COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 3,023 new cases
By Mississippi Today | December 30, 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 30:
New cases: 3,023 | New Deaths: 29
Total Hospitalizations: 1,409
Total cases:213,055|Total Deaths: 4,747
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
Repeat eviction judgments to be commonplace across the state, analysis shows.
Under a federal eviction moratorium and as a deadly virus continued to rage, landlords in Jackson sued even more tenants each day than they did in previous years.
Many Mississippi families, especially those who were suffering before the pandemic, have not been protected under the government’s narrowly tailored efforts to keep people housed during a global pandemic, advocates argue.
“Housing is fundamental, and in a perfect world, it would have been an original consideration for funding,” said Mississippi Home Corporation Director Scott Spivey, noting that by mid-December, Congress still had yet to appropriate funds that could be used to pay the rents of most struggling tenants, even in previous relief bills.
Under a new stimulus package Congress passed Dec. 20 and President Donald Trump signed on Sunday, Spivey said he expects Mississippi to receive about $200 million out of $25 billion for rental assistance. “It isn’t coming until now and it’s been talked about since mid-summer,” Spivey said.
Jackson property owners filed evictions — just the first step in forcing a tenant out of their home — against more than 1,100 families between Sept. 4 to Nov. 30 while the federal eviction moratorium was in place, according to records Mississippi Today requested from the Hinds County Justice Court clerk.
That amounts to nearly 13 families each day in that time period, compared to roughly ten per day in 2016, according to the Princeton University-based research group the Eviction Lab.
The landlords also secured warrants of removal, one of the last steps in an eviction, against nearly 200 Jackson renters.
It’s hard to say how many of these families overall were displaced, the way most people visualize an eviction, because data on actual evictions does not exist.
The Eviction Lab found that in 2016, about eight families were evicted from their homes each day, a rate that caused Jackson to be ranked fifth in the nation for cities with the most eviction that year.
So why — with a federal moratorium on evictions and $1.25 trillion that Mississippi received through various pandemic relief — did evictions continue?
Shortly after tens of thousands of Mississippians first began losing their jobs in March, the federal government increased unemployment benefits by $600 a week to those who qualified. Many continued to struggle because the overwhelmed unemployment agency had trouble taking in and processing the influx of claims. The $600 boost expired in August. A $300 boost started for some recipients in September but lasted only six weeks, an agency spokesperson said, at which point checks fell to the max of $235 per week. Congress extended the $300 boost in the latest relief bill.
But more than 11,000 people in Mississippi’s capital city were also unemployed before March, meaning that while the virus undoubtedly caused them hardship, they would not have been able to say they lost employment due to the pandemic and therefore would not have qualified for most relief.
The first pandemic-related funding Mississippi received to help struggling renters came through an existing U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program called the Emergency Solutions Grant. This rental assistance program began in July and totaled $18 million in Mississippi.
By Dec. 8, that program, called the Rental Assistance for Mississippians Program (RAMP), had received 8,736 calls, approved 1,155 applicants and committed just $2.88 million of the funding. It was processing an additional 925 applications. To be eligible for the pandemic relief-funded program, a renter household must earn under 50% of the median income of the area — $35,450 for a family of four in Hinds County, for example — be at immediate risk of homelessness and have been directly impacted by the virus.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered a stop to some evictions and residential removals beginning Sept. 4 to the end of the year, but for it to have worked, a renter must have provided a declaration to their landlord or property manager, certifying that the order applies to them.
“It’s pretty narrow,” said Desiree Hensley, who runs the Housing Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law. “You have to have a loss of income that is directly related to COVID, and that can be really difficult for people to demonstrate, especially, I think, as more time passes.”
Then, if the moratorium did apply to a renter, they became ineligible for any possible help under the RAMP program, Spivey said, because they were no longer close enough to an eviction and homelessness to qualify for the emergency funding.
“It’s so incredibly counterintuitive so as to be almost ridiculous,” Spivey said.
When the moratorium, instead of rental assistance, is used to avoid eviction, the landlord still doesn’t get paid and the rent debts continue to pile up. The moratorium is set to expire at the end of December but the relief bill extends it to Jan. 31.
“I’m actually sitting here, on top of money that I can use to help low income renters, saying to myself, ‘Man I really hope they don’t extend this moratorium on evictions.’ If they extend the moratorium, I’m in the same boat,” Spivey said. “I’m in crazy town.”
The next addition to rental assistance came in October with a $20 million legislative appropriation of the state’s federal pandemic relief funding under the CARES Act, money that must be spent by the end of the year. This appropriation by the Mississippi Legislature established the Mississippi Rental Assistance Grant Program administered by Mississippi Development Authority.
Landlords applied for this grant — up to $30,000 per property owner — between Oct. 22 and the Nov. 15 deadline. According to its website, the agency required the landlords to apply for funds on behalf of either tenants who were behind on rent, whose debts they would consider paid in full, or on units that were vacant as a result of the pandemic.
It approved 3,846 out of 7,213 applications, authorizing $11.9 million in relief, leaving several million unspent by mid-December.
The state Legislature passed a law so that any unspent CARES Act funding is diverted to the state’s unemployment insurance fund before Dec. 31 instead of being sent back to the federal government.
