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Janna Avalon, a 72-year-old retired newspaper editor, lived out the mid-February ice storm and weeks-long water outage just feet from South Jackson’s empty water tower.

The one million-gallon tank, one of several across the city, is meant to store water at a high elevation, utilizing gravity to pressurize the delivery system, especially during service interruptions.

But contingency plans are a myth in a system as chronically broken as Jackson’s.

So for the better part of the last month, Avalon and her husband Billy heaved buckets of water they retrieved from government tankers, kind neighbors or rainfall into their home to flush their toilet or wash dishes. 

Most Jacksonians lost running water altogether after back-to-back winter storms the week of Feb. 14 stunned unprepared utilities across the Deep South, and the Avalons were some of the roughly 43,000 people whose taps remained dry for more than two weeks. City officials were still telling most residents, 82% of whom are Black, to boil their water a month later.

In the Avalons’ spacious backyard — beyond a wooden playset, garden and plum trees, plastic flamingos and decorative stone statues — the water tower adds its own charm. Avalon said it reflects colors in the evening sky, prolonging sunsets.

“It’s got all these great little attributes,” Avalon said, “except water.” 

Avalon grew up in Jackson and has lived in her home, where she raised her five children, for 28 years. Despite ongoing utility hiccups, she’s intent on staying. She asks why she should have to move — and contribute to the city’s population decline of 20% since 1980 — to access basic human services. Why city and state government officials can’t or won’t improve conditions where she already lives. Why her water bills are unreliable, why nobody reads her water meter, and why there is a “huge city water tower in our backyard and there’s no water in it.”

The questions seem simple, but the answers are complex, and the dysfunction is causing a rift between Jacksonians and their leaders.

“Water is the most intimate relationship you have with the government,” said Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “It comes into your house. You take it into your body. We put our children in it, and we prepare food with it. And when that fails — when the water is of poor quality or, in your case, just not delivered — it’s a profound betrayal of trust. And it shakes you to your core.”

Many Jacksonians lacked access to clean drinking water long before the most recent storm. In fact, on a good day, officials advise pregnant people and children under five not to drink from the tap, a phenomenon that’s been the case for the last five years.

“And most people in Jackson don’t even know,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, a longtime reproductive rights activist in Jackson and director of Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, told Mississippi Today during the recent outage. “The city and the state have done nothing to provide water to those populations. This whole time they should have been providing water for pregnant people and children under five. This whole time.”

And yet, when Jackson water customers do receive a bill (because consistent and accurate billing has also been a problem), they’re sometimes paying exorbitant amounts for water that’s unsafe to drink.

Every city water bill notifies customers of the hazard of high lead levels first found in Jackson’s tap water in 2016, caused by recurring faulty water treatment techniques that remain unaddressed. 

Only a year ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency order stating that the city’s water system presented “imminent and substantial endangerment” to its customers and could contain E. Coli. 

Water outages and the presence of harmful contaminants when the water does reach the tap are two different scenarios with unique sets of threats, but they both stem from decades of underinvestment and deferred maintenance within a dysfunctional and outdated water treatment and delivery system. 

And the risks of scarce or dirty water exist more often in the homes of families who are already burdened by the ongoing pandemic, low wages, stagnant wealth, a lack of quality health care and racism.

The city is faced with two colliding but distinct funding problems: One, the city’s infrastructure is only getting older and past administrations did not plan for inevitable future capital investments, as is true in many aging cities. Two, the loss of customer base and pervasive billing troubles have left the water department without a feasible revenue model for regular operations and maintenance.

“This is like a triple or quadruple whammy, what’s going on,” said Alan Mallach, senior fellow at D.C.-based Center for Community Progress. “One layer is the fact that older cities — completely leaving aside race, poverty, all that — are at a disadvantage to young cities.”

“Then you get the second layer,” Mallach continued. “You have this whole phenomenon which has been going on really since the 1950s, where older cities, central cities, have essentially been abandoned by large parts of the middle class, especially the white middle class, for the suburbs.”

Winter storms in past years — 1989, 1994, 2010, 2014 and most recently 2018 — have tested the city’s outdated water delivery system and caused widespread water main breaks and outages. Each time, the city has scrambled to make band-aid repairs, only to wait until the next catastrophe. Jackson isn’t alone in taking this approach, said Teodoro, the Wisconsin professor.

“The nature of local politics is that city governments will tend to neglect utilities until they break because they’re literally buried,” he said. “One of the things that is a perennial challenge for governments that operate water systems is that the quality of the water system is very hard for people to observe. But the price is very easy for them to observe.”

