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Gov. Tate Reeves on Wednesday expanded orders limiting gatherings statewide after catching criticism for hosting Christmas parties for politicians and supporters at the Governor’s Mansion as COVID-19 cases soar and top health officials advise against such events.

Reeves said his parties will be carefully structured for social distancing and safety and that he respects state medical officials, considers them “confidants,” but doesn’t always agree with them. He said he believes Mississippians want some “normalcy” after 10 months of the pandemic and that holiday gatherings can be held safely.

The state health department and state health officer have recently advised Mississippians not to attend holiday parties beyond closest family, and warned holiday socializing will bring more cases and deaths as Mississippi’s health care system is overtaxed.

But Reeves said parties and public tours at the mansion “allows us to send a message to the people of Mississippi that you can return to life as somewhat normal, but you’ve got to do it in a way that minimizes risk.”

Still, as MSDH reported a record-setting 2,746 new cases on Wednesday, Reeves expanded statewide his order limiting gatherings to no more than 10 people indoors and 50 outdoors when social distancing can’t be practiced. Until Wednesday, 54 counties had been under such executive orders and under orders to wear masks inside public places. He did not expand the mask mandate beyond specific counties with highest cases of COVID-19, although state medical experts have also urged him to do so.

The new orders also added and removed some counties from the list of those under a mask mandate, bringing the total to 61 of 82 counties.

Vaccines available by next week

A day after the first fully vetted vaccine shots were distributed in the United Kingdom, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said that 25,000 doses of the new Pfizer vaccine will be available for Mississippi’s frontline healthcare workers next week. The following week, he expects the state will have enough vaccines for all nursing home residents and employees.

But the vaccine will likely not be available for the general public until the spring or summer as the COVID-19 spread regularly sets new peaks both nationally and statewide. Mississippi’s rolling seven-day average for new cases, now at 1,927, has reached a new record in six of the last nine days, and is up 40% in the last week and a half.

Recent numbers, layered with the concurrent cold season and winter holidays, have health officials begging the public to take new levels of precaution.

“I think as a society we’ve let our guard down, we’ve become more comfortable with certain things,” Dr. Alan Jones, assistant vice chancellor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said at a press conference last week. “It’s not the super-spreader events or some of the things we saw in the (summer peak). It’s smaller gatherings where people feel safe. Those events are not safe.”

Wednesday’s executive order also put forth new restrictions on indoor sporting events; at schools, crowds are limited to the lesser of four spectators per student participant or 250 ticketed spectators. Other indoor arenas will be limited to the lesser of 10% seating capacity or 1,000 attendees.

Reeves also announced that Mississippi Emergency and Management Agency Director Greg Michel, who regularly joins the governor and Dobbs at press conferences, had tested positive for the virus, and Michel did not appear at Wednesday’s briefing.

The 61 counties now under a mask mandate are: Adams, Alcorn, Amite, Attala, Bolivar, Calhoun, Carroll, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Clarke, Clay, Coahoma, Copiah, Covington, Desoto, Forrest, Franklin, Grenada, Harrison, Hinds, Holmes, Itawamba, Jackson, Jefferson, Jefferson Davis, Jones, Kemper, Lafayette, Lamar, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Lee, Leflore, Lincoln, Lowndes, Madison, Marion, Marshall, Monroe, Montgomery, Neshoba, Noxubee, Oktibbeha, Panola, Pearl River, Perry, Pontotoc, Prentiss, Rankin, Scott, Simpson, Stone, Tate, Tippah, Tishomingo, Union, Washington, Webster, Winston, Yalobusha and Yazoo Counties.

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COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 2,746 new cases

By Alex Rozier and Erica Hensley | December 9, 2020

We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.

This page was last updated Wednesday, December 9:

New cases: 2,746| New Deaths: 24

Total Hospitalizations: 1,222

Total cases: 170,672| Total Deaths: 4,041

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 54 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 2

After a record reporting of 2,457 new cases on Wednesday, the current seven-day average of 1,605 is now far past Mississippi’s summer peak. 

During a news conference yesterday, Gov. Tate Reeves denied that Mississippi had hit a new record for case spread, even though the rolling average had already surpassed the previous high of 1,381 in the summer. 

