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An education company that helps bring free college-level science courses to poor, rural public schools, many in the Mississippi Delta, will lose federal funding after the Biden Administration did not renew its grant last year. 

The Global Teaching Project has received more than $3.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education to support its work offering Advanced Placement science courses to nearly 40 high-poverty schools.

Over 1,000 have enrolled in the project’s classes, according to its founder, former tax attorney Matt Dolan, who says he has put more than six figures into the project since starting it in 2017. Districts could offer AP courses that they never had before. 

Global Teaching Project’s “blended” instructional model — online course content taught by in-class teachers who are supported by virtual STEM tutors from universities such as Harvard — was even praised by school choice and school voucher proponent Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration’s education secretary. Experts have heralded this approach as “the future of education, especially for rural schools,” and the Global Teaching Project has drawn the attention of entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban.

It’s also a model that has the interest of powerful Mississippi Republicans. Senate Appropriations Chair Briggs Hopson told the Magnolia Tribune earlier this legislative session that he hopes to expand virtual learning for schools that struggle to find qualified teachers. 

But the Global Teaching Project’s growth could falter without more financial support when its federal Education Innovation and Research grant expires this summer as, Dolan said, a majority of that funding went to the program costs. The minimum needed to operate this coming year is $1.2 million, Dolan said. 

The Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access, a coalition of rural public school districts, was technically the recipient of federal funds, but Dolan said the Global Teaching Project was the driver of the initiative, a relationship that grant reviewers in 2019 said could be clarified. 

“My guess is they’ve never seen such a thing where somebody not only develops and implements the program, but they provide the money,” Dolan said. “That’s what we told the school districts when we first started in 2017. We said we want to do this, and we’re not asking you to give us a penny.” 

Last year, the Biden Administration awarded more than $275 million in funding to projects in 20 states. Projects in three states — California, Massachusetts and Texas — received almost as much funding as the remaining 17.

Without the project, the Quitman County School District would not be able to offer AP Computer Science, said Baxter Swearengen, a special-education teacher who acts as a “facilitator” for the courses. 

Neither would the Holmes County School District, said Iftikhar Azeem, the science department chair at Holmes County Central High School. He teaches AP Physics and AP Computer Science. 

That’s because these districts, which have a small tax base, can’t compete with other counties and even states that pay teachers much better, or with other science-professions.

“The very fundamental thing is funding,” Azeem said. “I’ve taught several hundred physics students, but nobody came back as a teacher because when they do get a masters in science, they get a better job. … Why should they work as a teacher?”

Both districts struggle to retain college-educated graduates amid population losses since 2010. 

“A place like Holmes County, Mississippi, has fewer residents today than it did when the Civil War broke out,” Dolan said. “That teachers are not moving there is symptomatic of broader issues about exodus from these communities.” 

The Global Teaching Project helps fill this gap, Dolan said, by providing schools with “turnkey courses,” as well as textbooks and workbooks that students don’t have to pay for. And teachers like Swearengen and Azeem are offered stipends for professional development courses. 

“We are paying our teachers, not the other way around,” Dolan said. “We are providing services to our students. They never pay us a penny. Their parents never pay us a penny. We’ve never used a dollar of state or local tax dollars.” 

More than 90% of students who take Global Teaching Project’s classes go to college, though Dolan couldn’t provide the exact number, he said, due to limitations collecting data from public schools. But when students get to college, they are prepared, he said. 

“Where we make a difference, and here I am confident, is where they go to college, how well they do in college, how prepared they are in college, their persistence and scholarships,” Dolan said. 

Dolan said he has partial data on pass-rates on the AP national exams for Global Teaching Project students and that the pass-rate for AP Computer Science tends to be higher than AP Physics. A majority of students do not earn a qualifying score for college credit on the exams, which is a three or higher, Dolan said. 

“By taking this exam, you are part of an elite group,” Dolan tells his students. 

Both teachers said their classes’ exam scores aren’t as high as they wish due to a myriad of factors. 

In Quitman County, students don’t struggle with the curriculum, Swearengen said, because the Global Teaching Project provides tutors from Ivy League schools. It’s more about attention: Swearengen said his students tend to miss class for major athletic events. Cellphones are another distraction. 

But the biggest struggle, Swearengen said, is technology. His district has limited bandwidth. During end-of-year testing, only so many students can use a computer at one time, he said. Sometimes, all nine of his students have to crowd around one computer.

That’s a huge reason his AP Computer Science pass-rate isn’t where Swearengen wants it to be. 

“We have so many students on computers to where the technology person will just shut the entire network off,” he said. 

Still, Swearengen said the Global Teaching Project has benefited his students in ways that can’t be quantified. Through the project, they have an opportunity to experience college-level curriculum and visit campuses like Jackson State University. 

Their self-regard increases, he said. 

“They get to spend a night in a hotel room when they’ve never been,” he said. “They get to go to conferences and eat different food. And talk about computers. It’s just so much. It’s a bigger picture than I think anybody could have imagined.” 

That was Demeria Moore’s experience when, as a junior and senior at McAdams Attendance Center in Attala County, she took AP Physics and AP Computer Science, the latter course she was able to claim college credit for at Holmes Community College. 

Though it was lonely to be the only student in the AP Computer Science course, Moore said participating in the class helped her understand the “why” behind the world. 

“When I look out the window and I see the leaves, how they’re full of chlorophyll and the sun will allow them to have energy, and how that energy can get transferred to me and that just creates the circle of life,” Moore said. “All those little things have some type of science or math attached to it. It all just blew my mind.” 

Moore said the Global Teaching Project also provided a sense of community at her school where teacher turnover is high. McAdams is a junior-senior high school and, by the time she graduated, all her teachers from seventh grade had left.

“I had some really good teachers and even the students who may have just maybe caused a few issues in class, even they would listen to these teachers. And I just wish they would have stayed so everybody could have a better learning experience,” she said. 

Dolan said one of the successes of the Global Teaching Project also comes with irony. His initiative can help teachers become AP certified, which can lead them away from high-poverty school districts to ones that can pay better. 

“We recognize there are certain issues that we cannot affect,” Dolan said. “We don’t determine who is in the building, but we will serve whoever is there.” 

The post Company deemed ‘future of education’ for rural schools to falter without cash infusion, founder says appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi State baseball great Jay Powell won Game 7 of the World Series, among many other career highlights and then had his career ended by one of the most gruesome arm injuries in baseball history. Who better to talk about the alarming rate of pitching injuries in MLB and college baseball than Powell?

Stream all episodes here.

The post Podcast: Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer Jay Powell joins the pod to talk baseball. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The special geology of Mississippi is again giving the state a stab at playing a key role in the energy sector, this time for a burgeoning renewable power source called “green hydrogen.”

The company Hy Stor Energy, founded in 2019, is looking to take advantage of the state’s salt domes, which provide valuable underground pockets for gas storage. Hy Stor will store its hydrogen in different salt domes around the state, Chief Executive Officer Laura Luce said, but will primarily operate in Perry and Smith counties. The company is looking to start production by the end of 2026, she said.

“We’re really at the beginning of this green hydrogen revolution,” Luce said. “We really see the next three to 10 years where you’re going to have a lot of infrastructure be brought up and expanded and this industry stood up, and we’re confident that Mississippi is going to be the leaders in that industry.”

