Other than to joke about people thinking he might have smoked marijuana before his speech, Gov. Tate Reeves on Thursday never mentioned the issue that has had patients, lawmakers and voters on pins and needles for months: If or when he will call a special legislative session on medical marijuana as he promised.
He didn’t want to talk about it afterward, either, as he beat a hasty retreat from the Mississippi Coliseum with reporters jogging along trying to ask.
“It’s definitely a realistic possibility … We’re continuing to talk about it, as recently as yesterday,” Reeves told reporters without breaking stride before hopping in his state SUV with his security detail and leaving minutes after his speech ended.
Likewise, neither Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann nor House Speaker Philip Gunn mentioned the issue to the crowd at the Mississippi Economic Council’s annual Hobnob event on Thursday. After their speeches, they both told reporters they’ve heard squat from Reeves about it.
This silence is odd given the time and effort legislative leaders have put into medical marijuana legislation. And it’s odd given that residents have rallied for months for lawmakers to replace a medical marijuana program overwhelmingly passed by voters last November but shot down by the state Supreme Court on a constitutional technicality.
Reeves, who has sole authority to call lawmakers into special session, has said for months he would do so if lawmakers reached agreement on a bill. They did so, and informed Reeves of this on Sept. 24.
But Reeves, who as governor has no control over what lawmakers pass other than the power to veto it afterward, gave lawmakers a last-minute laundry list of things he didn’t like in the bill. Lawmakers said they conceded on many of Reeves’ issues, but called some “unreasonable.”
Since then, legislative leaders said, it’s been mostly crickets from Reeves on whether he would call the promised special session.
“We’re ready to go,” Speaker Gunn said Thursday after his Hobnob speech. “The last communication I had with (Reeves) was about two weeks ago — or, I guess about three weeks ago now. We called him and said, ‘Hey, we’re ready to go on this.’ He said he’d think about it. That’s all I’ve heard.”
Lt. Gov. Hosemann was also asked after his speech whether he’d heard anything from the governor on a special session.
“No,” Hosemann said, then looked at his watch. “No, as of 11:36 today, no.”
Reeves also appears to be dodging the public on the issue. Medical marijuana advocates on the “We Are the 74” Facebook page on Wednesday posted video of parents with a child in a wheelchair trying to question Reeves about a special session, as Reeves did some political meet-and-greeting at the 10th Inning Bar and Grill in Southaven. Reeves appears hesitant to address them as they follow him around pushing the child’s wheelchair. Reluctantly, Reeves accepts a photo from the boy that shows him with a black eye from seizures and his mom tells Reeves, “We need his medicine and we need it soon.”
Reeves in the video says, “Yes, ma’am, I’m working really hard on that” when the woman questions Reeves about calling a special session.
“He said that, ‘We’re working on it,’” the woman says later outside the restaurant. “… He ran away from us in the restaurant as I tried to push Brian around in his wheelchair … We handed him a photo of Brian with a black eye from his seizures, and he tried not to take it but I forced his hand and he just kept saying, thank you, thank you and tried to walk off.
“He wouldn’t give me an answer,” she said. “We told him we know that both sides have agreed to something, and they’re waiting on him to call a session. He would not answer us as to when the session would be … pretty much, he treated Brian like he had the plague, barely even looked at him.”
Besides patients with debilitating illness wanting medical cannabis and voters calling for their will to be reinstated after the Supreme Court decision, legislative leaders have said there is another pragmatic reason to deal with medical marijuana in special session instead of waiting for the January regular session. The Legislature has numerous, monumental issues before it, such as decennial redistricting, appropriating billions in pandemic relief and tax reform. Dealing with medical marijuana before the regular session would help clear the decks for work on the other issues.
One state leader did address medical marijuana at Hobnob on Thursday. Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson thanked lawmakers about addressing his concerns and having the Health Department, not his agency, license cultivators. Then he showed large photos on an easel of bags of California medical marijuana, brownies and edibles that “look like Fruity Pebbles” confiscated in Mississippi. He said he’s worried a state medical marijuana program will increase black market dealing and said law enforcement needs to be more involved in the Legislature’s plan.
Mississippi has enacted a policy that will allow low-income single parents to keep more money in their pockets.
To qualify for most public assistance programs in Mississippi, single parents, usually women, must sue their kids’ non-custodial parent for child support payments.
But if they have received cash assistance through a federal program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the state seizes those child support dollars to pay itself back for providing welfare.
That means some moms never see the child support money. And the fathers are simply paying into state coffers.
But in November, Mississippi will start allowing a child support “pass-through” of $100, according to a report by the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review released Wednesday. It’s a policy the agency was able to enact itself without legislative approval.
The new pass-through means a separated parent who has been on welfare will receive the first $100 in child support that comes in each month before the state takes the rest. Additionally, the state will not count the $100 as income, so it shouldn’t affect the parent’s eligibility for public assistance.
This is also the state’s second major policy change related to the TANF program after the State Auditor found in 2020 that the state welfare agency had misspent tens of millions of these federal funds.
