In this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey visits with Ellen Rodgers Daniels. Ellen is the new Executive Director for the Mississippi Book Festival, opening a next chapter in her forays into the heart of Mississippi culture.
This Rolling Fork native served for two and a half years as the festival literary director after a dozen years as a bookseller at Lemuria. She is also known for her work as a gallery assistant at Fischer Galleries and for her fine art photography, which has been shown in galleries throughout the Southeast.
Ellen and Marshall discuss this year’s virtual festival after the in-person event was canceled due to the Delta variant.
“Yea Mississippi,” a legislator sarcastically said when it was pointed out that Mississippi is one of only three states where a general election runoff is required if a candidate for statewide office does not garner a majority vote in the first election.
In every state in America — with the exception of Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — the person who garners the most votes wins regardless of whether that candidate gets 45% of the vote or 51%.
The legislator’s sarcastic remark was made because in so many areas, like on the issue of runoff elections, the Magnolia State stands outside of the mainstream.
For instance, Mississippi is:
The only state to require two documents to be notarized to vote by mail.
Among six states that do not allow no excuse early voting.
The only state in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic that did not allow some type of early voting for all citizens.
The only state to have its citizen-sponsored initiative process struck down by the courts. And it has happened twice in Mississippi.
The only state with no equal pay law for women.
Among 12 states not providing health insurance for the working poor by using primarily federal funds.
Among less than 10 states not restoring the right to vote to people convicted of felonies at some point after they complete their sentence.
The state with the highest state-imposed sales tax on groceries. While some local jurisdictions have higher sales taxes on grocery, there is no statewide sales tax on food higher than what Mississippi imposes.
The state with the most lenient gun laws and largest rate of gun deaths, according to the World Population Review.
The above list could go on if not for space limitations.
Yea Mississippi.
It should be pointed out that the unnamed legislator who uttered that term actually supported the runoff concept. People say without a runoff, candidates can be elected with a relatively small percentage of the vote, though they cannot cite many instances where that actually occurred.
The most famous instance might have been in the 1990s when former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota’s governorship with 37% of the vote. There are ways other than a runoff to prevent candidates from winning with a relatively small percentage of the vote.
For instance, a runoff could be required if no candidate garners at least 40% of the vote or even 45%. Or, as some other states are now doing, enact ranked voting where people select their second preference and so forth, and those selections factor into the overall vote total.
At any rate, the new Mississippi law that requires a runoff is inherently better than the old system. Previously, Mississippi was the only state in which a candidate for governor and other statewide offices could garner a majority of the vote (more than 50%) and not win election. Under the old system, the Constitution required a candidate for statewide office to win a majority of the vote and to capture the most votes in a majority of the 122 House districts. If both thresholds were not met, the state House selected the winner from the top two vote-getters.
In 2020, the Constitution was changed through an act of the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by the voters to remove the provision sending elections to the House to decide.
That action marked the first time in the state’s history where the state removed a provision from the 1890 Jim Crow Constitution designed to prevent Blacks from voting without first being ordered to by the federal judiciary. It should be pointed out, though, that a federal judge strongly hinted that he might rule the provision unconstitutional if the state did not act to remove it.
The state on its own, through legislative action in the summer of 2020, also removed the state flag — the last in the nation to prominently display the Confederate battle emblem as part of its design.
So, yea Mississippi.
And there was talk of a citizen-sponsored initiative effort to replace the language imposing a lifetime voting ban on people convicted of certain felonies. That initiative effort, of course, was quashed before it ever started when the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled the state’s initiative process unconstitutional.
The lifetime ban on voting for certain felony convictions was put into the 1890 Constitution in an effort to keep African Americans from voting.
The full panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals is considering a lawsuit that attempts to remove the lifetime ban on people convicted of all felonies except those convicted of murder and rape.
It would be another instance of the federal courts doing what state leaders refused to do.
Those who identify as anything other than white or African-American increased from 3.85% to 7.36%. And areas with traditionally significant African-American populations, like the Delta, have decreased as much as 12% in the last 10 years.
During a series of hearings to get the public’s input before redistricting starts next year, a major concern was ensuring the growth of Black political representation in the state. As such, legislators have a “puzzle” to solve, as Harrison says, amidst the Black populace’s decline.