The technology behind renewable hydrogen has been around for about a century, Luce explained. The energy source materializes through a process called electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But it wasn’t until the last few years that both the United States and the Europe began heavily investing in the technology. As part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021, the federal government appropriated $9.5 billion for clean hydrogen development. 

In a roadmap the U.S. Department of Energy released in 2023, the agency explained that “clean hydrogen,” as it’s also referred to, can be a key tool in meeting the country’s goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The plan says that clean hydrogen can reduce economy-wide emissions — targeting sectors like transportation, metal production, and fertilizer — by 10% over the next 30 years.

Last month, the DOE announced up to $500 million in funding for a “green steel” project, which would include producing iron in Perry County using clean hydrogen from Hy Stor. That facility, which would be operated by Swedish company SSAB, would then send the iron to Iowa to be made into steel. While the agency is still negotiating an exact award amount, the DOE projected that the project would create 540 permanent jobs as well as 6,000 construction jobs.

Hy Stor plans to use energy from other renewable sources, like solar and wind, to produce the green hydrogen, Luce said.

“The sun and the wind, even though they’re tremendous resources, they’re not available 24/7,” she said. “They’re available on an intermittent basis. So by taking those and converting them to hydrogen, now I have something that is dispatchable on minutes notice.”

Luce said the “epicenter” of Hy Stor will start out by a salt dome in Richton, near the proposed SSAB facility, with a pipeline connecting down to Port Bienville in southwest Mississippi.

An array of political leaders in the state have backed the project in letters to the DOE, including Gov. Tate Reeves, the State Oil and Gas Board, and the Mississippi Public Service Commission.

Even before Hy Stor, Mississippi’s geology has opened up the state to a number of energy sector investments. For instance, companies have long used the state’s salt domes to store natural gas. Mississippi has also recently positioned itself to become a hub for carbon storage, something that could be especially abundant in Gulf states because of the spaces between subsurface rocks.

The cost of the green hydrogen project will be steep, though. Luce said that the first phase of the project will cost over $10 billion, and that Hy Stor will look to enter into 10-, 20- or 30-year agreements with industrial customers to finance the operation. So far, she added, Hy Stor hasn’t received any federal or state government funding, but it will look for potential support from the DOE as well as renewable energy tax credits.

As far as who will buy the green hydrogen, Luce said Hy Stor’s initial customers in its first couple years of operations will include plastic, maritime and other transport companies, in addition to the proposed green steel project.

The post ‘Green hydrogen’ company looks to make Mississippi a leader of new renewable venture appeared first on Mississippi Today.

More than a decade ago, Celia Sims sat in a room with parents whose precious children had died while at day care. Most had been neglected by their caregivers. Some died from injuries, others in their sleep. 

Most of the children attended licensed facilities, and at the time, their parents believed that licensing meant providers were safe, that unqualified workers were screened out. But they weren’t. 

In the early 2010s, there was no federal requirement that child care providers undergo background checks. Fewer than a dozen states required a comprehensive check of criminal, child abuse and sex offender registries — most of the others only checked one, if that. Once these children died, police investigations revealed that providers at their care centers had past convictions for crimes like manslaughter and sexual abuse, Sims said. These people, the parents said, should not have been working in child care, period. 

The parents were outraged — and rightly so, Sims remembers thinking. It seemed so unnecessary. So preventable. 

“After that, you can’t just close your eyes and walk away,” said Sims, who was then a senior staffer for former Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. She got to work. 

Burr and then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, worked with members of the child care advocacy community to draft bipartisan legislation that would, for the first time,  establish national safety standards for child care. It would ultimately make its way into the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the national funding mechanism. States use the money they receive from the grant to reduce the cost of care for low-income children and improve that care by implementing safety and licensing requirements. But to get the money — at least in theory — states must abide by CCDBG rules.

And those rules would be stricter than ever. The reauthorization introduced eight background check requirements that state agencies must run on child care job applicants: two federal checks, of the FBI fingerprint and sex offender registries. Three state ones, of the criminal history, sex offender and child abuse registries. And three more interstate checks of the same state registries in any state where a provider lived during the previous five years. All of these checks were meant to screen out people with a history of crimes like child abuse, assault or endangerment. As part of the new CCDBG rules, states would also be required to post inspection reports online and collect data on serious incidents. It was a statement of values: The government was saying that this was the nation’s standard for child care, no matter where a program was located. 

States had until 2018 to come into compliance.

But 10 years after the law took effect, many states are still failing to uphold at least one of its components. 

According to a 2022 report to Congress analyzing the issue, at that time 27 states failed to conduct at least some, if not all, of the checks and hiring practices required by the law. Nineteen allowed staff to start working with children before background checks were completed. Nearly all of the states had been hampered by old technology systems, state bureaucracy and databases that range from incomplete to downright inaccurate.

It’s unclear where states stand today. The federal Office of Child Care, the regulatory agency that is meant to oversee states’ progress on fixing these problems, told The 19th that only three states had updated some of their policies since the report was published (New Hampshire, for example, no longer allows staff to start work before checks clear), but all 27 remain out of compliance because they do not yet conduct every required check. Yet several states disputed the agency’s determination and provided detailed documentation on their background check procedures, opening the possibility that even the regulatory agency can’t say for certain where states are falling short. 

The winding, chaotic path towards fixing these issues has baffled child care advocates. “I have not been able to understand why, in some states, this hasn’t been a big deal,” said Sims, who went on to found The Abecedarian Group, a child care and education consulting agency.

But it is a big deal.

Background checks are a critical safety requirement in most jobs, but especially when it comes to safeguarding small children who may not be able to express when something has gone wrong. Yet the haphazard enforcement of these rules means that, in some states, barriers to child care jobs are too high, while in others they are not high enough. States with the most stringent requirements have made it more difficult for day care providers to hire workers, and for people to join a workforce of much-needed caregivers. That’s creating additional barriers for in-home care providers, who are disproportionately women of color and are often the most accessible caregivers in low-income communities.

In states where the systems to run the checks are still not meeting federal standards, difficult questions remain about whether the screening mechanism meant to shield kids from injury, abuse and even death is functioning as it should.

A decade later, no one can yet quite say what the right balance is between protecting children and protecting the child care sector.

“You never want a child to be hurt on your dime — it is a terrible, terrible thing. If we didn’t do everything possible to protect every child, we have fallen down on our job,” said child care expert Danielle Ewen. “If you don’t have the systems in place to keep kids safe, who are you actually protecting and who are you hurting?”

For example, in 2014, interstate checks were added as a commonsense safeguard. Policymakers wanted to ensure caregivers didn’t hop from job to job in different states, evading screening along the way, particularly in areas like Washington D.C. and Virginia, where workers may live in one state but work in another. But over time, those checks have come to illustrate why the system itself is broken. 

Eleven states didn’t run interstate checks at all, the 2022 report found. Nine didn’t respond to other states’ requests. Some checks can’t be run because of simple — and mystifying — bureaucratic reasons: One state accepts credit card payments and the other doesn’t, for example. 

States also have differing laws about what information they can share across state lines, and with what agencies. After a request is submitted, states can decide whether to provide all the records they hold on a person, only conviction information, or simply to give a “yes” or “no” determination as to whether that person is eligible to work in child care based on their local laws. 