The alleged corruption occurred under the leadership of agency director John Davis, who took his orders from Gov. Phil Bryant. Davis is awaiting trial in what officials are calling the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history and officials have not accused Bryant of wrongdoing.
Mississippi public and nonprofit officials used the money on purchases such as a new volleyball stadium, a horse ranch for a famous athlete, multi-million dollar celebrity speaking engagements, high-tech virtual reality equipment, luxury vehicles, steakhouse dinners and even a speeding ticket, to name a few.
The state is allowed to choose how much of the federal block grant to spend on cash payments to poor families or on other social programs. And it was under virtually no requirement to report this detailed spending to the federal government.
The state has offered cash assistance to fewer and fewer Mississippians over the last decade. That, coupled with the low monthly benefit amount of $170 for a family of three, meant that the state was spending just a fraction of its funding, as low as 5%, on cash assistance.
In the 2021 session, lawmakers passed a bill to increase the cash benefit by $90, which closely reflects two decades of inflation. It was the first time the state raised the benefit in over 20 years.
For over 50 years, Mississippi had offered the lowest benefit of any state. At the new rate of $260-a-month for a family of three, the state no longer ranks last in this metric. It ranks fourth to last. Only Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana have lower benefits.
Last year, Mississippi Today spoke with eight safety net policy or government administration experts and compiled a list of policy changes Mississippi could make to improve the child support system for its citizens. In addition to creating a “pass-through,” they recommended the state:
Strengthen “ability to pay” measurements to ensure Mississippi is not punishing non-custodial parents for being poor.
Halt child support debts from accruing while a non-custodial parent is incarcerated.
Make the process of modifying child support orders easier, so the amount a non-custodial parent must pay can reflect their changing work circumstances.
Improve parent access to information about their case by creating an online portal.
Instead of assuming a minimum wage when calculating child support for a parent who does not have a job, take into account their realistic employability.
Make the process of applying easier, such as allowing electronic signatures.
Another piece of piece of legislation the welfare agency requested during the 2021 session would have eased the state’s eligibility determination process for public assistance recipients, reducing the agency manpower needed to process applications. Records previously obtained by Mississippi Today show that nearly 75% of people denied TANF were turned away not because they failed to meet a specific eligibility requirement, but because their applications were either incomplete or withdrawn, an indicator of the cumbersome process.
The legislation passed the Senate but died in committee in the House.
GULFPORT — Jessica Moore has become accustomed to the constant ping of her email inbox as recruiters offer to double her salary the same way she’s grown used to crying spells behind bathroom stall doors.
It’s part of a hospital nurse’s daily rhythm.
Moore, a nurse and manager at Singing River’s hospital in Gulfport, has chosen to stay put in her role. Mississippi is her home, she says. And so is Singing River.
But every day, the promise of more flexibility and more money is just an email or phone call away. Nursing staffing agencies, often called travel nurse companies, are constantly recruiting Mississippi nurses away from their bedside hospital jobs with offers of dramatic wage increases and $10,000 bonuses.
An increasing number of Mississippi’s nurses are taking these offers for the temporary gigs, as Mississippi hospitals struggle to fund meaningful pay raises for full-time staff. Moore has seen dozens of her coworkers and friends make the switch since the pandemic began.
“I’ve been through Katrina, I’ve been through storms, recessions, and you’ll have one or two nurses who leave for traveling jobs,” Moore said. “But with this pandemic, they’re leaving in droves.”
Hospital leaders aren’t just calling the current predicament a nurses shortage; they’re calling it an exodus.
It’s an untenable cycle that’s showing no signs of slowing. Singing River has lost a third of its nurses — about 290 — since March 2020.
In a few days, 900 nurses the state funded to help during the worst of the delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic are leaving dozens of hospitals across the state. Their contracts end Oct. 31.
Without the extra nurses on hand, Moore will once again stretch her staff to its limits to fill intensive care unit shifts. The nurse-to-patient ratio could creep back up 1:8 — double what it should be.
Worse, Moore said, the added stress could continue to push more hospital nurses out the door.
Of Mississippi’s 114 hospital and speciality facilities, just 30 run as for-profit businesses, according to the Mississippi Hospital Association. That means the bulk of Mississippi’s hospitals are community owned or nonprofits.
By design, those hospitals don’t have large business margins. It leaves them without the ability to dole out the massive across-the-board raises to nurses, their largest employee group, needed to stay competitive in the market.
As a result, they rely on a patchwork of positions filled by travel companies — as they can afford them — to keep hospital beds open.
A Clarksdale hospital using staffing agency Adex, for example, is seeking an ICU nurse to start in as little as two weeks. The contract covers 13 weeks, 48 hours per week. The weekly salary, the post says, is about $4,800.
Meanwhile, Mississippi’s average hospital nurse is taking home $29 an hour, according to the state employment security office. That’s just under $1,400 for a 48-hour work week.
The Adex posting is not special. Dozens are just like it. Usually, the staffing companies also offer cash incentives for nurses who recruit others to join them.
Vivian, an online job board for health care work, has seen a massive uptick in the demand for nurses in Mississippi over the last couple months, a spokesman said. By mid-October, Vivian’s website had more than 350 postings seeking nurses to fill in at hospitals across the state.