On Wednesday, the state health department issued new guidelines on distancing, recommending that people avoid all social gatherings with people outside of their home or nuclear family.

Mississippi also hit a new high for confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations on both Sunday and Monday, with the rolling average having increased 68% since the start of November. The rolling averages for ICU patients and people on ventilators are up 45% and 88%, respectively, in that time. Total hospitalizations, which includes suspected and confirmed cases, are still below the record set in August. 

Thirteen major hospitals are without ICU capacity, according to this week’s health department numbers. Currently, 86% of the state’s ICU beds are full — including 96% capacity among the highest level COVID-care centers — and COVID-19 patients are filling 30% of those spots.

On the county level, Choctaw (17% increase in the last week), Kemper (15%), Rankin (14%), Jefferson (12%) and Stone (12%) counties saw the sharpest rise in cases this last week. 

The Delta continues to accumulate the most cases per capita out of anywhere in the state. Of the 15 counties with the highest rates, 11 are in the Delta. 

The state health department reported 128,746 people have recovered. 

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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Mississippians turned out to vote in record numbers in 2020, according to final certified numbers released recently by the secretary of state’s office, though Mississippi’s record turnout still lagged behind most other states.

In this year’s election, 1,313,894 Mississippians voted. Total turnout this year broke the previous record of 2008, when 1,289,865 voted in the election between former President Barack Obama and John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for president.

President Donald Trump captured the most votes of any candidate running in a contested election in Mississippi with 756,789 votes, or 57.6%. McCain was the previous top vote-getter with 724,597 votes in 2008.

In Mississippi’s hotly contested U.S. Senate race, Mike Espy garnered the most votes ever for a Democrat running for statewide office in a losing effort on Nov. 3 to incumbent U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde Smith.

Espy won 578,806 votes, or 44.1%, against Hyde-Smith. The previous record vote-getter on the Democratic side in Mississippi was Obama in 2012, when he captured 562,949 votes in his re-election bid. In Mississippi that year, Republican Mitt Romney won 710,746 votes.

Before Espy’s 2020 record, former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove received the most votes for a Democrat running for a Senate seat with 560,064 votes, of 45%. Musgrove was running in a special election against Republican Roger Wicker.

Hyde-Smith received 709,539 votes, or 54.1%, on Nov. 3. She received more than 47,000 fewer votes than Trump and ran 3.5 points behind the president.

Prior to final votes being tabulated, Secretary of State Michael Watson had surmised in late November that while Mississippi had a strong turnout, it was not a record turnout.

“I think we will eclipse our number from 2016 of total votes cast, but I don’t think it will be as much as we expected,” Watson said at the time. “…I don’t think it is going to be a huge increase over 2016.”

But after record numbers of absentee ballots had to be counted in populous counties, the final numbers show that turnout not only eclipsed 2016 totals but also set a new record.

“I am incredibly proud of the extraordinary voter turnout this year,” Watson said.

PODCAST: Secretary of State Michael Watson discusses 2020 elections.

Dave Wasserman, a statistician and U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report, tweeted that there was an 8.6% increase in voter turnout over 2016, which was a relatively light turnout election in Mississippi, and a 1.3% swing against Trump in the state when compared to 2016.

While the most people in the history of the state voted on Nov. 3, turnout still was relatively low when compared to the nation. Turnout of eligible voters was 66.7% nationwide in 2020, according to Statista. Mississippi was in the bottom 10 states with 60.4% turnout.

While the compilation of turnout for 2020 is still in the early stages and could be revised, it most likely still will reflect a record turnout for the nation. The previous modern-era record turnout, percentage-wise, occurred in 1960 when 62.8% of the eligible voters participated. In the 1800s, there was higher estimated turnout, but during that time more than half of the population, including women and some minorities, were barred from voting.

In advance of the 2020 election, the Espy campaign said to win it would need a record turnout among African American voters who are more inclined to vote Democratic in Mississippi. While information on the 2020 election is still being compiled, Joe O’Hern, Espy’s campaign manager, told Mississippi Today he believes Espy achieved that record turnout among Black Mississippians.

