Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
Gov. Tate Reeves speaks to media about his shelter-in-place order for Lauderdale County, as Executive Director of MEMA Col. Gregory S. Michel listens during a press conference at the State of Mississippi Woolfolk Building in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, March 31, 2020.
As Mississippi’s number of COVID-19 cases continues to hit all-time highs, Gov. Tate Reeves is imposing a mandate to wear masks in 13 counties – including some of the state’s most populous.
During a Thursday news conference, Reeves said the criteria for counties chosen include having seen 200 new cases within the last 14 days or having had an average of 500 cases per 100,000 residents over that time.
“We’ve got to take additional measures or our health care system is going to be overwhelmed,” Reeves said.
The mask order goes into effect Monday, but during Thursday’s news conference Reeves pleaded with residents of all counties to wear masks when in public places and to also social distance.
The counties in the order touch most areas of the state. The counties are Hinds, DeSoto, Harrison, Rankin, Jackson, Washington, Sunflower, Grenada, Madison, Claiborne, Jefferson, Wayne and Quitman.
In addition, the mandates limit social gatherings to 10 people indoors and 20 outdoors.
Reeves had hoped to lift all restrictions put in place to combat COVID-19 by July 1, but during the past weeks the number of cases has soared, resulting in strains on the state’s health care system.
On Thursday, the Department of Health reported 703 new cases with 16 new deaths. The state has now reported 33,591 cases with 1,204 deaths.
“We went for literally months having no more than 400 cases in a day,” Reeves said. In recent weeks, the state has routinely reported more than 500 cases per day and has exceeded 1,000 new cases in a day.
Reeves’ new executive order does not change existing mandates limiting capacities at businesses such as restaurants, bars and casinos.
“To my fellow Mississippians: Please take this as an alarm,” Reeves said. “Our numbers are getting worse. We need your cooperation … The little things can make a difference. Please be smart. Stay safe and protect your loved ones.”
Despite the increasing number of cases Reeves continues to maintain his goal is to have schools open for the upcoming school year.
Tomato sculptures pepper downtown Crystal Springs, Mississippi, hailed as the “tomatopolis of the world” for the ubiquitous crop. Workers at the generator plant here say they don’t feel the company is doing enough to protect them from the coronavirus, for which several employees have tested positive.
Mississippi plant workers call for greater COVID-19 protections after coworker’s death and as cases continue to climb
Mississippi is entering a “sea of outbreaks,” fueled by community transmission but creating dangerous working conditions in factories across the state
When Terrence Tanner arrived to work at Hitachi ABB Power Grids on Wednesday at 5:55 a.m., he clocked in, gathered with his coworkers and waited for management to give their daily update on coronavirus cases inside the plant.
But the update didn’t come. There had been rumblings that a worker left the plant the previous afternoon with possible COVID-19 symptoms, a runny nose, to go get tested.
Tanner, vice president of the IUE-CWA Local 83799 union, and his coworkers said a prayer and dispersed to their work stations at the transformer manufacturing plant in Crystal Springs.
Ten minutes later, a manager told everyone in the winding department, where Tanner works, to file out of the plant while they conducted a “deep clean.”
About 40 workers waited outside for nearly four hours, fearful they’d be written up if they left, before a manager came out to address questions from furious employees.
“It’s a lot of things they ain’t really just sharing with the people,” Tanner said. “My worry is we don’t know really who we’re coming into contact with in the plant. We really don’t know who got what.”
The manager asked them to return to work.
As a deadly virus sweeps across Mississippi, ABB says it’s done virtually everything it’s supposed to — short of ceasing operations and sending its roughly 300 workers home.
The company allows some employees to telecommute and requires floor workers to social distance and wear masks where distancing isn’t possible. It said it offers employees daily briefings regarding COVID-19 cases “consistent with our policy of complete transparency.” It said it’s providing sanitizer, screening the temperatures of employees as they enter and offering an unprecedented 14 days of paid leave to people who become ill with the virus. The plant typically doesn’t offer any paid sick or personal days, employees said.
Anna Wolfe
Dozens of transformers manufactured at the ABB Power Grid plant in Crystal Springs sit in storage, waiting to be delivered to customers, such as hospitals and other businesses.
The reality is that the efforts are not sufficient for workers who fear for their safety and have no option but to return to the plant each day.