Gov. Tate Reeves’ office also told Mississippi Today he chose to commit the state’s entire additional $38 million Community Development Block Grant to rental assistance, this publication reported in early October. But by mid-December, the federal government had not released the necessary guidance for spending the funds, so Mississippi Development Authority, which will administer the money, had not yet inked a grant agreement with the Mississippi Home Corporation, which will operate the program.
The home corporation would also help administer the extra $200 million in the new relief bill.
Spivey said these future programs, when up and running, should allow greater flexibility to help struggling renters before they find themselves on the brink of homelessness. Those who earn up to 80% of the area media income — $56,700 for a family of four in Hinds County — would qualify.
“When they’re ready to go, we’re ready to go, so it can be as fast as possible and reach as many people as possible,” Spivey said in early October.
Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report For America
Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves leaves the Capital Club at Capital Towers in Jackson after the Stennis Capitol Press Forum Jackson Monday, January 14, 2019.
Editor’s note: This story is part two in a series examining Mississippi’s child support enforcement program. Read the other stories here.
In 2019, kids in Mississippi’s child support program got an average of about $900.
The same year, Gov. Tate Reeves’ campaign received $25,000 from the wealthy private government contractor who runs the public service.
Mississippi hired local attorney Rob Wells’ company, YoungWilliams, in 2016 to operate the state’s entire child support enforcement program, a federally-funded service that helps mostly single moms secure money from their child’s father.
Now, after Mississippi’s welfare agency cancelled two recent bids to reissue the contract — instead extending the YoungWilliams agreement to the tune of $58 million — one former employee is blowing a whistle about the entire procurement process.
“Me and the other people who worked in the program with integrity all agreed that this was shady and this was inside dealing and this was profiteering off of what should be a social service,” said New Albany attorney Rutledge McMillin, a former YoungWilliams child support attorney who also previously served in a state level Mississippi Department of Human Services’ position. “And we all hated it. We all thought it was corrupt.”
The state welfare agency solicited bids to renew the child support contract twice in 2019, but cancelled both of the procurements after it scored the proposals. In both cases, YoungWilliams received fewer points than their industry rival, Maximus, according to scoring sheets Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.
Former director of Human Services John Davis ushered in the first statewide contract with YoungWilliams. Davis currently faces embezzlement charges in an alleged fraud scheme that centers on the outsourcing of a different public service.
Davis has pleaded not guilty, while current agency officials have tried to distance themselves from his administration.
“My hunch is … instead of awarding the contract to the best bid, they just cancelled it,” McMillin said.
An agency spokesperson said the cancellations were due to poor timing and a significant overhaul of the agency amid an ongoing State Auditor’s Office and FBI investigation.
Wells, a prolific campaign donor, started his Jackson-based company in the 1990s to increase the efficiency of social services. He’s since built a $100 million a year corporation through this government contracting across 17 states.
While virtually no participants are getting rich off the child support service, the program has been lucrative for Wells. And the CEO has used his success to place a foot on the scale in several political races.
In the 2019 Mississippi gubernatorial race, which took place the year YoungWilliams’ first statewide child support contract in Mississippi was set to expire, Wells dumped at least $130,000 into competing campaigns.
He gave $75,000 to Republican Reeves over three years and $55,000 to his Democratic opponent, former Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, according to reports compiled by the National Institute on Money in Politics’ Follow The Money.
In addition, YoungWilliams is represented by high powered lobbyist Austin Barbour, the nephew of former Gov. Haley Barbour, who has charged the company a $45,000 fee most years.
In Mississippi, the welfare agency is an office under the governor and any legal services contracts, such as the child support contract, must be approved by the state attorney general’s office. Wells is a longtime Hood supporter and even hired on Hood’s nephew as a legal director at the company.
Wells also donated $5,000 and $500 in 2019 to then-attorney general candidates Republican Lynn Fitch, who won, and Democrat Jennifer Riley-Collins, respectively.
The businessman has a simple explanation for his extraordinary support in the 2019 election: “I like contributing to schools; I like contributing to certain charities; and I like contributing to people that run for public office that are extremely competent, very smart and very dedicated.”
Rob Wells, CEO of YoungWilliams
Wells had also donated several thousand to former Gov. Phil Bryant over the years, including $6,000 in 2009.
Wells declined to share his salary as CEO of the company or its Mississippi contract profit margin, which he said is a complicated equation in which you’d have to consider the company’s overall operation across several states. For example, he said YoungWilliams has taken on some public programs at a loss.
Wells is Reeves’ second largest individual donor ever, according to Follow The Money. Wells has donated $117,500 to the candidate since 2011, when Reeves first ran for Lieutenant Governor, the most powerful position in the Legislature, a job the politician held for the following eight years.
When asked how Wells’ donations over the years had played into the contracts he’s received from the state, Wells said they had nothing to do with each other.
“Nobody’s ever promised me anything,” he said. “I’ve never asked for anything.”
Mississippi state law allows for unlimited donations from individuals in statewide political races, unlike 39 states which cap donations at various annual amounts — all far under $75,000.