Not even EPA orders — including a decade-old consent decree over the city’s wastewater system that continues to release raw sewage into the Pearl River — have resulted in much meaningful action. City water and sewer systems are not like corporations, Teodoro said; the authorities can’t just take their license away. And imposing large fines only punishes the taxpayers they are supposed to be protecting. “In the end, there’s very little you can do,” Teodoro said of regulators.

This year, Jackson officials said, issues were particularly pronounced at the water treatment plants, which are not enclosed and protected from the elements like plants typically are up north.

Jackson Public Works Director Charles Williams told the media that the screens through which water from the reservoir is filtered had frozen, rendering the plant incapable of taking in water, causing pressure to drop across the system. Operators didn’t discover the issue until the weekend after the storms. They also encountered malfunctioning raw water pumps.

Also, the 10 million gallon basins where filtered reservoir water is stored before it is chemically treated contained two feet of sludge due to an overdose in chemicals that occured over time when water wasn’t coming in — a possible human error, Williams said. The city took two basins offline to clean them the week after the storm and cleaned the third a couple weeks later.

In addition to needed equipment upgrades, the city is sorely lacking the personnel needed to operate the plant in its current condition. City officials rely on these operators to notify them of an event, such as sludge build up, that they need to address. Jackson employs three high-level operators at each of its water treatment plants, when each facility really needs six of these top officials, Williams told Mississippi Today. In 2018, there were 60 unfilled positions in Public Works, Clarion Ledger reported.

“You have to maintain what you have until you’re able to make improvements,” Williams said. “But once again, you have to have funding.” 

Two generations of white and wealth flight out of Jackson has reduced the built-in revenue that officials say the water system needs just to maintain full operations, including hiring personnel — let alone to make a dent in an estimated $1 billion worth of needed upgrades.

The city’s bungled attempt to revamp its water meter and billing system through a $90 million contract with German-based manufacturer Siemens only worsened the water department’s cash flow — not to mention public confidence — while any outside investment in the capital city has come at a crawl.

“And we all know why,” Roberts, the activist, said. “Nobody wants to invest in Jackson because of who runs Jackson and who lives in Jackson. Because white folks don’t dominate here anymore. They just want to keep on letting stuff break until we break and go away. That’s what it feels like.”

With a population that’s 82% African American, Jackson is the single Blackest large city in the nation. Roughly 1-in-4 residents live in poverty, and in some west and south Jackson communities, the hardest hit by water outages, the average household pulls an income of $25,000 and as low as $15,000 in some pockets.

The capital city has lost roughly 40,000 residents since the population peaked at about 200,000 in 1980, after an initial wave of white residents left to avoid putting their children in integrated schools. Half of the decline occurred in the last two decades as more middle-class Black families moved, and the city’s white population continued to drop from 52% in 1980 to 28% in 2000 to 17% in 2019, according to U.S. Census data. 

As the customer base declines, the system might clean and pump out less water, but the same infrastructure remains under the surface of Jackson’s 111 square miles, an area geographically larger than Seattle, Baltimore or Cincinnati. Parts of Jackson’s 1,500 miles of water mains are over 100 years old.

Of course, pipes under streets in front of abandoned properties — about 4,000 by one 2019 count — still require maintenance.

At the same time, family resources are diminishing with inflation. Household buying power fell just slightly in the 1980s and was relatively stable through the 1990s. But since 2000, the annual median household income in Jackson has dropped about $6,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars, a roughly 15% decrease, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of Census data.

“We are a city with very high levels of poverty, and it’s difficult for us to raise the rates enough to do large scale replacement type projects and not make it unaffordable to live in the city of Jackson,” said former city councilman Melvin Priester Jr.

Yet the cost of Jackson’s poor quality water is still passed on to families who don’t trust the tap and purchase bottled water — which can cost a family of four $50-$100 a month — to drink instead.

The city raised water rates in 2013, but the Siemens deal penned the same year came with an onslaught of problems, including the installation of faulty water meters and meters that measured water in gallons instead of the correct cubic feet. This made any benefits of the rate increase virtually impossible to see. 

The results have been nonsensical. Over the past several years, the city has mailed exorbitant bills to some customers and none to others. Sometimes, the charges weren’t based on how much water a household used and other times, city officials advised residents to “pay what they think they owe.” Past officials said the city lacked the manpower and expertise in the billing department to manually rectify the account issues with any speed. 

In trying to protect people during the persistent billing blunders, the city has at times instituted no-shutoff policies, which demonstrate compassion but haven’t helped to compel payment. 

Today, more than 8,000 customers, or nearly one-sixth of the city’s customer base, still aren’t receiving bills. Nearly 16,000 customers owe more than $100 or are more than 90 days past due, a city spokesperson told Mississippi Today. Jackson water customers owe a total of $90.3 million.

As a result, the city continues to miss out on tens of millions of water revenues. In 2016, when officials first uncovered the issue, the city’s actual water sewer collections during the previous year was a startling 32% less than projected — a roughly $26 million shortfall. 

