‘We’re teachers too’: Community college faculty feel shortchanged by legislative raises
The Legislature appropriated $11 million dollars for faculty pay raises at Mississippi’s community college system but some say it is not enough to ensure their salaries stay competitive with K-12 after the historic teacher pay raise.
Mississippi’s 15 community colleges have long struggled to retain the best and brightest faculty due in part to a lack of state funding. A 2007 law mandates that community colleges receive mid-level funding, or half the per-student amount the Legislature appropriates to K-12 and the regional universities, but that has never happened.
Now some are saying the historic pay raise for K-12 teachers, coupled with the comparably modest sum lawmakers appropriated for community college instructors, means many faculty could be making more money if they switched to teaching K-12.
“I want to make it really clear, I’m pleased for the K-12 instructors,” said Thomas Huebner, Meridian Community College president. “But it will absolutely impact our ability to attract and retain instructors at the community college level.”
The likelihood a community college instructor will make more in K-12 will vary, and there is a lack of data to show how that could play out in aggregate. The Mississippi Department of Education has not calculated how the pay raise will affect average teacher salaries. It also can be tricky to make a direct comparison between K-12 and community college instructors because they work varying contract lengths and teach different subject areas.
For instance, if Brandi Pickett, a wellness instructor at Meridian Community College, went back to K-12, the historic teacher pay raise means she could make about $14,000 more due to her years of experience and status as a National Board Certified Teacher.
Pickett stays in her current position, with a base salary of $49,500 a year, because she went to community college and loves teaching students who remind her of herself. But she knows many community college faculty, especially those teaching general education courses like history or science, could be enticed to leave for K-12.
“Why is it (my salary) not comparable to K-12?” Pickett said. “Why aren’t people trying … to give an incentive to keep those great teachers and not have them move? Where I’m from, people can go to Alabama, right across the state line, and be able to teach.”
In March, the Legislature passed a $246 million K-12 teacher pay raise, the largest in state history. The average teacher in Mississippi made $46,862 during the 2020-21 school year, but that will increase with the pay raise. The average full-time community college instructor made $50,465 last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
The presidents of Mississippi’s 15 community colleges initially asked the Legislature to appropriate $11 million for salaries, enough for a 3%-across-the-board raise for the system’s nearly 6,000 employees. But they increased that request to $25 million in January due to the rate of inflation and the historic amount that K-12 teachers were likely to get, said Kell Smith, the Mississippi Community College Board’s interim executive director.
The Legislature stuck to the first request.
Mississippi’s community colleges already struggle to retain faculty, especially those in career-technical education who can make significantly more working in the trade than teaching it. Huebner said MCC recently lost an instructor in the electric lineman program because the college could not match the salary offered by out-of-state industry. He described the process of trying to find a replacement as “unbelievable.”
“There have been situations where we went nine months trying to find a welding instructor, because our pay scale was so far under what industry was trying to pay those folks,” he said.
Without sufficient state funding, community colleges are hamstrung in their ability to raise faculty salaries on their own. Some colleges have pushed for higher property taxes to fill the budget gap or raised tuition, Huebner said. But the latter option makes it more difficult for community colleges to fulfill their charge: “Offering a working class option, or entry, into the higher ed system,” said Chris Stevenson, a history instructor at Itawamba Community College.
Stevenson says he and his wife like to joke that they “took a vow of poverty” when they decided to become teachers.
“It is a labor of love more than a labor of salary,” he said.
In 2007, the Legislature attempted to address these budget woes by passing the Mid-Level Funding Act, which was intended “to provide adequate funding for Mississippi’s community and junior colleges.” That would be accomplished by funding the community colleges at a level more than K-12 schools but less than regional colleges. After lawmakers passed the bill, the plan was to phase-in mid-level funding over a three year period.
Then the Great Recession hit. The Legislature has never funded the community colleges at a mid-level amount, Smith said. And the community colleges have stopped asking for it. MCCB now tailors its budget priorities to funding formula increases, workforce programs, and salary raises.
“Honestly, we never had much success with” mid-level funding, Smith said. “It seemed like it became such a large ask.”
According to MCCB, the Legislature would have needed to appropriate an additional $159 million to the community college system to meet mid-level funding this session. That includes the extra $64 million needed to bring community college instructor salaries to a mid-point between K-12 teachers and university faculty.
“It does make us feel less important,” said Jennifer Smith, a librarian at Hinds Community College. “We’re teachers too, and we feel like we’re just not valued by the state. We train people to go into the workforce, and so what we do is develop our state. But our state is not rewarding us for helping the state.”
After Smith finishes cataloging books, she goes to her second job making truffles at a bakery. She said that many of her coworkers work extra jobs, like teaching additional classes at nearby universities, taking on custodial work, tutoring students, or running Instacart or Doordash deliveries.
Without these jobs, Smith said, “we can’t really afford to live.”
Last year, the Legislature allocated enough funds for a 1%-across-the-board raise for community college employees. In Pickett’s nine years of teaching at MCC, she said it was the first time she’d seen lawmakers give community college employees an across-the-board raise.
Pickett, who is the president of the Mississippi Association of Community College Faculty, an advocacy group, said she appreciates the money lawmakers have given for raises. She hopes that one day lawmakers will show they’re “ready to invest.”
“We have one of the best (community college) systems in the nation,” she said. “What would happen if we’re no longer here, to the workforce? To that big gap of students that need the community colleges?”
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Influential Delta business group calls for Medicaid expansion
A major economic development organization that represents the 19 Mississippi Delta counties on Monday called for lawmakers to expand Medicaid.
The Delta Council, long a powerful lobby that has the ear of top Republican leaders, is among the state’s first major, non-health care related organizations to recommend Medicaid expansion. Major medical groups in the state like the Mississippi Hospital Association have supported expansion for years.
The resolution was passed unanimously by Delta Council’s health and education committee. There are around 150 council members on the committee, though not all of them were in attendance.
“While Medicaid expansion is not a complete panacea for individuals, the community’s economy, health care providers, and employers, it is a critical first step that will benefit all of them in the short and long term,” the resolution reads.