That matters because states have different thresholds for what constitutes an offense that would prohibit someone from working with children. For example, a teenager who gets arrested for urinating in public might be considered a sex offender in one state, but not another. When that teenager applies for a job in a new state, their background check might indicate that yes, they have been arrested for a sex offense — but not give any context about what it was.

Tribes are also subject to the requirements of CCDBG, but none of them was given legal authority through the 2014 law — or any other, for that matter — to independently run federal background checks. To get around that, some tribes have had to ask states to submit requests on their behalf, creating the same problem: Child care workers may be disqualified based on state rules instead of tribe rules. 

Much of the information in the abuse registries is also incomplete or unreliable. The 2022 report to Congress, which was put together by an interagency task force, found that some states include unsubstantiated abuse cases as well as substantiated ones. That means people could be disqualified from working even if the allegations against them were found to have had no merit. 

Domestic violence survivors have particularly suffered as a result. In some states, they show up in registries not because they caused the abuse, but because an investigator determined that they failed to protect a child from the perpetrator or from witnessing the violence. “Consequently, victims of domestic violence can remain on [abuse] registries for years, regardless of whether the individual themselves would be unsafe to provide care in a child care program,” the report found. 

Experts have also questioned the racial and economic biases of the registry system, especially when it comes to flagging child neglect. About 75 percent of all child welfare cases are the result of neglect, not violence, and about half of states define neglect as a failure to provide basic needs. Caregivers living in poverty, the majority of whom are people of color, may get flagged simply because they’re unable to find affordable housing, for example. 

“How much do we trust the gatekeeping mechanism to be fair and equitable?” asks Gina Adams, a child care expert at the Urban Institute who has studied the racial disparities inherent in background checks for child care. “The challenge is that, to the extent that it finds true situations of child abuse or child risk, it is an important mechanism to protect children — so I strongly support that.”  

“However,” Adams continued. “I worry that because of inequitable policing, it may be also keeping out a whole bunch of people who should not be kept out.”

Just last year in New York City, a 1-year-old died of a fentanyl overdose at a day care that was a front for a drug operation. The providers had passed background checks. Reports also revealed the city had a backlog of 140 child care background checks at the time. 

In Washington state, provider Susan Brown has been wrestling with this question after 35 years in the child care business. As part of the federal law, prospective staff who pass a fingerprint check — either of the federal FBI registry or the state criminal history registry — are allowed to start working while their other checks are being completed. But Washington is more restrictive: Nobody can work until they pass the five federal and state checks. For Brown’s employees, the drive to just get their fingerprints taken can take hours roundtrip. The entire background check process can take up to a month, she said. Why would a worker wait that long when they can get a job tomorrow at a fast food restaurant and get paid about the same wages?

“Child care providers can’t afford to pay them until they’re in the classroom,” said Brown, the president and CEO of Kids Co., a chain that provides child care services across Seattle. And she pointed to another problem: Day cares have been short-staffed since the pandemic, and that’s limiting how many classrooms can be open and how many students can be enrolled. “Now with the crisis being what it is, because no one has any extra staff, you can’t even enroll kids to cover the wages of the person.”

Brown also questions why so many requirements have been imposed on child care providers, and not people in similar professions, like teachers. “We’ve had, over the years, the situation where we tried to hire public school teachers and they didn’t pass the background check,” Brown said. (In Washington, teachers need to only pass two checks — an FBI check and a state patrol check.)

The racial disparity is undeniable, Brown said. Women of color are overrepresented in the child care workforce and also face more scrutiny to enter jobs that are among the lowest paid in the country. Meanwhile, the majority of the teaching workforce is White women. 

In a January letter to the state, signed by more than 300 child care providers, Brown wrote: “This disparity is not only unjust, but perpetuates systemic racism within our regulatory framework. Washington State’s current background check process magnifies the inequity by removing the possibility of beginning supervised work after completing a fingerprint background check, as outlined in federal requirements.” 

In Washington, the state performs the five federal and in-state background checks together. Changing the process to do just the fingerprint checks first, so workers can start sooner, “would take a lot of resources and time to develop,” because all the results are currently submitted as one package, said a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families. “We made the decision to comply with federal regulations by requiring the completion of all background check components for this reason.” It takes about eight days on average to complete the checks once fingerprints are submitted, according to Washington state’s most recent 2024 data. 

Home-based providers feel the inequity of these checks most directly, because not only do these workers need to be background checked, but so does every adult who lives in the home. 

In-home child care is for many low-income families the only viable option, and it’s often run by women of color — women whose families are more likely to live intergenerationally and to come into contact with the criminal justice system or the immigration system. 

“It deters folks from becoming licensed,” said Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, which works to improve home-based child care. “They perceive risk.” 

That was the problem the congressional task force was meant to help solve. Previous reports from 2022 and 2021 had concluded that numerous states fell short of requirements. But the task force’s version, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, was the first to try to quantify which states were out of compliance, and why. The Office of Child Care then took on studying each state’s individual challenges and creating a plan to fix them. 

Some states do seem to be lagging. Mississippi, for example, doesn’t check the national sex offender registry, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health told The 19th. Still, the state refutes the 2022 report, which noted that Mississippi did not have policies in place to conduct any of the checks as required by the 2014 law. The Mississippi spokesperson said that  the information was dated.

When The 19th asked the Office of Child Care whether any of the information in the 2022 report was outdated, it listed only three states as having made improvements since the report was published, though it considers all 27 to still be out of compliance. Mississippi was not on the list. (The states were New Hampshire, Alabama and Washington.)

In fact, several states disputed the Office of Child Care’s determinations. The 19th reached out to officials in five states that had significant issues flagged in the 2022 report, and which the federal agency still considers to be out of compliance. Many said those issues had either been partially or completely rectified.

For example, according to the report, West Virginia only runs one of eight required checks. But Whitney Wetzel, a spokesperson for the West Virginia Department of Human Services, told The 19th that determination “should not be considered current.” 

Wetzel said the department “is confident that it is compliant with all statutory and regulatory background check requirements,” and provided a list of the checks performed, including the FBI fingerprint check and national sex offender check, as well as the in-state criminal, sex offender and abuse registries. 

New Jersey was flagged in the report for failing to run checks on a sub-group of providers, those who are license-exempt, but a spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services confirmed to The 19th that it has been running checks on those providers since mid-2021.

Other states are in more of a gray area. According to the agency, Alabama only recently created policies to run in-state, federal and interstate checks, and remains out of compliance with other aspects of the background check law. However, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Human Services told The 19th: “All checks required under the Child Care and Development Fund rules are performed,” and the discrepancy is only in how the federal office would like the state to structure the process. Alabama is in the process of updating its background check procedures, but the current system “still covers all the required checks,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Vermont was the only state flagged in the 2022 report for allowing staff to start working with children unsupervised before fingerprint background checks were cleared. But the deputy commissioner for the state’s child development division, Janet McLaughlin, told The 19th that while the state does allow new staff to start working before those checks are finalized, that work is supervised. That is, however, still out of compliance with the federal rule.

The Office of Child Care did not respond to The 19th’s requests to clarify the discrepancies between its records and the states’ assertions. But an official from the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the agency, told The 19th that the agency worked with state child care agencies and their partners to create plans to identify what staffing, technology and infrastructure investments they’d need to come into compliance. 

The agency went through an intensive process to document each state’s background check policies, the official said, and that study revealed gaps. 

