As we recap 2020 at Mississippi Today, we want to hear what the year meant to our readers. Please take a few minutes to fill out the survey below to help us learn how we can continue to serve your news needs in 2021.
Read More: From the editors: We couldn’t have made it through this year without you.
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Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks
A cabin at Holmes County State Park, which is ‘closed until further notice’ for repairs, according to the state parks website. Mississippi’s parks have suffered years of underfunding and lack of maintenance.
Lawmakers are trying to figure out how to revive Mississippi’s state parks, which have suffered from years of budget cuts and neglected maintenance.
But the price tag to bring the state’s 25 parks (three of which are run by local governments) up to snuff is an estimated $147 million. Plus, millions more a year would be needed to keep them up — prompting discussion of privatization and a search for other options, with a tax to fund parks likely a nonstarter in the Legislature.
State parks spending has been cut by nearly 60% since 2000, and staffing by 70%. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks lacks manpower and money for even routine maintenance. The initial legislative budget recommendation for the coming year would cut MDWFP another $900,000, or by about 15%.
“We are at a crossroads,” said Robert Taylor, chairman of the Mississippi Commission of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks. “We’ve got to fund them to fix the crumbling infrastructure — have parks we can be proud of — or look at different things. But something has got to change.”
Most of the state’s 600 structures in its parks are in need of some repair — from major to minor, said Jennifer Head, parks director for MDWFP.
This comes as other states cash in on state park tourism, with the COVID-19 pandemic driving demand for RV-ing, camping and outdoor vacationing and recreation.
Mississippi receives about 1 million visitors to its parks each year. Arkansas state parks attract nearly 8.5 million visitors a year and serves as the state’s largest tourism draw, generating more than $1 billion a year for that state’s economy. Alabama sees nearly 5 million visitors to its parks annually, with an economic impact of about $375 million.
In Arkansas, parks are funded through a dedicated “conservation tax.” In Alabama, parks are 90% self-funded through fees and rentals. Mississippi parks lack an adequate dedicated funding source.
Alabama privatized one of its state parks that it had closed because of budget cuts. A few states have sold park land or solicited large private developments.
“We have a jewel in the rough,” Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told Mississippi Today. “But we don’t have our parks up to the standards we would require for our people to use them, and further, they are not up to the standards of surrounding states which have more amenities … We are leaving money on the table with the tourism industry, and this is part of the face of Mississippi. People come through, see a park that’s run down and they can’t hook their RV up, and they get the same impression about us.
“It’s time for us to take a clear, long look at this,” Hosemann said.
But Hosemann noted the state doesn’t have an extra $147 million on hand to make repairs.
Sen. Neil Whaley, chairman of the Senate Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks committee, held a committee hearing on the issue last week. He said lawmakers are still in fact-gathering mode and are looking at all options. This includes possible privatization of parks — either having private interests take over operations or just some some services — which has been a controversial subject in the state and with federal and other states’ parks.
It also includes discussion of local governments, cities and counties, taking over park operations and maintenance. In some cases the local governments would be taking over parks and land they ceded to the state many years ago.
But Whaley said lawmakers must first research legal issues with any privatization, with many parks built years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps or purchased with federal money that could cause legal entanglement.
“This is all theoretical — we don’t even have a plan yet,” Whaley said.
Privatization of parks has drawn fierce debate nationwide and in Mississippi. Opponents fear private developers would “cherry pick” the best state parks that could turn profits leaving others neglected, or that privatization would turn parks into expensive resorts and limit public access.
“Absolutely, there is concern that if they’re privatized, are people going to be able to afford to get in there if they start putting high-end developments like hotels and condos?” said Louie Miller, director of the Sierra Club of Mississippi. “Where would that leave the average Mississippian who wants to vacation for a week in a state park with their family? There’s not a lot of public lands in Mississippi, and this was an investment by the taxpayers in state parks through the years … I’m not saying there’s no room for public-private partnership … but privatizing just for someone else’s gain needs to be looked at in the hard light of day.”
Hosemann, Whaley and others say whatever is done with state parks, lawmakers will preserve their affordability and accessibility for citizens.
“These parks belong to the people of the state of Mississippi, and I’m for finding solutions that perpetuate that,” said House Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks Chairman Rep. Bill Kinkade. “… I think we all advocate that we need new, creative ways to fund our parks system, and some form of privatization is inevitable — but not wholesale privatization.”