Today, the Delta Council Health & Education Committee, chaired by Dr. Cass Pennington, unanimously approved a resolution supporting Medicaid Expansion. Wade Litton of Greenwood lead a special subcommittee reviewing the issue, and brought it before full committee for approval. pic.twitter.com/5WYENqFx8z
— Delta Strong (@MSDeltaStrong) April 11, 2022
The resolution was presented to the committee after a special subcommittee studied different options for helping struggling health care facilities in the Delta.
“After we talked to the experts and people in the industry, it became obvious that the best way to do that is to expand Medicaid,” said Wade Litton, chairman of Delta Council’s Economic Development Committee and the leader of the subcommittee.
Mississippi is one of just 12 states not to expand Medicaid despite an increased federal matching rate under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 that would provide the state with an extra $600 million per year.
Gov. Tate Reeves and Speaker of the House Philip Gunn, two of Mississippi’s top elected officials, fiercely oppose Medicaid expansion. Reeves derisively calls it “Obamacare expansion” and has promised to never support it. Both Reeves and Gunn maintain that the state cannot afford it, despite years of legitimate research and economic studies that indicate otherwise.
At least eight expansion bills were filed during the 2022 legislative session, but none were debated or considered before dying in committee.
If state leaders were to expand Medicaid, at least 225,000 Mississippians would qualify for health care coverage.
READ MORE: ‘It makes it hard to work’: The real cost of not expanding Medicaid in Mississippi
The Delta Council resolution repeatedly refers to the findings of a report from State Economist Corey Miller that showed expanding Medicaid would pay for itself and offer a litany of economic benefits.
According to the report, Medicaid expansion would:
- Reduce the uncompensated care costs incurred by hospitals statewide. While these costs hurt each hospital’s bottom line, they have devastated small, rural hospitals Mississippi, particularly in the Delta.
- Create nearly 11,300 jobs a year between 2022 to 2027. Most of these jobs would be added in the health care and social assistance sector.
- Increase the state’s gross domestic product by between $719 million and $783 million each year.
- Increase the state’s population by about 3,300 to 11,500 new residents per year between 2022 and 2027. Mississippi was one of just three states in the U.S. to lose population between 2010 to 2020.
Expanding Medicaid would also help decrease the costs incurred by small businesses across the state in paying health insurance premiums for their employees, according to Litton. High amounts of uncompensated care contribute to hospitals raising the price of care, which then leads insurers to raise premiums.
The result is a negative feedback loop that ultimately harms those paying for insurance, Litton said.
Litton also said that Mississippi taxpayers are already helping pay for Medicaid expansion through their federal income taxes, but aren’t seeing any of the benefits from it.
Medicaid currently covers around 780,000 Mississippians. Those include the disabled, poor pregnant women, poor children and a segment of the elderly population. Medicaid expansion would provide coverage to those making up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or $17,774 annually for an individual.
Tom Gresham, a member of the health and education committee who has previously served as chairman and president of Delta Council, said the passing of the resolution supporting Medicaid expansion shows that the leadership of the business and agriculture communities in the Delta understand the health care needs in their communities.
“You have to have a healthy workforce and quality medical care for communities to thrive and to grow,” Gresham said.
More people left the Mississippi Delta between 2010 and 2020 than any other area of the state. Gresham said that the much-needed economic boon Medicaid expansion would provide the Delta would help encourage people to stay.
Getting people insured would also improve access to health screenings and preventative care, resulting in huge savings for individuals, health systems and taxpayers, Gresham said.
“If we keep somebody from having a stroke, think of the money we save versus if they have a stroke and they have to get on disability,” Gresham said. “That’s how we keep people in the workforce.”
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Southern Miss’ Wizard of Oz guides one of nation’s top pitching staffs
Southern Miss lost its top two starting pitchers and the Golden Eagles’ top arm out of the bullpen after reaching an NCAA Regional championship game at Oxford last season.
Walker Powell and Hunter Stanley, the two starters, and Ryan Och, the reliever, all play professional baseball now. Among them, they provided 24 victories against only six defeats and an earned run average of just over two runs per game. They struck out roughly five times as many batters as they walked. They were dominant was what they were.
So, how in the world do you you rebuild all that?
In the Golden Eagles case, they just reloaded.
Southern Miss, currently ranked as high as No. 11 in the country, has replaced those guys. And guess what: This season’s Eagle pitching staff has produced numbers far better than last year’s. Last year, Southern Miss had a team earned run average of 3.74 and opponents hit .236 against them. This season, Eagle pitchers have a team ERA of 2.86, nearly a run lower, and opponents hit just .222.
READ MORE: Christopher (Oz) Ostrander: This guy knows his stuff
In fact, Southern Miss pitching ranks in the top five of nearly every NCAA statistical category. Little wonder the Golden Eagles enter a three-game series at Florida International (FIU) Thursday night with 24-8 record and the nation’s ninth best RPI. All that has been achieved against a schedule that currently ranks 23rd most difficult in the nation.
The one constant in all this pitching success: pitching coach Christian Ostrander, known in college baseball circles as Oz, as in the Wizard of. Ostrander carries the additional title of associate head coach this season as a reward for the job he has done. If he is not the best in the country at what he does, he certainly belongs in the conversation. Ostrander, a Delta State grad, has been successful wherever he has worked, including stints at Delta State, Jones Junior College and Louisiana Tech.
Says Scott Berry, Ostrander’s boss: “No doubt, Coach Oz is one of the best pitching coaches in our game today. He has a unique ability to connect with his pitchers through trust which enables their willingness to listen and develop accordingly. Many of our pitchers have taken their game to another level through his teaching both from the mental and physical sides of the game.”
Ostander’s philosophy of successful collegiate pitching can best be summed up in two words: “Throw strikes.”
No, Coach Oz is not alone in that regard but he surely seems to get his pitchers to buy into that philosophy better than 99% of the rest. Southern Miss ranks No. 2 in the nation in strikeout-to-walks ratio behind Tennessee. Golden Eagle pitching has struck out (353) nearly five times as many batters as they have walked (75). As a result, the Eagles rank third in the nation in earned run average. A deep bullpen has contributed mightily.
“I tell our guys, ‘Don’t give the hitters too much credit,’” Ostrander says. “Make them earn their way on. I tell them to watch batting practice and see how many outs hitters make against BP pitching. Don’t give them any gifts. Make them earn it.”