Moore can’t blame nurses for leaving to better their finances. It has crossed her mind, too.
It’s a thought that steals a moment during a seven-day work week or sneaks in the minutes before catching a few hours of sleep ahead of back-to-back 12-hour shifts. When time with her two boys is little and the time she spends with her husband — also a nurse — nears nonexistent, it lingers.
But she can’t do it. She said the current cycle is ruining the hospital system, making it so nurses aren’t working together like the family she’s used to.
“It’s extremely difficult for a loyal nurse who stayed here to protect and save their community, that has roots here, and can’t travel, to work beside a contracted nurse that makes a lot more money than them,” said Singing River’s CEO Lee Bond.
Jessica Moore, a nurse at Singing River’s Gulfport hospital. (Photo courtesy: Singing River)
Gov. Tate Reeves’ executive order spread 920 temporary nurses across 61 Mississippi hospitals in September. It was never intended to solve the state’s staffing shortages, but it was a bandaid on a knife wound. For a moment, it helped slow the bleeding.
It gave hospitals the bandwidth to better handle the influx of patients being hospitalized with COVID-19 and crowding the ICU while the delta variant contributed to a record number of pandemic-related deaths across the state.
It also brought the nursing crisis within Mississippi’s hospital workforce to center stage.
The very staffing agencies winning over Mississippi nurses with higher pay are also the staffing agencies that filled Mississippi’s Emergency Management Agency contracts to bring in the hundreds of temporary, but desperately needed, nurses.
Nursing staffing agencies, which work similarly to temp agencies in the business world, have traditionally paid more than hospital jobs. But the pandemic and nursing shortage nationwide has caused the pay differentiation to skyrocket.
Early in the pandemic, travel nurses largely went to help in New York City’s hospitals. Now, they’re everywhere.
Before the state-funded travel nurses came into Singing River, Moore was often working seven days a week, covering the tasks of three jobs.
When the order to fund workers helping with COVID-19 patients ends this week, Singing River will instantly lose 70 high-paid temporary nurses it cannot afford to rehire. It could mean closing 95 beds across three hospitals.
Before the pandemic began, nurses were already abandoning hospitals. They opted for less stressful jobs at gastrointestinal clinics or surgery centers. They moved out of state to bigger cities with higher wages. The state was already projecting it would need 2,100 more nurses each year before the virus spread.
COVID-19 exacerbated the need.
“Our hospitals have a lot of uncompensated care,” said Kim Hoover, a registered nurse and leader at the Mississippi Hospital Association. “They’re not always in the best financial position to begin with. It’s difficult to weather a storm if you haven’t been able to bolster what you need to bolster.”
Hoover said only about 41% of the state’s registered nurses are reporting working for hospitals at all. About 2,000 fewer nurses are registered in the state at all compared to a year ago, according to nursing board data.
“It’s difficult to recruit and retain nurses in economically depressed areas, and Mississippi has quite a bit of that,” said Hoover, who heads the association’s education foundation. “But in this case, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the Delta or on the Coast, the nurses are just not here.”
Out of options, Mississippi health care leaders are asking the Legislature to create a new program that uses federal coronavirus aid to cover bonus checks to incentivise nurses to stay at the state’s struggling hospitals.
“Mississippi being less healthy, less wealthy, and not having the federal Medicaid dollars leaves it disproportionately affected,” said Bond, the hospital CEO.
The long-term consequences could be deadly.
“The one thing that could keep you from having your life saved is not having an RN,” Bond said.
Bond has put himself at the center of the nursing crisis. He and his team at Singing Rivers are leading the push for the state to use 25% of its $1.8 billion in American Rescue Plan funds to pay for health care workers incentive checks.
Bond’s plan calls for $20,000 — or about $833 each month — to go directly to each nurse or other in-demand bedside worker who signs a contract pledging to stay at a Mississippi hospital for at least two years.
Unless a special session is called, lawmakers won’t be able to take up the issue until the new year.
“Everybody is trying to compete when they don’t really have the resources they need to be truly competitive,” said Sondra Collins, senior economist with the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning.
Collins said one-time bonuses wouldn’t be nearly as effective as long-term raises. But having a $20,000 bonus spread across a two-year period could act similarly to a wage increase.
The reliance on staffing agencies is too pricey to serve as an indefinite solution.
Before the pandemic, Bond said Singing River didn’t use any contracted nurses. In order to keep beds open, the hospital system now has about 8% of its 1,200 nurses through staffing agencies.
At the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs Dr. Alan Jones said the hospital has done some base wage raises for its workers but it still can’t compete with what travel companies are offering.
On a recent Wednesday morning, Jones said that about 26 patients were stuck in the emergency room, even though they were admitted to the hospital.
There weren’t enough staffed beds opened for the patients to be transferred to the appropriate care units.
A nurse puts on protective equipment including gloves in preparation to flip a COVID-19 patient inside the ICU at Singing River Health System hospital in Ocean Springs on Tuesday, July 27, 2021. (Photo credit: Hannah Ruhoff/Sun Herald)
Moore’s days are marathons that begin the moment she wakes up at 5:30 a.m.