Sixteen ABB employees have tested positive for COVID-19, the company told Mississippi Today Wednesday, including six active cases. Considering the size of the plant, the rate of confirmed cases among the employees is roughly five times that of the entire state population.
One worker, who was just 46, died from COVID-19 in mid-June.
Kevin Brown, a 14-year ABB employee and chief steward for the union, said his cousin recently told him he should quit his job so he can quarantine like so many Americans are doing right now. “I said, ‘I can’t afford to go home,’” Brown said.
“It’s very scary because people are dying and it don’t seem like to me that the company is concerned with anything actually other than the bottom dollar,” Brown said.
The company says it follows a “very intensive contact tracing procedure” and infected employees have all caught the virus through personal contact outside the plant, but workers aren’t buying it.
“The painter that has it right now … he told me that he don’t go anywhere. And everywhere he go, he wears a mask, ” Brown said. “And the only places he goes is work and home, so he had to catch it at work.”
“We had three people in the same department go home in one week,” he added.
And yet, the company is doing all it’s required to do. State health officials have reiterated throughout the pandemic and especially recently that their contact tracing is limited in capacity. Both State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs and State Epidemiologist Paul Byers said Tuesday that businesses are not even legally required to alert all employees of an individual COVID-19 case. For the health department’s role, officials say they work with businesses on guidelines and quarantine recommendations once they identify a patient’s workplace. The problem though, is timing those conversations and recommendations within the patient’s transmission window.
“You’re kind of always behind because of the natural time lag. We do have some public health authority to do some stuff but, you know, mostly what we’ll do is we’ll give recommendation and guidance,” Dobbs said. “Every business, every business (his emphasis), every person needs to have a safety protocol that uses the masking and the socially distanced engineering or we’re going to have outbreaks. The reality of it is, beyond recommendations and guidelines and helping with that case investigation, … there’s limited capacity to do on the ground, individual outbreak investigation like we would normally want to do. We’re just absolutely not equipped for it.”
Meanwhile, community transmission is rampant across Mississippi and adding to the health department’s contact tracing and investigation capacity.
“We’re going to be in a sea of outbreaks,” Dobbs said Tuesday, adding most cases are stemming from young people spreading the virus at social gatherings. More than 30,000 total cases and 1,000 deaths have been reported, as the case-positivity rate and rolling new case average continue to climb.
ABB’s North American headquarters maintained that the safety of its workers is its top priority.
While a corporate headquarters statement said its plants are cleaning common areas — such as restrooms, cafeteria, door handles, sinks and office areas — at least three times a day, Brown explained that disinfectant cannot be used on the metal machinery and copper wire he and his colleagues touch all day.
A worker who had tested positive left work one Friday in late June to quarantine. Another worker and union president Robert Daniels arrived to the plant on Saturday morning to work on the same machine.
“No cleaning had been done. So they’re actually exposing him to the same virus that he had because the company is not doing what we feel like they should be doing,” Brown said. “The area should have been roped off.”
“They don’t want to stop production,” Daniels said.
Anna Wolfe
Robert Daniels, Hitachi ABB Power Grid plant worker and president of the IUE-CWA Local 83799 union, and chief steward Kevin Brown stand outside the union offices on June 25, 2020. Workers are calling on the company to increase pay and protections at the plant during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brown also said plant management hadn’t replaced disinfectant in the bathrooms in the manufacturing departments for two months, claiming the product is on back order. But Brown said they did stock bathrooms in the offices where management works.
As for case reporting and safety standards, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration does issue disinfectant and infected worker isolation guidance, and requires most workplaces to report work-related COVID-19 cases. But, like most coronavirus reporting, nuance in the way data is collected and shared dictates its reliability. OSHA, which regulates safety protocols in workplaces, advises safety officers to make good-faith efforts to determine if COVID-19 cases among workers are work-related.
“COVID-19 illnesses are likely work-related when several cases develop among workers who work closely together and there is no alternative explanation,” OSHA’s reporting guidance advises. But, OSHA goes on to advise, “If, after the reasonable and good faith inquiry described above, the employer cannot determine whether it is more likely than not that exposure in the workplace played a causal role with respect to a particular case of COVID-19, the employer does not need to record that COVID-19 illness.”