Southern Miss pitchers do. Look at the weekend starters: Tanner Hall has stuck out 68 batters and walked six in 49.2 innings. Hunter Riggins has fanned 41 and walked nine in 48 innings. Hurston Waldrep has struck out 63 and walked 13 in 42 innings. Waldrep, who has been the third starter in the rotation, has been most impressive of all, allowing only 25 hits and posting an ERA of 1.97. Opponents hit a measly .170 against him.
It helps to throw an explosive fastball with command in the 95-97 mph range, which Waldrep does.
“He’s power-power,” Ostrander said. “He’s got a four-pitch mix with that fastball, a slider, a curve and a split change that when he throws it right is a big league pitch. He works at it. He is strong as an ox. I call him Thor.”
Waldrep, recruited to Hattiesburg out of Thomasville, Ga., has seemingly come out of nowhere after pitching only 16 innings all season in 2021 as a freshman.
Ostrander believes he has more pitchers who might surprise, as Waldrep has, later on.
“We’re deep, I believe that,” Ostrander said. “We’ve got some guys down the line who are just waiting for an opportunity. There’s only so many innings available and when your starters go deep, as ours have, it’s hard to get everybody the work they probably deserve.”
All that depth should bode well at tournament time. Southern Miss – and Ole Miss – fans well remember the 2021 Oxford Regional when the Golden Eagles slugged their way to the championship game but then ran short of pitching in the finale, losing 12-9 to the Rebels in a slugfest that featured 12 home runs, seven by the Eagles.
With the depth of the current staff, the Eagles should be better able to handle playing five games in four days, as an NCAA Regional often requires.
As this is written, the Eagles are 32 games into a 55-game regular season schedule. Much of the best competition is behind them. With much baseball yet to be played, Southern Miss looks like an NCAA host currently. The Eagles surely pitch not only like an NCAA host but also like a team that could wind up a top eight seed.
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When this Mississippian sensed corruption at the welfare agency, she took matters into her own hands
Debbie Ellis knew something wasn’t right.
It was the spring of 2018 and day care providers like herself, who run centers that serve children in poverty, were in turmoil.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services hadn’t approved a single new child care voucher for a low-income working parent in five years.
And yet, the welfare agency had just bestowed a “financial windfall” on a north Mississippi nonprofit that had previously pulled in a modest annual revenue of around $1.5 million.
The new funding for the Family Resource Center of North Mississippi – which the state never publicly announced but would eventually total about $45 million – was enough for the nonprofit to open 15 new centers and increase its staff from 30 to 260 to run a program called “Families First for Mississippi.”
Ellis only knew about the nonprofit’s new cash infusion because the Daily Journal in Tupelo published an article about its recent expansion. She didn’t know where their money was coming from, but she had a hunch MDHS might be diverting funds from the Child Care Development Fund, which is supposed to supply the child care vouchers that centers like hers had stopped receiving.
The general public wouldn’t learn until two years later how much of that nonprofit’s operation was an alleged coverup for a still unresolved welfare scandal that occurred during then-Gov. Phil Bryant’s administration.
Family Resource Center is officially on the hook to repay the state $15 million, what the auditor says it misspent plus interest, though no one from the nonprofit has been accused of a crime. The founder of another nonprofit that helped run the Families First program, Nancy New, has pleaded not guilty to multiple embezzlement, bribery and racketeering charges and is potentially facing hundreds of years in prison.
Most of the misspent money came from a federal block grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), commonly known as “welfare”, but the Families First program also received some child care funds, according to a state audit.
Ellis still believes the newspaper article, which raised her suspicions, came about because an employee at the Family Resource Center, “who did not know there was anything wrong and did not know what not to say, just spilled the beans.”
Ellis’ instinct told her that this money, which was intended to help the state’s most vulnerable residents, was instead being shoveled into a program that lacked transparency and evidence of actually uplifting people in poverty.
“I knew then, this is entirely too much money for a subgrantee and there’s something to this story. There has to be. This is a lot of money,” Ellis recently told Mississippi Today. “The girl even reported that they were building new facilities, new facilities for Families First, one for every two counties. Now, there are eighty-something counties in Mississippi. That’s at least 40 facilities. And you know full well that grant money can not be used to build personal wealth. And yet these facilities were titled to Nancy New. It was absolutely stunning.”
But Ellis had an idea for how she would use this newfound knowledge. She took to her blog.
“Approximately one-half of all children who were being served (by the Child Care Development Fund) have been eliminated due to new, draconian eligibility requirements and new, additional hurdles in the redetermination process,” Ellis wrote on the website she runs on behalf of a consortium of child care providers in the Delta. “… Delusions of grandeur, bullying, inefficiency and state issued psychobabble rule the day.”
Agency leaders had recently acknowledged that MDHS programs were likely to suffer because of budget shortfalls. “Not so for Family Resource Center!” Ellis wrote in a sarcastic tone. “Wow! We are happy for them.”
Similar to TANF, the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) is a federal block grant. States can use the development fund to provide child care certificates to low-income parents so they can go to work or to improve the quality at day care centers.
Ellis, who opened The Learning Tree in Greenwood in 1986, relies on the voucher program to stay in business, because without it, many of the families she serves cannot afford to put their kids in child care. The department reported a voucher waitlist of more than 21,000 children in 2017. As Mississippi stopped issuing new vouchers, the state’s workforce participation rate hit a historic low of 55%.
“For those who would criticize the working poor, for those who would criticize those receiving public assistance, they need to understand these were working parents,” Ellis told Mississippi Today. “They were not at home sitting on their laurels. They were working. And because they lost their funding, they could no longer work. Now there’s a double standard in there somewhere, isn’t there?”
The day Ellis posted on her blog about the “financial windfall” of Families First, both the welfare director John Davis, who also is awaiting trial for his alleged role within the welfare fraud scheme, and Bryant’s early childhood education czar Laurie Smith reached out to the rebellious child care provider. They wanted to know what it would take for her to stop writing about them.
“Do you have time for a lunch meeting anytime soon?” Smith texted Ellis on March 12, 2018.