View our map illustrating the percentage shift in non-white populations by district between 2010 and 2020:
As director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky is constantly making critical decisions about public health in the United States.
Walensky recently sat down with reporters to answer questions about the challenges of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic at the national level. This Q&A was conducted during the 2021 Health Coverage Fellowship, which Mississippi Today health care reporter Will Stribling participated in.
Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Reporter: How did the U.S. get to the point where we’ve fallen behind on rapid antigen testing to the point where there are shortages on pharmacy shelves? What needs to be done on the testing front?
Walensky: I think we have been doing a lot of testing.I think the way that we are using testing is evolving, not only with the times of how testing is being utilized, but also with the new tests that are becoming available. That evolution, I think, is that appropriate natural evolution and there are many different strategies for testing available.
Mississippi Today: What has the CDC learned throughout this pandemic about effectively communicating with the public? I know there’s been a lot of criticism directed your way, especially around some messaging that was perceived to be bungled near the beginning of the pandemic. What have y’all learned on that front?
Walensky: There are a lot of lessons to be learned here. So much of what we have to do is communicate and I’m learning that in this position as well. I think part of the challenge that we have had is, and I like this analogy, people look at the weather every day to see whether they should bring an umbrella. But if the science changes (related to the pandemic), they’re not necessarily willing to be as flexible as today I need my raincoat or umbrella.
There was this moment. I remember it well. It was a Friday evening, when I saw the data from Provincetown that essentially showed that if you had a breakthrough infection with the Delta variant that you could transmit the disease to others. We hadn’t seen that from breakthrough infections yet. We all saw the data and our jaws kind of dropped. The data were going to be published about a week later, which in publication land, is extraordinarily fast. And then the question was when and how do we communicate this to others? We knew we essentially needed to put masks back on vaccinated people, at least in this moment. And the question in my mind was, do we wait until the paper comes out in a week? Or do we not and say, the data is forthcoming, it’ll be out shortly, I made the decision that we need to do this so that the public is aware, but while recognizing that everybody wanted to see the data.
And I felt that it was important that parents know that they might bring disease home to their own vaccinated kids, that people might bring disease home to their immunocompromised family members. I tell that story, because I am fully aware that I’m making decisions where I will be criticized, regardless of what I do. In those situations, and really in all situations, I put my head down, and I say, ‘what’s the right thing for public health? What’s the right thing for health in the country?’ And that’s what I do. And then you pick up the pieces wherever they land. You have to communicate those decisions well, you have to get out there, you can’t be afraid to own your decisions. And I haven’t been.
Reporter: We’ve heard from state officials and local officials frustration that they’ve had with the CDC about a lack of data, or in some cases, they felt that they were kind of going it alone. So can you speak a little bit to what the biggest challenges that you see that might be driving some of these concerns that we’re seeing in our own work, and that local states are?
Walensky: I came in a year into this, and the public health infrastructure in the country was frail to begin with. Just to give you a sense of where our public health infrastructure is in this country, between 2010-2021 we have had H1N1, we have had Zika, we’ve had Ebola and we’ve now had COVID-19. And in that decade, this country lost 60,000 public health jobs. So we started really frail. We started with an infrastructure where the data from public health could not communicate with the data from a health system. People were faxing in COVID tests. We just didn’t have the laboratory infrastructure, the data infrastructure, the data systems. Even the investment in data to this day is orders of magnitude literally, less than it would cost a single system to upgrade their electronic health record. So the resources that have been there have been thin, and we are doing our best to work with them.
Mississippi Today: You’ve talked about how the work of CDC is meant to be preventative care. But we hear all the time in America that we don’t have health care, we have sick care, and that is baked into the way that public health is funded. I’ve heard from our state health officer in Mississippi that when a crisis like Ebola or COVID-19 emerges, they get all of this money that is really chained to responding to that specific crisis. No funding is given for building better public health infrastructure so they can be better equipped to deal with future crises. You also can’t use an inconsistent block of funding like that to hire public health workers. So how do we reconcile this disconnect and fix these issues if we want to have a public health system that really is focused on preventing future crises from barreling out of control?