It’s a vicious cycle: revenue shortfalls make it harder for the city to purchase upgrades or hire the personnel needed to properly manage the billing system; the billing inaccuracies and sloppy accounting encourage a culture of nonpayment; the unpaid bills just further tank the revenue. 

Frustration only grows as residents are expected to pay for subpar service within a utility that’s already largely taken for granted.

The city received just under $60 million out of last year’s $90 million Siemens settlement, about $33 million of which is restricted in reserves or bond covenants. Another $12.6 million went to repay the general fund, leaving about $14 million for emergency sewer repairs and a new billing system.

Lawyers got the rest — a little more than $30 million. 

The story of Jackson’s failing infrastructure, national experts say, could just as easily describe the scenario in other major cities like Detroit, Toledo or Kansas City, whose leaders have had to look outside their own budgets to solve major crises.

A city rests within a state, after all, and decisions made at the state level and the impact those decisions have on the economy and public services affect what a city is able to accomplish.

“It’s really disingenuous to look at the politics and policies of any one American city in isolation from the state context in which it exists,” Teodoro said.

The residents who left Jackson in the late 20th century fled to surrounding suburbs such as Rankin County, the wealthier Republican bastion that produced many of Mississippi’s most powerful politicians, including Gov. Tate Reeves. 

Less than a year ago, Reeves vetoed bipartisan legislation that would have provided relief to poor Jacksonians with past due water bills and propped up the city’s bond rating, a proposal he suggested perpetuated a “‘free money’ concept,” Clarion Ledger reported.

A similar bill, which would apply to all municipalities, is making its way through the Legislature this session. Lawmakers also killed a bill to assist Jackson with infrastructure bonds, but it still has a chance to pass legislation that would allow the city to propose its own sales tax increase to pay for water system improvements.

Meanwhile, Speaker Philip Gunn, another top lawmaker who lives in a Jackson suburb, spent the session trying to pass tax reform that would have actually increased the tax burden on the bottom 60% of the state’s income earners, according to one study, while significantly cutting the taxes of the richest residents.

The city is also still fighting the state’s 2016 attempt to wrest control of Jackson’s airport. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said during a recent mayoral debate that during a conversation with Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the state Senate leader who lives in the white pocket of northeast Jackson, the lieutenant governor asked the mayor to “give me my airport” in exchange for infrastructure funding.

This ongoing tension is the backdrop for the city’s current crisis.

Academics who have studied government water systems recommend they regionalize in order to spread costs among struggling cities and more affluent suburbs. There’s just one recurring hitch to securing such an agreement: “Racism makes all of this so much harder,” Teodoro said.

“These would be hard problems, but we could solve them if it wasn’t for racism.”

The history of racial conflict, Teodoro explained, creates a scenario where Black residents of the city fear losing control of their services to the same people who have systematically oppressed them. And white residents of the suburbs, who chalk the city’s problems up to incompetence, don’t feel responsible to help.

In the Jackson metro, not only is regionalization a tough sell, there are examples of the opposite happening. West Rankin Utility Authority recently splintered off to build its own wastewater treatment facility to become independent from Jackson’s Savannah Street Wastewater Treatment Plant. 

It’s twofold: Systemic racism is an unmistakable underlying cause for Jackson’s stripped resources, and while it may be clouded by a mutual distrust today, racism continues to prevent future investment.

For Avalon, a white woman, understanding the decline of her majority-Black community is as easy as pointing to the state’s refusal to fully fund education or expand Medicaid. 

“Racism is everywhere,” Avalon said. “We need to recognize what we’re talking about. If my kid goes to public school that’s not up to par, why? We’re all paying taxes.”

The storage tank on Avalon’s street wasn’t full of water, Williams explained, because as the system loses pressure on an ongoing basis, not just during storms, the tower is constantly drained to make up for the deficiencies. He said he didn’t know if that tank had ever been full.

South Jackson often bears the brunt of water crises because the area is one of the furthest away from the treatment plant, so water takes longer to travel there. What little water would have been inside the tower at the time of the storm was used up immediately by some of the roughly 70,000 people who live in South Jackson.

That’s a convenient explanation for Avalon, who says her community is always last to receive attention on a variety of issues. “We’ve been putting up with that stuff all my life in south Jackson,” she said.

Jackson City Councilman De’Keither Stamps pushed the council to ask the state for $60 million, in addition to an initial $47 million proposal, to build new water storage towers in South Jackson and Byram to build up capacity in those areas.

“You shouldn’t have to live your life in fear of the plant going down,” Stamps said. “You should have enough capacity within a short distance from your house to maintain yourself.”