Kinkade said bike, kayak and other rentals, for instance, could be privately operated. The state park system is already signed on with a national reservations systems for cabins.
One major expense for Mississippi parks is that MDWFP is responsible for all utilities — roads, electrical services, water and sewerage — inside parks. There has been some discussion of asking power companies, co-ops and other entities to help with this infrastructure.
Hosemann said that, as former secretary of state, he has a record of championing public lands as he led the state’s acquisition of Cat Island off the Coast and thousands of acres statewide. He said he would oppose any privatization that restricted public access to parks or raised prices drastically.
“Enlarging and improving our public spaces has been a goal of mine, and I intend to pursue it further,” Hosemann said.
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By Mississippi Today | December 30, 2020
This page was last updated Wednesday, December 30:
New cases: 3,023 | New Deaths: 29
Total Hospitalizations: 1,409
Total cases:213,055| Total Deaths: 4,747
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
All data and information reported by the Mississippi State Department of Health as of 6 p.m. yesterday
Weekly update: Wednesday, December 16
By Alex Rozier
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
View our COVID-19 resource page for more information about coronavirus in Mississippi.
The post COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 3,023 new cases appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Associated Press
Repeat eviction judgments to be commonplace across the state, analysis shows.
Under a federal eviction moratorium and as a deadly virus continued to rage, landlords in Jackson sued even more tenants each day than they did in previous years.
Many Mississippi families, especially those who were suffering before the pandemic, have not been protected under the government’s narrowly tailored efforts to keep people housed during a global pandemic, advocates argue.
“Housing is fundamental, and in a perfect world, it would have been an original consideration for funding,” said Mississippi Home Corporation Director Scott Spivey, noting that by mid-December, Congress still had yet to appropriate funds that could be used to pay the rents of most struggling tenants, even in previous relief bills.
Under a new stimulus package Congress passed Dec. 20 and President Donald Trump signed on Sunday, Spivey said he expects Mississippi to receive about $200 million out of $25 billion for rental assistance. “It isn’t coming until now and it’s been talked about since mid-summer,” Spivey said.
Jackson property owners filed evictions — just the first step in forcing a tenant out of their home — against more than 1,100 families between Sept. 4 to Nov. 30 while the federal eviction moratorium was in place, according to records Mississippi Today requested from the Hinds County Justice Court clerk.
That amounts to nearly 13 families each day in that time period, compared to roughly ten per day in 2016, according to the Princeton University-based research group the Eviction Lab.
The landlords also secured warrants of removal, one of the last steps in an eviction, against nearly 200 Jackson renters.
READ MORE: COVID-19 has made in-person court too risky, but eviction hearings continue — virtually.
It’s hard to say how many of these families overall were displaced, the way most people visualize an eviction, because data on actual evictions does not exist.
The Eviction Lab found that in 2016, about eight families were evicted from their homes each day, a rate that caused Jackson to be ranked fifth in the nation for cities with the most eviction that year.
So why — with a federal moratorium on evictions and $1.25 trillion that Mississippi received through various pandemic relief — did evictions continue?
Shortly after tens of thousands of Mississippians first began losing their jobs in March, the federal government increased unemployment benefits by $600 a week to those who qualified. Many continued to struggle because the overwhelmed unemployment agency had trouble taking in and processing the influx of claims. The $600 boost expired in August. A $300 boost started for some recipients in September but lasted only six weeks, an agency spokesperson said, at which point checks fell to the max of $235 per week. Congress extended the $300 boost in the latest relief bill.
But more than 11,000 people in Mississippi’s capital city were also unemployed before March, meaning that while the virus undoubtedly caused them hardship, they would not have been able to say they lost employment due to the pandemic and therefore would not have qualified for most relief.
The first pandemic-related funding Mississippi received to help struggling renters came through an existing U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program called the Emergency Solutions Grant. This rental assistance program began in July and totaled $18 million in Mississippi.
By Dec. 8, that program, called the Rental Assistance for Mississippians Program (RAMP), had received 8,736 calls, approved 1,155 applicants and committed just $2.88 million of the funding. It was processing an additional 925 applications. To be eligible for the pandemic relief-funded program, a renter household must earn under 50% of the median income of the area — $35,450 for a family of four in Hinds County, for example — be at immediate risk of homelessness and have been directly impacted by the virus.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered a stop to some evictions and residential removals beginning Sept. 4 to the end of the year, but for it to have worked, a renter must have provided a declaration to their landlord or property manager, certifying that the order applies to them.