“You probably saw historic Black turnout this cycle,” said O’Hern. “… Even with nobody thinking Biden was going to win Mississippi, you probably saw historic Black turnout.”

That turnout helped Espy achieve lofty numbers for a Mississippi Democrat, but not enough for him or Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to win the state.

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No-show prison workers cost Mississippi taxpayers millions

Prisoners, guards face danger from chronic understaffing by MTC

By Joseph Neff and Alysia Santo, The Marshall Project | Dec. 9, 2020

This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, The Clarion-Ledger and Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.  

When Darrell Adams showed up for an overnight shift at the Marshall County Correctional Facility in rural Mississippi, he was one of six officers guarding about 1,000 prisoners.

Adams said he thought that was normal; only half-a-dozen guards had been turning up each night during the three months he’d worked at the prison, which is run by Management & Training Corporation. He didn’t know the state’s contract with MTC required at least 19 officers.

On April 3, 2019, Adams escorted a nurse to deliver medicine in a unit where the most dangerous prisoners were held in solitary confinement. The contract required a sergeant and an officer to be there at all times. But that night, Adams and the nurse said, he was the sole guard working the unit, and was also covering for six absent officers in three other buildings.

As Adams was leaving the unit, a prisoner slipped out of his cell, sneaked up behind Adams and smashed his head into the steel door frame. As the nurse watched in horror, the prisoner dragged Adams inside the cell block, shut the door and beat him unconscious.

Prisons across the country, both public and private, are struggling with staff shortages. But the circumstances that led to the attack on Adams illustrate a perverse financial incentive unique to private prisons: While fewer workers means more danger for staff and incarcerated people, it can create more profit for companies like MTC.

This problem is acute in Mississippi, where state officials failed to enforce contractual penalties that punish short staffing. Instead, they continued to pay MTC the salaries of absent employees, aka ghost workers.

By contract, MTC must have a set number of guards on every shift at its three Mississippi prisons. When a mandatory position isn’t filled, the company is supposed to repay the state the wages plus a 25 percent penalty. At the prison where Adams was attacked, the company paid some refunds to the state for several years. But MTC invoices show those repayments dropped from more than $700,000 in 2017 to only $23,000 in 2018, even as the staff vacancy rate rose.

In the company’s two other Mississippi prisons, MTC didn’t repay a penny from 2013 to 2019, despite understaffing, allowing the company to pocket millions of taxpayers’ dollars for ghost workers’ pay, according to records analyzed by The Marshall Project.

Other states have forced MTC and other prison companies to pay back millions of dollars for vacant positions and other contractual violations. Some came to light after riots, escapes, murders and sexual assaults drew attention to the company’s staffing shortfalls.

Neither MTC nor state officials would discuss how much the company owes for unfilled shifts. To estimate that amount, The Marshall Project obtained the company’s monthly invoices through public records requests, as well as data on vacant positions MTC submitted to the state from 2013 to 2019. Our analysis showed that MTC should have repaid about $6 million at Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, $950,000 at East Mississippi Correctional Facility, and $800,000 at Marshall.

MTC spokesman Issa Arnita declined to address our analysis. He attributed staff shortages to low pay resulting from a state law that requires private prisons to cost 10 percent less to operate than public facilities, as well as the small labor pools near the rural prisons.

“Attempting to make a connection between staff shortages and profit is reckless and wrong,” Arnita said. “Our goal is always to have all vacancies filled.”

After eight years of contracting with MTC, the Mississippi Department of Corrections said that in recent months it began withholding payments from the company for failing to meet staffing requirements. Commissioner of Corrections Burl Cain declined an interview request.
In a statement, he said his department has withheld $208,000 from MTC for unfilled positions since he took office in June.

Although MTC is the nation’s third-largest private prison company, it lacks the high public profile and notoriety of its larger publicly traded rivals, CoreCivic and GEO Group.

Based in Centerville, Utah, MTC is privately owned and run by a prominent Utah family, the Marquardts. Through the company spokesman, members of the family declined to comment.

Created to seek contracts to operate federal job training centers, MTC expanded into private prisons in 1987. The company now runs 20 prisons in the United States and two overseas, as well as five immigrant detention facilities. Dun & Bradstreet reports the company had annual revenues of $667 million.