Walensky: I’ve been to the (U.S. Capitol) Hill eight times to testify and I spent a lot of time talking about longitudinal resources. We have a lot of resources now, but we don’t have educated public health workers to hire. And even if we did, we can’t hire on a two year budget. We need to hire on a five year or 10 year budget. This, I call it staccato funding, disaster to disaster does not create a pipeline of people who have secure jobs in public health. It doesn’t have community workforces who are from the communities they serve. You know, I say that if we had had public health workers in Chelsea, Massachusetts, who went to churches and did blood pressure screenings every week, then when it came time to do testing, when it came time to do vaccinations, it would have been easy, right? They would have had trusted people on the ground. We haven’t had that and we’ve never had it.
The other thing I will say is, we need disease agnostic resources. So much of our funding at CDC and to the public health departments is line item (meaning it’s restricted to work related to a specific disease). If we have a line item for every disease, how do we treat a community? What are the things that we do to improve health in a community? It’s a huge problem and I’m trying to sort of chisel away some of the line items so we can have disease agnostic, longitudinal funding.
Reporter: When is this pandemic going to end? What do you see as sort of the necessary factors to ending this?
Walensky: Well, I would say nobody really wants it over more than I do. That may not be entirely true, but I’m probably pretty high up there. This is not going to be a very satisfying answer, but I’ll give it to you anyway. I think a lot of it depends on human behavior. We have a lot of the science right now. We have vaccines. What we can’t really predict is human behavior, and human behavior in this pandemic hasn’t served us very well. We are battling with one another, and not battling with the common foe, which is the virus itself. We have 55% of people fully vaccinated, perhaps we have some more protection by some people who’ve been recently infected.
But with the Delta variant, our R0 (a mathematical term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease is) is eight or nine. That means we need a lot of a lot of protection in that community to not have disease. And the real challenge is that there are some communities that are really well vaccinated and really well protected. And then there are pockets of places that have very little protection. And the virus isn’t stupid, it’s going to go there. So really, what this depends on is how well we coalesce together as a humanity and a community to do the things that we need to do in those communities to get ourselves protected.
And his modus operandi on others’ proposals is to not communicate any issues he has beforehand, but spring them as a last-minute gotcha. Even his fellow Republican leaders have learned they’re more likely to find out what he thinks of their plans through his press conferences or social medial posts than from a phone call or meeting beforehand.
He’s done it again, this time with the Legislature’s medical marijuana proposal.
There’s been debate among his fellows of whether Reeves’ M.O. of last-minute decrees is more political strategy or procrastination. Exhibit A: He can’t seem to make his required political appointments to various boards by deadline to save his life.
And many a House chairman spent hours cooling their heels and sweating late-night budget deadlines during Reeves’ Senate tenure. They were waiting to see what last-minute havoc he would wreak on budgets that had otherwise been long agreed to. They soon learned that just because Reeves’ Senate chairmen or staffers agreed to something didn’t mean he would when he finally got around to looking at it.
Reeves, true to form, has thrown some last-minute wrenches into months of work on a medical marijuana program by Senate and House leaders. This is despite Reeves proclaiming for months that he would call lawmakers into special session to pass a medical marijuana bill once they had an agreement.
They reached an agreement. He doesn’t like it. Now what? He hasn’t said.
As a former handlebar-mustachioed House Ways and Means Chairman once said late one budget deadline night: “Tate works in mysterious ways.”
Reeves gave lawmakers a last-minute laundry list of things he didn’t like in the bill. Lawmakers said they conceded on many of the items. But one major sticking point is that Reeves thinks the proposal would give patients too much smokable pot. Legislative leaders counter that they are using a well-researched, industry-standard dosage amount and Reeves is being unreasonable.
They note that the Initiative 65 cannabis program voters approved — but the state Supreme Court shot down — would have allowed patients to have more marijuana flower than the legislative proposal.
Reeves also indicated at a press conference last week that he wants lawmakers to further reduce the amount of THC in Mississippi medical marijuana, something lawmakers said he hadn’t communicated to them. They noted Mississippi’s proposed program is already conservative and already has THC limits, which would make it the only medical cannabis program in the country to have such limits.