Union reps say most of the workers’ cases were among staff whose work stations are close together.
More research is emerging about how coronavirus spreads from person to person. While it’s been clear to scientists that the virus is spread through respiratory droplets, early attention focused on disinfecting surfaces as the best way to mitigate spread. Over the last few months, research has shifted to highlight the role of airborne particles in virus transmission. Researchers agree that hand-washing, masking and social distancing are the best protective measures, but there is disagreement on how small the viral particles are and how long they can linger in the air.
Most employees at the plant are wearing masks during the workday, but in the welding shop, temperatures of 98 to 100 degrees make it “pretty much impossible to wear a mask all day,” Brown said.
The World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still suggest that person-to-person transmission – spreading respiratory droplets through close contact – is the most prominent form of transmission, but growing evidence suggests the virus can linger in the air. This week, WHO agreed to review new evidence and consider updating its policy recommendations – particularly affecting indoor, closed, poorly ventilated spaces, like most factory settings.
On May 20, the union presidents at five ABB plants in Pennsylvania, California, Missouri and Mississippi sent a letter to national headquarters asking for hazard pay, a 15 percent bump to hourly pay, during the pandemic.
“While each shop has put their own mitigation efforts in place, we still know that reporting to work means potentially exposing ourselves, our families, and our communities to the virus,” they wrote.
Union officials said the company, which just merged with Japanese conglomerate Hitachi to form Hitachi ABB Power Grids on July 1, would let managers at individual plants decide whether to grant the additional pay.
“Employees work in controlled environments that generally allow physical distancing and do not require any interaction with the public. For this reason, we have not offered ‘hazard pay,’” the company told Mississippi Today by email.
Management at the local plant, which has more direct control over the workplace conditions employees must endure, has shown even less concern, workers told Mississippi Today.
In response to the workers’ requests: “‘You’re lucky you have a job.’ That’s what she told me,” Brown said.
Daniels said plant management went as far as to obtain medical records from a worker’s doctor in order to see if he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
The safety director called the worker, who was waiting for the results, to inform him he had tested negative even before the doctor called, Daniels said, and urged the employee to come back to work. Daniels said he tried to complain to the health department, but the representative he reached said they couldn’t do anything about the situation.
“For the protection of our employees, our safety director confirms that any impacted employee tests negative before returning to work,” the company said in an email in response to Mississippi Today.
Daniels himself, an employee for 22 years, was fired in March after he wrote a Facebook post, informing his followers of the developments at the plant regarding the virus. At that time, the plant had sent a handful of people home to quarantine because they had recently traveled.
Their reason for firing him? Misrepresentation. He wrote in his post that ABB had sent two people home, he said, when they had really sent four.
Daniels said the human resource officer acknowledged that he had “a good case for arbitration,” when she terminated him — and he eventually got his job back after securing an attorney and signing an apology — but the union believes it illustrated the plant’s efforts to silence its workers.
The workers have asked ABB, now Hitachi ABB Power Grids, to temporarily shut down the whole facility for deep cleaning; establish a schedule for regular cleaning of workstations; notify the workers of all COVID cases; and send workers home to quarantine for 14 days anytime they test positive or come into contact with a person who has tested positive. They await a response.
State health officials gave a plea to Mississippians on Thursday to take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously as cases continue to rise and major hospitals reach full capacity.
UMMC Communications
Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the vice chancellor of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, at a press conference at UMMC.
“This issue is not about limiting anybody’s right to make their own personal decisions,” said Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the vice chancellor of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, at a press conference at UMMC. “Things are not normal, and we can’t behave as if they are, because we’re fooling ourselves and the numbers are showing that what we’re doing now is not working.”
Mississippi reached its highest seven-day average for new daily cases on July 4 at 734, a 135 percent increase from exactly a month ago. On Wednesday, the state recorded its highest number of confirmed hospitalizations in a day with 686, a 67 percent increase from a month ago.
The surge in patients have led to limited bed space and ambulance diversions across the state, which in turn caused the health department to order six counties, mostly in Central Mississippi,to limit elective procedures again.
State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said five of the state’s largest medical centers had zero available ICU beds as of Wednesday; four other hospitals had less than five percent availability, and three others have less than 10 percent, he said.