MTC has a long history of failing to meet contractual obligations in its prisons, in some cases with violent consequences.

In 2006, the company built what was then the nation’s largest immigration detention facility north of Brownsville, Texas. It was understaffed, according to human rights groups, and there were complaints of poor medical care and nutrition, as well as allegations of physical and sexual abuse of detainees. MTC’s spokesman said those claims were “not true and were never substantiated.” The federal government closed the facility in 2015 after prisoners seized control for two days and set it on fire, leading the government to declare it “uninhabitable.”

A similar situation unfolded at the Kingman prison in Arizona, which MTC was hired to run in 2004. Two years later, prison officials said MTC’s understaffing violated its contract. But the dysfunction at Kingman wasn’t fully revealed until 2010, when a group of prisoners escaped and carjacked and murdered a retired couple. State investigators blamed a broken alarm system, unsecured doors, and untrained staff.

Arizona prison officials levied nearly $2 million in fines between 2006 and 2013 for understaffing. Still, the deficiencies remained. In 2015, a three-day riot broke out; 16 people were injured and the facility was badly damaged. State officials described “a culture of disorganization, disengagement, and disregard,” and soon after, the governor cancelled MTC’s contract. The company disputes the state’s findings.

In Mississippi, MTC understaffing was an issue at a 2018 trial after civil rights groups sued over bad prison conditions. The corrections commissioner at the time, Pelicia Hall, took the witness stand and was asked whether MTC had repaid the state for ghost workers.

“I am not aware of that,” Hall testified. She did not respond to messages from The Marshall Project.

Even after that court appearance, Hall and other prison officials failed to impose financial penalties on MTC as low staffing made its prisons increasingly dangerous.

Wilkinson, a high-security prison for 950 men, was so violent and understaffed that its then-warden admitted in a 2018 internal audit that he had ceded control to prison gangs. Yet MTC invoices show the company refunded nothing to the state for vacant positions at Wilkinson between 2013 and 2019. The state paid MTC $87 million to run the prison over this period.

In the internal audit, MTC noted that Wilkinson routinely failed to fill two or three mandatory positions every shift. The overnight shift was the worst: A dozen officers have told The Marshall Project that it was common for five or six guards to run the prison when the contract called for a minimum of 30 overnight.

Markus Chatman, 31, had been working at Wilkinson for two months when he was stabbed in May of 2019 in the prison’s most dangerous unit.

He and his coworkers were escorting men to and from the showers one afternoon when a prisoner pulled out a shank and demanded his keys. Chatman says the other two officers fled as he struggled with the prisoner, who stabbed him in the back and collarbone and sliced his arm. He estimated only a dozen guards had shown up to work the day he was attacked; the contract requires 43 officers on the day shift.

Chatman returned to work but quit a few weeks later. The prison is “very understaffed,” he said. People fail to show up for shifts so often, he said, “you wouldn’t believe they still had a job there,” he said.

MTC did not respond to questions about Chatman’s assertions.

It’s difficult to put an exact dollar amount on how much MTC owes the state for ghost workers. The Marshall Project’s estimate is conservative and based on MTC invoices and monthly vacancy reports. A former manager said Wilkinson undoubtedly owed the state more than The Marshall Project’s estimate of $6 million.

More precise numbers could have been found in shift rosters filed with the state, but Mississippi officials denied The Marshall Project’s public records request for those documents. Payroll data would be even more exact, but those records are not public because they are maintained by MTC. Employee pay is the single biggest cost of running a prison.

MTC went to court to try to redact staffing patterns from contracts that have been posted for years on the website transparency.mississippi.gov. The Marshall Project is suing to obtain weekly reports from state officials responsible for monitoring the prisons; the corrections department had agreed to provide these records until MTC intervened, citing security concerns.

“Private prison companies are always trying to minimize their operating costs, because that is how they increase their margins and revenue,” said Shahrzad Habibi, research and policy director of In the Public Interest, which opposes privatization of public services. Habibi has analyzed dozens of private prison contracts nationwide, and says understaffing and paying subpar wages are common ways to increase profits.

“That’s taxpayer money that could actually be reinvested in the system to make it better,” she said.