Ellis said she “knew from the immediate reaction from both John’s office and Laurie, that I had hit on something with the Families First post.”
Smith was the director of the governor-appointed State Early Childhood Advisory Council. A member of the council had sent Ellis’ blog post to Smith, asking for an explanation. “None of this is true,” Smith responded.
“They knew more would be coming,” Ellis said, referring to her blog. “I couldn’t put all of the pieces together, but I had enough information to know something was very, very sinister and wrong.”
Less than two week later, Ellis met with Smith, Davis and his deputy Dana Kidd, head of the economic assistance division, at Wellington’s Buffet inside the Hilton hotel on the north edge of Jackson.
“Honestly I never got past salad. Because I had a lot of things to say,” Ellis said.
“My posts had continued to say, ‘No new enrollment. No new certificates for new enrollment.’ And so they knew that my end game was to have that funding released,” she continued. “And we were also beginning to call for forensic audits for the CCDF from 2014 to 2018. That still has not been done … Where did that money go for five years? We still don’t know.”
At lunch, Ellis said, Smith was very quiet and Davis was friendly as always.
“He asked what he could do for me to help alleviate my concern for the Child Care Development Fund,” Ellis said. “And I said, ‘You can do for me as you must do for every low-income child care provider in the state of Mississippi: release this funding today. We don’t have a lot of time.’”
They asked Ellis how long she would give them to start issuing the vouchers before she would continue blogging. Ellis said two weeks. They missed the first deadline, but three weeks after that, the department began making their way down the wait list and working parents started receiving notification they had been approved for the benefit.
“I just knew we had to have new enrollment in order for the industry to survive. And we’re still recovering from that. The only salvation for the child care industry, as a whole, as a result of their shenanigans — the nicest thing to ever happen to us was a deadly pandemic,” Ellis said. “Because of the relief funding and the stabilization grants. With that kind of funding we can do the things that need to be done for child care.”
Today, low-income parents still face barriers getting the child care certificate, but Ellis said the agency isn’t systematically blocking enrollment anymore.
“There are good and honest people at DECCD (Division of Early Childhood Care and Development) today,” Ellis said. “But one thing the pandemic told us was that the policies are still punitive.”
This is a supplement to Part 4 of Mississippi Today’s series “The Backchannel,” which examines former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the running of his welfare department, which perpetuated what officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.
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Community colleges get $1.4 million grant to train more lineworkers from Accelerate Mississippi
Mississippi’s year-old workforce office, Accelerate Mississippi, has given an $1.4 million grant to a pair of community colleges grow their utility lineworker program.
The grant will fund Meridian Community College and East Central Community College’s efforts to double the number of lineworkers they train and help fill jobs needed by Mississippi Power and the East Mississippi Electric Power Association. The colleges, which are about 30 miles apart, serve six rural counties: Lauderdale, Leake, Neshoba, Newton, Scott and Winston.
“This is a quality program to train, equip and deploy utility lineworkers throughout their region,” said Accelerate Mississippi executive director Ryan Miller. “They provide an incredible service. In our minds, they’re first responders.”
Accelerate Mississippi oversees tens of millions of dollars, including a $25 million pot collected via an unemployment insurance tax on businesses called workforce enhancement training – or “WET” – funds.
Last year, the office awarded nearly $1 million to Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College to fund a diesel technician program, another field with high demands for workers.
Mississippi Power and the East Mississippi Electric Power Association had expressed a demand to the colleges already for skilled workers, especially for underground linemen, to install broadband cables as the state works to extend internet access to rural areas.
The colleges wrote in their application to the workforce office that a number of jobs had been lost in “one of the nation’s most economically distressed regions” because of layoffs and business closures. They identified advanced manufacturing, health care, and energy work as having the most potential employment opportunities for their part of the state.
But there is a gap between the region’s demand for certain jobs and the skills of their population.
“This was two community college colleges combining forces to apply for WET funds,” said Miller. “It’s exactly what we hope to see: let’s coordinate on resources to meet and address a need that is out there.”
The colleges expect to train up to 48 new utility workers over each 16-week session. Trainees can find jobs with wages between $21.75 and $31.56 an hour, according to data from the state employment security office.
Students will leave the program with the skills needed to perform electrical work both high on poles and underground.
The bulk of the funding is going to pay for the equipment – from a bucket truck to a mini excavator – needed to train more students.
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Mississippi legislative budget process: There’s got to be a better way
Many people who experience “conference weekend” at the Mississippi Legislature have the same takeaway: There’s got to be a better way to set a state budget. Some phrase it in more colorful or profane language.
It’s a harried, hurried couple of days in which a handful of selected negotiators haggle out a multi-billion dollar budget. Most members of the 174-member Legislature twiddle their thumbs for hours on end, then are hastily called into session to pass dozens of budget bills under deadline, with most not knowing exactly what’s in the bills on which they are voting.
Some lawmakers have asked in vain for more information — such as spreadsheets — before voting. Often, such info is not available because of the last-minute nature of Mississippi budget setting. Public transparency? It goes right out the window in this process.
READ MORE: Lawmakers end 2022 session with historic spending spree
Politicos over the years have likened it to a game of whack-a-mole, lemmings following each other off a cliff, college students scrambling on a term paper after procrastinating and a goat rodeo. Others have been less flattering.
In this frenzied affair, mistakes get made. Sometimes, big ones. Like when lawmakers accidentally spent $57 million more than they had because of a “staff error” in 2016. Or when 10,000 teachers (and $18.5 million) got left out of a teacher pay raise because of a “clerical error” in 2019. Other times, things get sneaked into spending bills that would otherwise never pass muster if more legislators or the public knew they were in there.
One might assume that this budgeting scramble plays a role in lawmakers and budget staff not uncovering some of the multi-million dollar malfeasance, embezzlement and bribery scandals that have rocked the state in recent years. More time and eyes spent on agency budgets and spending certainly couldn’t hurt.
At times lawmakers have vowed to change the process, provide more deliberation on budgeting. This was the case years ago during a push for “performance-based” budgeting. Lawmakers vowed to more deeply analyze what bang taxpayers are getting for their bucks with state agency spending and programs. But these efforts fizzled out. Otherwise, there appears to be very little long-range planning in the Legislature’s budget work.