“We’ve been talking about this, saying it’s coming, and here it is. And not only is it here, it’s going to get worse,” Dobbs said. “Our biggest medical institutions that take care of our sickest patients have no room to take care of additional folks. Now is the time for hospitals to step up and try to counter the impacts of reckless social behavior.”
Elective surgeries in Hinds, Rankin, Madison, Forrest, Jones and Washington will be limited effective Wednesday through July 20. Health officials warned Thursday in a meeting of trauma care providers that more counties will likely be added. Gov. Tate Reeves said Wednesday that part of the reason for the swift change is due to some hospitals not adhering to the order to reserve 25 percent capacity for COVID-19 patients. Mississippi is one of only a few states to proactively renew elective procedure bans and currently has the third highest hospitalization rate per capita behind Arizona and Texas.
UMMC has already turned away transfers of COVID-19 patients from other hospitals, as well as patients with heart conditions, strokes, and trauma, said Dr. Alan Jones, the hospital’s assistance vice chancellor for clinical affairs.
UMMC Communications
Dr. Alan Jones at a press conference at UMMC.
“We’re the only hospital in the state that cares for major trauma, we’re the only hospital in the state that cares for transplant patients,” Jones said. “These are not things that are elective, these are things that save lives, and if we continue to see this trajectory we won’t be able to do those things. We’ll be overrun.”
Preparing for new school year and hurricane season
When asked about schools reopening in just a month, Dobbs said that teaching children will not be the hard part, but rather limiting recreational gathering among young people.
“We can educate kids safely, but we can’t do it if we’re living in this society of reckless abandon where it’s more important to go a bar and violate the rules than it is to have our kids go to school, our hospitals be able to take care of us, and our businesses be able to thrive,” he said.
Dr. Anita Henderson, president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Mississippi Chapter, said that school districts are discussing how to limit children’s movement when classes restart. She mentioned methods such as moving teachers between classrooms instead of students and encouraging classes outdoors.
“We know there’s a risk, we know children are going to get sick, but our goal is to mitigate that risk,” Henderson said.
UMMC Communications
Dr. LouAnn Woodward and Dr. Anita Henderson at a press conference at UMMC.
With the state also in the beginning of the hurricane season, Dr. Jonathan Wilson, incident manager at UMMC, said that Mississippi and neighboring states do not have the resources to handle an additional major disaster during the pandemic.
“Hospital capacity has already been taxed,” he said. “You can only surge to a certain point, and then you’re surging into the parking lot where you’re going to start taking care of patients, and that’s really the scenario we’d be looking at if these trends continue and we have a major hurricane.”
Throughout the conference, Woodward and others repeated the three key mitigation guidelines of wearing masks, avoiding gatherings, and washing hands. Dobbs reiterated his frustration with Mississippians’ avoiding those guidelines.
“There was this mythical theory in people’s minds, that was never expressed, that we’re going to shut it down for three weeks and then everything’s going to be normal,” he said. “We sacrificed a lot in those three weeks, and then we’ve given it all back and then some.”
“I’m utterly frustrated by our inability to follow very simple things, and to believe crazy conspiracy nonsense as an excuse to not do the right thing,” he said.
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
Gov. Tate Reeves speaks to media about his shelter-in-place order for Lauderdale County during a press conference at the State of Mississippi Woolfolk Building in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, March 31, 2020.
Gov. Tate Reeves, before a midnight Wednesday deadline, vetoed the bulk of the state public education budget and a handful of other bills, including two criminal justice reform measures aimed at reducing the prison population.
For the criminal justice reform measures, Reeves said they “went too far,” and would result in dangerous criminals on the street.
Reeves in a social media post said his vetoes thwarted “efforts in the Legislature to cut teacher pay and let violent criminals out of prison early.”
It is unclear when the Legislature could return to deal with the vetoes – either sustain or override them – and other unfinished business, because of a COVID-19 outbreak at the Capitol. At least 26 lawmakers and 10 staffers have tested positive, the state health officer said Wednesday.
“It would be at least 14 days from today before the Legislature could meet remotely safe … and that’s only remotely safe,” Reeves said Wednesday.
Highlights of Reeves’ vetoes:
Education budget: Reeves said he vetoed most of the state’s $2.6 billion public education budget because lawmakers shifted $26 million from a teacher incentive pay program to the main operational budget for school districts.