At the Marshall prison, short staffing eroded medical care, according to Dr. Amy Woods, who according to court records fought with prison officials when they refused to take injured prisoners to the hospital for appropriate medical care.

Woods worked for Centurion, a private health care provider hired by the corrections department. She declined to speak with The Marshall Project, but her story is detailed in the federal employment lawsuit she filed against MTC, Centurion, and the warden after she was pushed out last year. MTC declined to discuss the case.

Woods’ suit said that in April 2019, the warden delayed her order to take a prisoner who said he was raped to a hospital for evaluation, even though DNA evidence must be collected as soon as possible.

Two months later, a nurse told Woods that a prisoner bit off a big chunk of another man’s ear, according to Woods’ lawsuit. Fearing the victim could bleed to death, Woods ordered he be taken to the local hospital. The emergency doctor said the injury was too severe to be treated there, and urged Woods to transfer the man to a medical center in Jackson, the state capital.

Woods agreed, the lawsuit says. But a prison captain told Woods that there were not enough guards available and ordered the man returned to prison. Woods recalled her reply: “If his ear rots off and he sues someone, it’s going to be you and not me.” Prison officials eventually relented and sent the man to Jackson late that afternoon.

Two days after that incident, the warden accused Woods of disclosing the short staffing problems to a local legislator who chaired the House Corrections Committee, her lawsuit says. Woods denied it.

That legislator was state Rep. Bill Kinkade, who testified in a deposition in Woods’ case that a different prison employee had complained that the extreme short staffing made Marshall dangerous for staff and prisoners. Kinkade said he took his concerns to top state corrections officials, but the short staffing continued.

The warden revoked Woods’ security clearance, effectively firing her, even though she worked for Centurion. Kinkade, the warden, and MTC declined to comment on Woods’ case, which is scheduled for trial in January. Centurion did not respond to requests for comment.

For those who work at MTC prisons, the consequences of the short staffing can be permanent. Adams, the corrections officer beaten at Marshall last year, said he doesn’t remember being attacked. He slipped in and out of consciousness as he was put on a helicopter and flown to a trauma center in Memphis, where doctors diagnosed traumatic brain injury, he said. Surgeons used six slim metal strips to wire together his shattered eye socket, cheek and jaw.

Adams never returned to Marshall. He drives a tow truck now. He says that throbbing pain in his cheek reminds him daily of his three months as a correctional officer.

“I really want somebody to crack down on this prison, because this prison really dropped the ball,” he said. “I should have never been there by myself.”

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Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves asks a question during a meeting of the State Board of Election Commissioners, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020, in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

A spokeswoman for Gov. Tate Reeves says Christmas parties planned for the Governor’s Mansion will be “conducted safely” and follow Reeves’ COVID-19 executive orders restricting gatherings across much of the state.

Reeves is hosting several Christmas parties at the Governor’s Mansion, despite warnings from state health experts against such gatherings and the governor’s own orders limiting the number of people allowed at such events.

“The Governor and First Lady have cancelled or delayed many mansion events this year including the 1st Friday Christmas Candlelighters event and their daughter’s 16th birthday party, and have only continued with those events that can be conducted safely — following the governor’s executive orders,” spokeswoman Bailey Martin said in a written statement. “These events — that tend to be smaller and never allow more than 10 participants indoors at a time to see the museum/decorations — are conducted similar to the limited public tours that are offered to the general public.”

As COVID-19 statistics continue to set new records almost by the day, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs and the health department have warned Mississippians to avoid holiday gatherings beyond closest family and to avoid any groups beyond school, work or “essential gatherings.” Dobbs called the holidays a “perfect storm” for “explosive outbreaks” of COVID-19 and warned, “We will see deaths, absolutely, around holiday gatherings.” Health officials warn that Mississippi hospitals are overloaded with patients as pandemic cases spike to record levels.

Reeves has in recent weeks issued executive orders for 54 of Mississippi’s 82 counties that require wearing of masks in public and limiting gatherings to no more than 10 indoors and no more than 50 outdoors where social distancing is not possible.

An invitation, obtained by Mississippi Today, extended to “a small group of the governor’s friends and biggest supporters” for a party at the Governor’s Mansion.