Instead, Mississippi’s state government budgeting appears to have become even more hurried and the power over the purse strings more concentrated among fewer top lawmakers. And some policy changes have provided rank-and-file lawmakers less input and scrutiny of budgets.
For instance, the House and Senate Joint Legislative Budget Committee holds fall budget hearings, ostensibly for state agencies to make budget requests and justify their spending, and for lawmakers to ask questions. A couple of decades ago, these hearings — open to the public and media — lasted about a month and provided fairly in-depth insight. But over time, the hearings became shorter and more proforma. In recent years, the hearings have become a one-day affair with only a handful of agencies showing up and giving quick-hit superficial overviews.
Some lawmakers have pushed, usually to little avail, for policy and structure changes to address these issues. Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs, has for years filed such bills. One would have limited general legislative sessions — where lawmakers offer non-budget or general bills — to every other year. This would help weed out superfluous legislation and allow more vetting and contemplation of state spending and major issues.
Senate Accountability, Efficiency and Transparency Chairman John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, has recently suggested a programmed pause in budgeting. Once budget conference reports, or agreements between House and Senate negotiators, are filed, Polk suggested, instead of rushing a vote on them, the Legislature could recess for a week or two to allow all lawmakers — and even the public — time to scrutinize the proposals.
“It’s an idea,” Polk said. “That way, no one could say they didn’t have a chance to read them.”
In some states, major budget decisions are subject to more public scrutiny — even public hearings — before being passed into law. In Arizona, for instance, the public can speak on the budget at joint House and Senate appropriations hearings. A joint committee in Wisconsin travels the state holding town hall meetings for citizen input on state spending.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, serving his first term in that position, said, “I do not like conference weekend.”
Hosemann said he had planned this year to move up budget negotiations and not have a big scramble at the end. But he said that because of a standoff over tax cuts, the House “refused to enter into negotiations until a tax cut was passed.”
This resulted in negotiations being even later and more hectic than usual, in part because lawmakers not only had to set a $7 billion state budget, but decide how to spend $1.8 billion in federal pandemic stimulus from Congress.
“It is my goal that we do not go through that process, at that speed, again,” Hosemann said. “… Certainly, we are open to look at ways to make it better, more positive. We need to do it over a longer period of time, and more eyes on things would always be better.”
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Phil Bryant’s star-powered selfies and slick brochures didn’t Save the Children
As Jennifer Garner spoke about growing up and her family’s narrow escape from poverty in West Virginia, a C-SPAN camera panned over to then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant.
From across the room, Bryant held up his cellphone with both arms, capturing video of the “13 Going on 30” actress on his device.
Garner and Bryant were together at a panel on early childhood education at the 2017 National Governors Association meeting in Washington.
As many politicians do, Bryant liked to leverage his proximity to celebrities like country music singers, star athletes and even a reality TV personality to advance his agenda.
When it was his turn to speak, Bryant began by name-checking a low-income grandmother Garner had recently met in the Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou. Tracy Price’s grandchildren attended the nearby elementary school where Garner read to students during her visit.
“I hope Tracy Price is doing good,” Bryant said. “We sent Tracy a selfie yesterday so Jennifer could tell them she’s gone to the top of the government in Mississippi to make sure Tracy gets help.”
Garner beamed, nodding her head. Bryant’s comment suggested that Garner – the kind of “elite Hollywood liberal” that conservatives often mock – had some pull with the governor, that someone with her stardom wielded influence in the Magnolia State.
But like many low-income parents who were systematically denied government benefits during Bryant’s administration, Price did not, in fact, “get help.”
“Jennifer came to my house,” Price, 62, told Mississippi Today when the publication found her in January. “But I have gotten nothing from anybody since then. I have not received a thing. … Nothing. I had my grandkids here and I was losing my house and everything. They never reached out to me.”
When Garner arrived at her home, Price added, “I had no idea who she was.”
A few months after Bryant and Garner’s exchange in Washington, Bryant’s office arranged for the Mississippi Department of Human Services to start awarding welfare money to the international nonprofit that Garner represented in the meeting. The organization would later give Bryant a shiny award.
Save the Children, a century-old and well-regarded humanitarian organization, has received about $2 million in funding from Mississippi’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grant since then.
TANF, the subject of a sprawling fraud investigation in Mississippi, is an anti-poverty program best known for providing direct cash assistance to poor families.
When Save the Children came on the welfare scene, the state was denying more than 98% of poor families applying for the cash benefit while investigators say officials were misspending and embezzling millions from the program. On Bryant’s watch, more than $70 million that the welfare agency passed through two private nonprofits was misspent, according to independent auditors.
Unlike the more conspicuous welfare contractors, Save the Children received its welfare funding directly from the welfare agency for legitimate literacy, after-school and summer programs. Auditors did not find any of its funding was improper.
But a deeper look at Save the Children’s connection to the welfare program reveals how Bryant used the group to project an image that his administration was implementing innovative approaches to battling chronic poverty and nationally recognized early childhood development, even though the plan never got off the ground. Mississippi remains near the bottom of most national rankings dealing with early childhood development and well-being.
Price said she was initially turned off by Save the Children’s involvement in Mississippi, since the international group is best known for using private donations to aid and educate children in war-torn countries and after natural disasters.
“My whole thing was I kept asking, ‘Why do we have to save the world?’” Price told Mississippi Today. “We can start saving stuff right here. We’ve got a need here. … Charity starts at home.”
But less prominently, Save the Children also operates as a government contractor across the United States.
Save the Children says it has served people in Mississippi for more than 80 years, and former officials and advocates told Mississippi Today the organization really elevated its state presence in 2005 during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It most notably raised private money to build a new child care center on the Coast. The group also took over the federally funded Head Start Center in Sunflower in 2014 after it won the federal grant over the local organization that ran it before.
Ever since, Save the Children has received funding from the Mississippi Department of Education to provide literacy, nutrition and fitness programming in Mississippi’s notoriously underfunded public school system. Reports show it also runs a home-visiting program to coach parents on the best early childhood practices. Save the Children says it matches the public funding it gets with private dollars, almost 2-to-1 in Mississippi, to boost its state programs.
