jackson J.H. Fewell General Pump Repair and Replacement Drinking Water ($2.75 million) • Jackson West Bank Interceptor Sewer Line Repair and Rehabilitation Project Wastewater ($7.5 million) • Jackson Mill Street Sewer Basin Reconstruction Wastewater ($4.7 million)
Horhn said on Friday that “we are looking for the state to do more once the regular session begins in January.”
Overall, 130 projects around the state received funding: $93 million went to 76 wastewater projects, $47 million went to 36 drinking water projects, and $35 million went to 18 storm water projects.
Rankin County received the most money for a single project, getting $14.5 million for its “watershed protection and restoration program.” Meridian received the next highest project award with $8.9 million to improve its wastewater system as required in a federal consent decree.
See the table below for a full list of awarded projects:
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include a clarification from MDEQ and a full list of projects receiving funding.
When news broke in 2020 that the new volleyball stadium opening on University of Southern Mississippi’s campus that year had been built with federal welfare funds, university officials said it would work to use the facility to help needy families.
“Southern Miss Athletic Foundation is looking forward to initiating conversations with the appropriate state agency and leaders about how its athletics facilities, including the Wellness Center, can be used to the benefit of Mississippi families and individuals in the spirit of the original agreement,” USM spokesperson Jim Coll told Mississippi Today in an February 2020 email.
Nearly three years later, that hasn’t happened. Now, in response to mounting pressure from its own faculty, public officials and the media, USM continues to ignore the idea of returning the funds, saying instead in a statement Thursday morning that it is working on a proposal to allow the welfare department to utilize space on campus to provide programming to the underserved community.
But within hours, that proposal was apparently dead. The Mississippi Department of Human Services released its own statement Thursday afternoon saying it believed such an arrangement would be against the federal laws that govern the funds in question, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant.
“As noted in prior audits, use of TANF funds for the construction of brick and mortar building projects has never been authorized by law,” reads the welfare department’s statement. “MDHS cannot accept USM’s offer to utilize the building constructed with TANF funds in lieu of repayment of the funds, because we believe it to be a continued violation of the law and the purpose of the TANF program to help lift needy families out of poverty.”
USM did not respond to a request for comment regarding the MDHS statement and has declined to speak further on the welfare scandal, including whether it plans to return the funds.
The volleyball stadium is not included in MDHS’s ongoing civil lawsuit, which currently attempts to claw back roughly $24 million in welfare funds from 38 individuals or organizations. Though MDHS Director Bob Anderson has alluded to the possibility of pursuing the volleyball project, the agency’s recent statement is the most unequivocal on its stance about the illegality of the expenditure.
Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy director for policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy and national TANF expert, told Mississippi Today that even if a building were to benefit needy families — low-income housing development, for example — the use of TANF funds on construction is strictly prohibited by federal law.
“So even if Mississippi wanted to reach and try to argue that providing tennis lessons to teens from families with low incomes would keep them busy and prevent unplanned pregnancies, they could only use TANF funds to pay usage fees and not for construction of the facility,” she said in an email.
Federal regulations around welfare spending are otherwise notoriously lax, allowing states to use the money on a variety of programs they say will reduce or prevent poverty. But Lower-Basch, who has worked on TANF and other safety net policies for over 25 years, said she has not seen another state use TANF funds in quite this way before.
“Mississippi should not try to justify its past misuse of the TANF program and instead commit to using TANF funds for their intended purpose – helping parents raise their children with the economic security they need to thrive,” Lower-Basch wrote.
MDHS also said it was unable to comment further because of ongoing investigations. It did not answer whether it now plans to add the athletic foundation, which received the funds to build the facility, in the civil suit. The agency fired the private attorney, former U.S. Attorney Brad Pigott, it initially hired to bring the civil suit after he subpoenaed the athletic foundation for its communication with various figures, including former Gov. Phil Bryant, in an attempt to get to the bottom of how welfare money was funneled to a volleyball court. Defense attorneys have also made the stadium an issue of the case, subpoenaing Bryant himself for records related to the deal.
Retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre, whose daughter played volleyball at Southern Miss, was the inspiration behind the new stadium. Text messages show he pushed various officials, including Bryant, for funding for the project in 2017.
After a meeting at USM between Favre, welfare officials and athletics department officials in July of 2017, MDHS and USM legal counsel negotiated a lease agreement that would allow a nonprofit founded by Nancy New to pay $5 million in welfare funds to the Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation to rent university athletic facilities that it would use to conduct programming. The facilities were used for just one event, a Healthy Teens rally, according to records retrieved by Mississippi Today. Nancy New’s son, Zach New, pleaded guilty to fraud for using TANF money on construction, disguising it as a lease agreement.
None of the six people arrested in connection with the welfare scandal in February of 2020 is expected to have a trial. Five defendants — Nancy New, Zach New, former MDHS Director John Davis, former professional wrestler Brett DiBiase and nonprofit accountant Anne McGrew — have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the prosecution. A sixth defendant, former MDHS procurement officer Gregory “Latimer” Smith, entered a pre-trial diversion program in October. No one else has been charged criminally, but officials have said the investigation is ongoing.
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.”
