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Hundreds of thousands of Mississippians could benefit from student debt relief plans announced by the Biden administration, as many others now face the prospect of resuming loan repayment come next year. 

Under plans announced by the U.S. Department of Education Wednesday, borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year will be eligible for up to $10,000 in loan forgiveness. Pell Grant recipients with federal loans could see up to $20,000 forgiven. 

Relief is capped at the amount a borrower owes. 

The department also announced student loan payments will resume in January 2023; these had been on pause since 2020 under the Trump Administration.

The plan will not benefit those with private loans but could wipe away some debt for more than half of the nearly 439,000 Mississippians with federal student loans, according to an analysis by  the Education Data Initiative. The average Mississippian with federal student loans owes about $37,000, one of the highest average debts in the country. 

The median earning for a Mississippian with a bachelor’s degree was approximately $43,500 in 2019, according to data from the Institutions of Higher Learning, while those with a graduate degree earned about $55,500.

Details on how borrowers can get their loans canceled will be announced later this month. To qualify, a borrower must have taken out loans before July 2022 and made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021, the Washington Post reported. Current students are eligible if their parents fall under the income cap. 

In order to receive relief, the department must have a borrower’s income data. The Biden administration is planning to launch an application in the coming weeks for borrower’s to upload this data, according to studentaid.gov. Borrowers can sign up here to be notified when the application opens. 

The department also announced a proposal that will significantly reduce future monthly payments for borrowers on income-driven repayment plans. The White House said it hopes these changes will lead more borrowers to sign up for income-driven repayment plans even as consumer watchdogs have decried the program’s “abysmal track record.” 

The proposed changes to income-driven repayment programs will halve monthly payments for those with undergraduate student loans and make it so borrowers with graduate loans would pay an average weighted rate. Borrowers making less than $15 an hour would not have to make any monthly payments under the proposal.

Current and future borrowers would see their average annual payments drop by more than $1,000 under these proposed changes, according to a White House fact sheet. The federal government would also start forgiving loan balances after 10 years of payment, down from 20 years, and make it so that interest won’t accumulate as long as a borrower makes monthly payments. 

In a press release, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona cast the plan as a way to restore faith among Americans that student loans can lead to opportunity rather than a cycle of debt. 

“For too many people, student loan debt has hindered their ability to achieve their dreams—including buying a home, starting a business, or providing for their family. Getting an education should set us free; not strap us down,” he said.

The announcement was met with criticism Wednesday from the left and the right. On Twitter, Gov. Tate Reeves called the plan an unfair use of taxpayer dollars from working-class people who don’t have student loans.

Progressive groups said President Joe Biden’s plan doesn’t do enough to help borrowers who struggle to repay their loans. Many noted that Biden had campaigned on a more far-reaching pledge to forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt for borrowers making under $125,000 who graduated from public colleges and universities and private historically Black colleges and minority-serving institutions.  

“On one hand, I’m happy about any type of loan forgiveness and leniency and extended grace periods,” said Stephen Brown, the assistant director of outreach at Get2College. “I think where the biggest conflict comes in — as far as arguments from people that (Biden) needs to cancel it all — was it was one of his campaign promises.”

Get2College is a nonprofit that advocates for college access and affordability and helps high school seniors fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Financial Aid. 

In an op-ed Wednesday, Derrick Johnson, the CEO of the NAACP, and Wisdom Cole, the NAACP’s national director of youth and college, called Biden’s plan “bad public policy and a devastating political mistake.” The NAACP had called for Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt as a way to address the widening racial wealth gap among millennials.

Student debt disproportionately burdens borrowers in Black, brown and low-income communities, who have higher averages of student debt than white borrowers. 

“Many privileged and predominantly White Americans, who inherited generational wealth, have had the fortune of not depending on expensive loans to begin with,” Johnson and Cole wrote. “They will likely benefit from $10,000 in cancellation to cover the remaining sum. But what about those in our society who did not inherit generational wealth?”

In Mississippi, Black borrowers take on higher amounts of undergraduate student debt than those of other races, according to data from a recent National Postsecondary Aid study. Black students in Mississippi borrowed an average of $10,800 in undergraduate student debt during the 2017-18 school year, while borrowers of other races took out an average of $7,400. 