On March 1, just as water was starting to trickle out of her tap, Avalon stood on her back porch as it rained and looked out at the empty water reservoir that engulfs the skyline. City contractors had just come out a few years ago to repaint its dingy exterior, she recalled. Some 100 feet up, a large black fowl crouched on top of the massive steel structure stamped with the City of Jackson seal.

“If they’re vultures, gosh, that’s a terrible omen,” she said with a chuckle.

Water pressure in the Avalon home fell again in the following days as city officials discovered the facility’s intake filters were clogged with clams, mussels, tree branches and other items and had to take the systems offline. The Avalons had to shut off their water again the following weekend because of a broken pipe on their property. They’ll expect outages to continue.

“It keeps coming back and slapping us in the face, and we can’t do anything about it,” Avalon said.

Check back for a follow-up story about solutions to Jackson’s water crisis. Reporter Alex Rozier contributed to this story.

The post ‘A profound betrayal of trust’: Why Jackson’s water system is broken appeared first on Mississippi Today.

This month marks five years of publication for Mississippi Today. To celebrate, we hosted a members-only event on March 22 featuring Editor-in-Chief Adam Ganucheau and Mississippi Today board member Tray Hairston.

Watch to take a look back at Mississippi Today’s founding in 2016, dive into the work we’ve done since and explore what’s next for our newsroom.

The post WATCH: Mississippi Today’s Fifth Anniversary Event appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Here’s the latest round of positive proof that Mississippi is, above all else, a baseball state:

• Mississippi State is ranked No. 2 in the nation in the latest Baseball America poll. The Bulldogs, 16-4 and 2-1, are fresh from taking two of three games from LSU at Baton Rouge — no easy feat. Here’s what jumps out at me about Chris Lemonis’ team: State has used a staggering 23 pitchers in the 20 games so far. Those arms have combined for a team earned run average of 2.36. They have struck out 259batters and walked only 66 over 179 innings. Opponents hit only .176. That’s crazy good. Fourteen State pitchers have ERAs of under 2. That’s insane.

• Ole Miss is ranked No. 4 in the latest Baseball America poll, having swept three straight from Auburn to begin the SEC season. The Rebels, like State, are 16-4 overall and the similarities don’t end there. Mike Bianco has called on 19 pitchers to date and most have delivered, led by Friday night starter Gunnar Hoglund, who pitched eight innings of shutout ball, striking out 13 against Auburn. Hoglund leads the nation in strikeouts with 55. At the plate, Ole Miss loves the long ball. The Rebels have hit 24 home runs in 20 games, led by strapping first baseman Tim Elko with seven.

• Unranked Southern Miss, after a slow start, has won eight of its last night games to move to 12-6. Perhaps more impressively, Scott Berry’s Golden Eagles have won five consecutive weekend series to begin the season. Pitching has led the way with 18 pitchers combining to strike out 204 and walk only 36 over 158 innings. You read right: 204 Ks and 36 BBs over 158 innings. That’s a ridiculous strikeout/walks ratio and that pitching has allowed the Eagles to succeed despite an uncharacteristically anemic offensive attack. Southern Miss currently hits .208 as a team. That must improve for Berry’s team to have the success it has come to expect.

• Don’t look now, but Jackson State has the look of an NCAA Regional team. Since starting 0-4, the Tigers have won 11 of 12, including a three-game road sweep of arch-rival Alcorn when the Tigers outscored the Braves a whopping 47-13.

• It should be noted that, despite COVID-19, Ole Miss, State and Southern Miss all have drawn well. No tickets have been sold at the games. The entire allotment of available tickets have been sold beforehand.

If you follow college baseball, you know that the more you win, the more important it seems that the games become. That’s certainly the case this week where the Mississippi teams are concerned.

Start with this: No. 2 ranked State plays a three-game home weekend series with No. 1 ranked Arkansas. How’s that for March baseball: No. 1 vs. No. 2, 14-3 vs. 16-4? If standing-room-only crowds were allowed, you might have 45,000 people for those three games. Arkansas, which took two of three from Alabama to open its SEC season, is scheduled for two mid-week games with Memphis.

No. 4 ranked Ole Miss is scheduled to play Central Arkansas Tuesday night, followed by a three-game set Thursday through Saturday against Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Alabama, 15-5 going into a scheduled Tuesday afternoon home game with Southern Miss, is ranked No. 23 by Baseball America and displayed its power in taking a 17-1 victory at Arkansas before dropping the last two games of the series.

In Hattiesburg, Berry’s Golden Eagles will play one of its most important early season in years this weekend against Louisiana Tech, which is somehow unranked by Baseball America but is ranked No. 23 by DI Baseball and probably deserves to be ranked even higher. The Bulldogs, playing in a brand new ball yard under Meridian native Lane Burroughs, are off to a 13-5 record against one of the nation’s more difficult schedules. Tech clobbered Ole Miss 13-1 in one mid-week game and is coming off a three-game sweep at Tulane.