“It’s pretty narrow,” said Desiree Hensley, who runs the Housing Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “You have to have a loss of income that is directly related to COVID, and that can be really difficult for people to demonstrate, especially, I think, as more time passes.”
Even if a tenant tries to invoke the order, a judge may still rule in favor of the landlord, Mississippi Today found when it attended a virtual eviction hearing in September.
Then, if the moratorium did apply to a renter, they became ineligible for any possible help under the RAMP program, Spivey said, because they were no longer close enough to an eviction and homelessness to qualify for the emergency funding.
“It’s so incredibly counterintuitive so as to be almost ridiculous,” Spivey said.
When the moratorium, instead of rental assistance, is used to avoid eviction, the landlord still doesn’t get paid and the rent debts continue to pile up. The moratorium is set to expire at the end of December but the relief bill extends it to Jan. 31.
“I’m actually sitting here, on top of money that I can use to help low income renters, saying to myself, ‘Man I really hope they don’t extend this moratorium on evictions.’ If they extend the moratorium, I’m in the same boat,” Spivey said. “I’m in crazy town.”
The next addition to rental assistance came in October with a $20 million legislative appropriation of the state’s federal pandemic relief funding under the CARES Act, money that must be spent by the end of the year. This appropriation by the Mississippi Legislature established the Mississippi Rental Assistance Grant Program administered by Mississippi Development Authority.
Landlords applied for this grant — up to $30,000 per property owner — between Oct. 22 and the Nov. 15 deadline. According to its website, the agency required the landlords to apply for funds on behalf of either tenants who were behind on rent, whose debts they would consider paid in full, or on units that were vacant as a result of the pandemic.
It approved 3,846 out of 7,213 applications, authorizing $11.9 million in relief, leaving several million unspent by mid-December.
The state Legislature passed a law so that any unspent CARES Act funding is diverted to the state’s unemployment insurance fund before Dec. 31 instead of being sent back to the federal government.
Gov. Tate Reeves’ office also told Mississippi Today he chose to commit the state’s entire additional $38 million Community Development Block Grant to rental assistance, this publication reported in early October. But by mid-December, the federal government had not released the necessary guidance for spending the funds, so Mississippi Development Authority, which will administer the money, had not yet inked a grant agreement with the Mississippi Home Corporation, which will operate the program.
The home corporation would also help administer the extra $200 million in the new relief bill.
Spivey said these future programs, when up and running, should allow greater flexibility to help struggling renters before they find themselves on the brink of homelessness. Those who earn up to 80% of the area media income — $56,700 for a family of four in Hinds County — would qualify.
“When they’re ready to go, we’re ready to go, so it can be as fast as possible and reach as many people as possible,” Spivey said in early October.
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Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report For America
Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves leaves the Capital Club at Capital Towers in Jackson after the Stennis Capitol Press Forum Jackson Monday, January 14, 2019.
Editor’s note: This story is part two in a series examining Mississippi’s child support enforcement program. Read the other stories here.
In 2019, kids in Mississippi’s child support program got an average of about $900.
The same year, Gov. Tate Reeves’ campaign received $25,000 from the wealthy private government contractor who runs the public service.
Mississippi hired local attorney Rob Wells’ company, YoungWilliams, in 2016 to operate the state’s entire child support enforcement program, a federally-funded service that helps mostly single moms secure money from their child’s father.
Now, after Mississippi’s welfare agency cancelled two recent bids to reissue the contract — instead extending the YoungWilliams agreement to the tune of $58 million — one former employee is blowing a whistle about the entire procurement process.
“Me and the other people who worked in the program with integrity all agreed that this was shady and this was inside dealing and this was profiteering off of what should be a social service,” said New Albany attorney Rutledge McMillin, a former YoungWilliams child support attorney who also previously served in a state level Mississippi Department of Human Services’ position. “And we all hated it. We all thought it was corrupt.”
The state welfare agency solicited bids to renew the child support contract twice in 2019, but cancelled both of the procurements after it scored the proposals. In both cases, YoungWilliams received fewer points than their industry rival, Maximus, according to scoring sheets Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.