Reeves has separate parties planned at the mansion for the 52-member Senate and 122-member state House, and for statewide and districtwide elected officials. He also has Christmas receptions planned for “a small group of the governor’s friends and biggest supporters,” Martin said.

This follows a fundraiser held by a hospital executive at his home on the Coast last week for Reeves for more than 20 people.

Reeves has caught some public criticism for planning such events and for being photographed at Republican events in Washington, D.C. and North Carolina while Mississippi was under mask-wearing and crowd limit mandates per his executive orders.

READ MORE: Gov. Tate Reeves plans Christmas parties despite his own orders and record COVID-19 numbers.

Reeves, along with Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, is listed as a headliner for a fundraiser scheduled for Monday at the Westin hotel in Jackson for state Sen. Briggs Hopson of Vicksburg. But a spokeswoman for Hosemann said he is not planning to attend — Reeves might not, either — and Hopson said Tuesday that it might be cancelled.

Gov. Tate Reeves and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann are the listed headliners for a December fundraiser for state Sen. Briggs Hopson.

Hopson said he had “planned the event and sent invitations prior to any recommendations that may have affected gatherings.” He said he is “looking at options on what to do.”

Martin said that Reeves “’hosts’ or ‘headlines’ fundraising efforts for upstanding legislators, of which Senator Hopson certainly tops that list.”

“The Governor does not always or even routinely attend but his involvement on the invite is typically a sign that he supports the work of the person in question, rather than an RSVP to be there.”

The invitation for Hopson’s fundraiser says, “Please join Governor Tate Reeves and Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann for a reception honoring Senator Briggs Hopson,” with attendance costing from $200 to $2,500, depending on sponsorship levels.

READ MORE: CEO of major Mississippi hospital hosts in-person fundraiser for Gov. Tate Reeves.

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Rogelio V. Solis, AP

State Superintendent of Education Dr. Carey Wright

This school year there are 23,000 fewer students enrolled in public schools, and currently all but 1,156 are accounted for. The Mississippi Department of Education attributes this drop primarily to a decline in kindergarten enrollment and increase in homeschooling.

Public school enrollment in Mississippi has steadily declined in recent years, but the most recent school year (2020-21) showed 23,286 fewer students are enrolled in the public school system this year compared to 2019-20 — a 5% decrease from last school year. Statewide enrollment has dropped on average about 5,500 students a year over the past three years before this current year.

Mississippi Today previously reported that the department was working with school attendance officers to locate these 23,000 students. On Monday, a news release from the department said that 4,345 fewer kindergarten students enrolled compared to the same time last year, and homeschool enrollment increased by nearly 6,800 students – jumping from 18,758 to 25,489 students total.

Additionally, 1,603 students enrolled after Sept. 30. Other children have either moved out of state or transferred to private schools. School attendance officers have not validated, or confirmed with evidence, the status of 1,156 students, the release said.

Mississippi Today spoke with Carey Wright, state superintendent of education, on Monday afternoon about the process of finding students who did not re-enroll in public schools.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Mississippi Today: Initially when I looked at the 23,000 students who hadn’t re-enrolled in comparison to the (enrollment) numbers from previous years, it seemed like that was a huge gap. What steps did the department take to try to find the students?

Carey Wright: I asked (the school attendance officers) at the beginning of the year to make sure that we could account for every child that was enrolled in spring and was not here in the fall, and so they got lists from schools. They made home visits. They made calls. They sent letters. They’ve done just a number of things to try to make sure that children are accounted for.

And so even if … we know this child has moved to, let’s say Alabama, well, that’s the reason we use the term “validated the status.” …Even if you’ve known that the child has moved — if the school in Alabama has not requested their records, even though we know that that’s where the child is — we can’t quote unquote validate their status because it’s not an official transfer. If it’s an out of state, then we determine by evidence that other school districts have sent us requesting student records or things of that nature. So that’s a way to validate where children are.

So they’ve done a Herculean job. When you think when we started, north of 23,000 (students unaccounted for) and we’re down to 1,156, they’ve done an amazing job of trying to locate and they will continue to work on validating the status. The issue in Mississippi is that the compulsory age does not start until age six. If parents have enrolled their children in kindergarten, then they are under the official compulsory attendance law. If they have not enrolled their children in kindergarten, there’s really nothing that we can do about parents that decide to keep their kindergarten children at home because they don’t have to start attending schools in Mississippi until they’re age six.