In 2020, Save the Children reported that 91% of 3-year-olds who spent at least one year in its “Early Steps” program had an average or above average vocabulary.
“I have never met a parent that didn’t want to give their child the best possible start in life, but many that just don’t know how. So that’s why these programs are so important,” said Yolanda Minor, Save the Children’s Mississippi State Director. “… We go in and assess the parent, build their self-confidence, provide those age-appropriate activities.”
Current Gov. Tate Reeves awarded the charity more than $460,000 from the Governor’s Emergency Education Response (GEER) pandemic relief funds in 2021. Since current MDHS director Bob Anderson took over and promised to clean up the agency, Save the Children is one of the few welfare grantees introduced during the scandal who is still receiving TANF grants through a newly implemented competitive bid process. In its 2020 application for TANF funding, Save the Children said it employs 160 people in Mississippi and serves 7,529 children and parents.
Save the Children fits as a TANF recipient because in addition to the “welfare check,” states may use the federal dollars for a variety of services including child care, workforce training, transportation, parenting classes and aid to children at risk of abuse and neglect.
Mississippi Today examined Save the Children’s introduction into the welfare landscape, and like all subgrantees at the time, the charity did not have to win a competitive bid to receive funding. They just had to have the governor’s ear.
Emails show Bryant and his education policy adviser Laurie Smith had a hand in channeling welfare funds to Save the Children for the first time in 2017.
Smith, originally from Arizona, was a public school teacher who eventually served as director of Mississippi Building Blocks, an early education and child care center training program launched in 2008 by former Netscape CEO and philanthropist Jim Barksdale’s reading institute.*
Gov. Bryant’s publicly stated policy preferences – “school choice” and resistance to fully-funding public schools – were opposite those Barksdale endorsed. Yet the governor eventually tapped Smith as his education policy adviser in 2012.
Smith, who led both the State Early Childhood Advisory Council and the State Workforce Investment Board for Bryant, had great control and decision-making power in her position in the governor’s cabinet.
They seemed to take a special interest in keeping tax dollars flowing to Save the Children.
“The Governor, through Laurie’s advice, helped us obtain some TANF funding the past year or so and have been able to use those funds to sustain programs as legislative appropriations have decreased over time,” a lobbyist for Save the Children wrote in an email to former MDHS director Davis in November of 2018.
Save the Children had been receiving a $150,000 direct allocation within the Legislature’s annual education appropriations bill, but in 2018, it was reduced to $50,000.
Trevor Moe, Save the Children’s Managing Director of Partnership Development, told Mississippi Today that it is not unusual for the organization to press leaders to find the funding so it can keep providing services to kids in need. While Save the Children does refer families to other resources, they keep a narrow focus on kids.
“Our approach to dealing with governors, elected officials, is … we’re very zealous about advocating for rural kids – unabashedly so,” he said.
Price said Save the Children selected her as a parent advocate in 2016 because of her involvement at one of the schools it served.
Years later, during a particularly difficult time in her life near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Price sent an email to the organization.
“I would love to do more but I am struggling to hold my life together,” Price wrote. “I have nobody to help me … Jen said that she would never forget me yet I knew that we would never meet again. Who helps us in our own country? … I am rich at heart but struggling to make ends meet. I have never reached out to anyone. Can your world wide organization help me?”
Price said she never received a response.
Garner has served as an ambassador for Save the Children for more than a decade, with a focus on early childhood development, an area of special concern in Mississippi. Science shows that the first five years of a child’s life is the most critical for brain development. Experts say that supporting development in a child’s earliest years, even before pre-K, is an effective way of interrupting generational poverty.
Today, more than one in four Mississippi children live in poverty, the highest rate in the nation. For Black children, the poverty rate is 43%.
There are several agencies that operate public programs for the youngest Mississippians: the health department has an early intervention program; Medicaid provides health insurance and case management; some public schools offer pre-K through what are called Early Learning Collaboratives; and local community organizations operate federally funded Head Start programs for low-income families.
But the state’s private child care industry, which does not receive a direct allocation in state or federal budgets, is an often overlooked avenue for helping the tens of thousands of babies and young kids it impacts on a daily basis.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services, which saw massive misspending and theft allegations during the Bryant administration, is in charge of the federal fund that props up these private child care centers in low-income areas.
The fund, the Child Care Development Fund, provides vouchers to working class parents so they can afford the child care that allows them to keep a job. The agency’s child care division also grants some of the money to centers that qualify so they can make improvements in accordance with a state plan and quality rating system the division develops.
During his administration, Bryant acknowledged the importance of early education and claimed Mississippi was making progress in that arena. He singled out Save the Children as a key player in making it happen.
At that 2017 governor’s meeting, he held up an orange and fuschia booklet with a wordy title in white letters across the front: “Family Based Unified and Integrated Early Childhood System.”
“The great thing about Save the Children is, we have a statewide plan,” he said, pamphlet in hand. “We worked three years on this, for early childhood learning in the state of Mississippi and this program fits exactly into this plan. It was almost as if, through fate, perhaps divine intervention, that Save the Children came to be a part of this.”
The plan included several components but the main objective was two-fold: To usher in a new child care quality rating system, replacing an old controversial policy, and to increase training opportunities in private child care centers so the employees can appropriately educate, not just supervise, the kids in their care. The less-than-novel concept mirrored the Building Blocks program Smith previously ran. They called this new training effort Early Childhood Academies, which purported to partner with Families First for Mississippi, the program that was misspending tens of millions of TANF funds.
“We’ve been creative in the funding,” Bryant said in the meeting. “We use TANF. Delta Regional Authority has been a part of this. Private funds. Wherever we can find funds, we go and do so.”
The previous quality rating system, which rated centers one through five stars and provided higher reimbursement rates to centers who scored higher, had proved unsuccessful. Fewer than half of centers participated, and advocates complained that the policy worsened racial inequity and offered few resources to actually help centers improve. A 2016 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigation into Mississippi’s child care voucher program found that “far too many eligible children are not serviced by the subsidy program, and that the money that should support this eligible population of children is redirected elsewhere.”
The new system was to rate centers either “standard” or “comprehensive.” Standard centers would meet minimum guidelines, plus additional training and professional development, while comprehensive centers would provide more staff coaching and conduct child assessments, among other requirements. Centers would have to rate as standard to participate in the voucher program while comprehensive centers would receive higher reimbursement rates.