This weekend will mark the COVID-induced four-game league series in Conference USA. Instead of the traditional three-game sets, CUSA teams will play four-game series with Friday single games, Saturday seven-inning double-headers and then a single game on Sunday. Tech and Southern Miss, along with Florida Atlantic, are expected to be the class of CUSA this season. Hard to imagine a more meaningful March series than this one.

The post Mississippi college baseball continues to flourish this spring appeared first on Mississippi Today.

One million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves announced during a Monday press conference. 

While that figure signals the progress that has been made in vaccination efforts across Mississippi, the state faces hurdles to radically increasing the vaccinated population. 

“We’re not yet out of this fight. In fact, we know that the next million shots are going to be harder to get than the last million,” Reeves said. 

Reeves attributed the difficulties in administering shots to vaccine hesitancy in the state. The demand for vaccines was much higher than the state’s supply when its rollout began, but the Mississippi State Department of Health is already seeing the shift to demand being equal to or even lower than supply. 

Mississippi is lagging behind most other states in administering the shots it’s received. — And many of the states doing better than Mississippi have much stricter eligibility requirements for vaccination. Mississippi ranks 47th in the percentage of allotted doses given. 

Recent polling has shown that Mississippians are generally more open to getting a COVID-19 vaccine than they were in early January, but it’s unclear how significantly this shift has impacted demand for vaccines. 

To even maintain the current rate at which shots are being administered in Mississippi, Reeves said the state has to “get creative” in how it distributes the vaccine. That’s why Mississippi was the second state to make all residents 16 and older eligible for vaccination. Last week, Mississippi also became one of the first states to begin mass vaccinating inmates in state prisons. 

“It’s another area in which Mississippi is leading,” Reeves said.

Though the state officially reached the milestone of administering one million shots on Monday, the actual number of doses given could be as much as 10% higher, according to Reeves. 

That disconnect is due to delays between when certain private healthcare providers administer shots and when they report that through the system the state uses to report to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). All private providers that are receiving vaccine allotments sign an agreement to log all the doses they’ve given into the system within 24 hours of administering them, but some haven’t followed through.

READ MORE: Frequently asked questions about COVID vaccines in Mississippi

State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said this information gap has expanded as more local providers have been brought in to distribution efforts because data entry is more of a hassle for them. A large hospital might have software that transfers their vaccination data to the state system automatically, while smaller operations have to do it manually.

“They think it’s important to get the shots in and the documentation is just boring bureaucratic paperwork, but it’s important,” Dobbs said. 

Streamlining the reporting process isn’t just important because it affects the numbers being reported by the state. It also plays a factor in how quickly a provider will receive more vaccine shipments or whether they will at all. 

In Mississippi, 646,945 people — 22% of the state’s population — have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. More than 364,000 people have been fully inoculated since the state began distributing vaccines in December.

MAP: Where to get the COVID-19 vaccine in Mississippi

The post One million doses in, challenges ahead for COVID-19 vaccinations in Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The legislative roads for two of the most high-profile issues of the 2021 session — a massive tax swap proposal and the legalization of medical marijuana — appear to have reached a dead end.

While the ability of Mississippi legislators to revive an issue should never be underestimated, it appears the joint rules would make it near impossible to bring back to life both issues.

The end came quietly when House Judiciary B Chair Nick Bain, R-Corinth, made a motion to go to conference on a Senate bill that contained the language legalizing medical marijuana. Senate Finance Chair Josh Harkins, R-Flowood, did the same for the House bill that would have enacted the tax swap. Both motions were approved with no fanfare.

Conference committees consist of three senators and three House members and are formed to hash out the differences between the two chambers on a bill. The reason sending the two issues to conference likely kills the proposals is Legislative Joint Rule 25, which says in part, “When a conference report is considered by the house of origin and it contains an amendment by the other house which adds code sections not included in the bill as passed the house of origin, a point of order that the conference report is not in order shall be sustained and the bill shall be returned to conference” to remove those offending code sections.

Mississippi legal code is broken down by sections with laws dealing with drug enforcement, for instance, found in one code section, and laws dealing with taxes found in other code sections.

The Senate added the language legalizing medical marijuana to a bill dealing with research on cannabidiol, or CBD oil. The code sections dealing with the legalization of medical marijuana was not in the original bill.

Ditto for the House adding the tax swap proposal — multiple code sections dealing with the tax code — to a bill authorizing the sale of bonds to finance long-term construction projects across the state.

A couple of scenarios could occur where Joint Rule 25 is circumvented.

The first is if no member raises a point of order challenging the addition of the code sections. A point of order is not made automatically. A member must raise the point of order when the legislation is brought up for consideration.