A 2014 report by the Center for Media and Democracy also questioned Wells’ contribution of $2,000, the state maximum, to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback shortly before the state outsourced the bulk of its child support enforcement program to YoungWilliams.
“While YoungWilliams boasted that it landed the contract because of its ‘innovative service delivery structure,’ there might be more to it than that,” the report said, referencing backroom meetings Barbour arranged between the company and the governor.
The child support enforcement contract serves many functions. It provides legal support to separated parents, especially low-income families, so they don’t have to hire a private attorney to secure court orders that spell out how much the noncustodial parent must pay to support their child each month.
The contractor also establishes paternity for children born out of wedlock and enforces support orders by extracting money, usually through wage garnishment and tax return intercepts, from noncustodial parents.
Mississippi’s misunderstood child support enforcement program, in which about half of children and one-fourth of the state’s overall population participate, is notoriously troubled, partly due to its underfunding.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services had attempted different iterations of privatizing components of the program since the 1990s under Gov. Kirk Fordice, but by 2013, officials were considering outsourcing all case management and enforcement.
A bill to allow for this privatization narrowly passed in the Legislature that year, despite warnings from lawmakers like former longtime chairman of the House Public Health Committee and undertaker Steve Holland: “It’s a greased pig already. Somebody on high knows who’s going to get this business. In the funeral business, we’d call this a prearranged funeral. That stinks. I don’t care who the governor is, it stinks.”
In 2015, the agency issued a bid — a process it says it’s not actually required to perform — for a pilot program in which a private company would operate the entirety of the child support offices in 17 of the state’s 82 counties.
YoungWilliams won the contract against just one other competitor, Maximus, because its proposal estimated a significantly lower cost, an agency spokesperson said. State workers in those county offices were given the option to become YoungWilliams employees and the pilot began.
A year later, McMillin said he watched as Davis, the former welfare department director, hastily privatized the entire public service statewide shortly after taking the helm of the agency.
Davis is now facing embezzlement charges, to which he’s pleaded not guilty, within a case that centers on the agency’s privatization of another social program, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program or TANF.
The two programs are closely related. The state actually intercepts child support payments for families on welfare, first paying itself back for any cash assistance it provided the family.
During the 2016 legislative session, lawmakers were notably focused on the welfare agency, but not because of the child support program.
Instead, to deal with a massive federal lawsuit that began in 2004 and alleged the state had failed to protect children in their foster care system, the Legislature worked on a bill to separate child protection services from the Mississippi Department of Human Services into its own agency.
To accomplish this, the bill also exempted all Human Services employees from protections under the personnel board, which McMillin said had been a barrier in past agency attempts to privatize.
“When the Legislature exempted DHS from those rules, it made full privatization possible because there were no longer any state service employees,” said McMillin, who at the time was working a stint at the Mississippi State Personnel Board, where his job was to track legislation that dealt with the board.
The month it took effect, Human Services issued a bid for the statewide child support contract.
“He (Davis) rushed out an RFP and nobody other than YoungWilliams knew about it or had an opportunity to put together a bid,” McMillin said. “So it was decided beforehand that YoungWilliams was going to get this contract, which I don’t think is the way government procurement is supposed to operate.”
Davis’ attorney, Merrida Coxwell, refuted that assertion, saying by text that privatizing the child support program “was a topic that began well before John Davis became the Executive Director.”
Before the department issued the bid, consultants told agency leaders that the initial pilot supplied no evidence that the services had improved under YoungWilliams, according to emails and documents Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.
Compared to state-run offices, YoungWilliams performed better in just one of four metrics — cases with support orders, an area in which the state severely lacked and where YoungWilliams placed much of its emphasis. The private offices also cost more than half a million more to operate than the state offices, the report said.
But the agency moved forward anyway.
YoungWilliams indeed was the only company to respond to the July 2016 request for proposals and officials inked the contract in October 2016, agency officials confirmed. “Other national vendors had lost interest in the state outsourcing because of the limited (finite) budget and one vendor (Young Williams) was willing to cut the cost per case well below the national average,” Coxwell told Mississippi Today by text.
Davis described the new contract to then-Gov. Phil Bryant in a memo that month, saying, “MDHS, with your support, entered into a contract with YoungWilliams” to operate all county offices.
“During the YoungWilliams pilot program for 17 counties in Southwest Mississippi, it was proven successful both with results and with saving Mississippi tax dollars,” Davis said, contradicting the report the agency commissioned to determine the company’s performance.
YoungWilliams has since closed roughly three-fourths of the physical child support offices statewide as it has centralized case management.
“Whether you think privatization of a government service is a good thing or not, I think the way that YoungWilliams got the contract is shady,” McMillin said. “I think that there was a determination in the Republican political circles to privatize child support and give the contract to Rob Wells. And I think John Davis saw the opportunity … He knew he had free rein. He knew various contract review boards were not going to be breathing down his neck.”
In the following years, YoungWilliams created a new child support enforcement infrastructure for the state, helping to improve program performance in some metrics.
The agency, under Davis, issued a new Request for Proposals for the contract in June of 2019. YoungWilliams had scored better for its project plan, records show, but because Maximus’ price was much lower, it won more overall points. When that happened, the agency cancelled the bid in August of 2019 and simply extended the contract with YoungWilliams. Former director Christopher Freeze had taken over during that time after Davis’ July 2019 retirement.