Mississippi received a federal $10.6 million Preschool Development Grant at the end of 2018 to implement the plan.
But the idea, concocted by Laurie Smith and data scientist Mimmo Parisi of the governor-appointed State Early Childhood Advisory Council, barely materialized. The former council’s website, along with the reports and information it published at that time, was eventually wiped from the internet.
“Everybody interested in participating in the comprehensive plan was invited to a luncheon,” said Amy Berry, director of Little Saints Academy, which received $5,000 through the grant to buy a laminator among other equipment. “They served really nice food, gave us little plaques, gave us all kinds of little trinkets and stuff. They were just spending the money, in essence.”
State leadership placed the grant under the Mississippi Community College Board. The board then hired Austin Smith, the nephew of then-MDHS director John Davis, to serve as the program manager.
Austin Smith (no known relation to Laurie Smith) was also hired to develop a “coding academy” for Families First for Mississippi, the MDHS-funded program that perpetuated the welfare scandal. A forensic audit of the department showed that his employment history included restaurants, a canoe rental company and his father’s landscaping business and suggested he was not qualified to conduct this work. Austin Smith received an auditor’s office demand to repay the state almost $380,000.
His uncle, Davis, also a Bryant appointee, is currently awaiting trial in what officials have called the largest public embezzlement case in state history.
The FBI also investigated the board’s spending of the preschool grant in 2020, former Mississippi Community College Board Director Andrea Mayfield told Mississippi Today, but have not made any public allegations surrounding it.
Behind the scenes of the preschool grant, communication shows Laurie Smith was calling the shots with a particular interest in Save the Children. Mayfield, who chaired the governor’s workforce board that Laurie Smith directed, worked closely with Smith to carry out her vision.
“Hi- will you continue with save the children funding?” Laurie Smith texted Davis on June 21, 2019, just a few days before investigators would administer his first polygraph test and he would be forced out of office. “I’m going to have pdg (Preschool Development Grant) pay for some additional work.”
Mississippi Today requested all expenditure documents, invoices and receipts pertaining to the Preschool Development Grant funding. Save the Children does not appear as a direct subgrant recipient. The organization said it never received this funding.
Under the grant, the community colleges sent trainers out to participating child care centers to work with the staff and read to the children, but Berry said the training her center received was too sporadic and short lived to result in meaningful progress. Much of the money also went to private day care centers to buy equipment like printers and laptops or supplies like ink and markers.
About $190,000 went to Mississippi Community Education Center founded by Nancy New, a key figure in Mississippi’s unraveling welfare scandal. Records show the nonprofit used most of the money to purchase commodities and equipment for child care centers.
Overall, Mississippi spent only about 60% of the preschool funds it was awarded, the final expenditure report shows, leaving about $4.2 million unspent.
“There was nothing beyond giving child care centers furniture,” Deloris Suel, owner of Prep Company Tutorial School in Jackson, said of the grant. “That was the biggest part of it.”
Near the end of Bryant’s last term in October of 2019, then-President Donald Trump appointed Laurie Smith to lead the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau. Now, she’s a partner at Bryant’s lobbying company; her work with Building Blocks is absent from her staff profile on the firm’s website.
Laurie Smith declined to interview for this story, but she sent the following statement: “Although I wasn’t there at the time, once the decision to not move forward with the comprehensive model was made, returning federal taxpayer dollars seems like a responsible decision.”
By the end of the grant period in early 2020, the department had still failed to designate any centers as “comprehensive,” and the rating system was soon abandoned. The state was relying on an additional $10 million federal grant it applied for in late 2019 in hopes of keeping the plan intact. Save the Children representatives said they had discussed working under this grant with state leaders, and even assisted Mississippi with its application.
In a recent interview with Mississippi Today, Bryant said that the state secured $50 million for this early childhood program – which records show is not true. Laurie Smith also told Mississippi Today in 2019 that the state would be going after a $50 million grant, but it only applied for $10 million.
The government eventually rejected Mississippi’s application and the whole operation collapsed.
“It was a complete failure to launch,” said Debbie Ellis, owner of Greenwood child care center The Learning Tree and leader of a coalition of providers in the Mississippi Delta. “And it set us back years.”
Today, there is no child care quality rating system in Mississippi.
Yet, Bryant was still touting the defunct program as recently as December 2020.
“When I was governor, I helped create the Family Based Unified and Integrated Early Childhood System, which connects and integrates resources and services for both parents/caregivers and their children,” Bryant said well after the grant was over and the program ceased to function. “This system was expanded as Mississippi secured a $10.6 million federal Preschool Development Grant. This grant funding is helping to strengthen the state’s early childhood systems and improve access and quality for Mississippi families with children age five and under.”
Mississippi Today informed Bryant that no centers ever received the comprehensive designation. “If you’re telling me some government program didn’t work properly, I’m not saying that they always do,” Bryant told Mississippi Today.
Bryant did characterize the program as a success because, he said, “I was told that it was.”
“Dr. (Laurie) Smith managed that and from every report I got was doing a very good job,” Bryant said.
Asked how he knew, during his administration, if reports he received about the efficacy of his programs were honest, he responded, “You don’t. It’s impossible.”
Bryant also said he didn’t know that the community college board had placed Austin Smith, who according to the forensic audit had little experience in this kind of programming, over the management of the grant or that the state failed to spend 40% of the funding.
Ellis said the early childhood development plan’s purpose was little more than to make Mississippi politicians and bureaucrats look good, “to look like they were doing something no one else had been able to do.”
“And they were not,” she said. “They actually did nothing but print beautiful brochures and tout a program throughout the nation that never launched in Mississippi.”
In October of 2019, Save the Children awarded Bryant the “Champion for Children Award” for being a leader in child advocacy.
In an email to Mississippi Today, Save the Children said Bryant’s efforts with the Early Childhood Academies made him the right candidate for one of their awards.
The organization also praised Bryant for the reduced caseload at Child Protection Services, an agency that remains out of compliance with a federal settlement due to underfunding; reading gains ushered in after the controversial “third grade reading gate”; and the Early Learning Collaboratives, public pre-K programs set up by the Legislature in 2013.