There have been popular proposals approved in the past in obvious violation of legislative rules, but no member was willing to raise the point of order to kill the proposal. That is not likely to occur especially in the House where Rep. Joel Bomgar, R-Madison, strongly opposes efforts of the Legislature to approve a medical marijuana proposal that he believes is a not-so-subtle attempt to weaken the citizen-sponsored medical marijuana initiative he helped to pass in November.

The other path around Joint Rule 25 would be for the two presiding officers — House Speaker Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate — just to ignore the rule if a member such as Bomgar raises a point of order. That would be unprecedented, but most likely the presiding officers could get away with it.

The courts, based on precedent, would not overrule the presiding officer. The only option would be for the presiding officer to be overruled by a vote of the chamber where he presides. That also is not likely to happen. Seldom would a majority of a chamber go against the presiding officer in such a public manner.

No doubt, both Gunn and Hosemann would want to ignore Joint Rule 25 in these particular instances. Hosemann has spent a considerable amount of the Senate’s time this session trying to pass the medical marijuana legislation, including keeping the chamber in session one day to around 1 a.m. Gunn calls the tax swap bill, which he authored, the most important legislation of his tenure. It would phase out the personal income tax, reduce the 7% sale tax on food in half and increase the sales tax on many other items by 2.5% on each dollar spent.

But it also is unlikely that Gunn and Hosemann, both attorneys, would simply ignore the plain reading of Joint Rule 25.

So, in other words, both the Legislature’s approval of medical marijuana and of a massive tax swap proposal are likely dead for the 2021 session.

The post Medical marijuana and taxes, the hallmark 2021 legislative efforts, are likely dead appeared first on Mississippi Today.

My first day at Mississippi Today — five years ago last month — I flipped an empty cardboard box upside down to use as a desk. There was no WiFi to connect my laptop to, and I had exactly three colleagues in a small office that smelled like fresh paint.

Workers came later that week to install desks and internet. A couple weeks later, two new colleagues joined the team. A couple weeks after that, our website went live and we unceremoniously published our first article. It was a humble beginning for what has become Mississippi’s largest newsroom.

What started in March 2016 as a staff of five has grown to 23 (we had to literally tear down a wall a couple years in to expand the newsroom). State capitol coverage was our main focus from the jump, but we now have reporters covering more than a dozen beats. We’re the only statewide newsroom with full-time reporters based in several regions of the state: the Jackson metro, the Delta, the North Mississippi Hills, and the Gulf Coast.

While many things have changed in five years, some of the most important things have not. From day one, our vision for Mississippi Today was anchored in three values: fairness, accountability and truth. I’m proud to say we’ve stuck to those values these past five years.

But if I’m being completely honest, it’s been difficult. In this ever-polarized political era, everyone has their own definitions of those three values. They have been bastardized by people on both ends of the political spectrum, and so-called “news outlets” and media personalities have used them to sow discord rather than inform. We’ve done our very best to report in a way that honors the actual definitions of those values, not just the way they’ve been weaponized for political purposes.

Readers on the political right sometimes criticize us for framing our journalism with a left-leaning bias. I can understand why they see it that way. After all, the fundamental mission of American journalism is to hold government officials accountable for their words and actions, and Republicans dominate nearly every pocket of government power in Mississippi.

Readers on the left, meanwhile, have criticized us for not doing more to directly bring about political change. I can understand how hopeless it must feel to have little platform in a state where there are few means to balance the scales.

But there’s common ground I know we can all stand on, regardless of the lens through which you read our reporting: Unchecked power is harmful to every Mississippian. That’s why we came together five years ago. We tell stories and share perspectives we believe to be true, and we hold officials — Republicans and Democrats — accountable. All the while, we focus our reporting on the experiences of Mississippians most marginalized by the decisions those powerful officials make.

We’re a group of native and adopted Mississippians who love this state and believe in its future. We’ve celebrated our state’s successes, and we’ve demanded more of its leaders. We’ve exposed government wrongdoing, and we’ve inspired change. We’ve seen our work improve lives, and we’ve pondered what more we can do to help. We’ve made mistakes, but we’re careful to learn and grow from them.

We’ve done some good work, but we want to do so much more in the next five years and the years after that. This is just the beginning of how we plan to serve Mississippians.

We want to continue hiring journalists to serve as watchdogs of our public officials. We want to find innovative ways to tell the stories of Mississippi’s ignored or forgotten citizens. We want to reach even more Mississippians and arm them with the information they need to become more civically engaged.

But we cannot do any of that without your support.

The generosity of so many people over the past five years has made our work possible. But what I tell people any chance I get is that we are not the beneficiaries of that generosity; Mississippians are.