She spends workdays explaining care to patients in 10 minutes when she’d rather have twice that time — or at least enough time to ensure they understand what she’s saying.
She regularly reminds young nurses not to blame themselves for the staggering number of patient deaths they’ve encountered through the pandemic between teaching them to place difficult intravenous lines, or IVs.
She handles phone calls, apologizing to loved ones frustrated that their elderly parents were left on bedpans for 15 minutes, even though there is nothing she can do to remedy their concerns.
“What they don’t realize,” she said, “is while their mother was on the bedpan, we were in the room across the hall because a patient could not breathe. We were attempting to save their life. Unfortunately, there’s three of us on the floor, and it took all three hands to do that.”
She is relieved that the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations are dwindling. But last winter, a wave of infections of the virus pushed the hospital to its limits. She worries the same thing could happen this season and lead to even more burnout.
And if it does, she will manage the mounting stress the way she has over the last two years.
“You go to the bathroom,” she said. “You cry. You get over it.”
Then you go back to work.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated because since publishing, Singing River says it will be losing about 20 more state-funded nurses than it had previously anticipated.
Make no mistake, Southern Miss has made the correct — and probably long overdue — decision to exit Conference USA and enter the Sun Belt Conference. The move was made official at a press conference in Hattiesburg on Tuesday.
Any businessman would understand the logic: cut expenses, increase revenue and deal with partners — in this case, universities — that are more like-minded.
Rick Cleveland
Conference USA made sense for Southern Miss back when the Golden Eagles were competing and winning against conference mates such as Memphis, Tulane, Houston, Louisville and others. It makes no sense now when the competition is as far flung as El Paso, Miami and Coral Gables, Fla.
Southern Miss already has a history with Sun Belt teams such as South Alabama, Troy, Arkansas State, Louisiana-Lafayette and Louisiana-Monroe. Those rivalries are something to nurture and built upon.
Don’t take it from me. Listen to Wright Waters, who has a history with both Southern Miss and with the Sun Belt. Early in his career, in the late 1970s, Waters worked in athletics at USM when Bobby Collins and M.K. Turk were building strong programs that competed at a high level as an independent. Later on, from 1999 until 2012, Waters was the commissioner of the Sun Belt. He knows both entities well enough to know they are fit.
Southern Miss, Waters says, brings a rich history of winning and a historically strong fan base to the Sun Belt. In return, the Sun Belt provides a much more comfortable and sensible home for Southern Miss.
“I’ll put it to you this way,” Waters said, “Southern Miss can use all that money they’ve been spending on jet fuel and spend it on things that make you better. I’m talking about things such as facilities, coaches’ salaries and recruiting budgets. Good coaches and good players are what make you better. The Sun Belt, in my opinion, gives them a better chance to have both.”
Conference USA has become a jet league. The Sun Belt will be more of a bus league. Jeremy McClain, the Southern Miss athletic director, believes the annual travel expenses for all athletic programs will be reduced between $500,000 and a million dollars.
That might sound like chump change to Southeastern Conference fans, but it is a huge deal to athletic programs that don’t collect millions upon millions of dollars from their league’s TV and bowl revenue.
To be sure, TV revenue won’t be that much higher in the Sun Belt than it was in CUSA, but TV exposure will be much more broad. The Sun Belt is an ESPN league with national exposure. CUSA’s main TV partners are CBSSports Network — not to be confused with CBS — and Stadium.
No matter what conference Southern Miss plays in, it must do better at the gate. That is, sell more tickets. Again, the Sun Belt gives them a better opportunity to do that.
“Division games will be drive-able,” Waters said. “Mobile, Lafayette, Monroe and Troy are easy drives from Hattiesburg. Jonesboro (Ark.) is doable. Build those rivalries and fans will travel.”
Again, a game against, say, Louisiana-Lafayette or South Alabama is far more interesting for Southern Miss fans than, say, a game against UTEP or FIU.
McClain is well aware of all that. He came back to Southern Miss from Troy where he served as athletic director for nearly four years. He knows what life is like in both leagues. Clearly, he prefers the Sun Belt where the leadership, under commissioner Keith Gill, a rising star in college athletics, appears more sharply focused.
For years now, Conference USA, which Southern Miss joined in 1995, has seemed almost like a bicycle without handle bars: unsteady at best, direction-less at worst. When Memphis, Houston, Tulane and others left, CUSA went after other large-market schools in belief they would give the league more TV appeal.
The truth, however: North Texas does not really give you the Dallas-Fort Worth TV market, any more than Florida Atlantic and Florida International give you the south Florida market. In Dallas, fans still tune in to watch Texas and Texas A&M. In Miami, they still turn the dial to watch the Gators, Seminoles and Hurricanes.
TV market-size is how Southern Miss got left behind in CUSA in the first place. Despite beating Memphis, Tulane and Houston consistently on the field, the Golden Eagles got passed by during conference re-alignment because of the relatively small amount of TV viewers in south Mississippi.