But now, because of the disagreements between states and the agency,  it is hard to say how close each has come to filling them.

The more time that goes by, and the longer states have been out of compliance, the more states have also started to question whether what is being asked of them is even doable, Ewen said. She was the director of the Child Care and Early Education team at the Center for Law and Social Policy when the CCDBG rules were being crafted. 

“If you have a system where people start to believe that you can’t achieve the end goals, they are not incentivized to try. They’re more incentivized to try and go to Congress and say, ‘This doesn’t work’ instead of going to their state leaders and saying, ‘We’re gonna get dinged for this in an audit,’” Ewen said. 

Linda Smith, the former executive director of Child Care Aware, the advocacy organization whose research was critical to the creation of the safety standards, said the federal government has long been too lenient with the states. In her view, it’s past time that the issue be resolved.

“These are some of these things that if you want to do it — you do it,” Smith said. “I don’t think there was ever any excuse for not doing them. We are talking about the basic safety of children who can’t talk.”  

Yet the 2022 report — and the fact the Office of Child Care has not credited any state with coming into full compliance since it was issued — pointed out some uncomfortable truths. Yes, some states have delayed compliance. And yes, some tried but faced truly significant challenges. It’s also clear by now, a decade later, Sims said, that “we got some things wrong in the statute.” 

The abuse registries were a “mess,” she said. And some of the things that seemed commonsense, like interstate background checks, turned out to be much more complicated than anyone had realized. 

Grace Reef, then the chief of policy at Child Care Aware who conducted the initial research on the issues with background checks, said the intention behind the law was sound: “to help protect kids and give parents some peace of mind,” she said. 

But they were operating with limited information about the quality of the data in the registries and the state laws that would make it difficult, in practice, to conduct all the checks they felt were important. “We had trouble trying to figure out how to structure language,” she recalled. “You do the best you can.” 

This year, for the first time, states will be required to answer detailed questions in their state child care plans regarding the remaining obstacles they face with background checks. Each state needs to submit their plan, a roughly 300-page document that outlines how its system works, by July 1. 

At the state level, advocates like Lorena Garcia, the CEO of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, are working to ensure her state narrows the list of offenses that would disqualify someone from working. Garcia works with what are known as family, friend and neighbor providers: registered but unlicensed in-home providers who also need to undergo checks, but might be hesitant to do so because they live with people who have some kind of criminal record or because they are in mixed immigration status households. She wants to make sure only offenses that would affect the safety of children are counted. 

To address the interstate checks, Cindy Mall, the senior program director of the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, sees the National Fingerprint File as the most obvious solution. Twenty-four states participate in the FBI-maintained fingerprint database, which makes performing interstate checks a relatively simple experience. If all states were a part of it, more could come into compliance, Mall said — including California, which the report currently lists as out of compliance on performing the national sex offender registry check and the three interstate checks.  

For her, the issue comes down to a question of resources. It’s not enough to say something is a priority without the support to make it happen. In 2022, President Joe Biden tried to pass a $400 billion child care plan that would have given states funding they could have used to improve their systems and increase staffing. But that effort ultimately failed after Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, withdrew support from the package saying it was too costly and expansive.

The task force that studied the background checks came to a similar conclusion. Even if the states followed every recommendation the group laid out, they wrote, “full implementation of the current array of checks is unlikely without major additional fiscal investment and changes to state laws not addressed in this report.” 

“It comes down to money,” Mall said. “Money is staffing, money is resources, money is databases.” 

It also comes down to political will. Burr and Mirkulski have since left the Senate and few champions remain. But the problems linger. Since the pandemic, child care as an industry has been on life support, kept alive through a one-time federal investment that allowed states and programs to get the resources they needed to improve their systems. 

But that money was temporary — the needs aren’t. Safety remains as important as ever.

“Ten years into this,” Reef said, “we ought to have sufficient information in a bipartisan way, not to make it a partisan issue, but to make sure the law works as intended by commonsense approaches. I think that’s what’s needed.” 

This story has been republished in partnership with Mississippi Today.

The post States are required to background check child care workers. Many are falling short. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

House Republican leaders offered a compromise Medicaid expansion plan to Senate leaders in a much-anticipated conference committee meeting on Tuesday.

Earlier this session, House leaders passed a full Medicaid expansion plan that would draw down roughly $1 billion a year in federal money, plus another $650 million over the first two years, and provide health insurance coverage to more than 200,000 Mississippians.

A month later, however, the Senate passed its own plan that would forgo the extra federal money and insure about 74,000. Senate leaders said they fear a more generous plan would cause people to drop private insurance or quit working.

In a conference meeting Tuesday, three Senate leaders and three House leaders — all Republicans — met to seek compromise. House Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee offered a compromise “hybrid” proposal that would expand Medicaid coverage but keep thousands of people on a private insurance exchange as some other states have done.

The Senate conferees offered no compromise from their side, and offered a cool response to the House proposal, but said they would take it back to their fellow Senate Republicans. Both sides said they will meet up again, but did not set a firm time or date of a follow up meeting.

Below are some key points the Republican conferees made during the meeting and in later interviews with Mississippi Today.

Rep. Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg

As the meeting ended, Senate conferees said they would take the House’s proposed compromise back to Lt. Gov. Hosemann and other Senate leadership. They urged McGee to also go back and talk with the House speaker and leadership.

“But if your position has not changed, or you haven’t offered anything, then I don’t have anything to take back,” McGee responded.

McGee said that while the House is open to negotiation, it likely won’t agree to any plan that turns down billions of federal dollars earmarked for expansion.

“We just cannot make that make sense,” McGee said. “… (The Senate plan) would be leaving a lot of money on the table and leave a lot of Mississippians uninsured … We talk about running things like a business. If someone’s offering to give you 90 cents for every 10 cents you put up, I don’t know of any business that wouldn’t take that.”

Sen. Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven

“Despite our different opinions, we have begun a dialogue that has not occurred in this building,” Blackwell said. “… Despite it taking so long to get here, it is moving in the right direction and I for one hope it continues.”

“The reality is the Senate is not going to accept your position,” he said. “We have an easier position. I know it is not what you prefer, but we are moving. If this dies, it is going to be hard next year to get here and damn sure it is not getting brought up in the next two years.”

Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford

Boyd had a cold response to the House’s compromise plan, but she said she was open to studying the proposal if House leaders can produce numbers that show it would not be a net cost to the state to implement.

The Lafayette County lawmaker said the Senate leadership initially considered proposing a hybrid plan, but it decided against that model because it determined a hybrid would be more costly than what the Senate eventually passed.

“I want to see different numbers,” Boyd told reporters. “Look, we are incredibly open to looking at everything and making sure that we get the best plan for the state of Mississippi and for the taxpayers of Mississippi. Just the numbers that we have right now haven’t shown (a Hybrid model) to be a financially feasible option. But we are absolutely open to looking at those if we can get numbers to show us that’s what the case is.”

Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula

Wiggins, a former Medicaid Committee chairman, had a more realistic response to the hybrid plan offered by the House, but he still believed the Senate’s initial plan was the better proposal to ensure the federal marketplace exchange remains intact.

The coastal lawmaker said he is personally open to a hybrid model, but he does not want to publicly back the compromise plan unless it has a two-thirds majority support of the senators needed to override a potential veto.