Black borrowers in Mississippi also took out more loans during the school year than the average Black borrower across the country, while borrowers of other races took on less debt than average. 

While Biden’s announcement will benefit borrowers with past loans, it does little to address one of the primary reasons many Mississippians will go into debt to pay for college in the future — the rising cost of tuition. 

Jennifer Rogers, the director of the Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid, said she hopes Biden’s announcement will result in more legislative efforts to reduce the cost of college. 

“The President’s executive action will certainly benefit past borrowers,” Rogers said. “I hope this action will also create momentum in the college affordability movement that results in additional bipartisan action to make college more affordable and therefore reduce the need for borrowing by current and future students.”

Since 2008, the cost of college has steadily increased in Mississippi — due in part to a dearth of state funding — but family income hasn’t kept pace. At the same time, the Legislature has cut the amount of state grant aid available to college students. A 2019 study from LendEDU found that the average student loan debt in Mississippi is rising at the ninth fastest rate in the country. 

About 50% of students at public universities in Mississippi borrowed money to pay for college during the 2019-20 school year, according to federal data. 

Nearly half of borrowers who have defaulted on their student loans — meaning they haven’t made payments for 270 days — could see their balances erased under Biden’s plan. 

Brown, from Get2College, said this will benefit many adult students he has worked with who want to go back to college but can’t because their loans are in default. Mississippi’s educational attainment goals depend on increasing the number of adult college students. 

Graduates of for-profit colleges will also benefit from this plan, Brown said. He noted that these institutions, which typically charge pricey tuition rates for non-accredited degrees, tend to target students of color and non-traditional college students, like single parents and veterans. Borrowers who attended for-profit colleges also default at higher rates than those who did not. 

“You really can’t tell this story without highlighting that a large percentage of student debt is from for-profit institutions,” Brown said.

Brown added that he would like to see Biden’s plan kickstart more local initiatives to reduce the price of tuition, particularly for teachers. 

Student debt is a significant factor in Mississippi’s teacher shortage, said Toren Ballard, the director of K-12 policy education with Mississippi First, a policy nonprofit. In order to become a teacher, students typically have to take on loans to pay for college tuition — only to make meager salaries that often do not cover the monthly payments. 

Teachers with student debt are more likely to leave their positions within a year than teachers without debt, according to a survey that Ballard conducted in late 2021. For teachers with student debt, 58% reported being likely to leave the classroom within a year, Ballard found, compared to 49% of teachers without debt. 

Student debt also causes Black teachers in Mississippi to leave the profession at significantly higher rates than white teachers, Ballard found, which contributes to larger racial inequities in the state’s public schools.

“The attrition gap between Black and white teachers is being driven solely by a disproportionate debt load that Black teachers have,” Ballard said. 

Biden’s plan will help Mississippi teachers, but Ballard said the state needs to look at more long-term solutions to the high tuition rates that lead teachers to take on unaffordable student debt.  

“This is just a temporary Band-Aid for a really wide-reaching problem,” he said.

Editor’s note: Get2College is a program of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, a Mississippi Today donor.

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Greenwood Leflore Hospital is reopening some of its inpatient operations as of Wednesday, but its intensive care unit remains closed. 

The 208-bed hospital suspended inpatient services last week following a sewage leak that caused patients to be transferred to other facilities and clinics to be shut down for three days. 

Twelve of the hospital’s medical and surgical beds will be reopened. They will be utilized by post-surgery patients, medical admissions and patients who require less than 24 hours of medical supervision. 

Hospital officials said that the beds will be staffed by employees of the hospital, not contract laborers. 

“The hospital has committed to continuing service availability without the use of contract labor,” hospital officials said in a press release. 

The hospital is continuing to analyze inpatient services it has closed, including its intensive care unit. Its labor and delivery unit is currently staffed at the minimum level required by federal law for providing emergency medical treatment. 

“This analysis was required to determine, with labor shortages and higher labor costs, how the hospital can continue to operate inpatient services while covering the cost of providing those services,” the press release stated.

The hospital, which is jointly owned by Leflore County and the city of Greenwood, laid off 30 people in May to offset losses during the pandemic. It announced in June that it is in talks with the University of Mississippi Medical Center on a joint operation agreement. 