Competition will be stiff. Just last season, on one September Saturday, three Sun Belt teams played three Big 12 teams (two of those ranked) on the road. All three Sun Belt teams — Arkansas State, Louisiana-Lafayette and Coastal Carolina — collected huge checks for playing on the road. All three Sun Belt teams won. Both Louisiana-Lafayette and Coastal finished in the top 15 of the Associated Press’s final 2020 Top 25 poll.
It’s not just football either. The Sun Belt is intensely competitive in the spring sports of baseball and softball. Coastal Carolina baseball, which won the 2016 College World Series, finished last in its own division last season. South Alabama, Louisiana-Lafayette and Georgia Southern are all traditionally strong programs. Southern Miss will add much to the league. Four Sun Belt softball teams earned NCAA Tournament berths last season. Only the SEC and Pac 12 had more.
Basketball? My take is that the Sun Belt and Conference USA are quite similar as far as competition. Says McClain, “Sun Belt basketball is under-rated. I’ve seen it up close. It’s a grind.”
For Southern Miss, one potential stumbling block in switching leagues has been the exit fee, long reported to be $5 million.
On Tuesday, McClain said his school and others who leave CUSA are contracted over two years to pay the equivalent of what a share of CUSA distribution would be for those two years.
“We believe that it will be in the neighborhood of $3 million,” McClain said. “We have a plan for that.”
In the long term, the move should be worth far more than $3 million to Southern Miss. Said McClain, “This move just makes sense geographically, for our fan base and, most of all for our student-athletes.”
Gill nodded as McClain spoke, and later added, “The Sun Belt has gotten a lot better in recent years. Today, we got better.”
A federal judge has ruled in favor of the University of Mississippi Medical Center over litigation against three former employees who stole patient medical records for their own use and then lied about possessing them for years.
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves on Oct. 8 issued a default judgment in the federal trade secrets lawsuit, saying the defendants’ “clear, persistent pattern of perjury, evidence destruction, and concealment” warranted the default judgment.
The case centers around Dr. Spencer Sullivan, who UMMC hired in July 2014 to head its Hemophilia Treatment Center. As part of his employment, Sullivan agreed to refrain from taking or using patient information for his own benefit, including soliciting patients for his own independent practice. However, in January 2016, Sullivan began arranging to start his own for-profit hemophilia clinic and pharmacy.
Over the course of the next few months, Sullivan coordinated with other UMMC staff —namely co-defendants Linnea McMillan and Kathryn Sue Stevens — to prepare for the new clinic’s opening. This included compiling UMMC patient records into a spreadsheet they called “the List.” This spreadsheet included patients’ birthdate, diagnosis, prescriptions, dose and frequency, insurance, pharmacy and home and mobile telephone numbers.
Sullivan resigned from his position at UMMC in June 2016, and then used the records stolen from UMMC to solicit these patents to continue their treatment at Sullivan’s new clinic in Madison called Mississippi Center for Advanced Medicine. Sullivan recruited at least 20 UMMC employees to work for him at his new clinic, and the majority of UMMC’s hemophilia patients followed their physicians to his clinic.
During the course of both state and federal lawsuits brought on by UMMC, Sullivan, McMillan and Stevens lied multiple times under oath, denying they had ever taken the patient records from UMMC. The existence of “the List” came out following a 2018 Clarion-Ledger article. After reading the article, defendant Linnea McMillan’s ex-husband, Aubrey McMillan, provided UMMC’s legal council with a copy of “the List” he found in his ex-wife’s car.
All three defendants continued to deny taking or possessing “the List” until March 2020, when Harris admitted to lying in her deposition and produced 1,469 pages of text messages sent by herself and fellow defendants that revealed they had conspired to shred the stolen documents, violating the clinic’s policy against destroying patient information.
Sullivan also committed perjury multiple times, and as recently as April 2021, by denying he possessed a hard drive containing files and emails from UMMC. He only admitted possessing the files on a hard drive and a thumb drive after a Magistrate Judge forced him to choose between producing the hard drives or his computer.
“Defendants’ lies and evasions, particularly Dr. Sullivan’s recent conduct in relation to the long-sought hard drives, suggest that nothing less than the full exercise of this court’s inherent power will command the defendants’ respect for the judicial process, or secure their commitment to telling this court the truth,” Reeves wrote.
With a default judgment issued, a trial on damages will now take place on the date previously set for jury trial on Feb. 16, 2022.
CLEVELAND — As students, educators and parents adjust to the newly consolidated Cleveland Public School District, what began as rumblings of discontent with the new administration has escalated into a movement.
Mississippi Today spoke with more than a dozen parents and current and former employees about their concerns, which range from what they say is a lack of transparency, incompetence and irresponsible spending on the part of the administration and the school board. The administration says the community is just resistant to change.
But many, including current and former employees, parents and community members, say it’s not change they’re resisting. They question whether the new superintendent is qualified for the job and take issue with decisions he’s made since coming to the district.
First he cut pre-K classes. Then the district delayed handing out new devices to students to take home during the pandemic. And as the district reeled from a reduction in force and budget cuts, the school board approved a $22,500 raise in the superintendent’s salary and hired an outside public relations firm for $80,000 a year.