Former director of Human Services John Davis ushered in the first statewide contract with YoungWilliams. Davis currently faces embezzlement charges in an alleged fraud scheme that centers on the outsourcing of a different public service.
Davis has pleaded not guilty, while current agency officials have tried to distance themselves from his administration.
“My hunch is … instead of awarding the contract to the best bid, they just cancelled it,” McMillin said.
An agency spokesperson said the cancellations were due to poor timing and a significant overhaul of the agency amid an ongoing State Auditor’s Office and FBI investigation.
Wells, a prolific campaign donor, started his Jackson-based company in the 1990s to increase the efficiency of social services. He’s since built a $100 million a year corporation through this government contracting across 17 states.
While virtually no participants are getting rich off the child support service, the program has been lucrative for Wells. And the CEO has used his success to place a foot on the scale in several political races.
In the 2019 Mississippi gubernatorial race, which took place the year YoungWilliams’ first statewide child support contract in Mississippi was set to expire, Wells dumped at least $130,000 into competing campaigns.
He gave $75,000 to Republican Reeves over three years and $55,000 to his Democratic opponent, former Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, according to reports compiled by the National Institute on Money in Politics’ Follow The Money.
In addition, YoungWilliams is represented by high powered lobbyist Austin Barbour, the nephew of former Gov. Haley Barbour, who has charged the company a $45,000 fee most years.
In Mississippi, the welfare agency is an office under the governor and any legal services contracts, such as the child support contract, must be approved by the state attorney general’s office. Wells is a longtime Hood supporter and even hired on Hood’s nephew as a legal director at the company.
Wells also donated $5,000 and $500 in 2019 to then-attorney general candidates Republican Lynn Fitch, who won, and Democrat Jennifer Riley-Collins, respectively.
The businessman has a simple explanation for his extraordinary support in the 2019 election: “I like contributing to schools; I like contributing to certain charities; and I like contributing to people that run for public office that are extremely competent, very smart and very dedicated.”
Wells had also donated several thousand to former Gov. Phil Bryant over the years, including $6,000 in 2009.
Wells declined to share his salary as CEO of the company or its Mississippi contract profit margin, which he said is a complicated equation in which you’d have to consider the company’s overall operation across several states. For example, he said YoungWilliams has taken on some public programs at a loss.
Wells is Reeves’ second largest individual donor ever, according to Follow The Money. Wells has donated $117,500 to the candidate since 2011, when Reeves first ran for Lieutenant Governor, the most powerful position in the Legislature, a job the politician held for the following eight years.
When asked how Wells’ donations over the years had played into the contracts he’s received from the state, Wells said they had nothing to do with each other.
“Nobody’s ever promised me anything,” he said. “I’ve never asked for anything.”
Mississippi state law allows for unlimited donations from individuals in statewide political races, unlike 39 states which cap donations at various annual amounts — all far under $75,000.
A 2014 report by the Center for Media and Democracy also questioned Wells’ contribution of $2,000, the state maximum, to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback shortly before the state outsourced the bulk of its child support enforcement program to YoungWilliams.
“While YoungWilliams boasted that it landed the contract because of its ‘innovative service delivery structure,’ there might be more to it than that,” the report said, referencing backroom meetings Barbour arranged between the company and the governor.
The child support enforcement contract serves many functions. It provides legal support to separated parents, especially low-income families, so they don’t have to hire a private attorney to secure court orders that spell out how much the noncustodial parent must pay to support their child each month.
The contractor also establishes paternity for children born out of wedlock and enforces support orders by extracting money, usually through wage garnishment and tax return intercepts, from noncustodial parents.
Mississippi’s misunderstood child support enforcement program, in which about half of children and one-fourth of the state’s overall population participate, is notoriously troubled, partly due to its underfunding.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services had attempted different iterations of privatizing components of the program since the 1990s under Gov. Kirk Fordice, but by 2013, officials were considering outsourcing all case management and enforcement.
A bill to allow for this privatization narrowly passed in the Legislature that year, despite warnings from lawmakers like former longtime chairman of the House Public Health Committee and undertaker Steve Holland: “It’s a greased pig already. Somebody on high knows who’s going to get this business. In the funeral business, we’d call this a prearranged funeral. That stinks. I don’t care who the governor is, it stinks.”