Prior to his last-minute edicts about the legislative proposal, Reeves’ only stated policy on medical marijuana was that he was against it (he once referred to supporters as “stoners.”) But he later said that since voters overwhelmingly approved it, he would call the Legislature into special session once they had an agreement, to abide by “the will of the voters.”
Reeves has sole authority to call lawmakers into a special session. He has pretty much zilch authority over what the Legislature passes, other than he can veto it after the fact. For that matter, even with an agreement among legislative leaders, the proposed bill can still be changed (or killed) in the legislative process. That’s just… the legislative process.
A Greenwood Commonwealth editorial last week stated: “Tate Reeves may be forgetting in which branch of government he now works. When it comes to medical marijuana, he’s been acting more like the lieutenant governor he used to be than the governor he is now.”
There is great public pressure for the state to reinstate voters’ will and create a medical marijuana program and a lot of those voters appear to be getting irritated as months drag on. Lawmakers certainly haven’t moved with lightning speed on it, but they have put in the work and reached what appears to be a workable consensus.
Is Reeves really prepared to shoulder the blame for further delays — or failure to have a special session at all — because he wants to call the shots on intricacies and issues that are not really up to him?
A Mississippi governor can have great sway and input on legislation, and many in the past have. But that’s typically been through close communication and cooperation with legislative leaders. And it usually requires working with them early in the process. Or, others have influenced legislation with their skills in communication and persuasion. They’ve gotten the public onboard and lobbying for policy, or “worked the floors” and persuaded rank-and-file lawmakers to back their proposals.
But that’s not Reeves’ M.O. He disposes and opposes more than he proposes.
Greenville Christian Head Coach Jon Reed McLendon says he cannot find teams willing to play his No. 1 ranked team in the state.
Greenville Christian, the tiny Delta academy ranked No. 1 ahead of much larger private and public schools in all of Mississippi high school football, didn’t play last Friday night and won’t play this Friday night.
It is not from a lack of trying.
“We’ve tried everything I know to find someone to play us,” Jon Reed McLendon, head coach of the Greenville Christian Saints, said Wednesday. “We’ve reached out to every team we could find that had an open date this Friday night. We would have traveled anywhere. We would have played here at home. We just wanted to play. We have had no takers.”
Over the course of the season, three teams have canceled games with the Saints, each citing small rosters, plagued with injuries, as the reason. That’s why, with playoffs nearing, Greenville Christian has played only seven games and has a 6-1 record on the field (8-1 counting forfeits).
The Saints’ only loss was to Collins Hill (Ga.), the No. 1 team in Georgia and a team ranked No. 7 in the country. Most impressively, Greenville Christian defeated defending Mississippi Class 6A champion and previously undefeated Oak Grove at Oak Grove in a hastily arranged game at mid-season. The Saints also own one-sided victories over much larger private schools Madison-Ridgeland Academy, Jackson Prep and Jackson Academy.
Rick Cleveland
The Saints, an all-Black team dominating Mississippi’s predominantly white private school league, have earned statewide acclaim and are on the verge of national notoriety. CBS News recently had a crew in Greenville to film a segment scheduled to air on CBS Morning one day next week. That will be nice, McLendon said, but his team would rather play ball.
“It’s just frustrating, really, really frustrating,” McLendon said. “These kids have worked so hard and continue to work so hard every day, every week and then they don’t have the opportunity to play on Friday night. There’s supposed to be a reward for all that hard work, but our guys are not getting that reward.”
Greenville Christian was originally scheduled to have played four home games by now. The Saints have played only one. They have one regular season game remaining, Oct. 22, against Delta Streets of Greenwood. The game is scheduled to be played at Greenville Christian. And, said McLendon, “The Delta Streets coaches have assured us they are going to come play.”
After that, the playoffs begin.
Southern Miss once had a football motto: “Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.” Greenville Christian has tried to adopt practically the same mantra. But here lately the Saints can’t find anyone who will play them, no matter where, and no matter when.
Two weeks ago, McLendon began searching far and wide to land an opponent for this Friday night. He thought for certain he had a foe in St. John’s College High School of Washington D.C., an undefeated, nationally-ranked team that plays in the strong D.C. Catholic league.