Hospital officials have not answered questions about the number of employees affected by the changes in services. 

Last week, clogged manholes forced sewage into the crawl space below the hospital. As a result, at least 17 patients were transferred to six other hospitals across Mississippi and one hospital in Arkansas. At least 16 patients were discharged. 

After the sewage problem was resolved, the hospital resumed all outpatient services and reopened the clinics located outside of the main hospital building. 

The hospital is one of the largest employers in Leflore County with 770 employees.

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Weeks after a federal judge ordered a receiver be appointed to run the Hinds County jail, county officials say they don’t agree with the mandated oversight. 

In an Aug. 12 court filing, attorneys representing the county and Sheriff Tyree Jones said imposing a receiver would take the jail out of local control, which is a “debilitation of the democratic process” and departure from the court’s typical work. 

Judges need to show receivership is a last resort, the filing states, but Hinds County isn’t at that point. A new injunction order, which scaled back a 2016 consent decree, was put in place three months before U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves decided in July he will appoint a receiver for the jail, attorneys argue. 

“Defendants maintain and preserve the arguments that they have made in this case, do not waive or forfeit any of their arguments, and maintain that, among other things, the Raymond Detention Center is not in violation of constitutional minimums, and no receiver is warranted,” the court filing states. 

The receiver will be in charge of day-to-day management of the jail to follow the injunction order: bring the jail into compliance and meet a minimum standard of living for detainees, which is a constitutional right. 

In his July 29 order, Reeves wrote receivership is necessary because there is a risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff. He stated issues highlighted during a three weeks of hearings: Seven detainees died in 2021 by suicide or were killed by other detainees. There is violence and contraband. The jail is chronically understaffed and infrastructure needs repair.

“While the Court has considered other sanctions, it must be noted that the County has never suggested any other alternative. It has simply argued against a receivership,” Reeves wrote. 

“It continues to plead for more time, but we have been there and done that. There is no sense in granting the County more time to do nothing.”

He set a deadline of Nov. 1 to appoint a receiver. Reeves asked the county and U.S. Department of Justice to present potential candidates for the jail receiver role. The county proposed one person and the department recommended three, according to court documents.

The county requested a hearing be held to consider qualifications of the potential receivers and for both parties to ask the candidates questions. 

A status conference is scheduled for Aug. 29 at 10 a.m. and will be held over Zoom. The link to watch the hearing will be available on the Southern District’s website under the “News & Announcements” section. 

The county’s recommendation for a receiver was Frank Shaw, the current interim jail administrator.

In his July 29 order, Reeves said Shaw is “wholly unqualified for the role” because he was in charge of a privately-run prison in Arizona where riots broke out. Reeves also said Shaw’s contract with the county is expected to expire soon. 

The DOJ’s candidates are Wendell France Sr., who has worked in prisons and the now-closed Baltimore City Detention Center and Susan McCampbell, who has worked as a court monitor at jails and prisons in multiple states, according to court filings. 

The name of the DOJ’s last candidate is not mentioned in recent court records. A spokesperson for the department was not immediately available for comment and attorneys for Hinds County did not respond to a request for comment. 

Reeves eliminated Shaw as an option and said he will select a receiver from the remaining three candidates.

In its Aug. 12 court filing, attorneys representing the county objected to France and McCampbell as potential choices for jail receiver because of their previous work with the DOJ. France has consulted for the department and McCampbell has provided expert litigative services. 

Despite the objections to having a jail receiver, the county submitted an order detailing what kind of duties, powers and authority the receiver should have, according to court documents.

Within 90 days of the receiver’s appointment, that person must develop and submit an action plan. The receiver is encouraged to seek input from the Hinds County Board of Supervisors, county administrator and the U.S. Department of Justice. The sheriff must approve the action plan. 

Generally, the receiver can ask for the sheriff’s input, but it is not required. 

The county said the receiver would only have power over staff at the jail, not those employed by the sheriff’s office or county.

The receiver will also not have power or authority over planning, design and operation of a new jail, the order proposes. 

County officials plan to build a new jail on McDowell Road in Jackson with a projected completion date in June 2025, according to court documents. The jail is expected to cost over $60 million, have 200 beds and allow for direct supervision of inmates – an issue raised during hearings in federal court and in numerous court monitor reports. 