We need you to help us continue to grow. Let’s all keep an eye on the future of Mississippi together.

The post Five years in, and this is just the beginning appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Money! appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Even before the pandemic, Treasure Cosie was already on a path to not have a geometry teacher her junior year at Leland High School.

Her school district isn’t technically designated as a Critical Teacher Shortage area by the Mississippi Department of Education, but there aren’t enough teachers to teach even core subjects like math.

“You’re expecting to have a teacher teach you something you didn’t know before, but you don’t get that because you don’t have a teacher in the class,” Cosie said about her geometry course.

Instead of having an educator who can work with her in real time, her district uses an online program called Grade Results that essentially relies on students to self-teach. Students work through different sets of problems, get electronically graded on them, and if they get something wrong, they have no one to ask why. 

The stress of this was only made worse by the pandemic, explained Cosie, whose classes have been all virtual since the pandemic hit. 

“It’s depressing to some kids because they’re used to teachers explaining stuff to them. Everybody learns differently,” she said. “… And we’re dealing with this pandemic plus on top of not having teachers. It just makes you want to quit it all.”

In Mississippi, she’s not alone in being enrolled in this type of program instead of having an actual teacher. The practice is increasingly common, even in school districts not chronically plagued with teacher shortages.

When the pandemic hit, many schools in Mississippi looked to a company called Edgenuity to help serve virtual students. Districts in areas of the state hardest hit by the teacher shortage had been using the online course provider for years, but this year, even students in some of the largest, high-performing districts like Madison and DeSoto are using the program to earn initial or traditional credits.

Courses offered through online learning programs like Edgenuity are different from the virtual learning methods that schools across the country turned to as the pandemic broke out. With a typical virtual learning class, educators teach online in real time through platforms like Zoom. If that doesn’t happen, the teacher will still have designated times to work with students. 

Either way, there is intentional student-teacher interaction where students can ask questions and teachers can explain lessons. But this is not the case with programs like Edgenuity, where the only education professional connected to the program is a school district “facilitator” who may or may not know anything about the subject they’re facilitating. 

Previously only used for credit recovery (when students get the chance to retake a course they previously failed) and summer school, virtual students in Madison County could take Edgenuity courses such as physics, AP U.S. government and psychology as part of their coursework for the year. 

But Jan Richardson, the parent of a 10th-grader at Ridgeland High School, said there are problems with the program. Although a teacher or administrator is technically assigned to each of the Edgenuity courses, the reality is that for much of the year, they struggled to find answers for her son’s questions when he had an issue.

“We had a facilitator assigned to the class, but their role was not well-defined to us. We didn’t always have someone certified in the subject area assigned to help, so the students seem to be on their own,” said Richardson.

Last semester, her son and all other virtual students were supervised as a group by the district rather than their individual school, she said. When he needed help with his Personal Finance class, Richardson emailed a district employee. 

“(My son’s) question is that when he takes a test it doesn’t report back what questions were missed so it isn’t possible to learn what one got wrong,” she wrote. “He also had a concern (about) a question on a recent test where he said the answer didn’t seem correct based on the content taught. He wanted to go over that with someone.” 

The district employee responded that he did not have an answer because it is a “completely self-taught course/platform. However, I will consult with the individual that oversees Edgenuity for the district and see if there is any info I can pass along.”

Richardson then went to Edgenuity. 

“The Edgenuity representative told me the role of the assigned teacher was to field student questions, communicate with Edgenuity, and help the student if they are struggling with something. The intention is not for students to be on their own,” she said. 

Richardson and her son never got those particular issues resolved, but she did say since the district changed the way it oversees virtual students this semester, more help has been available. 

Amanda Coyle, a spokeswoman for Edgenuity, said the company provides schools with guidance on best practices for use of their programs, “as well as the option to toggle settings and customize the way their classroom leverages Edgenuity.”

“However, we do not have influence over — or insight into — the way these teachers actually choose to engage with their students or assign workloads,” she said. 

Mississippi’s use of these programs is happening as the critical teacher shortage persists and teacher pay remains low. Though the legislature recently passed a $1,000 raise for teachers, average Mississippi teacher pay ranks lowest in the Southeast and nation. Low pay is one of the most common listed reasons as the cause of the teacher shortage. 

School districts designated as critical teacher shortage areas rose from 49 school districts in 2018-2019 to 54 in 2019-2020 (the latest data available). This data only considers the percentage of teachers who are not properly certified; MDE does not track teacher vacancies. 

Teacher vacancies, however, are the reason why some school districts turn to programs like Edgenuity. 

The number of school districts that use these programs has remained somewhat steady during the past five years. But from the 2018-2019 school year to the 2019-2020 school year, the number of courses in the state through programs like Edgenuity increased from 381 to 670. During the 2020-2021 school year there were again 670 courses offered through online courses. 