Greenville Christian was willing to make the 15-hour bus ride to play in return for a $10,000 guarantee to help offset the expensive trip. McLendon says the team even heard from potential donors around Mississippi who promised to help fund the trip.
“I thought it was going to happen,” McLendon coach. “The St. John’s coach seemed like he wanted it to happen. It would have been a really long trip, a really tough game, but we were ready to go. Our kids were excited.”
Then came the news late last Friday that St. John’s had decided not to play, that their coaches had decided they really needed the open date to prepare for a grueling slate of difficult upcoming league games.
“That was option one, but we already had feelers out with other schools,” McLendon said. “We contacted teams in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, all over the place really.”
McLendon thought he had found another opponent in a private school in Clearwater, Fla., Again Greenville Christian would have had to travel, but the Saints were more than willing.
“The first indication we got from their coaches was that they really wanted to play,” McLendon said. That was over the weekend. The deal fell through Monday.
“Their coaches said their school was on fall break and after checking they learned several players already had made plans for college visits,” McLendon said.
A much more reasonable solution: Hartfield Academy of Flowood, a much larger private school team with an impressive 7-1 record, has an open date Friday night. McLendon reached out, to no avail. “I get it,” McLendon said. “They have Jackson Prep and MRA coming up the next two weeks. They probably don’t need another hard game, but we sure would have like to have played.”
McLendon thought he had two more possibilities with Memphis teams. Both decided not to play in the end.
“It’s tough, especially for our seniors and we’ve got 21 of them,” McLendon said. “This is their last year of high school football and they aren’t getting to finish it out like they wanted.”
The Saints still have the one last regular season game and then the playoffs. There is one more possibility. Greenville Christian almost surely will have a first-round bye in the playoffs. “So, we asked the state office if it would be OK for us to play one more regular season game that first week of the playoffs if we can find an opponent,” McLendon said. “They told us there is no rule against it. I don’t know if that’s what we’ll do or if that’s even what we should do, or if there is anyone out there who would play us. But we probably will explore it.
The Post-Secondary Board this week unanimously voted to recommend an overhaul of Mississippi’s financial aid programs that could completely change how the state helps students pay for college.
If adopted by the Legislature this upcoming session, low-income and Black students stand to lose thousands of dollars for college.
The program, called the “Mississippi One Grant,” was proposed Tuesday by a committee of eight financial aid directors at colleges and universities across the state.
It will replace Mississippi’s three current financial aid programs: the Mississippi Tuition Assistance Grant (MTAG), which awards between $500 and $1,000 a year; the Mississippi Eminent Scholars Grant (MESG), the state’s merit-based grant, and the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students (HELP) program, the state’s only need-based grant that covers all four years of college.
“We had a lot of conversations, we had multiple meetings, we ran hundreds of scenarios,” said Paul McKinney, the director of financial aid at Mississippi State University who headed up the committee, said when he introduced the program. “I’m very proud to announce that, at the end of the day, with what we presented, it was unanimous.”
The proposed program will award financial aid based on their need and merit. “Need” will be determined by a student’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), and “merit” by composite ACT score. The poorest students with the best ACT scores will receive the highest award of $4,500.
For the average low-income student who currently receives the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students (HELP) grant, that is a loss of more than $1,500 in financial aid. Students who receive HELP got an average award of $6,172 last year, according to the latest annual report from the Office of Student Financial Aid.
Eliminating the HELP grant — and not replacing it with a similar program — is going to make it much harder for low-income students to afford college in Mississippi, advocates for college access told Mississippi Today.
“It just breaks my heart,” said Ann Hendrick, the director of Get2College, a nonprofit that helps students complete the FAFSA. The HELP grant is “such a game-changer for students who didn’t think they could afford college.”
Notably, the program lacks input from students who rely on financial aid to go to college and their families. The committee did not reach out to those stakeholders for their thoughts.
“The way I see it is that we’ve got these individuals who spent their whole career doing financial aid awarding (on the committee), and they are also on the front lines with students and parents and they know the impact it’s gonna have … but point well taken, we never intended to pull in the public,” said Jim Turcotte, the chair of the Post-Secondary Board.
Despite the unanimous support from the committee and the board, advocates for college access are concerned about the policy.