The county asked for the receiver’s term to end when the new jail opens or upon “reasonable implementation” of the injunction order at the current jail, according to court records. 

In ordering the receivership, Reeves wrote the opening of a new jail can be seen as a “natural projected end-date” for the receiver. Regardless, it is challenging to gauge how fast a receiver can fix a jail, he said. 

The county proposes a maximum $75,000 annual salary for the receiver and $50,000 for up to two staff members to work with the receiver. 

The receiver will draft a budget for jail operations and present it to the board of supervisors. If it is not approved, they can try to negotiate and reconcile the receiver’s budget and an alternate one proposed by the board. If there is no agreement, the budgets will be submitted to the court for resolution, according to court documents. 

The county said there can’t be more than a $1 million increase for the total jail operation budget from each fiscal year to the next. If requesting a higher increase, the receiver must show “clear and convincing evidence” the increase is essential to implement the injunction order and achieve compliance, according to court documents. 

The post Hinds County pushes back against mandated federal oversight of jail appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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As if Robbie Faulk doesn’t have enough to do as sports editor of the Starkville Daily News and Mississippi State beat writer for 247 Sports, he is also the Mississippi voter in the weekly Associated Press college football reporter. As we learn, that AP poll takes a lot of time if you’re going to do it right.

Stream all episodes here.

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Sen. Roger Wicker and Rep. Bennie Thompson are hosting federal agency officials in Rolling Fork on Wednesday for a listening session to discuss the area’s regular flooding.

The event comes months after the Environmental Protection Agency decided to reinstate its veto of the Yazoo Pumps project, a long-debated flood control proposal that the agency revisited under the Trump administration. The EPA originally vetoed the project — which has the support of top Mississippi politicians including Wicker, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Gov. Tate Reeves — in 2008 due to its potential effects on wetlands in the South Delta.

Since the decision to reinstate the veto last November, both Wicker and Hyde-Smith have pressed the EPA to reconsider the project during congressional committee meetings. In May, Wicker argued that the high rate of poverty in the South Delta makes flood control in the area a suitable project for President Biden’s focus on environmental justice.

Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality Brenda Mallory — along with officials from the EPA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — will appear at Wednesday’s roundtable discussion, according to an invitation to the event local community organizer and attorney Ty Pinkins shared with Mississippi Today.

Thompson, who represents the South Delta in Congress, has expressed cautious support for the pumps project in recent years, citing an estimated $500 million price tag and suggesting that alternatives should be on the table as well.

Thompson also questioned the EPA’s decision to reverse the 2008 veto during the Trump administration, and last year requested that the agency investigate the matter after reports that officials had ignored scientists’ concerns about the Yazoo Pumps.

Opponents of the project point to other solutions with federal funding available, such as buyouts and elevating structures.

The event will take place at 5:30 p.m. at South Delta High School in Rolling Fork.

The post Thompson, Wicker to host listening session on Delta flooding appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A Greenville hospital closed its neonatal intensive care unit in July after the unit reported losses of $1 million a year. 

Now, there is no longer a NICU in the Mississippi Delta. 

Delta Health-The Medical Center, which is currently operating with only one medical floor, also closed its cardiac rehabilitation department. It and the NICU are “non-revenue producing ventures,” said interim CEO Iris Yeldell-Stacker in an Aug. 1 presentation to the Washington County Board of Supervisors. 

Hospital officials told Mississippi Today that operating the NICU created annual losses for the hospital of $1 million. An average of 150 newborns have been placed in the NICU each year since 2019.

The hospital serves four Delta counties: Bolivar, Coahoma, Sunflower and Washington – all counties with poverty levels over 30%, well above both the state and national average. 

“Infants that require care in the NICU will be transferred, as they always have been,” Amy Walker, chief nursing officer at Delta Health System, said. “This will likely cause a hardship on the families of the infant as they will have to travel to Jackson to be with their baby for what could be a lengthy hospital stay. We will still provide a well baby nursery for babies delivered here, and can provide things like IV fluids and limited antibiotic therapy for those babies.”

The NICU’s closure shocked many employees who saw it as a valuable asset, said an employee who asked to remain anonymous in the story for fear of retribution from the hospital. The employee said the hope for the unit was to break even, not turn a profit, but that this proved impossible due to a lower than expected number of transfers from surrounding communities.