Edgenuity has been the subject of scrutiny recently, particularly during the pandemic. Parents in a Tennessee school district picketed outside a school board meeting at the beginning of the school year. They said the online options offered through Edgenuity were supposed to be accompanied by a district teacher, but that was not happening. 

A high schooler in Nevada wrote to her local newspaper to share problems she experienced with Edgenuity.

“When I begin my assignments, it becomes clear that no one really cares about my education. Most of the Edgenuity assignments are graded immediately upon submission, simply based on ‘keywords’ the system looks for in my responses,” she wrote. “So far in this school year, I have received an estimated 30-40 automatic 0% grades in my various classes … To make matters worse, it seems no one at my school, nor the district, nor Edgenuity knows exactly how to correct the error.” 

It’s unclear which districts in Mississippi are using Edgenuity and similar programs because of the pandemic, the teacher shortage, to expand course offerings or some combination of those. 

But the Mississippi Department of Education did have to conduct an additional review of approved courses over the summer due to “additional demand” created by the pandemic, a spokeswoman for the department said.

The use of Edgenuity also grew nationwide, according to Amanda Coyle, a spokesperson for the company. 

“K-12 schools were already increasing use of digital curricula and tools, but the pandemic fueled increased — and wider — use,” she said, noting Edgenuity is used by more than 20,000 schools, including 20 of the 25 largest school districts in the country.

Nathan Oakley, chief academic officer for the state education department, said ideally, schools have a designated person facilitating the online course.

“If I were in a school, I would say, ‘OK, do I have somebody on staff for a period of day that students in that online course can come (to) if they need technical assistance or support with software?’” said Oakley. “There may be a point person in the school in each content area or at the school level at least so the students get a touch point at the school.” 

Education advocates have argued for years that this reasoning is a “band-aid” fix that is used instead of working to get qualified teachers into critical shortage areas, which is ultimately damaging to kids. 

“Online learning platforms like that where you don’t have a teacher just scream, ‘Nobody cares about you,’” said Lucas Rapisarda, a former program director at the Rosedale Freedom Project, during a 2018 interview with Mississippi Today. “It screams we have to create a program where we have to pre-record people talking to you because nobody else would come to your school. I see it in the kids every single day. That’s where their indifference comes from. Because they don’t think that anybody cares.”

The Rosedale Freedom project serves students in the West Bolivar Consolidated School District, administrators have turned to Edgenuity as the critical teacher shortage persists.

Yazoo County School District used Edgenuity and other online platforms several years ago for credit recovery but recently began using Edgenuity specifically for initial credit, remediation courses and test prep courses. 

During the pandemic, the district does not use it for virtual learners like Madison County does, however, except for one special circumstance involving a social studies course.

“Students have been able to take several classes through Edgenuity that weren’t available on campus for a variety of reasons, but it basically boils down to numbers. Whether it’s limited teacher certifications or limited student interest in a course, we have to utilize our staff in the most cost-effective way possible,” explained Amy Trammell, graduation coach for the district. “Smaller districts (like ours) can’t afford to assign a teacher to teach a class of 10 or fewer students… Edgenuity has been a tremendous help in filling that gap.” 

Instead, virtual learners primarily use Canvas and are taught directly by local teachers.

“With Edgenuity being somewhat self-paced, we decided that virtual students would perform better with assistance from one of our local teachers,” she said.

Trammell said some students do better with the “self-paced” courses than others, but she believes the presence of a facilitator who oversees students’ progress and answers any technical questions helps the students perform better. 

“Through trial and error, we have discovered that students who are successful in Edgenuity are those who are assigned time during the school day to work on their coursework. We have a facilitator who oversees their progress and encourages them to complete assignments daily,” said Trammell. 

While the facilitator may not be able to provide academic assistance depending on the situation, tutors or other subject-area specialists can help students who are struggling. 

Back in Leland, Treasure Cosie said she does have a facilitator to be a touch person for her geometry class. 

“She motivates us to keep going because she knows it could be difficult for us. We’re already doing all virtual learning and then (in geometry) we don’t have a teacher,” Cosie said. 

To Cosie, even though this district support is helpful, it doesn’t replace the basic need of having an actual instructor teach the course — whether that be virtual or in person. 

“We need teachers. That’s the whole thing. We need teachers for every subject that we have so that we can better understand it instead of teaching ourselves. I’m not saying we can’t. I can understand most of the concepts, but I know some kids are different from me,” Cosie said.

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Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe joins editor-in-chief Adam Ganucheau to discuss federal charges filed last week against Nancy New and Zach New, what’s next in the ongoing federal and state investigations of their alleged misspending, and who else may be ensnared in the alleged schemes.

Listen here:

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