“Everybody wants to make Medicaid expansion kind of a black-and-white issue,” Wiggins said. “The reality is it’s a very, very gray issue about what the policy is. That’s why I’m saying, yes, I think if a hybrid plan is there, and it’s beneficial to all the citizens of Mississippi under the parameters that we’ve set out in the Senate, then, yes, I’m open to doing that. At this particular time, I personally am not shutting off those discussions. With that being said, as conferees, we have a duty to our Senate chamber. And I think when people hear what we’ve been talking about, I think they’re going to understand that there’s more to it than black and white, and they want us to get to a solution.” 

Reps. Sam Creekmore, R-New Albany, and Rep. Joey Hood, R-Ackerman, said little during the meeting as McGee took the House lead. They regularly nodded along as McGee spoke.

The post Quotes: Republicans debating Medicaid expansion share thoughts on key meeting day appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Kevin Blackwell, the main Senate negotiator trying to reach agreement on expanding Medicaid to provide health insurance for primarily the working poor, urged his House counterparts Tuesday to accept the Senate’s scaled-down version of Medicaid expansion.

“Both chambers are off the porch” in terms of passing bills to expand Medicaid, Blackwell said. “… Both have taken a step forward. But if your position is my way or the highway, it is going to put us right back on the porch.”

House negotiators, meanwhile, offered a compromise expansion plan to the Senate on Tuesday, but Blackwell and his Senate negotiators did not reciprocate, saying only they would take the House counter back to Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and other Senate leaders for consideration and casting doubt that they can gin up more Senate support.

Blackwell made his warning Tuesday near the end of the first open-to-the-public conference committee meeting, which was packed to capacity with onlookers eager to witness a key meeting of the Legislature’s first-ever earnest debate of Medicaid expansion.

The issue has become the major focus of a contentious 2024 legislative session, with hundreds of Mississippians, top state business leaders, health officials and even religious leaders publicly advocating at the Capitol for full Medicaid expansion that stands to significantly help the poorest, unhealthiest state in the nation.

In the meeting on Tuesday, three House negotiators and three Senate negotiators met to try to hash out the differences between the two chambers on expanding Medicaid as is allowed by federal law and covered largely with federal funding.

House Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee, the lead House negotiator, said her chamber’s goal is to expand Medicaid to cover the maximum number of poor Mississippians allowed under federal law and to draw down the maximum amount of federal dollars.

READ MORE: Experts analyze House, Senate Medicaid expansion proposals, offer compromise plan

She said the Senate plan did not do that. The House would expand Medicaid to cover those earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level or about $20,000 annually for an individual.

The Senate plan would cover those earning less than 100% of the federal poverty level or about $15,000 annually for an individual. McGee pointed out under the Senate plan there would be much less federal money available to pay for expansion. She said the goal should be to cover as many people as possible at the most affordable cost. She said the House plan does that.

But as a compromise, she offered “a hybrid plan” where those earning between 100% and 138% of the federal poverty level would receive health care coverage through private health insurance policies offered on the federal exchange. The costs of the policies, though, would be covered through federal-state Medicaid funds. But under the plan, the federal government would pay 90% of the costs.

Under the Senate plan, the federal government would pay 77% of the costs.

McGee said the House is offering the compromise to cover people through private insurance after Senate leaders said expanding Medicaid to 138% of the federal poverty level would damage the marketplace in Mississippi by moving people from the marketplace to Medicaid. While senators said they did not want to damage the marketplace, in reality, the marketplace provides polices for people earning much more than 138% of the poverty level and exchanges in the 40 states that have expanded Medicaid have not been harmed.

After McGee and the two other House negotiators offered the “hybrid plan” as a compromise, she urged Blackwell and his two Senate colleagues to take the proposal back to Senate colleagues and to come back in the coming days to possibly offer a counterproposal.

“We feel this is a major compromise,” she said.

As the meeting ended, Senate conferees said they would take the House’s proposed compromise back to Hosemann and other Senate leadership. They urged McGee to also go back and talk with the House speaker and leadership.

“But if your position has not changed, or you haven’t offered anything, then I don’t have anything to take back,” McGee responded.

Blackwell said the Senate wanted to take slow steps while the House was moving forward with “a Ferrari plan.”

He said he does not believe the Senate would agree to such rapid movement after the two chambers had refused for the past decade to even consider Medicaid expansion.

Blackwell said that in other states, the number of people insured through Medicaid expansion and the costs have come in higher than initially estimated.

When asked after the meeting if he could point to any other state that had seen a great detrimental effect — financially or otherwise — from Medicaid expansion, he paused for a moment.

“I can’t answer that,” Blackwell said. “I’m not in those other states,” although he said he met a lawmaker from Kentucky who told him the program had been expensive.

If the House would accept the Senate proposal, Blackwell said in the coming years the two chambers could work to expand upon it.

The first full conference committee on the pivotal issue occurred less than a week before the deadline for the conference committee to reach an agreement to offer to the two chambers for possible passage during the scheduled final week of the 2024 session.

McGee pointed out 40 other states, many governed by Republicans, have expanded Medicaid and none of those have tried to repeal the program. Blackwell argued that the expansion has cost more in those states than initial studies said it would cost.

McGee said the House plan had a four-year “repealer” and would be cost neutral through that time, according to various studies, which also indicate little or no cost to the state after those initial four years. After those four years, the two chambers would have to vote to continue the program or it would be repealed.

“It is almost as if we have a four-year pilot program paid for by the federal government,” McGee said.

But Blackwell warned that if the Legislature is unable to pass any version of expansion this year, he did not believe it would be possible in upcoming years.

“If it dies this year, it gets harder next and then it becomes almost impossible after that,” Blackwell predicted.

The two sides also at odds on other issues. For instance, the Senate does not want to expand Medicaid if the federal government will not allow a work requirement.

READ MORE: Top Mississippi business leaders endorse full Medicaid expansion

The post Medicaid expansion negotiators still far apart after first public meeting appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A delegation of major business leaders, including the incoming president of the state’s chamber of commerce and the former commander of the Mississippi National Guard, pleaded with lawmakers on Tuesday to not adjourn their session without passing a bill that fully expands Medicaid coverage to the state’s poorest citizens. 

Jack Reed Jr. the former Republican mayor of Tupelo and the owner of Tupelo-based Reed’s Department Store, spoke on behalf of the business leaders at the state Capitol, where he urged lawmakers to support expansion because of the positive financial impact it would have on the state’s economy.   

“It’s the right thing to do morally,” Reed said of expansion. “Legislators, by virtue of your offices, you are in a position to make it happen. We Mississippi businesses are supporting you.”

Reed, former chairman of the Mississippi Economic Council and leader of the store that’s been an anchor of north Mississippi for over a century, and his family have a storied history of advocating causes that are now considered visionary but were not politically expedient at the time. 

Reed’s father, Jack Reed Sr., served as the MEC chairman in the early 60s when he used his position to urge state leaders to keep public schools open and comply with court-ordered integration. 

The elder Reed unsuccessfully ran as the Republican nominee for governor in 1987, was the inaugural chairman of the State Board of Education and was an early voice to call for state politicians to change Mississippi’s former state flag that featured a Confederate battle emblem. 

Scores of medical and faith leaders have spent weeks at the Capitol advocating for lawmakers to compromise on a plan that expands Medicaid coverage under the federal Affordable Care Act to 138% of the federal poverty level and draws down the full 90% matching rate from the federal government. 