He said that means “23,157 Mississippi teachers would get money that they’ve earned taken out of their pockets.”
The incentive program, which Reeves championed when he was lieutenant governor, was created in 2014 and gives merit pay to teachers in high-performing schools and those in schools that improve a letter grade. The system has received some criticism, saying it exacerbates problems with recruiting teachers to struggling districts.
House Education Chairman Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, on Wednesday said lawmakers had assured Reeves the program could continue without him vetoing or the Legislature having to redo the budget. But Reeves said the veto was necessary to prevent teachers getting a pay cut.
Reeves said public education is a constitutionally mandated state responsibility and will continue to be funded and function after his veto, and “The bulk of the agency will run in the short term by a letter from me, backed up by an AG opinion” until the Legislature addresses it.
Criminal justice reform: The state faces a prison crisis – overcrowding, violence and lawsuits including one from the Department of Justice – largely from Mississippi’s harsh sentencing laws and lack of reentry programs. Lawmakers passed a suite of reform bills aimed at reducing prison population and other problems.
Reeves vetoed two of the measures.
Reeves said Senate Bill 2123, which would have provided parole eligibility for thousands of inmates, “was well-intentioned but too far.” He said the measure would have allowed parole for people convicted of crimes that could get them the death penalty if they had been sentenced to life instead. He said it would also have allowed parole of violent offenders who are 60 or older, removing restrictions currently in place for violent and habitual offenders.
House Bill 658, aimed at helping convicts re-enter society and the workforce, would increase the number of felony expungements people could get after serving their sentences and a five-year wait from one to three.
Reeves said allowing people to erase multiple felonies from their records would result in “career criminals walking around with no records.”
House Judiciary B Chairman Rep. Nick Bain, R-Corinth, who helped pass the reform measures, said Reeves was under a tight deadline for signing or vetoing bills and “I don’t know if he had all the details from what we did.”
“Particularly (Senate Bill) 2123, we had a lot of input from conservative groups, and lots of criminal justice experts’ input,” Bain said. “We were addressing a lot of issues the DOJ has. That’s certainly the governor’s prerogative to veto. He mentioned in his message wanting to discuss this with us, and I certainly hope he keeps that line of communication open.”
Skills training: Reeves said, “I had to veto one bill that I love,” House Bill 1387, which would allow skills training instead of traditional education.
“It goes just a little bit too far by conflicting with federal law,” Reeves said. “Because of that it put federal dollars for skills training at risk … Great goal – just needs a few tweaks and we can get it done.”
Federal coronavirus health care spending: Reeves vetoed two line items in a bill spending $130 million in federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act money on Mississippi health care.
Reeves vetoed $6 million earmarked for the MAGnet Community Health Disparity Program, calling it “an earmark to give $6 million of CARES Act funds to a cherry-picked corporation to address disparity.”
“If they gave it to the Health Department, that’d be fine,” Reeves said. “But there’s no justification for slipping it to handpicked interests and letting them dole it out to others for a vague mission.”
Reeves also vetoed $2 million in the health CARES spending earmarked for Tate County for “North Regional Medical Center or its successor.” Reeves noted the hospital has been closed since 2018 and asked, “How does that have anything to do with COVID-19? They’ve been closed for two years.”
Reeves said he is signing hundreds of bills lawmakers recently passed, and letting some go into law without his signature “because I didn’t love them – lots of earmarks for special projects.”
“But (I) didn’t feel like they rose to the level of a veto,” Reeves said.
Last month, a 3D printed house that can float on a pontoon was unveiled in the Czech Republic. Last year, work started on a community of 3D printed houses for low-income families in Mexico. While building homes with 3D printers is becoming more scalable, it’s also still a fun way to play around with unique designs and futuristic concepts for our living spaces.
It doesn’t get much more futuristic than living on Mars—and guess what? There’s a 3D printed home for that, too. In fact, there are a few; last year saw the conclusion of a contest held by NASA called the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge.
The long-running competition, started in 2015, tasked participants with creating homes that would be viable to build on Mars. Teams had to consider not just the technology they’d use, but what type of material will be available on the Red Planet and what kind of features a Martian home will need to have for a human to survive (and ideally, to survive comfortably); the structures need to be strong enough to make it through a meteor collision, for example, and able to hold an atmosphere very different than the one just outside their walls.