The same thing happened during another RFP the agency issued in November of 2019 under Freeze and cancelled last February under the interim director Jacob Black. YoungWilliams received a second year-long extension in September under the agency’s new director Bob Anderson.
By the end of September 2021, the state will have paid YoungWilliams $153 million over six years to operate the child support program.
Because of the change in leadership and the departure of top officials of the child support program in recent months, communications director Danny Blanton said the agency retains little knowledge about the past procurements.
Blanton did say that the agency cancelled the first bid in August of 2019 because it did not build in enough time for a potential transition period before the contract’s October 1 effective date. He said it cancelled the second bid so it wouldn’t be tying the hands of the agency’s new incoming leadership. That procurement was in process when the State Auditor’s Office arrested former agency officials in early February.
Wells told Mississippi Today that he was not aware his company had scored fewer points, had nothing to do with the cancellation and that he never donated to politicians while any procurement was taking place.
In early December, the department issued a new Request for Proposals for the contract, which is set to begin in October of 2021, with relatively little fanfare.
Child support privatization hasn’t been a huge conversation in Mississippi in recent years, but it remains on the radars of some officials.
“I’m not against people having government contracts,” said Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, who filed an unsuccessful bill in 2020 to end the child support contract and bring the program back in-house. “I’m not against that, but I am against people making more money off the system than the people receiving assistance.”
Carol Burnett, director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative and former director of the Office of Youth and Children for the state’s welfare agency, watched for years as officials fought over privatization — which she said is typically an excuse to pass public dollars to a well-connected contractor.
“(Child support) is just a service that has been in those kinds of fights and used for contracting purposes,” Burnett said, “so this new round is like a new chapter in the same old story.”
Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, left, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann speak after a press conference in May.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said he plans to talk with House Speaker Philip Gunn on Tuesday afternoon about postponing the 2021 legislative session from January to March as COVID-19 numbers continue to spike in Mississippi.
Hosemann, who leads the Senate, told reporters he thinks lawmakers should return to Jackson on Jan. 5 as scheduled, complete pressing work in a week or so, and recess the session until the first week of March.
“I’m concerned about my legislators going back to different parts of the state and spreading it to places that didn’t previously have it,” Hosemann said. “And I’m worried about the people who work here (at the Capitol). We have several hundred people who work here every day.”
But House leaders in recent days and weeks have expressed hesitation about that idea. Hosemann himself acknowledged on Tuesday that his idea has met resistance from the House.
“I just don’t see us doing that, not while schools are open and teachers and others are working,” House Education Chair Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, told Mississippi Today earlier this month. “I think the Legislature needs to be working, too.”
Hosemann and Gunn were among a few dozen legislators who contracted COVID-19 earlier this year at the Capitol. The large outbreak, which also affected at least one Capitol staffer and one Capitol police officer, was also responsible for at least one death — a family member of a legislator, State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said earlier this year.
The Capitol COVID-19 outbreak occurred in June after lawmakers recessed in March because of concerns over the coronavirus. When they returned, multiple safety precautions were implemented. The number of people allowed in the House and Senate chambers, where the members’ desks are only a few feet apart, were limited. Health officials took temperatures of everyone who entered through the main doors of the building.
Throughout that time period, recommended safety precautions to combat COVID-19 like wearing masks and social distancing were largely ignored by many legislators, though some did wear masks. Many of the lawmakers who later confirmed they contracted the virus were previously seen without masks and not distancing from colleagues.
Citing the 2020 Capitol outbreak, Hosemann suggested that lawmakers should meet for a week or so in early January to address pressing issues, including ratification of the new state flag, confirmation hearings and any necessary federal stimulus spending.
Hosemann said if lawmakers recessed until early March, they could finish their work for the year by the end of May.
In the only photo UMSRG has been able to unearth of enslaved people on the university campus stand three people — the woman, Mary Boynton, the child, Lizza Boynton and an unnamed Black woman — presumably enslaved and owned by the man who took the photo, Edward Boynton, a chemistry professor at UM. Photo courtesy of the University of Mississippi Department of Archives and Special Collections
University of Mississippi professors research legacy of slavery at state’s flagship university
OXFORD — Five University of Mississippi professors, along with local community organizations and other campus partners, are exploring the history and impact of slavery at the university and in the Oxford community.
The University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group (UMSRG) started as a 2013 book club consisting of several faculty and administrators where they read and discussed historian Craig Steven Wilder’s book, “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” in efforts to “develop a set of preliminary initiatives that faculty and students on the campus might be able to tackle with regard to the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi,” according to the group’s website.
Seven years later, UMSRG still upholds its core mission to “explore new scholarship on slavery and the legacies of slavery” and “to address these historical omissions and social neglect.”
Brittany Brown
The Lyceum, the oldest building on UM’s campus, was built by enslaved laborers between 1846 and 1848.
So far, the group has been able to name and identify 11 enslaved people who labored on the campus, has led campus slavery tours and has completed many other stories and projects in order to bring to life the connection between slavery, the University of Mississippi and the greater Oxford and Lafayette County community.