Otha Belcher began his tenure as superintendent of the Cleveland Public School District in June of 2019 after serving two years as an assistant superintendent in Jackson Public School District. He worked for several years in the Vicksburg Warren and Hinds County school districts prior to that.
At a recent community meeting at the middle school, Belcher touted his “history of turning around schools.”
“I have a long history of turning schools and districts around,” he told the 60 or so parents, teachers and community members in the audience. “A lot of it.”
He served his longest stint as an administrator when he was an assistant principal at Byram Middle School from July of 2010 to December of 2013. Over the course of his time there, the district did increase from a “successful” school to a “high performing” school, or the equivalent of a C to a B in today’s accountability model.
Superintendent Otha Belcher Credit: Cleveland School District
But while the principal at Vicksburg Junior High from January 2014 to June 2015, the school didn’t see any improvement in its accountability rating. In fact, without the waiver granted by the state in the 2014-2015 school year due to a change in the accountability rating system, the school would have fallen from a C to a D.
While Belcher was curriculum director in Vicksburg, it remained a D-rated school district, though Jackson Public School District did increase from an F to a D during the two years Belcher was an assistant superintendent.
Evans, the board president, said the board hired Belcher because he was “young and vibrant” and the district needed a change.
“He was positive, and we were tired of the same old results we were getting over the past 10 to 15 years, so we decided it was time for a change,” said Evans, who has served on the school board for 20 years.
When asked if there was something in particular about his experience that stood out to Evans or made him think he would be a good fit for Cleveland, he responded, “No.”
One of Belcher’s first major actions as superintendent was to cut the district’s pre-kindergarten classes.
Belcher instituted a “reduction in force” in the 2020-2021 school year in an effort to save $1.7 million as a result of fewer students enrolling in the district that year. When he announced he’d be cutting some pre-kindergarten classes in an attempt to save money, parents were outraged.
Many pointed out the inequity of the decision, which put the pre-K classes at the two higher performing elementary schools, and took them away from Nailor and Parks Elementary schools, which are lower performing and have more low-income students.
Todd Davis, a parent of a child in the district, said his and other parents’ attempts to work with Belcher to identify other ways to cut costs turned into “a fire.” He said they identified several places to cut costs, including at the parent resource center, which Davis said had a full staff but no measurable objectives or outcomes.
Davis said cutting those pre-K classes put up barriers for poorer families who can’t afford to drive to the remaining classes, which are further away from the city of Cleveland.
When asked if pre-K access concerns him, Belcher said no.
“No, I mean the parents at those two schools that we did get rid of — they had a chance to go to either one of those (other schools),” he said.
There are 110 pre-K students in five classes this year, up from 105 students last year, according to Belcher. He also said the district is planning to add an additional class in the 2022-2023 school year back at Parks or Nailor Elementary Schools.
At the same time the debate was heating up over pre-K, Belcher was working on other methods to cut costs. In late 2020, he asked principals to identify ways to save money, a former principal said.
“I literally spent my Christmas break going through numbers, looking at my teacher units, class sizes, and seeing where I can cut,” the former principal said.
Belcher told Mississippi Today the funds were ultimately saved by not filling open positions in the school, among other measures. He said he did not believe any of the cuts impacted students’ academics and resources.
The principal, who spoke anonymously because of fear of retribution at his job in a new school district, said that was not the case.
“When you’re in a high poverty school, you need those additional supports to build up your academics … and that was being taken away,” he said. “It was just very detrimental to us.”
While the district was still reeling from the budget cuts and reduction of the pre-K program, the school board extended Belcher’s contract and issued him a substantial raise.
In July of 2021, the school board approved a $11,200 raise for Belcher for the 2021-2022 school year. The addendum to his original contract also shows the board approved another $11,300 raise for the following school year, bringing his annual salary up from $117,500 in 2019 to $140,000 in the 2022-2023 school year.
George Evans, the board president, said the board was simply bringing Belcher’s salary in line with superintendents of similarly sized school districts in the area.
“There’s been unrest for a few years, but the big turning point was when he was signed on to a new contract,” said Gabby Hays, the parent of an elementary school student in the district.
Teachers who spoke to Mississippi Today said when they heard of the contract renewal and raise, they were furious.
“What warrants him getting the raise? We got our $1,000 extra a year (from the state-funded teacher pay raise), but our insurance goes up, deductible goes up — we don’t see it (the money),” one said.
When asked when the last time teachers received a district-issued raise was, Evans and another school board member, Todd Fuller, did not respond.
Current and former district staff say there were other problems that led to large turnover.
Morgan Dean, a former principal at two schools in Cleveland, had been in the district nine years before he resigned in December of 2019.
Under Belcher’s leadership, he said, principals were being micromanaged.
He said the administration changed the teacher observation process to a tedious series of tasks. The process required principals to complete three teacher observations a week and write a two-page report for each, one of which would be submitted to the central office for review.
“We had to include references to articles and theory, and we were given a rubric as administrators” they would be judged by, said Dean.