Mississippi Today: Do you think what’s going on with the pandemic has contributed to how, if it has been challenging, to track down students?

Wright: I think it presents its challenges just as in people being fearful of their own health and safety. I think that is certainly added to it. But I think that’s a reason that they’ve also been trying to make calls and send letters and notify as best that they can.

Once children reach the age of 17, then they obviously don’t have to attend school, but between the ages of six and 17, we are responsible… for trying to ensure that everyone is being educated. And that was my biggest concern. If parents had decided because of COVID you keep your kids home and homeschool them, that’s certainly their prerogative. What I didn’t want to happen is just children weren’t getting educated at all. In other words, parents just decided to keep their kids home, but not necessarily enrolling them in homeschooling… That’s something that’s not allowed.

Mississippi Today: Was that a concern for you? And if it was a concern, have those concerns eased a little bit now that you for the most part know where a lot of those students are now?

Wright: Oh, absolutely. The immediate thing that we did was pull enrollment data back from another four to five years. And we’ve never dropped more than like 5,000, maybe 6,000 something anywhere bouncing between that, but to drop in enrollment by 23,000. Yeah, it was very alarming. Interestingly enough, the biggest reductions that we have are in our primary grades, which you know it’s not so surprising. With the fear about just the overall health, I think of young children.

The two largest numbers that we’ve got because they have not returned are kids that moved out of the state or kids that transferred to homeschooling cause that accounted for over 15,000 of the 23,000 right there.

Mississippi Today: I know the implications of declining enrollment for local school districts correlates to their school funding (schools receive funding based on average daily attendance). Are there any other potential challenges that school districts may face because of this?

Wright: Well, I think that’s probably their biggest fear I think is ‘cause they need the funds particularly now if ever because of all the money that they’ve had to expend due to COVID, whether it’s to personal protective equipment (PPE) or whether it’s cleaning school buses on a daily basis, or whether it’s cleaning schools more deeply on a daily basis. I think that those monies had to come out of their pockets already, as well as then trying to ensure that kids were being educated and whether some districts would try to buy devices early, they get them in their hands, et cetera, et cetera. I think that’s been, that’s on the top of everybody’s mind, quite honestly.

Mississippi Today: Is there just anything else that you feel like we didn’t cover or you feel like it’s very important?

Wright: I think it’s the school attendance officers and the districts and teachers that deserve so much credit for being on top of this. Just hats off to the school attendance officers and to the districts and teachers for being so diligent about this. It speaks volumes about our teachers in Mississippi.

The post Q&A: State Superintendent Carey Wright discusses where 23,000 students went this year appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Read: Legislative leaders say teacher pay hike, tax cut on table despite COVID-19 uncertainties 

The post Marshall Ramsey: Teacher Raise appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report For America

Jefferson County third grade teacher Yashica Suddeth is working with students this summer to help them pass a reading test.

Most teacher education preparation programs, including those in Mississippi, are overwhelmingly white. This exacerbates an existing teacher diversity gap which means many teachers do not look like the students they serve, a new study found.

On Tuesday, TNTP, formerly The New Teacher Project, published “A Broken Pipeline Teacher Preparation’s Diversity Problem.” The study used 2017-2018 data from the U.S Department of Education, the most recent available, to analyze the racial divide in teacher preparation programs.

Out of 50 states and Washington, D.C., Mississippi ranks second for the largest diversity gap. Mississippi is one of three states, including Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, that have a teacher prep diversity gap of 30 or more percentage points, according to the report. This gap represents the percentage difference of white students in public schools in comparison to white students enrolled in preparation programs. 

In Mississippi during the 2017-28 school year, 76% of those enrolled in teacher preparation programs were white. But only 44% of the public school student population was white.

Nationwide, the majority of 400,000 prospective teachers enrolled in 25,000 teacher preparation programs were white, the study found. When broken down by type of program, alternate route programs (for candidates pursuing a teaching license who have non-education degrees) were 47% more diverse than traditional programs, which were 70% white.