The state most recently ranked 39th in the nation for preschool access for 4-year-olds and 42nd for state spending in early childhood education, according to the The National Institute for Early Education Research annual preschool report.
Mississippi ranked last in the nation for overall child well-being in The Casey Foundation’s 2021 KIDS COUNT report.
But there is some hope for progress today. In 2021, the state doubled its investment in pre-K. MDHS also recently announced it is developing a new curriculum for child care centers with a $5 million grant to Mississippi State University, calling it the “first step in a strategic partnership for early childhood development.”
Back at the 2017 governor’s meeting in Washington, Garner told stories about visiting the homes of poor families and encouraging often stressed-out moms to talk, read and play with their babies. This is the cornerstone of the work Save the Children has been doing in the Mississippi Delta.
Garner described the homes as having “not an ounce of sound or joy in the place.”
“When we walk into these homes, you would be suffocated by the silence in the rooms,” she said.
Mississippi Today shared the video with Price, who had no idea that Mississippi’s governor had mentioned her in a national broadcast. She said she never received a “selfie” from the governor or Garner.
Price also said Garner is mistaken when it comes to the Mississippi homes and families she knows.
“Jen missed the mark. Said too much incorrect fluff that leads any reader or listeners to the wrong conclusion,” Price wrote in a text message. “We struggle to survive but proudly. There is a lot of talent here but no opportunity.”
Save the Children told Mississippi Today that Garner was not available for an interview for this story.
Price was born in Jackson but grew up and went to college in California. There, she spent 29 years working for the same telephone provider until the company abruptly laid her off in 2008. A single mom of a teenager, Price moved back to Mississippi to be with family and wound up in Bolivar County, a particularly economically ravaged part of the Delta.
Now, Price takes care of her two grandchildren, 15 and 13, while their mom finds work elsewhere.
Price said she almost lost her home a few years ago due to a squabble with the previous owners. She now owns the house, which is situated on an isolated piece of property out in the county.
But with the little income she pulls from disability payments, she’s struggled to afford upkeep. The house needs plumbing and siding repairs, but as Mississippi Today has previously reported, home rehabilitation programs for low-income families are sparse in Mississippi.
Price had to take out high interest debt that she would like to consolidate and refinance, but she said lenders have locked her out of opportunities. She said she worked to get her credit score well into the 700s, then a recent $9,000 medical bill for one of the children caused it to drop again. She started a trucking business in 2017 but said she’s been unable to get business loans to purchase the necessary equipment to keep it running. The company didn’t qualify for any of the pandemic relief, either.
“Society has suppressed me economically and reduced me to a credit score,” Price told Mississippi Today. “If you don’t know somebody, you ain’t getting nothing here.”
Price may struggle, but she said that’s what strengthens her faith and the bonds in her family.
In a picture taken with Garner at Price’s home, peeling beige paint near the ceiling is visible. So are colorful curtains, a display cabinet that held a series of Black figurines passed down to her daughter, and Price’s wide, infectious smile.
Her home is not joyless.
“I go down to the projects, I go down to the low-income places, it’s more joy down there than I see anywhere else,” Price said. “My grandkids are happy, you know? They smile all the time, laugh. They normal; they fight and cuss at each other, too. But they got a roof over their head. They got food in their mouth. They got clothes on their back.”
“They know – beyond a shadow of a doubt – they know their grandma got them.”
*Editor’s note: Jim Barksdale is a Mississippi Today co-founder and major donor.
This is Part 4 in Mississippi Today’s series “The Backchannel,” which examines former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the running of his welfare department during what officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.
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Reeves signs bill creating Mississippi broadband office, appoints Sally Doty to run it
Gov. Tate Reeves on Wednesday signed into law the “Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi Act” and appointed former state senator and current Public Utilities Staff Director Sally Doty to run the new BEAM office.
The new office will direct hundreds of millions in federal dollars to expand broadband internet access across Mississippi, where some have estimated 40% of the state lacks access. The effort has been likened to providing electricity to rural Mississippi in the 1930s.
“It is my strong belief that one’s zip code should not limit access to these technologies,” Reeves said as he signed House Bill 1029 into law and announced Doty’s appointment. “… Mississippi needs someone who gets up every single day and asks, ‘What can we do to improve and increase access to broadband for our entire state.”
The new BEAM office, under the state Department of Finance and Administration, will take applications from internet providers and dole out $162 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act money earmarked for broadband expansion projects. Mississippi also is expected to receive from $500 million to $1.1 billion for broadband expansion from the infrastructure bill Congress passed late last year.
Doty, as public utilities staff director appointed by Reeves in 2020, has already been helping oversee broadband expansion work in Mississippi. The state has received hundreds of millions of federal dollars for broadband expansion in recent years. It received $495 million from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund and lawmakers earmarked another $75 million from the first round of pandemic relief the state received. Most of this money went to rural electric cooperatives.
READ MORE: Cable giants, Mississippi electric cooperatives battle over federal broadband dollars
Doty said electric co-ops and small rural phone companies that received the earlier round of funds have laid thousands of miles of fiber optics and hooked up thousands of households.
“We want to allow all Mississippians to participate in the digital economy we are all part of now,” Doty said. She said Mississippians need access to telehealth, higher education, remote working and other online opportunities to compete and “all of these opportunities depend on connectivity in today’s world.”
House Public Utilities Chairman Scott Bounds, R-Philadelphia, author of the act, said 40 other states have such an office overseeing broadband expansion as the federal government pumps billions of dollars into the efforts nationwide. He said the new office and legislation will be invaluable for future state and federal efforts.
Reeves said the new office will help with “accountability and transparency” of Mississippi’s deployment of hundreds of millions of federal dollars for broadband. But he was also questioned at a press conference after signing the bill about exemptions in the new law for BEAM from public records and open meetings laws. The new law says BEAM records are “confidential, proprietary, and subject to exemption from disclosure.”
Reeves said there are “accountability measures in place,” for the new office and that it will be accountable to him and thus taxpayers. He said the public disclosure shield measures are needed so that internet providers will be candid about their work and service area maps. Nationwide, there is a problem coming up with accurate internet service maps.
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