“For me, studying the institution of slavery on the university’s campus is a part of giving people who say they love the university a full and accurate and complete history of that institution,” Anne Twitty, an associate professor of history, told Mississippi Today.
Photo courtesy of Anne Twitty
Twitty, who is one of five professors from across the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, African American Studies and Southern Studies to lead UMSRG, also said the value of studying slavery at the University of Mississippi connects to more recent eras in history.
“The fact that slavery was such an integral part of Mississippi, not only at the university’s founding, but that racism and Jim Crow and white supremacy continued to be absolutely essential features of the university,” Twitty said. “I think that that history deserves to be a part of the university’s narrative.”
Brittany Brown
A contextualization plaque, erected in 2018, stands in front of Barnard Observatory, which explains the details of the enslaved woman, Jane, who was owned by former Chancellor F.A.P.Barnard.
Jane, one of the 11 enslaved workers the group has been able to identify, was one of two enslaved women owned by Frederick Barnard, the university’s third chancellor. In 1859, Jane was attacked and sexually assaulted by a UM student who was expelled by then-Chancellor Barnard. Soon after, an investigation was opened against Barnard “for taking the word of an African American female slave over the word of a white male student,” according to UMSRG’s website.
In the only photo UMSRG has been able to unearth of enslaved people on the university campus stand three people — Mary Boynton, Lizza Boynton and an unnamed Black woman — presumably enslaved and owned by the man who took the photo, Edward Boynton, a chemistry professor at UM. Aside from the photo, the only records that exist of the unnamed enslaved woman in the photo are from the 1860 Federal Slave Schedule, which only list “age, ‘45;’ sex, ‘female;’ color, ‘black,’” according to UMSRG’s website.
Brittany Brown
Three fingerprints are indented one of the bricks on the building which houses the Croft Institute for International Studies. UMSRG identified these fingerprints, which likely belonged to a child or a woman, which shows “slaves were clearly used to move these bricks,” UM professor Charles Ross said.
Photo courtesy of Charles Ross
“Slavery was a part of the United States from 1619 to 1865, so we’re talking a couple of hundred years of a system that had a direct effect on the ideology of both Black and white population in our country,” Charles Ross, UM professor of history and African American Studies and one of UMSRG’s leaders, said.
Though the group’s progress has been slightly delayed by COVID-19 with the inability to meet in person, UMSRG hopes to continue to move forward next year with continued research of the history of slavery on the grounds of Rowan Oak, the home of renowned Mississippi author William Faulkner, and creating more accessible avenues for the public to interact with UMSRG’s work, Jodi Skipper, an associate professor of anthropology and Southern Studies at UM, said.
Skipper also said UMSRG is “part of a broader movement in North Mississippi to tell a lot of these stories that we’ve ignored or silenced for the past 80 years or so.”
Photo provided by Jodi Skipper
“Thinking about it regionally, thinking about it statewide, thinking about which groups that we’re trying to attract. Often when we think about doing this type of work, we prioritize this group of alumni that might not be so happy about the work being done, and we don’t necessarily think about potential groups that could offer support and what that looks like or might need this kind of work to be done,” Skipper said.
COVID-19 cases: Mississippi reports 1,943 new cases
By Mississippi Today | December 29, 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 29:
New cases: 1,943 | New Deaths: 85
Total Hospitalizations: 1,325
Total cases:210,032|Total Deaths: 4,719
Mask Mandates | On Sept. 30, Gov. Tate Reeves ended the statewide mask mandate order, originally issued Aug. 4. Since then, he has added a total of 78 individual county mask mandates, covering half of the state. State health officials encourage widespread masking and credit the original mandate with helping cases improve after a steep summer spike. View the full list of COVID-19 orders here.
On Tuesday Mississippi hit a new record with the seven-day average for cases, reaching 2,196. After going nine months without reporting 2,000 cases in a day, the state has reached that point nine times in just the 16 days of December so far.
On Dec. 9, Mississippi also hit a new high for total hospitalizations on the rolling average, surpassing the summer peak. The state had already reached a new high for confirmed hospitalizations at the end of November, but hadn’t yet for the total tally, which includes suspected cases as well.
As seen in MSDH’s illness onset chart, the record for most illnesses in a day — Dec. 11, with 2,442 — is within the last two-week period, meaning those numbers could still go up.
Mississippi’s present rise in cases mirrors the national surge, as the state currently has the 26th most new cases per capita. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute tracker, every state except Vermont is now in the “red zone” (recording over 25 daily new cases per 100,000 people).
The health department reports that 148,466 people are presumed covered as of Dec. 13.
Click through the links below to view our interactive charts describing the trends around the coronavirus in Mississippi:
Family nurse practitioner Anne Norwood jokes with student Jashon Jones during a wellness checkup on Sept. 27, 2018.
For children in some areas of Mississippi, a visit to the pediatrician can mean an hour-long drive and missed class time. Some parents miss work or lack access to transportation, and in the worst cases, the child never makes the appointment at all.
But thanks to a new effort on the part of the Mississippi Department of Education and the Mississippi State Medical Association, students could have access to physicians and mental health professionals through telehealth — from within the walls of their school.