Artist rendering of the second-level kitchen and office. Image Credit: AI Space Factory
The top prize ($500,000) went to AI Space Factory, a New York-based architecture and construction technologies company focused on building for space exploration. Their dual-shell, four-level design is called Marsha, and unlike Martian habitats we’ve seen on the big screen or read about in sci-fi novels, it’s neither a dome nor an underground bunker. In fact, it sits fully above ground and it looks like a cross between a hive and a giant egg.
The team chose the hive-egg shape very deliberately, saying that it’s not only optimized to handle the pressure and temperature demands of the Martian atmosphere, but building it with a 3D printer will be easier because the printer won’t have to move around as much as it would to build a structure with a larger footprint. That means less risk of errors and a faster building speed.
“It’s important to be structurally efficient as a shape, because that means you can use less material,” said David Malott, AI Space Factory’s founder and CEO. “If you think about an eggshell on Earth, [it’s] a very efficient shape. The eggshell can be very, very thin, and still it has the right amount of strength.”
Artist rendering of the home’s top floor rec area. Image Credit: AI Space Factory
The home’s layout is like a multi-level townhouse, except with some Mars-specific tweaks; the first floor is both a preparation area, where occupants can get suited up before heading outside, and a “wet lab” for research. There’s a rover docking port just outside the prep area, attached to the house.
On the second floor is what I’d consider the most important room—the kitchen—and the third floor has a garden, bathroom, and sleeping pods that take the place of bedrooms (sorry, no space for your antique dresser or Ikea desk here). The top floor is a rec area where you can recreate either by watching TV or exercising—or perhaps both simultaneously.
It took 30 hours to build a one-third scale model of the home, but this doesn’t mean it would take 90 hours to build the real thing; printing during the contest was done in 10-hour increments, and since the model contains all the same structural aspects of the full-size home, the 3D printer would just need to expand its reachable surface area and height to print the real thing.
If all goes as planned (which, really, there are no plans yet; just ideas), there will be plenty of material on hand to build the real thing in the real place (Mars, that is). AI Space Factory collaborated with a materials design company called Techmer PM to come up with a super-strong mix of basalt fiber—which would come from rocks on Mars—and a renewable bioplastic that could be made from plants grown on Mars. In NASA’s tests, the material was shown to be stronger and more durable than concrete and more resistant to repeated freezes and thaws.
The company was set to open an Earth version of Marsha, called Tera, in upstate New York this past March, and people leaped at the chance to pay $175-500 to sleep in the structure for a night; but the plans were derailed by the coronavirus pandemic, and the company hasn’t yet announced a re-opening of the Earthbound cabin.
Rain chances going down and temperatures going up this weekend. Right now, it looks like these middle to upper 90s will last well into next week. The heat index will be near 110 Friday!
FRIDAY: Mostly sunny, with a high near 95. Heat index values as high as 110! A 40% chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Light wind becoming north northwest 5 to 10 mph.
FRIDAY NIGHT: Mostly clear, with a low around 74.
SATURDAY: Mostly sunny, with a high near 92. Heat index values as high as 103! A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms. Calm wind becoming northwest around 5 mph.
SATURDAY NIGHT: Partly cloudy, with a low around 74.
SUNDAY: Mostly sunny, with a high near 91. Calm wind becoming west around 5 mph in the morning. A 50% chance of showers and thunderstorms.
SUNDAY NIGHT: Mostly clear, with a low around 73. A 30% chance of showers and thunderstorms.
Mississippi Department of Education headquarters in Jackson.
Gov. Tate Reeves in a press conference Wednesday said it was “very likely” he would veto the budget bill for the Mississippi Department of Education, a state agency that oversees almost 900 public schools and more than 465,000 students.
If he does — the deadline to sign it is midnight Wednesday — the Legislature will be dealing with the veto in the midst of chaos caused by the fact that both presiding officers, Speaker Philip Gunn in the House and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann in the Senate, have tested positive for COVID-19. State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said Wednesday 36 cases of coronavirus came from an outbreak at the Capitol, and 26 of those were lawmakers.