“I don’t have any problem with being critiqued but that particular process was laborious and served very little purpose in improving schools or teachers. Teachers don’t have a lot of time to read two-page essays, so that’s really not best practice.”
Dean, who is one of a number of principals who have left the district since Belcher arrived, said he felt targeted by the new administration.
“There’s a habit in education where you force people out by making them extremely uncomfortable while making it clear they’re not wanted,” he said.
Another former principal, who spoke to Mississippi Today anonymously to protect his new job, echoed Dean.
The principal said he often asked for programs which never came about. Then, when he would ask about their status, it was as if the conversation had never occurred.
“We were doing a lot of stuff I would call window dressing,” he said. “It looked good, but it didn’t mean anything. When we’d bring concerns, they were completely discounted.”
Both said they’d never struggled to work with former superintendents before Belcher.
Dean, along with several other current and former employees who spoke with Mississippi Today, said they saw many administrators and teachers leave after Belcher arrived.
“I have never seen that kind of turnover,” one former employee who’d been with the district more than 30 years, said.
But Belcher said staff turnover is no more than in previous years. When asked for the numbers, the district said it does not have them on hand, but this reporter could go through monthly meeting minutes to calculate resignations and terminations.
“There hasn’t been an abnormally large turnover,” he said. “People are retiring, people changing professions because of the pressure, and we’ve had people leave for better opportunities,” he said. “But we’re doing fine. Actually, some of the superintendents around have asked me ‘How do you keep the people?’”
Parents say they became frustrated with the administration during the pandemic. When schools first closed, students learning virtually struggled without access to devices to take home from the district. Despite the rollout of enough devices for every student in the state, there was a major lag in the district’s distribution of the devices.
A few months into the pandemic, Lindsey Wright had three school-age children at home. She was unemployed after she lost her job as a result of the virus, and money was tight.
Take-home paper packets from teachers stopped being an option for her kids, all of whom are students in the district, in April of 2020. So she tried purchasing a late generation iPad for $80, but it didn’t work. She ended up borrowing the money to buy one laptop for her children to share and used her phone’s hotspot for Internet connection.
As the months of 2020 rolled on, the district still didn’t issue its students the devices that were delivered in the fall of that year.
Throughout the school year her children were distance learning, Wright kept asking administrators at Pearman Elementary School and Cleveland Central High School where the laptops were.
All three of her children failed that school year.
Her neighbor Tanisha Lewis faced the same challenge with her third grader. When she went to purchase a device for her virtual learner, the stores were out of stock.
Each day, Wright had to “choose which child I wanted to have an education, and it was wrong,” she said.
Lewis said her daughter’s grades dropped “dramatically.”
Belcher told Mississippi Today the devices weren’t distributed to any students to take home because they didn’t arrive “white gloved,” or tagged and cased with packaging materials removed and devices already joined to the district network. He later clarified that a majority of the computers were white-gloved but did not have cases.
The devices that arrived without proper tags and cases were ordered independent of the Mississippi Department of Education’s program, which delivered devices ready to be distributed.
“We were already short on our technology department, so what we had to do was make it all inventoried,” said Belcher. That included three technology staff members manually tagging the more than 2,000 devices.
He said he chose to only distribute the devices to the schools, and not make them available for students to take home, in the spring of 2021 due to an upcoming audit by the state education department. The Chromebooks were just made available for students to take home — for a $25 annual fee — in September 2021.
“We were just not sending anything home because we knew MDE was coming to do an audit.”
But according to the Mississippi Department of Education, there was no audit of the district.
“I have no idea what that is,” said John Kraman, chief information officer for the department, said when asked about what the district said was an “MDE Chromebook audit” that occurred in May. “We don’t do Chromebook audits.”
Concern about the new administration’s decisions reached its summit in mid-September this year when two students were arrested on the Cleveland Central High School campus after organizing a protest of the district’s dress code and cafeteria food.
Parents questioned why law enforcement was involved, and the district defended its decision. It’s unclear what the students were charged with, but a statement put out by the district said a school resource officer called in back-up from the Cleveland Police Department “due to the continued breach of the peace and use of insulting/profane language.”
After the incident, a group of five parents and community members started a Facebook group called “Reform Cleveland Schools.” Within weeks, the group had grown to nearly 700 members.
LaDonne Sterling, a former employee of the district and parent of two children in the schools, said there has been a breakdown of trust.
Cleveland Public School District Superintendent Otha Belcher, right, at a district-wide community meeting in late September. Jesse Johnson, left, of the Carter Malone Group, facilitated the question-and-answer session. Credit: Kate Royals/Mississippi Today
“Now that the disconnection is known, it’s noticeable. It’s hard to go and gain that trust back from the parents and the community,” said Sterling.
But the purpose of the Reform Cleveland Schools group is to try, she said. And there are positive things happening — notably, that Belcher has agreed to meet monthly with the leaders of the group.
Voters will also get the chance to elect a new school board member Nov. 2.
Candidates running to replace current board member Tonya Short held a question and answer session with community members last week. Short was not present at the meeting.