In 2015, the agency issued a bid — a process it says it’s not actually required to perform — for a pilot program in which a private company would operate the entirety of the child support offices in 17 of the state’s 82 counties.
YoungWilliams won the contract against just one other competitor, Maximus, because its proposal estimated a significantly lower cost, an agency spokesperson said. State workers in those county offices were given the option to become YoungWilliams employees and the pilot began.
A year later, McMillin said he watched as Davis, the former welfare department director, hastily privatized the entire public service statewide shortly after taking the helm of the agency.
Davis is now facing embezzlement charges, to which he’s pleaded not guilty, within a case that centers on the agency’s privatization of another social program, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program or TANF.
The two programs are closely related. The state actually intercepts child support payments for families on welfare, first paying itself back for any cash assistance it provided the family.
During the 2016 legislative session, lawmakers were notably focused on the welfare agency, but not because of the child support program.
Instead, to deal with a massive federal lawsuit that began in 2004 and alleged the state had failed to protect children in their foster care system, the Legislature worked on a bill to separate child protection services from the Mississippi Department of Human Services into its own agency.
To accomplish this, the bill also exempted all Human Services employees from protections under the personnel board, which McMillin said had been a barrier in past agency attempts to privatize.
“When the Legislature exempted DHS from those rules, it made full privatization possible because there were no longer any state service employees,” said McMillin, who at the time was working a stint at the Mississippi State Personnel Board, where his job was to track legislation that dealt with the board.
The month it took effect, Human Services issued a bid for the statewide child support contract.
“He (Davis) rushed out an RFP and nobody other than YoungWilliams knew about it or had an opportunity to put together a bid,” McMillin said. “So it was decided beforehand that YoungWilliams was going to get this contract, which I don’t think is the way government procurement is supposed to operate.”
Davis’ attorney, Merrida Coxwell, refuted that assertion, saying by text that privatizing the child support program “was a topic that began well before John Davis became the Executive Director.”
Before the department issued the bid, consultants told agency leaders that the initial pilot supplied no evidence that the services had improved under YoungWilliams, according to emails and documents Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.
Compared to state-run offices, YoungWilliams performed better in just one of four metrics — cases with support orders, an area in which the state severely lacked and where YoungWilliams placed much of its emphasis. The private offices also cost more than half a million more to operate than the state offices, the report said.
But the agency moved forward anyway.
YoungWilliams indeed was the only company to respond to the July 2016 request for proposals and officials inked the contract in October 2016, agency officials confirmed. “Other national vendors had lost interest in the state outsourcing because of the limited (finite) budget and one vendor (Young Williams) was willing to cut the cost per case well below the national average,” Coxwell told Mississippi Today by text.
Davis described the new contract to then-Gov. Phil Bryant in a memo that month, saying, “MDHS, with your support, entered into a contract with YoungWilliams” to operate all county offices.
“During the YoungWilliams pilot program for 17 counties in Southwest Mississippi, it was proven successful both with results and with saving Mississippi tax dollars,” Davis said, contradicting the report the agency commissioned to determine the company’s performance.
YoungWilliams has since closed roughly three-fourths of the physical child support offices statewide as it has centralized case management.
“Whether you think privatization of a government service is a good thing or not, I think the way that YoungWilliams got the contract is shady,” McMillin said. “I think that there was a determination in the Republican political circles to privatize child support and give the contract to Rob Wells. And I think John Davis saw the opportunity … He knew he had free rein. He knew various contract review boards were not going to be breathing down his neck.”
In the following years, YoungWilliams created a new child support enforcement infrastructure for the state, helping to improve program performance in some metrics.
The agency, under Davis, issued a new Request for Proposals for the contract in June of 2019. YoungWilliams had scored better for its project plan, records show, but because Maximus’ price was much lower, it won more overall points. When that happened, the agency cancelled the bid in August of 2019 and simply extended the contract with YoungWilliams. Former director Christopher Freeze had taken over during that time after Davis’ July 2019 retirement.
The same thing happened during another RFP the agency issued in November of 2019 under Freeze and cancelled last February under the interim director Jacob Black. YoungWilliams received a second year-long extension in September under the agency’s new director Bob Anderson.
By the end of September 2021, the state will have paid YoungWilliams $153 million over six years to operate the child support program.