But Tuesday was the first time business leaders have openly spoken out about Medicaid expansion. The MEC, the Mississippi Manufacturers Association and the Business and Industry Political Education Committee have also tacitly endorsed expansion.

Both chambers of the Legislature have passed plans that expand Medicaid coverage to more Mississippians, but the proposals are drastically different. 

The House’s expansion plan aims to expand health care coverage to upwards of 200,000 Mississippians, and accept $1 billion a year in federal money to cover it, as most other states have done.

The Senate, on the other hand, wants a more restrictive program, to expand Medicaid to cover around 40,000 people, turn down the federal money, and require proof that recipients are working at least 30 hours a week. 

Around 10 business leaders also wrote letters to state leaders on Tuesday,  the majority of whom backed the House proposal to expand Medicaid to more Mississippians and draw the full match from the federal government. 

Pat Thomasson, CEO of Philadelphia-based Thomasson Company, is the incoming MEC chairwoman, and she penned a letter to Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, House Speaker Jason White and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves on Tuesday urging them to support expansion. 

“By covering the working poor and accepting the 90% federal match, plus the $700 million incentive program that would fully pay for the program for the first four years, we will have a healthier Mississippi and a better state economy,” Thomasson wrote. 

B & B Concrete CEO David Brevard, CREATE Foundation President Mike Clayborne, Renasant Bank Board Chairman Robin McGraw, Montgomery Enterprises CEO Luke Montgomery, The Taylor Group CEO Lex Taylor, Community Development Foundation CEO David Rumbarger and MINTACT CEO Augustus Collins all wrote letters to state leaders supporting expansion.  

Retired Maj. Gen. Augustus “Leon” Collins is also the former adjutant general of Mississippi and was commander of the Mississippi Army and Air National Guard under former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant. He wrote a letter to Hosemann urging Medicaid expansion.

“Many rural hospitals are suffering and are on the verge of closure,” Collins wrote. “This expansion has the ability to save these hospitals … Mississippi has delayed far too long. The time is now.”

The Tuesday event happened hours before a group of House and Senate negotiators were scheduled to meet at the Capitol to haggle out a compromise on the different expansion plans.  

Speaker White previously told Mississippi Today he was open to adopting a hybrid model of expansion that uses both public and private options to cover additional people. But it’s unclear if  a majority of Republican senators would agree to a plan that fully expands Medicaid. 

Reed told Mississippi Today that he would encourage state senators who are on the fence about supporting full expansion to think about their legacy and consider the full picture of the economic and medical risks at stake for Mississippi, one of the unhealthiest states in the nation. 

“There comes a time in every legislator’s life when he or she has the opportunity to really do something that makes a difference to thousands of their fellow Mississippians,” Reed said. “This is one of those times.” 

The post Former, incoming heads of state chamber, other business leaders endorse full Medicaid expansion appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Ricky Junco was working a low-wage, e-commerce job at Goodwill and volunteering to teach Microsoft Word to kids at a youth detention center in 2018 when he met Vince Jordan, founder of a local tech startup.

Junco had been looking for ways to strengthen his skills to secure better employment. And Jordan had the solution: a virtual reality programming academy offered by his company, Lobaki. Junco said he was reluctant at first, doubting he’d be able to afford the courses. That’s when Jordan explained he could attend free of charge.

Lobaki’s foundation had recently — and suddenly — received a large grant from the state’s welfare department, Mississippi Department of Human Services, to offer the classes. 

The money didn’t come directly from the state agency, but through a contract with a private entity called Families First for Mississippi, which auditors and prosecutors say facilitated a multimillion dollar fraud scheme between 2016 to 2019.

Junco started training at the academy in the evenings. First, he learned how to design a graphic triangle, then make it 3D, then give it texture, then make it look like concrete, and so on.

Junco and his classmates, some of whom he said were transitioning out of prison, were learning how to design and build “experiences” — the term that describes the immersive worlds that appear inside virtual reality headsets. Junco’s goal was to create a simulation of a welding gun, then the experience of welding at a tall height.

“A big challenge in the oil rig right now is that they’ll spend time training somebody to be a welder, and then they ask her to go on top of the rig, and they find out that she’s hesitant about heights,” Junco said. “So therein lies one of the examples of the value of immersive technology is that you can replicate these things and identify fears and defeat fears as well.”

These programming skills could translate to the entertainment industry, such as animation in video games or movies, or to virtual education and vocational training, such as programs to teach someone how to drive a forklift.

Before its demise, Families First touted its VR capabilities in preparing people for the workforce, though it’s unclear how much of that kind of training actually took place.

Faster than it began, the welfare-meets-silicon valley experiment was over. 

In June of 2019, Lobaki President Kevin Loud said three women whose names and titles he couldn’t remember visited the tech company’s office and pulled Lobaki’s chief operating officer aside.

“She came out with this amazed look on her face, and she says, ‘We gotta be out of here by the end of the week,’” Loud said.

The state auditor had begun investigating widespread misspending and theft within the state’s welfare program after receiving a tip from inside the agency. MDHS seized all of the VR equipment Lobaki purchased under the grant, including two expensive harness stations, devices similar to treadmills used for immersive gaming — a seemingly bizarre purchase for a state welfare office.

Lobaki would soon find itself at the center of one of the biggest scandals in state history. The tech startup was lumped with dozens of other alleged fraudsters and accused of robbing the poorest citizens of the poorest state in the country.

“We felt it was completely unjust and we tried to position ourselves as best as possible, but it was like a wave that just kept coming in on you, you know?” Loud said.

The former state welfare agency director and directors of both nonprofits in charge of Families First pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges — some of which relate to the Lobaki contract — in 2022 and 2023 and are awaiting sentencing.

But to Junco, Lobaki’s function with the welfare agency was the embodiment of the popular “hand up, not a hand out” philosophy. Though Junco and his classmates did not have to be low-income to participate, Junco said that he and plenty of others were, in fact, just the kind of people MDHS purports to serve.

“As a result of that exposure, it did lead to a better lifestyle for me later on,” Junco said. “Because I learned something and it segued to a job opportunity as well. Which is, in my opinion, the classic example of what programs like this should look like.”

After the investigation began, Junco returned to class one night to find the doors locked. He walked down the stairs to another level of the building and peered through the windows of a vacant room where the VR equipment was stashed haphazardly. MDHS owned the gadgets, but the agency didn’t have a use for them, so they would continue collecting dust for years. MDHS eventually disposed of the equipment by sending it to the Mississippi Office of Surplus Property, which sells the public’s unused or confiscated items. MDHS did not answer Mississippi Today’s questions about when this occurred, how much money it may have recouped from any sales, or if those proceeds will be transferred back to the welfare program.

Though Junco said he never received a certificate from Lobaki’s VR academy due to the fallout, the company later hired him to teach programming classes at the Jackson Medical Mall. He now serves as Lobaki’s director of business development. A handful of other employees at the roughly 15-person firm also came from the academy.

Lobaki told auditors that it graduated a total of 60 students at a cost of $13,250 per student. The academy was not an accredited program, but Loud said students took with them design portfolios they could use to entice employers. Student outcomes weren’t well documented. Besides the participants Lobaki hired, one of which eventually left to work for Meta, formerly known as Facebook, Lobaki is aware of two other students who secured jobs in the field, plus one who went back to college and another who entered the military for computer science.