Under the rules suspension in place it is likely that legislators could come back to address any veto without having to be called into special session by the governor. But Reeves surmised that because of the coronavirus outbreak in the Capitol, “It would be at least 14 days from today before the Legislature could meet remotely safe … and that’s only remotely.”
The education budget, about $2.2 billion in state funds, was one of the last approved by legislators before they adjourned with the intent to come back in the coming days to deal with one final budget for the Department of Marine Resources. Last week the Legislature approved a budget in the midst of declining state revenues caused by the coronavirus. Under the roughly $6 billion budget approved, most agencies will absorb cuts of between 3 percent and 5 percent for the current fiscal year.
The possible veto comes from the governor posting on social media Tuesday that “the education bill has a major problem,” saying the Legislature cut teacher pay by more than $26 million. He was referencing the school recognition program, which provides monetary rewards to schools that improve letter grades.
By moving the funding for this program into the main school funding program instead of earmarking it for the recognition program, the governor said, “over 20,000 teachers will get less pay than they earned if we allow this budget to become law.”
The Legislature created the program in 2014. It is a merit-based pay system to incentivize teachers and staff in high performing schools and those who are improving letter grades. Teachers in A-rated schools or improve from a ‘F’ to ‘D,’ or ‘D’ to ‘C’ receive $100 per student, and ‘B’ rated schools receive $75 per student. Since 2017, the Legislature has funneled about $71 million into the recognition program.
For the current budget year, information provided by the Department of Education indicates it would take $28 million to fully fund the program for about 21,000 teachers who qualify for the funds based on their schools’ grades. Reeves maintained Wednesday, more than 23,000 teachers would lose the bonuses. For fiscal year 2020, nearly 21,000 teachers in 510 public schools collectively received $25 million, according to Mississippi Today’s analysis of program records.
While Gov. Tate Reeves cited that teachers “will see pay cuts of a couple thousand dollars,” Mississippi Today’s analysis of the data found no teacher received thousands of dollars.
Last year, the Legislature created new guidelines clarifying that the money should only be awarded to current and certified staff of the eligible school and the award must be distributed evenly. For the first two years of the program, it has been difficult to solidify the accurate number of teachers receiving rewards because the Mississippi Department of Education has not kept record of this information.
House Education Chairman Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, on Wednesday said legislative leaders had contacted the governor’s office, and assured him the program can continue without him vetoing or lawmakers having to redo the budget.
“As chairman of Education, the loss of the School Recognition program deeply troubles me. Regardless of budgetary movements, it was and continues to be our intent for MDE to fund this program,” Bennett said. “We informed the governor’s staff that legislative clarification will easily fix this matter, and that a veto was unnecessary. The Legislature can provide a deficit appropriation into the future to fund expenses for MDE to continue this program.”
Schools would qualify in the current fiscal year beginning July 1 for their educators to receive the funds based on their rating for the 2018-19 school year, according to information from the Department of Education.
The program was part of a pay increase provided to teachers in 2014. Then-Lt. Gov. Reeves and then-Senate Education Chair Gray Tollison, R-Oxford, were the primary proponents of the program. Some education advocates argued against the program, saying it would result in teachers trying to work in top performing or improving districts where they were more apt to receive the extra pay.
“The first couple of years the guidance sent out, based on what the Legislature wanted, was for individual schools to form a teacher committee to make a decision based on how the money would be dispersed. I don’t think the forms asked how many teachers would receive the money. It was more or less … we just needed something on record to determine how they were going to disperse that money,” Pete Smith, Mississippi Department of Education chief of communications and government relations said in February in an interview with Mississippi Today.
Though it was mandatory for districts to submit response forms that show how the money was dispersed and the number of certified staff who received money, a number of districts did not submit a form or state the number of certified staff to receive the award.
If Reeves vetoes the education budget as he said he is likely to do, he said under a 2010 Attorney General’s opinion funding to for the public schools can continue because education is identified as a constitutional mandate of the state.
Aallyah will moderate the ‘How I Did the Story’ session, where reporters give the backstory on projects and discuss what they learned along the way. The panel will feature three EWA award finalists, who will discuss their work on race and educational equity.
Aallyah joined the EWA’s advisory board, a select group of journalists from a mix of regional and national media organizations, in April. The group of accomplished journalists helps EWA carry out its mission to strengthen community of education writers and improve the quality of education coverage to help better inform the public.
Education reporter