The NICU was classified as a level II, meaning it could provide some intensive care for sick and premature infants, such as those who required respirator support or those who were born experiencing drug withdrawals. The hospital transferred an average of 16 babies per year to Children’s of Mississippi’s level IV NICU, the only unit in the state with this designation. 

Now, all babies born in the Delta that require NICU care will be sent to Children’s of Mississippi in Jackson or go out of state. 

The hospital’s NICU was being managed by Children’s of Mississippi when it closed. University of Mississippi Medical Center officials said they had no comment for the story. They also declined Mississippi Today’s request to interview the doctors and nurses who managed the unit. 

Further operational changes are likely in Delta Health System’s future because of its dire financial state. The entire system has a current income of negative $13.2 million for 2022,  according to Yeldell-Stacker. Its Greenville hospital is responsible for $334,000 of these losses, while the rest were attributed to Delta Health System’s other medical centers and groups. 

Yeldell-Stacker cited increased operating costs, mostly coming from an increase in contact labor. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospital paid nurses between $40 and $55 per hour, whereas contact nurses cost between $155 to $175 per hour. 

The hospital also received a $14 million loan from Medicare early in the pandemic, which Yeldell-Stacker said they are paying back to the tune of $1 million per month, further dragging down its  finances. 

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The first woman judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi has joined the bench. 

A formal investiture ceremony was held last week for Judge Kristi Haskins Johnson of Brandon. 

“This truly was a lifelong dream of mine,” Johnson said about her appointment in a February 2021 article by her alma mater, the University of Mississippi. 

She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in Nov. 2020 by a 53 to 43 vote. 

Johnson previously worked as Mississippi’s first solicitor general. She also worked for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Jackson as an assistant U.S. attorney. 

From 2008 to 2010, Johnson clerked for Judge Sharion Aycock of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi — the state’s first woman federal district court judge. Johnson also clerked for Judge Leslie Southwick of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Elected officials including Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch, the first woman in her role, praised Johnson after her Senate confirmation. 

“Judge Johnson, as you exercise your power, I pray that God will grant you wisdom, humility, compassion and courage. Congratulations!” Hyde-Smith wrote in a Friday tweet after she attended Johnson’s investiture ceremony. 

The post Johnson sworn in as first woman judge in Mississippi’s southern district appeared first on Mississippi Today.

When Scott Crawford goes to see his neurologist at St. Dominic Memorial Hospital in Jackson, he travels down State Street to Fondren and then rolls his wheelchair along Lakeland Drive. A glass pedestrian bridge suspended above the street connects the parking garage to the hospital – but he can’t access it.  

Instead, he’s forced to steer his wheelchair across eight lanes of high-speed traffic at an intersection with no pedestrian signal.

St. Dominic locks the door that links the garage to the sidewalk, which shuts out Crawford and other patients who don’t drive. He can’t safely access the garage the way people in cars do, because the vehicle entrance consists of a steeply sloping road with no sidewalk. 

Crawford, who has multiple sclerosis, does not drive because he experiences spasms that would make it unsafe for himself and others. 

Hospital employees told him that the door from the sidewalk to the garage must remain locked for “safety reasons.”

St. Dominic is violating federal law including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by forcing non-drivers in wheelchairs to navigate a treacherous path while able-bodied people with cars enjoy easy access to the hospital, claims a lawsuit filed by the organization Disability Rights Mississippi in late July.

Disability Rights, the state’s nonprofit “protection and advocacy system,” charged by Congress with advocating for the rights of people with disabilities, filed the lawsuit after Crawford spent more than a year reaching out to the hospital with his concerns. He created multi-page PDF documents describing his journey step by step, with photographs and citations of the ADA. 

“They cared enough to build the bridge,” he said. “Why not care enough to at least welcome all visitors to it?”

Meredith V. Bailess, senior director of marketing at St. Dominic, said in an email that the hospital’s attorneys had not been aware of the lawsuit before Mississippi Today reached out for comment.

“We are looking into the items raised in the complaint,” she said. 

She added that the hospital could comment further “once we receive and review the formal complaint.”