“Our national reckoning with racial injustice has sparked long-overdue conversations about how our education and other systems have historically failed people of color, along with urgent calls to improve them,” the report said. “Closing the teacher diversity gap is one of the most important steps we could take to make public education more equitable.”

The call to diversify the teacher candidate pool speaks to recent research showing the academic, social and emotional benefits for students of color.

But increasing teacher diversity is a complicated issue. Teacher candidates of color — traditionally underserved, with limited advance courses during K-12 education — struggle the most in becoming certified. 

A 2019 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality showed programs don’t always prepare teacher candidates to pass the Praxis —four to five certification exams — or require them to take the classes they need in order to teach the necessary content in the classroom.

READ MORE: Would-be teachers in Mississippi struggle to pass certification exams, advocates call for evaluation of prep programs.

“It’s a complex problem with many causes, from certification rules that prioritize test scores over teaching ability, to latent bias in district recruitment and hiring processes, to school cultures that too often fail to help teachers of color build long careers in the classroom,” the TNTP report stated. 

Mississippi’s public school teacher workforce is primarily composed of white women, which also reflects the makeup of enrollment in prep programs. Mississippi teachers are some of the lowest-paid in the country, even with a $1,500 pay increase last year. The average salary for a public school teacher in 2019 was $45,105, according to the Mississippi Department of Education, and Mississippi’s average salary is the lowest in the nation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

READ MORE: Who’s teaching Mississippi’s children? A deep dive into race, gender of state’s educators.

While the authors of the TNTP report don’t solely blame teacher preparation programs for creating or solving this issue, they create the teacher candidate pool, so those programs should make diversity a top priority, the report said. 

“State governments, school districts, and even individual schools all have important roles to play in bringing more teachers of color into the classroom and ensuring they stay,” the report stated. “But too often, higher education leaders seek to absolve themselves of responsibility for their programs’ lack of diversity instead of  acknowledging their power to change it.”

The TNTP report suggested that educational institutions should recruit more candidates of color, consider financial incentives, create “grow your own” programs, and implement policies to retain teachers of color, among other suggestions. 

A February 2019 news release from the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) outlined measures taken by public universities to better prepare the “next generation of educators.”

The measures include extensive clinical practice and high quality field experiences to allow candidates to have experience teaching in elementary schools, expanding partnerships with schools, working with digital age learners in traditional and nontraditional settings, along with other professional development opportunities.

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COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 1,732 new cases

By Alex Rozier and Erica Hensley | December 8, 2020

We are bringing you the latest COVID-19 Mississippi trends with daily case, death and hospitalization updates, as well as testing data charts and other helpful interactive maps and graphs.

This page was last updated Tuesday, December 8:

New cases: 1,732| New Deaths: 56

Total Hospitalizations: 1,157

Total cases: 167,926| Total Deaths: 4,017

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 54 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 2

After a record reporting of 2,457 new cases on Wednesday, the current seven-day average of 1,605 is now far past Mississippi’s summer peak. 

During a news conference yesterday, Gov. Tate Reeves denied that Mississippi had hit a new record for case spread, even though the rolling average had already surpassed the previous high of 1,381 in the summer. 

On Wednesday, the state health department issued new guidelines on distancing, recommending that people avoid all social gatherings with people outside of their home or nuclear family.

Mississippi also hit a new high for confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations on both Sunday and Monday, with the rolling average having increased 68% since the start of November. The rolling averages for ICU patients and people on ventilators are up 45% and 88%, respectively, in that time. Total hospitalizations, which includes suspected and confirmed cases, are still below the record set in August. 

Thirteen major hospitals are without ICU capacity, according to this week’s health department numbers. Currently, 86% of the state’s ICU beds are full — including 96% capacity among the highest level COVID-care centers — and COVID-19 patients are filling 30% of those spots.

On the county level, Choctaw (17% increase in the last week), Kemper (15%), Rankin (14%), Jefferson (12%) and Stone (12%) counties saw the sharpest rise in cases this last week. 

The Delta continues to accumulate the most cases per capita out of anywhere in the state. Of the 15 counties with the highest rates, 11 are in the Delta. 

The state health department reported 128,746 people have recovered. 

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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