With an influx of federal money flowing into the state from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Carey Wright, state superintendent of education, began laying the foundation in late spring for a pilot telehealth program in a small number of schools.
The telehealth and teletherapy efforts are part of a larger program called Mississippi Connects. The program was developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and aims to provide every public school student in the state with the technology needed to learn at home. Components of the program include the provision of devices, professional development for teachers, students and parents, and connectivity resources.
The final piece of the puzzle is virtual medical and behavioral services.
“Everybody’s come together to figure out what this would look like and what it would take,” Wright said, noting she’s been in meetings with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the Mississippi Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatricians, the Mississippi Department of Health and the Mississippi Division of Medicaid.
Dr. John Gaudet, a Hattiesburg pediatrician and president of the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the need for a program like this is apparent.
“When you really look at the distribution of doctors in Mississippi, you have plenty in Jackson, Hattiesburg, Tupelo and Biloxi, but you get out to (those rural counties) and you are really in a health care desert,” he said. “Telehealth is a way to keep kids learning, keep kids engaged in school and keep from having to pull them out to drive 40 miles for an appointment that could’ve been accomplished rapidly and easily by telehealth.”
While the details of the program are still in the works, and a small pilot program isn’t set to begin until late spring, Gaudet said one of the models they are looking at is Health-e-Schools in western North Carolina.
Students in several districts have access to a centrally located health care provider with the use of high-definition video-conferencing with specially equipped stethoscopes and cameras. The provider can manage both acute issues such as sore throats and ear aches and long-term issues such as chronic disease management and sports physicals. Mental and behavioral health services are also offered, and a sliding fee scale is used for the uninsured.
The goal is not to disrupt existing doctor-patient relationships, but to create access to a provider where there is none.
And teletherapy is immensely needed right now, said Gaudet, who described access to mental health services in the state as “abysmal.”
“Mental health problems are skyrocketing. If you had a little bit of anxiety, now (during the COVID-19 pandemic) you have a lot. If you had a little bit of depression, now you have a lot,” he said of what he’s seen in his pediatrics practice. “Add on top of that financial stresses, educational stresses…”
Telehealth is also useful for patients with chronic conditions, said Gaudet and Dr. Jennifer Bryan, a family physician practicing in Flowood and chair of the Mississippi State Medical Association Board of Trustees.
“We can assess obesity issues, diabetes — we’ve got children with hypertension,” said Bryan. “If we get ahead of these chronic conditions in these rural areas, we can really impact overall health outcomes in Mississippi.”
The Mississippi State Medical Association currently runs the Mississippi Telehealth Network, a network developed during the COVID-19 pandemic for member physicians to use to see patients. Bryan said this network will be helpful when creating the school program.
Bryan said there is a huge willingness on the part of physicians to get involved, and the state medical board’s loosening of restrictions around telemedicine in April now makes it easier for doctors to use.
The program will start small in school districts that currently have nurses, and the estimated cost per school is from $3,000 to $5,000. The equipment will be paid for with CARES Act funds, and the school nurse will serve as the point person at each site.
The U.S. House voted 275-134 on Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000. (Photo by Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
The U.S. House of Representatives voted 275-134 on Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000 — an action demanded by President Donald Trump in recent days as he threatened to veto the larger stimulus plan.
Nearly every House Democrat voted on Monday to increase the direct checks to Americans. They were joined by 44 Republicans, meeting a two-thirds threshold needed for the resolution to pass.
In total, 134 House members — including 130 Republicans — voted against the measure. Twenty-one House Republicans did not vote, and two independents voted against the measure.
The House’s move comes a day after Trump signed an earlier passed $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief package. The president threatened a veto of that package for several days, demanding on social media over the weekend that Congress — the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate — increase direct payments from $600 to $2,000 per individual.
The procedural resolution passed by the House on Monday now moves to the Senate, where it will also require a two-thirds vote.
It is unclear if the Senate will even take up the House proposal, Politico reports, despite Trump insisting Sunday night he had secured an agreement from Republican leaders.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000. (Photo by Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Monday evening to increase the second round of federal direct payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000 — an action demanded by President Donald Trump in recent days as he threatened to veto the larger stimulus plan.
Nearly every House Democrat, including Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson, voted on Monday to increase the direct checks to Americans. They were joined by 44 Republicans, meeting a two-thirds threshold needed for the resolution to pass.
But 130 Republicans — including Mississippi Reps. Trent Kelly, Michael Guest and Steven Palazzo — voted against the measure.
The House’s move comes a day after Trump signed an earlier passed $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief package. The president threatened a veto of that package for several days, demanding on social media over the weekend that Congress — the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate — increase direct payments from $600 to $2,000 per individual.
The procedural resolution passed by the House on Monday now moves to the Senate, where it will also require a two-thirds vote.
It is unclear if the Senate will even take up the House proposal, Politico reports, despite Trump insisting Sunday night he had secured an agreement from Republican leaders to do so.
Mississippi Republican Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith rejected earlier calls for higher direct payments to individuals.
A stack of cash — money that noncustodial parents paid to help care for their kids — sat unsupervised on a table in the middle of a room at Mississippi’s child support disbursement unit.