Polly Tribble, executive director of Disability Rights Mississippi, said St. Dominic had not yet been served with the lawsuit, but that will take place this week. The lawsuit was filed July 28.

If the hospital is concerned about car break-ins, Tribble said, denying access to the pedestrian bridge is not the solution. 

“There’s some easy remedies for that,” she said. ‘They used to have a security guard there that would patrol around the parking garage, that kind of thing. So it’s a safety issue but it’s also just a humane access issue for people that need it.”

A retired clinical neuropsychologist with a PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi, Crawford moved to Jackson in late 2006 to be closer to family. He learned that the city’s JATRAN buses weren’t accessible to people in wheelchairs and filed a lawsuit that forced the city of Jackson to ensure buses were equipped with wheelchair lifts and designate an ADA coordinator in the planning department, among other reforms. 

Crawford is an advocate for pedestrian safety. He’s also a member of the City of Jackson’s Americans with Disabilities Act Advisory Council and a board member of the Mississippi Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities.

So when he first encountered the locked door to the pedestrian bridge in 2014, he knew how to advocate for himself and other wheelchair users and non-drivers. In January of that year, he reached out to Commander Orange Young at the hospital’s security office to explain his concerns. 

“The mantra in the disability community is educate or litigate,” he said. “So I try very, very hard to educate.”

After months of back and forth, he received a letter from hospital risk and safety manager K. Jerry Farr in March 2015. Farr explained that the security department had unlocked the door after Crawford’s initial outreach, but locked it again after “a vehicle break in was recorded and access to the garagae (sic) was traced to that door.” But the hospital was putting a timer on the door to keep it unlocked during the day, Farr said. 

For years after that, Crawford had no problems accessing the pedestrian bridge. 

But in March 2021, he found that the door was locked again. Crawford said one hospital employee said the door was locked because “Homeless people are camping out in the garage.” 

Over the next 14 months, he contacted Commander Orange Young and the hospital’s vice president and general counsel Jonathan Werne to describe his inability to access the pedestrian bridge every time he visited the hospital. 

“As we have previously explained to you, due to safety reasons, the outside access door to the parking garage on the North side of Lakeland Drive has been closed to all individuals,” Werne wrote in May 2022. “The parking garage itself is still open to all visitors. Anyone can access the pedestrian bridge through the parking garage.”

But because he doesn’t drive, Crawford has no way to access the parking garage without rolling down a steep road that has no sidewalks. 

Werne said Crawford could call hospital security to open the door for him when he gets there. Because of his multiple sclerosis, however, Crawford has dysphonia, which makes it painful for him to raise his voice to be heard over the traffic on Lakeland Drive. 

“They think it’s OK for me to just give them a call and then wait for them to come and open the door for me,” Crawford told Mississippi Today. “Well, that’s not what the ADA calls for. ADA calls for independent access.” 

When Mississippi Today visited St. Dominic on a recent weekday morning, the door to the garage from the street was locked, and there was no sign explaining who to call to get inside. 

Two able-bodied reporters made the street crossing Crawford must undertake in his wheelchair; it took 13 seconds and both had to start jogging to get across the street before the light changed. Without a pedestrian crossing sign, it was difficult to tell when it was safe to start crossing. 

Despite the locked door at street level, anyone could get into the parking garage by accessing the pedestrian bridge from the hospital side. A Mississippi Today reporter also found she could use the vehicle entrance to walk inside the parking garage, but the slope was steep and there was little room to avoid passing cars. 

Crawford sees in St. Dominic’s stance not only a lack of regard for the safety of people with disabilities but also a presumption that individuals without cars are likelier to cause trouble. He believes that conflicts with the hospital’s mission to “create a spirit of healing… with humility and justice for all those entrusted to our care.”

“St. Dominic was thoughtful enough to provide a safe route crossing Lakeland, but it is profoundly insensitive to deprive pedestrians access to that safety,” Crawford wrote to St. Dominic officials on Aug. 10, 2021. “Are people that either cannot drive, or simply choose not to, unworthy of the same trust you afford everyone else? In short, opening the pedestrian bridge to those that drive, but *NOT* those who walk or roll is offensive in the extreme, and conduct unbecoming a faith-based institution such as yours.”

Read the lawsuit here:

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