On the whole, the Mississippi One Grant will result in more students being eligible for state financial aid. The committee estimated that about 4,500 more students will qualify for financial aid under the new program.
At the same time, students across the board will receive lower aid awards under the new program. The average student will receive $228 less than they would under the current system.
The average white student, however, will receive just $83 less than they would under the current system, according to the committee’s presentation. The average Black student will lose out on $689 of state financial aid.
Toren Ballard, the director of K-12 policy at Mississippi First, said that at scale, the new program amounts to “a massive transfer of resources from non-white students to white students.”
Under the new program, non-white students at four-year universities will lose approximately $1.1 million in state financial aid while white students will gain nearly $1.6 million, according to released by OSFA after the meeting.
“It’s like spreading the pie among more people, and cutting more even slices of each piece, rather than giving the largest ones to people who are more hungry,” Ballard told Mississippi Today.
Turcotte told Mississippi Today that this shift in resources was “not an intended outcome” of the new program. The committee didn’t “deliberately say, ‘let’s take money from this group and give it to that group,” he said. “We didn’t want to have a disparate impact on low-income students, white or Black.”
“There’s one pie and we can divide it up in various ways,” Turcotte said at the meeting. “We’re suggesting we want to help more students. There are winners and losers.”
At the meeting, the committee was asked whether gaps in funding created by the proposed program would lead to low-income students in Mississippi taking out student loans.
McKinney conceded that was a possibility. Student debt “gets a bum rap,” he said. “If used responsibly, it has a positive return. I can’t tell you how much more I made in my career because of student loans.”
The Office of Student Financial Aid, which works under the Post-Secondary Board, has warned for years that Mississippi’s financial aid programs — and the HELP grant in particular — were growing at an unsustainable rate.
As more and more students sought out and were awarded the HELP grant, the OSFA saw its budget balloon. Meanwhile, the funding from the state Legislature has not kept pace, leading OSFA’s director Jennifer Rogers to warn in 2019 the office had reached a “tipping point.”
At the Post-Secondary Board’s request, Rogers proposed an ambitious new program that same year. She recommended eliminating MTAG and MESG, and expanding the HELP grant. The rationale was simple: MTAG and MESG do not accomplish what the state created them to do, whereas study after study has shown the HELP grant is effective.
According to a study commissioned by NSPARC, about 75% of students who received HELP as a degree-seeking freshmen graduated in six years, compared to about 67% of students who were eligible for HELP but did not receive it.
But the Legislature never acted on Rogers’ proposals, and Turcotte, the chairman of the board, was asked to take another stab at revamping the programs. When Turcotte created the current committee, he charged it with proposing a single, indexed grant that would:
Smooth out HELP and MESG’s eligibility cut-offs
“Support needy and/or high achieving students”
“Have a positive impact on as many students as possible”
Stay within the current appropriations of $48 million
To qualify for the proposed One Grant, students who are Mississippi residents must complete the FAFSA, have a 2.5 high school GPA, and take at least 12 credit hours a semester. They must also score a composite score of at least 18 on the ACT.
Currently, students must score a 15 on the ACT to get MTAG, a 29 for MESG and a superscore (highest cumulative score) of 20 for HELP.
Raising the ACT scores was one way the committee hopes to keep the proposed program on budget, McKinney said at the meeting.
Turcotte is now writing a letter recommending the new program to the Legislature. He said he hopes lawmakers will solicit input from stakeholders like students when it considers the recommendation this session.
If the new program is put into place, there will be a four-year transition period for students who currently receive HELP, MTAG or MESG.
In the meantime, Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, who has been an outspoken proponent of the HELP grant, requested a meeting with Turcotte and members of the redesign committee to better understand the proposal. Hendrick and other college access folks are also looking over the numbers and have requested OSFA send them additional data about the program. They have a lot of questions about what the proposed program hopes to do.
Serving more people is “easy to do,” Hendrick said, “But what does that mean? Does that mean more people graduate from college or have access to college or is there a financial aid gap closed? I just wanted to understand what the rationale was behind some of the decisions they made, rather than stick to the budget and give more people money.”
Clarification: The proposed program would apply to new college students. Students who currently receive HELP, MTAG and MESG would not be affected.
Editor’s note: Get2College is a program of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, a Mississippi Today donor.