Local government contractor Rob Wells encountered the scene in 2010 when he visited the office to look for ways to improve a deeply flawed and antiquated system overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services.
The unit was responsible for intaking child support money, a debt the state imposes mostly on separated fathers, and issuing it to the correct family.
Many mothers had complained of long delays in receiving the funds. Wells knew about this because his company ran the call center where parents could call for help on their cases.
At the office, Wells spoke to the sole worker tasked with solving “exceptions,” which occur when the unit receives payment but can’t immediately identify its corresponding case in the state computer system.
If she couldn’t find the right case in three minutes, she would send the flagged entry to a separate floor, where another worker would pick up the queue. So Wells journeyed upstairs to find that employee.
“They said, ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about,’” he said.
The incomplete computer entries were stranded in the ether, along with millions and millions of child support dollars that could have been used on food, clothing, housing and health care for children of separated parents.
In over twelve hours of interviews with Wells for this investigative series, he told Mississippi Today that he and his staff worked for a year and a half to clear the backlog.
Once that was solved, the state eventually let his $100 million a year corporation modernize and operate the enforcement side of the child support program — a public service that’s been financially strangled and largely neglected by state leaders.
Years before the state outsourced virtually all facets of the office, Mississippi had a haphazard child support program — the worst in the nation by many measurements, in large part because of severe underfunding. Mississippi could hang its hat only on an extraordinary cost efficiency score, because of how little the state spent to run it.
Despite it’s still paltry budget, the program has improved its ranking in most of the federal performance metrics that reflect how smoothly the gears of the agency are turning.
But the poorest state in the country is always going to have a harder time extracting money from its residents, which goes far in explaining why Mississippi still ranks dead last for its rate of collections. The office collected and disbursed 54% of the money currently ordered to custodial parents in the program in 2019 — at about the same rate as it did a decade ago — compared to 66% nationwide. The total amount of past child support owed has continued to grow, totaling $1.6 billion in 2019.
Any technical improvements made by the deeply complex and often misunderstood program, which touches half of kids in the state, haven’t minimized scrutiny from the public officials and advocates at all familiar with it.
“I have a great lede for you,” Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, told Mississippi Today when the publication reached out to him about this series. “The child support system in Mississippi is f-cked up, and no one knows how to unf-ck it.”
Here’s how it’s supposed to work: A separated parent, usually a mom, who needs help collecting child support from a noncustodial parent applies to the state’s child support enforcement program by mailing in an application and a $25 fee. Other moms are forced into the program when they try to apply for assistance.
The child support division of the Mississippi Department of Human Services then creates a case and starts by identifying the child’s parents. If a child’s birth certificate only contains the mother’s name, for example, the state helps track down the father and facilitate a paternity test.
A staff attorney then secures a support order — a legally binding document that spells out how much a noncustodial parent must pay each month — from the local chancery court.
Next, the state has several enforcement and collection measures it can take. For parents who have jobs, the state can investigate their employment and seek wage or unemployment benefit withholding and tax refund offsets. The state collects about 80% of child support this way.
Collecting the rest from the many Mississippians with nontraditional or unstable employment is tougher. After locating the parent, caseworkers can try to level with them, to convince them to pay voluntarily. Otherwise, the state may choose to suspend the parent’s driver’s license until they pay, file a contempt order in the case, take the parent to court and potentially put them behind bars.
The federal government created the child support enforcement program within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families in 1975 primarily as a way to spread the societal financial responsibility of caring for families on welfare, which were mostly those headed by single mothers, to the fathers.
Child Support is one of Mississippi Department of Human Services’ largest divisions, and nationally, the anti-poverty program touches more families, especially men, for a longer period of time than nearly any other social program.
Single-parent households are one significant determinant of poverty in the state and nation. Women-headed families with minor children, where no husband is present, are about five times more likely to live in poverty than married-parent families, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But for decades at the child support office, stacks of paperwork that single mothers submitted in hopes of receiving some help sat ignored in banana boxes.
Empty folders served as placeholders for cases — some 10, 15 years old — that the state had never taken to court. Out of all families who were seeking the state’s help in 2010, only a little over half of their cases contained support orders.
No support order meant there was nothing for the state to enforce.
Many mothers also complained of long lags between the time their child’s father paid into the program and when they received the funds and a lack of proper accounting, leaving them unable to track how much they were receiving or owed.
In short, the system was broken.
As is still true for many government agencies and courts today, the child support division had not digitized all of its cases, so processes to move them through the system could not be automated.
The state did not employ enough people to do the manual functions needed to manage the load. Mississippi was typically spending under $100 per case per year, compared to almost $400 nationally, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of federal data.
Though Mississippi receives a generous 2-to-1 match in federal dollars to operate the program, officials say the agency never allocated the budget the child support office needed to bulk up its staff. During a time when the Legislature was looking to cut state government, increased funding to this niche program was the last thing on lawmakers’ minds.
But right in the agency’s backyard, there was an attorney who believed he knew the fix.
Wells, a Yazoo City-native attorney, had started a Jackson law firm specializing in the delivery of child support services in the early 1990’s after he watched a similar firm called Maximus try to secure work in the state.