This lack of data collection isn’t unusual: the welfare grant Lobaki operated the academy under is notorious for involving no metrics for tracking program performance.

The public funds Lobaki received came from the federal safety net program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or “TANF,” which is known for providing monthly cash assistance, or “welfare checks,” to very poor families. But Mississippi only uses 5% of the funds this way. States may also use the block grant to “end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits” through workforce development.

Lawyers working to recoup misspent TANF funds for the state argued that Lobaki received the grant through fraudulent transfers, that its program did not align with a lawful TANF purpose, especially since its participants were not necessarily needy, and that it must return $795,000 to the state. 

After waging a legal battle for nearly two years, MDHS and Lobaki recently reached a settlement. Lobaki paid MDHS $10,000 on April 15 and the next day, the judge dismissed charges against the company. Lobaki agreed to pay back a total of $300,000 by 2028, which could be reduced to $240,000 if it pays earlier. In the agreement, Lobaki maintained its denial of the allegations in the suit, saying it only settles “to buy their peace and avoid further cost of defense.”

In Lobaki’s failed 2023 motion to dismiss the complaint against it, the company argued, among other things, that it never made any false statements or misrepresentations to procure the funds. Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson denied the motion and the Mississippi Supreme Court declined to take the case on appeal. 

“We didn’t know the difference between TANF and a frickin’ turnip patch, you know?” Loud said.

But Lobaki’s stated mission of providing unique training that underemployed Mississippians could use to take advantage of better, newly emerging job opportunities sounds like exactly the kind of thing that Mississippi’s conservative welfare agency would support.

“We thought we were doing something good for society,” Loud said. “We thought we were doing it completely along the lines of state regulation.”

In fact, shortly after they launched the academy in downtown Jackson, Loud said he remembered receiving a visit from then-Gov. Phil Bryant, who appointed the now disgraced former director John Davis and oversaw the agency during the years of the scandal.

“He (Bryant) puts on the headsets, and he says, ‘This is exactly what we should be doing,’ you know?” Loud said. “And when you see the governor of the state saying something like that, and then he says to John Davis, he says, ‘How much money are we giving these guys?’ He says, ‘We’ve given them $635,000.’ He (Bryant) goes, ‘Give them some more.’ He (Davis) writes us a check for $160,000 that day.”

“So, I mean, how are you not going to think that you’re not doing something in complete compliance with the state?” Loud added.

MDHS has not named Bryant as a defendant in the civil suit and he is not facing any criminal charges. Bryant’s attorney declined to comment on the former governor’s dealings with Lobaki. MDHS would not comment on the Lobaki settlement, telling Mississippi Today, “Due to the suppression order in the Civil Case, MDHS is unable to comment on the filing.”

Loud said Lobaki first got linked up with the welfare agency in 2018 after Davis read an Fox News article about its efforts to train students in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in video game development. “Virtual reality developers aim to spark tech boom in the Deep South,” the headline reads.

Unlike other defendants in the scandal, Loud noted that MDHS approached Lobaki, not the other way around.

“John Davis sees it, calls up Vince, comes up, tours it. He (Davis) says, ‘I love this, but I want you to do it in Jackson,’” Loud said. “‘You come to Jackson, we’ll set up an academy. I got 58 career development centers across the state. We’ll set these up in all 58 of them.’”

By this point, MDHS had begun pushing tens of millions of TANF funds to the two nonprofits running Families First for Mississippi. Technically, states may define “needy” however they want. For the types of services Families First provided, Mississippi had set the income threshold at 300% of the poverty line, so in 2018, a family of three could have earned $60,000 and still qualified for the program. But no one was checking. The state had written in official plans submitted to the federal government that the Families First centers “have strategically braided all available resources therefore eligibility requirements are waived for families and services are free of charge.” 

This may have been moot anyway because according to emails and notes from a meeting between MDHS and another grantee, MDHS lawyers and Families First had adopted the theory that once the money hit the private nonprofits, the grantee was no longer bound by federal spending regulations. 

Davis instructed the nonprofits running Families First to ink a one-year $635,000 contract with Lobaki to begin Sept. 1, 2018. This itself was a violation of federal regulations, according to the state auditor, because it flouted the competitive bid process. Also, according to contracting rules, once the government issues a contract to a private entity, it cannot then tell that entity with whom to enter subcontracts.

Davis had recently leased expensive offices for MDHS executive staff at a high rise in the middle of downtown Jackson called City Centre, where Lobaki was given space to set up shop. The academy, where students like Junco took classes, was located at the old state-owned building on State Street that previously housed MDHS and where Families First would soon be headquartered.

Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, the nonprofit running Families First in the northern part of the state, paid Lobaki the $635,000 in one lump sum payment at the start of the contract. In January of 2019, Gov. Bryant toured Lobaki, and Mississippi Community Education Center, the other Families First nonprofit, entered an additional contract with Lobaki for $160,000.

Loud said the first red flag surrounding Lobaki’s relationship with MDHS came in early 2019 when Lobaki was seeking support from another state agency, the Mississippi Development Authority. MDA asked Lobaki for a copy of its office lease. It didn’t have one. By June of 2019, the state was kicking Davis out of office and stripping Lobaki of its academy.

Bryant left office in January of 2020 and auditors office agents arrested Davis and Mississippi Community Education Center founder Nancy New in February of 2020. Loud said Davis’ fall and the revelations around the funding devastated Jordan, Lobaki’s founder, who eventually left the company to join a VR education consultancy in Florida.

Before that, though, Lobaki brought on Glenn McCullough, who had just left his post as director of MDA under Bryant, as a board member in March of 2020.

A couple months later, State Auditor Shad White released his single audit, which first questioned the payments to Lobaki “due to the known conflict of interest, and inability to determine if these contracts were reasonably priced due to lack of procurement and the lack of arms-length bargaining,” the audit reads.

Despite the audit finding, Gov. Tate Reeves distributed $800,000 in Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) funds to Loabki for online learning in early 2021.

Later that year in October of 2021, independent forensic auditors commissioned by MDHS confirmed that the welfare payments to Lobaki were unallowable under federal regulations. The audit said the VR academy failed to align with federal TANF rules because it did not impose eligibility requirements on participants. But while the program violated federal rules, it did appear to adhere to the state’s own rules since the state plan had suspended income requirements for Families First clients.

“The work performed by Lobaki Foundation appeared to align with its contractual obligations,” forensic auditors wrote.

After the forensic audit, White sent demands for repayment to more than two dozen people or companies, which he referred to the AG’s office. Lobaki was not one of the entities White recommended for prosecution.

By April of 2022, Nancy New and her son Zach New were pleading guilty to charges of fraud against the government and wire fraud for the payments they made to the VR academy. Zach New admitted to paying $500,000 to construct a virtual reality center at the downtown high rise and disguising the payment as a “lease.” There is a strict prohibition on using TANF funds for brick and mortar construction.

Represented by outside counsel Brad Pigott, a former U.S. Attorney, MDHS filed its first civil suit in May of 2022, but the complaint did not name Lobaki. MDHS fired Pigott shortly after he filed the suit and replaced him with law firm Jones Walker, which filed the amended complaint that added Lobaki to the suit in December of 2022. McCullough left Lobaki shortly after that but maintains stock in the company, Loud said.