Because of the change in leadership and the departure of top officials of the child support program in recent months, communications director Danny Blanton said the agency retains little knowledge about the past procurements.
Blanton did say that the agency cancelled the first bid in August of 2019 because it did not build in enough time for a potential transition period before the contract’s October 1 effective date. He said it cancelled the second bid so it wouldn’t be tying the hands of the agency’s new incoming leadership. That procurement was in process when the State Auditor’s Office arrested former agency officials in early February.
Wells told Mississippi Today that he was not aware his company had scored fewer points, had nothing to do with the cancellation and that he never donated to politicians while any procurement was taking place.
In early December, the department issued a new Request for Proposals for the contract, which is set to begin in October of 2021, with relatively little fanfare.
Child support privatization hasn’t been a huge conversation in Mississippi in recent years, but it remains on the radars of some officials.
“I’m not against people having government contracts,” said Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, who filed an unsuccessful bill in 2020 to end the child support contract and bring the program back in-house. “I’m not against that, but I am against people making more money off the system than the people receiving assistance.”
Carol Burnett, director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative and former director of the Office of Youth and Children for the state’s welfare agency, watched for years as officials fought over privatization — which she said is typically an excuse to pass public dollars to a well-connected contractor.
“(Child support) is just a service that has been in those kinds of fights and used for contracting purposes,” Burnett said, “so this new round is like a new chapter in the same old story.”
The post Who’s getting rich off child support? (Hint: It’s not the moms) appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today
Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, left, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann speak after a press conference in May.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said he plans to talk with House Speaker Philip Gunn on Tuesday afternoon about postponing the 2021 legislative session from January to March as COVID-19 numbers continue to spike in Mississippi.
Hosemann, who leads the Senate, told reporters he thinks lawmakers should return to Jackson on Jan. 5 as scheduled, complete pressing work in a week or so, and recess the session until the first week of March.
“I’m concerned about my legislators going back to different parts of the state and spreading it to places that didn’t previously have it,” Hosemann said. “And I’m worried about the people who work here (at the Capitol). We have several hundred people who work here every day.”
But House leaders in recent days and weeks have expressed hesitation about that idea. Hosemann himself acknowledged on Tuesday that his idea has met resistance from the House.
“I just don’t see us doing that, not while schools are open and teachers and others are working,” House Education Chair Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, told Mississippi Today earlier this month. “I think the Legislature needs to be working, too.”
Hosemann and Gunn were among a few dozen legislators who contracted COVID-19 earlier this year at the Capitol. The large outbreak, which also affected at least one Capitol staffer and one Capitol police officer, was also responsible for at least one death — a family member of a legislator, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said earlier this year.
READ MORE: “It sucks”: Coronavirus outbreak at Capitol leaves state government in limbo.
The Capitol COVID-19 outbreak occurred in June after lawmakers recessed in March because of concerns over the coronavirus. When they returned, multiple safety precautions were implemented. The number of people allowed in the House and Senate chambers, where the members’ desks are only a few feet apart, were limited. Health officials took temperatures of everyone who entered through the main doors of the building.
Throughout that time period, recommended safety precautions to combat COVID-19 like wearing masks and social distancing were largely ignored by many legislators, though some did wear masks. Many of the lawmakers who later confirmed they contracted the virus were previously seen without masks and not distancing from colleagues.
READ MORE: Legislators pay price for disregarding COVID-19 precautions at Capitol.
Citing the 2020 Capitol outbreak, Hosemann suggested that lawmakers should meet for a week or so in early January to address pressing issues, including ratification of the new state flag, confirmation hearings and any necessary federal stimulus spending.
Hosemann said if lawmakers recessed until early March, they could finish their work for the year by the end of May.
The post Hosemann wants to delay 2021 session as COVID-19 spikes. House leaders remain hesitant. appeared first on Mississippi Today.
OXFORD — Five University of Mississippi professors, along with local community organizations and other campus partners, are exploring the history and impact of slavery at the university and in the Oxford community.
The University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group (UMSRG) started as a 2013 book club consisting of several faculty and administrators where they read and discussed historian Craig Steven Wilder’s book, “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” in efforts to “develop a set of preliminary initiatives that faculty and students on the campus might be able to tackle with regard to the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi,” according to the group’s website.