Before the session ended, one audience member asked the candidates: ”What are we going to do to get back to effective schools, period? To make sure our schools are ready to run and the school board won’t have to constantly fix it, fix it, fix it?”
Candidate Paulette Howze’s answer focused on the importance of quality leadership.
“It starts at the head. As plain as I can say it,” she told the crowd. “… And it all goes back to accountability — whether we, as a board, are holding that person accountable.”
More than 10 months into his first term, President Joe Biden has yet to announce his nominees for the two U.S. attorneys slots in Mississippi.
When asked recently for an update on the nomination process, Ike Hajinazarian, a regional White House communications director, said “no news to share on this right now.”
Early in his tenure, Biden asked for the resignations of the two Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys in Mississippi, Mike Hurst in the Southern District and William C. Lamar in the Northern District.
Currently serving as interim U.S. attorneys are Clay Joyner in the Northern District and Darren LaMarca in the Southern District — both longtime prosecutors.
U.S. attorneys oversee the prosecutions for violations of federal crimes. Traditionally in Mississippi, they have placed an emphasis on pursuing public corruption cases. The people ultimately appointed to the posts by the president will face U.S. Senate confirmation.
Those being rumored as possible contenders for the posts include former state Attorney General Jim Hood, state District Attorney Scott Colom of Columbus, state Sen. Derrick Simmons of Greenville, state District Attorney Jody Owens of Jackson, Ole Miss law professor and MacArthur Justice Center director Cliff Johnson, former Southern District U.S. Attorney Gregory Davis and others.
Davis was appointed U.S. attorney by former President Barack Obama. Obama appointed Davis to the Southern District seat and Felicia Adams to the Northern District post during his second year in office.
Trump appointed Hurst and Lamar in June of his first year in office.
According to a September news release from the White House, the president has named 25 nominees for U.S. attorney slots. There are 93 U.S. attorneys across the natino, and it is customary for an incoming president to replace most, if not all, of the U.S. attorneys named by his predecessor.
Generally speaking, the state’s federal elected officials, especially senators, have influence in such presidential appointments on the state level. Since Mississippi has no Democratic senators, it is likely that U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, will have influence with the Biden administration in making such appointments.
Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccurately reported on the death of a federal judge. U.S. Magistrate Judge John C. Gargiulo recently died. Federal magistrates, unlike federal judges, are not presidential appointees.
If ever there were a political odd couple, it’s former Republican Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and former Obama administration Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
This seems strange from two who were deeply entrenched in partisan politics in education policy during their tenures.
Bryant and Duncan were particularly diametrically opposed on national Common Core public education standards. Duncan was pushing for states to adopt the standards. Bryant called them a “bureaucratic federal education scheme” and issued an executive order in 2013 that, in his words, “affirmed that Mississippi, not the federal government, has the right and responsibility to define public education standards.”
But in their op-ed published last week, the pair said that setting national standards is a key to success in public education.
“The federal government is blocked from setting nationwide education standards, but that doesn’t mean we should have 50 different definitions of success,” they wrote. “On the contrary, all students from Maine to Maui must learn skills and knowledge for our era … regardless of what we call them and how we create them, we need agreed-upon national standards.”
In a 2014 op-ed, then-Gov. Phil Bryant opined, “What we don’t need is a one-size-fits-all program with federal government strings attached.” He said the state should “… implement Mississippi standards and curricula.”
Bryant and Duncan’s piece, which ran in publications across the country, also urged today’s leaders to “Keep politics out of the classroom,” and decried the current, often partisan and racially charged debate over teaching of critical race theory.
CRT — teaching that systemic racism exists in this country, making it more difficult for people of color to succeed — has drawn the ire of mostly Republicans across the country and prompted efforts in many state to ban it. Mississippi’s current Republican leaders, including Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn, have vehemently criticized it and pledged to push legislation to ban it, despite the state superintendent saying it is not being taught in any Mississippi public schools.
Bryant, during his two terms as governor from 2012 to 2020, was not often one to let a partisan social issue pass by or to not join in on a red meat Republican movement, be it education issues or others.
But in the shared-byline op-ed, Bryant and Duncan said that such “politics is threatening to undermine our progress in the classroom.”
“Exhibit A is the misguided debate over critical race theory,” the pair wrote. “Let’s agree to neither deny the painful truths of our ancestors nor blame their descendants. President Reagan once encouraged an ‘informed patriotism’ that is ‘grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.’ From our vantage point, that means an education where students can openly and honestly acknowledge the continuing remnants of racism in our society and make sure all children are grounded in the principles of civics and democracy needed to address them fully and finally.”
Duncan and the Obama administration were often at bitter odds with social conservative Republicans such as Bryant. But perhaps the seemingly strange bedfellows have politically mellowed. They called for more collaboration between local and federal government, “the former knows how to invest effectively in education, and the latter has the resource to make it happen.”
And they closed with: “As with so many other issues, progress will come when we move away from partisan bickering and embrace audacious bipartisan goals. The outcome of such collaboration — high achievement, high graduation rates, and more — is something every politician and American can rally behind.”