Loud said he’s caught up with White since Lobaki’s legal troubles began.

“I said, ‘Shad,’ I said, ‘You recommended a lot of people over to the AG to be prosecuted. Why didn’t you recommend Lobaki?’ He said, very simply, he says, ‘Because you guys didn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘Well, thanks. Can you stop this litigation?’” Loud said with a laugh.

As White has stated repeatedly, the state auditor and his investigators are not prosecutors and do not determine who will be charged criminally or civilly.

“We did not serve a demand letter on Lobaki because the evidence we’d seen suggested they performed the services they were hired to perform,” White said in a statement to Mississippi Today. “It’s similar to the newspapers that had been paid in welfare money to run ads, and then they ran those ads. Performing the service would possibly give a vendor a good faith vendor defense under the law, though the ultimate call about whether to sue anyone in this case who did not receive a demand is made by the attorneys representing the state, not us.”

The attorney general’s office has partnered with MDHS’s counsel on the civil suit, but Gov. Reeves has indicated that as the authority over MDHS, his office is leading the litigation and ultimately selected who to hold culpable.

Loud estimates Lobaki has spent $100,000 or $150,000 in legal fees. That’s a lot for a young company like Lobaki, Loud said, whereas the state of Mississippi has seemingly unlimited resources, especially since it’s dipping into its large TANF pot to pay for the lawsuit.

Since the state has tightened up spending in light of the scandal, it has amassed an unspent balance of $146 million in TANF as of 2022 — money that the state could direct towards fighting poverty. When Lobaki received the welfare grant in 2018, the state was serving roughly 4,500 families through the traditional cash assistance program and reported a TANF application approval rate of about 20%. Today, as the welfare civil suit enters its third year, MDHS is serving just 1,600 families and approves roughly 9% of monthly applicants, according to 2023 data.

“It’s just kind of ironic that the attorneys opposing us are getting funded from TANF funds. And one of the things that they’re accusing us of is using TANF funds incorrectly,” Loud said. “But the attorneys wrote the law, so the attorneys wrote that it was fine for them to get paid out of it.”

What’s worse for the company, Loud believes Lobaki has lost roughly $8 million in work with entities who were turned off by its association with the TANF scandal. In 2023, Lobaki secured a $300,000 line item appropriation in Mississippi’s K-12 budget proposal for a VR pilot program. Before state lawmakers passed the budget, they found the appropriation to Lobaki tucked away in the bill. No lawmaker would admit to making the addition and they removed it before passage. 

Lobaki did, however, quietly receive $74,500 from the American Rescue Plan Act, the coronavirus pandemic relief fund, for a program with the Mississippi National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Academy in 2023.

The company also hired powerful lobbying firm Capital Resources in 2023 to lobby for VR funding on the federal level and offer public relations advice, but that contract has since ended. Lobaki’s current lobbyist, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, is Allan Cole.

Loud and the rest of the staff hope the recent settlement means Lobaki can begin repairing its reputation.

On April 15 after delivering the $10,000 check to MDHS, Loud said he ran into the agency’s director Bob Anderson — a former unit director at the Attorney General’s Office appointed by Reeves to run MDHS in 2020 — at Martin’s restaurant, a popular lunch spot in downtown Jackson. They’d never met in person. Loud went up to the former prosecutor, stuck out his hand and introduced himself.

“I said, ‘I didn’t think you could get blood out of a turnip, but you did a pretty damn good job,’” Loud said. “He said, ‘We just wanted a little bit of blood.’”

The post ‘A little bit of blood’: Mississippi tech company settles welfare scandal suit appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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A group of business leaders from northeast Mississippi, one of the most conservative areas of the state, recently wrote a letter to House Speaker Jason White encouraging lawmakers to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor. 

The letter, signed by influential Itawamba County business owner and Republican donor Luke Mongtomery, thanked White for pressing forward with Medicaid expansion legislation and called it “the most important legislative issue for the 2024 session.” 

“As this bill now goes to our legislators appointed to the conference committee for consideration, I have faith that a workable solution will be developed that is agreeable among House and Senate leaders,” Montgomery wrote. “Legislation that is good for our future and for all Mississippians.”

Montgomery wrote the letter on behalf of Mississippi Hills Leadership PAC, a committee of north Mississippi business leaders who regularly donate to statewide politicians and dozens of conservative legislative candidates.

Montgomery is the current chairman of the PAC, while Dan Rollins, CEO of Tupelo-based Cadence Bank, serves as the vice vice chairman and David Rumbarger, CEO of Lee County’s Community Development Foundation, serves as its treasurer.

The PAC last year donated $50,000 to White’s campaign, $50,000 to a PAC White controls, $50,000 to Hosemann and thousands of dollars to lawmakers, according to campaign finance reports with the secretary of state’s office. 

Business and civic leaders in northeast Mississippi such as Jack Reed Sr., George McLean, Hassell Franklin and Bobby Martin, all of whom have since passed away, had a longstanding history of advocating for political causes in the region. 

But in modern times, business leaders from the area are careful to wade into political issues beyond the typical scope of local business interests.

Montgomery told Mississippi Today in a statement that the PAC’s leaders support White, a Republican from West, and Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, for realizing the importance of passing expansion legislation. 

“The Mississippi Hills Leadership PAC fully supports our House and Senate leaders as they work together to develop a responsible healthcare expansion plan that takes full advantage of available federal support for the benefit of our hospitals, our people, and our future,” Montgomery said.

The letter comes in the middle of House and Senate leaders attempting to hammer out a compromise in a conference committee to resolve the different expansion plans the chambers have proposed.  

The House’s expansion plan aims to expand health care coverage to upwards of 200,000 Mississippians, and accept $1 billion a year in federal money to cover it, as most other states have done.

The Senate, on the other hand, wants a more restrictive program, to expand Medicaid to cover around 40,000 people, turn down the federal money, and require proof that recipients are working at least 30 hours a week. 

Montgomery’s letter did not endorse a specific plan, but it did call the House’s plan, which expanded coverage to the full 138% of the federal poverty level under the Affordable Care Act, “a reasonable and responsible proposal.” 

A potential compromise is for the two chambers to agree on a  “MarketPlus Hybrid Plan,” which health policy experts with the Center for Mississippi Health Policy and the Hilltop Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County estimate could save the state money in the long-term. 

Speaker White previously told Mississippi Today in an interview that he believes he can hold a bipartisan group of more than 90 House members, a veto-proof majority, together in support of a compromise expansion package. 

But the coalition of support in the 52-member Senate is more fragile. The Capitol’s upper chamber only passed its austere expansion plan by 36 votes, with only one vote to spare for the two-thirds threshold needed to override a governor’s veto. 

In addition to Hosemann, the PAC has donated money to the following senators: Kathy Chism, R-New Albany; Rita Potts Parks, R-Corinth; Daniel Sparks, R-Belmont; Chad McMahan, R-Guntown; Hob Bryan, D-Amory; Ben Suber, R-Bruce; Dean Kirby, R-Pearl; Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg and Josh Harkins, R-Flowood. 

Jack Reed Jr., the former Republican mayor of Tupelo and the CEO of Reed’s Department Store, an economic anchor of downtown Tupelo, is also expected to be at the Capitol on Tuesday morning to advocate for expansion. 

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