Seven years later, UMSRG still upholds its core mission to “explore new scholarship on slavery and the legacies of slavery” and “to address these historical omissions and social neglect.”
Brittany Brown
The Lyceum, the oldest building on UM’s campus, was built by enslaved laborers between 1846 and 1848.
So far, the group has been able to name and identify 11 enslaved people who labored on the campus, has led campus slavery tours and has completed many other stories and projects in order to bring to life the connection between slavery, the University of Mississippi and the greater Oxford and Lafayette County community.
“For me, studying the institution of slavery on the university’s campus is a part of giving people who say they love the university a full and accurate and complete history of that institution,” Anne Twitty, an associate professor of history, told Mississippi Today.
Twitty, who is one of five professors from across the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, African American Studies and Southern Studies to lead UMSRG, also said the value of studying slavery at the University of Mississippi connects to more recent eras in history.
“The fact that slavery was such an integral part of Mississippi, not only at the university’s founding, but that racism and Jim Crow and white supremacy continued to be absolutely essential features of the university,” Twitty said. “I think that that history deserves to be a part of the university’s narrative.”
Brittany Brown
A contextualization plaque, erected in 2018, stands in front of Barnard Observatory, which explains the details of the enslaved woman, Jane, who was owned by former Chancellor F.A.P.Barnard.
Jane, one of the 11 enslaved workers the group has been able to identify, was one of two enslaved women owned by Frederick Barnard, the university’s third chancellor. In 1859, Jane was attacked and sexually assaulted by a UM student who was expelled by then-Chancellor Barnard. Soon after, an investigation was opened against Barnard “for taking the word of an African American female slave over the word of a white male student,” according to UMSRG’s website.
In the only photo UMSRG has been able to unearth of enslaved people on the university campus stand three people — Mary Boynton, Lizza Boynton and an unnamed Black woman — presumably enslaved and owned by the man who took the photo, Edward Boynton, a chemistry professor at UM. Aside from the photo, the only records that exist of the unnamed enslaved woman in the photo are from the 1860 Federal Slave Schedule, which only list “age, ‘45;’ sex, ‘female;’ color, ‘black,’” according to UMSRG’s website.
Brittany Brown
Three fingerprints are indented one of the bricks on the building which houses the Croft Institute for International Studies. UMSRG identified these fingerprints, which likely belonged to a child or a woman, which shows “slaves were clearly used to move these bricks,” UM professor Charles Ross said.
“Slavery was a part of the United States from 1619 to 1865, so we’re talking a couple of hundred years of a system that had a direct effect on the ideology of both Black and white population in our country,” Charles Ross, UM professor of history and African American Studies and one of UMSRG’s leaders, said.
Though the group’s progress has been slightly delayed by COVID-19 with the inability to meet in person, UMSRG hopes to continue to move forward next year with continued research of the history of slavery on the grounds of Rowan Oak, the home of renowned Mississippi author William Faulkner, and creating more accessible avenues for the public to interact with UMSRG’s work, Jodi Skipper, an associate professor of anthropology and Southern Studies at UM, said.
Skipper also said UMSRG is “part of a broader movement in North Mississippi to tell a lot of these stories that we’ve ignored or silenced for the past 80 years or so.”
“Thinking about it regionally, thinking about it statewide, thinking about which groups that we’re trying to attract. Often when we think about doing this type of work, we prioritize this group of alumni that might not be so happy about the work being done, and we don’t necessarily think about potential groups that could offer support and what that looks like or might need this kind of work to be done,” Skipper said.
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By Mississippi Today | December 29, 2020
This page was last updated Tuesday, December 29:
New cases: 1,943 | New Deaths: 85
Total Hospitalizations: 1,325
Total cases:210,032| Total Deaths: 4,719
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
All data and information reported by the Mississippi State Department of Health as of 6 p.m. yesterday
Weekly update: Wednesday, December 16
By Alex Rozier
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
View our COVID-19 resource page for more information about coronavirus in Mississippi.
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Kayleigh Skinner, Mississippi Today
Family nurse practitioner Anne Norwood jokes with student Jashon Jones during a wellness checkup on Sept. 27, 2018.
For children in some areas of Mississippi, a visit to the pediatrician can mean an hour-long drive and missed class time. Some parents miss work or lack access to transportation, and in the worst cases, the child never makes the appointment at all.
But thanks to a new effort on the part of the Mississippi Department of Education and the Mississippi State Medical Association, students could have access to physicians and mental health professionals through telehealth — from within the walls of their school.
With an influx of federal money flowing into the state from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Carey Wright, state superintendent of education, began laying the foundation in late spring for a pilot telehealth program in a small number of schools.
The telehealth and teletherapy efforts are part of a larger program called Mississippi Connects. The program was developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and aims to provide every public school student in the state with the technology needed to learn at home. Components of the program include the provision of devices, professional development for teachers, students and parents, and connectivity resources.
The final piece of the puzzle is virtual medical and behavioral services.
“Everybody’s come together to figure out what this would look like and what it would take,” Wright said, noting she’s been in meetings with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the Mississippi Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatricians, the Mississippi Department of Health and the Mississippi Division of Medicaid.
Dr. John Gaudet, a Hattiesburg pediatrician and president of the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the need for a program like this is apparent.
“When you really look at the distribution of doctors in Mississippi, you have plenty in Jackson, Hattiesburg, Tupelo and Biloxi, but you get out to (those rural counties) and you are really in a health care desert,” he said. “Telehealth is a way to keep kids learning, keep kids engaged in school and keep from having to pull them out to drive 40 miles for an appointment that could’ve been accomplished rapidly and easily by telehealth.”
While the details of the program are still in the works, and a small pilot program isn’t set to begin until late spring, Gaudet said one of the models they are looking at is Health-e-Schools in western North Carolina.
Students in several districts have access to a centrally located health care provider with the use of high-definition video-conferencing with specially equipped stethoscopes and cameras. The provider can manage both acute issues such as sore throats and ear aches and long-term issues such as chronic disease management and sports physicals. Mental and behavioral health services are also offered, and a sliding fee scale is used for the uninsured.
The goal is not to disrupt existing doctor-patient relationships, but to create access to a provider where there is none.
And teletherapy is immensely needed right now, said Gaudet, who described access to mental health services in the state as “abysmal.”
“Mental health problems are skyrocketing. If you had a little bit of anxiety, now (during the COVID-19 pandemic) you have a lot. If you had a little bit of depression, now you have a lot,” he said of what he’s seen in his pediatrics practice. “Add on top of that financial stresses, educational stresses…”
Telehealth is also useful for patients with chronic conditions, said Gaudet and Dr. Jennifer Bryan, a family physician practicing in Flowood and chair of the Mississippi State Medical Association Board of Trustees.
“We can assess obesity issues, diabetes — we’ve got children with hypertension,” said Bryan. “If we get ahead of these chronic conditions in these rural areas, we can really impact overall health outcomes in Mississippi.”
The Mississippi State Medical Association currently runs the Mississippi Telehealth Network, a network developed during the COVID-19 pandemic for member physicians to use to see patients. Bryan said this network will be helpful when creating the school program.
Bryan said there is a huge willingness on the part of physicians to get involved, and the state medical board’s loosening of restrictions around telemedicine in April now makes it easier for doctors to use.
The program will start small in school districts that currently have nurses, and the estimated cost per school is from $3,000 to $5,000. The equipment will be paid for with CARES Act funds, and the school nurse will serve as the point person at each site.
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The U.S. House voted 275-134 on Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000. (Photo by Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
The U.S. House of Representatives voted 275-134 on Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000 — an action demanded by President Donald Trump in recent days as he threatened to veto the larger stimulus plan.
VOTE TALLY: Click here to see how your House member voted on the stimulus check increase.
Nearly every House Democrat voted on Monday to increase the direct checks to Americans. They were joined by 44 Republicans, meeting a two-thirds threshold needed for the resolution to pass.
In total, 134 House members — including 130 Republicans — voted against the measure. Twenty-one House Republicans did not vote, and two independents voted against the measure.
The House’s move comes a day after Trump signed an earlier passed $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief package. The president threatened a veto of that package for several days, demanding on social media over the weekend that Congress — the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate — increase direct payments from $600 to $2,000 per individual.
The procedural resolution passed by the House on Monday now moves to the Senate, where it will also require a two-thirds vote.
It is unclear if the Senate will even take up the House proposal, Politico reports, despite Trump insisting Sunday night he had secured an agreement from Republican leaders.
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