In the following 20 years, more and more states, including Mississippi, began contracting out certain functions within their child support programs, such as call centers and disbursement units. Wells’ company, YoungWilliams, eventually became one of a handful of primary companies conducting this work nationally.
By 2015, the Mississippi Department of Human Services sought something new: a completely privatized child support enforcement office — though early studies suggested that these contracts produced mixed results.
“The significant additional cost of privatization would outweigh the potential additional benefits,” the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER), the legislative watchdog, wrote in a 2013 report that examined the potential of outsourcing the child support program.
After winning a competitive bid, YoungWilliams started with a pilot program in 2015 and began running case management across all county offices in 2016. The company extended job offers to all existing state workers. Separately, the Department of Human Services contracted out the disbursement unit to another firm.
“I think the state has to strike a good balance of recognizing what does the state do well and where they need help whenever they’re considering privatizing,” said former child support program director Lyndsy Irwin, who took over after the initial pilot and left the agency in September. “… being able to leverage the technology that a vendor has to offer in the area of weakness for the agency.”
Republican state leaders have increasingly pushed for government privatization with the belief that having private companies operate public programs results in better quality and more cost efficient services. However, public policy researchers say privatization more often increases inequity in an economy with a growing opportunity gap.
YoungWilliams was going to have to find a way to fix a floundering program without any more money. The company would have to keep the operation lean, but luckily, it also had the capital from its work in other states to invest millions into developing specialized software and building a new child support enforcement infrastructure in Mississippi.
It implemented its signature computer program called Y-Trac, which continually populates “tasks” for caseworkers to complete within the child support system. The Mississippi Enforcement Tracking of Support System, the system of record, was where state workers had been managing cases. It’s a legacy system, characterized by its black screen and lime green lettering, that made a slog out of performing basic tasks, data entry and pushing cases along.
The new technology made it possible for YoungWilliams to centralize case management, and it eventually closed about 60 physical child support offices, roughly three-fourths of them, across the state.
Wells has gotten the quality control software down to a science: He knows how many fewer seconds it takes a worker to complete a certain task — processing a wage withholding or entering biographical information from a client — in his system versus the old one.
“Without Y-Trac we would be flying blind,” Wells said.
This also makes for a cutthroat work environment, two former YoungWilliams employees told Mississippi Today, with each employee working large loads. The company places cameras in each office, where executive staff may beam in at any time. Corporate leadership can log in to its computer system and view exactly how long a caseworker was inside Y-Trac, how quickly they entered information and how their performance compared to their peers.
These factors are perhaps why even as the contractor was making improvements, it was still able to reduce the program’s already limited staff 15% from 515 in 2015 to 438 in 2019, which reflect national trends, according to the most recent federal report.
The program reinvention resulted in a decrease in overall child support cases, Wells said, as YoungWilliams identified old cases that needed to be closed. The state is still spending just $165 per case — and that’s counting a budget hike in 2019 — compared to $442 nationally.
But now, instead of boxes of empty files, the office has secured court orders in 84% of child support cases. The rate of cases with established paternity rose from 94% in 2015 to 98% in 2019. Collections, as a dollar amount, are increasing even as the caseload is dropping.
The office of child support enforcement helped pump about $340 million into the households of children with separated parents in Mississippi in 2019, compared to $268 million in 2010.
While the state recorded $11.9 million in undistributed child support dollars at the end of 2019, just 12 percent were any more than a year old. Mississippi is one of only five states that does not have any undistributed collections more than five years old.
For the program’s improvements, Wells said he credits state agency leaders like Irwin and Walley Nalor, former child support directors, “taking careful risks and trying against all odds and barriers to fix something nobody was screaming to fix.”
With its current funding, Wells claims the program, with its new sophisticated infrastructure and increasing automation, can continue performing its basic functions at a reasonable rate. It will continue to petition courts, locate fathers, garnish paychecks and intercept tax refunds where those avenues exist.
After that, he said, the current program and its collection rate will only improve as much as economic circumstances and the conditions of Mississippians’ lives do.
But the service could conceivably go further. With the existing wide net of the child support program, the welfare agency has an opportunity to connect with men it might not otherwise, to identify their needs and barriers, and to offer counseling and workforce training.
This would follow a national trend, an attempted shift in philosophy away from punishing and shaming unwed fathers to uplifting them. And while YoungWilliams says it’s eager to take that approach, this kind of outreach costs money — the type of funding that’s never even been on the table.
Wells says he’s never had much pull with Human Services and that the agency doesn’t confer with him on policy changes, contract language or recommendations to the Legislature — which could be considered an appropriate distance for a state contractor to have with his client.
From the CEO’s perspective, he’s not a tycoon or a consultant so much as a government plumber.
To appreciate the work of contractors like YoungWilliams is to understand the complex “plumbing,” as Wells puts it, of public services. Everyone wants their sewer to work, but few care to peek at the pipes beneath the soil to see how.
Wells, a wealthy and undoubtedly influential figure, and his company simply exist below the surface of state government, tinkering away on the lines.
While lots of people have gripes with the child support office, he says few with any power to invest in improvements have had the time or will to wade into the mud with him — try as he might.
“Bureaucracy that’s underfunded doesn’t work,” Wells said. “The people who are in public office care … They want to listen and they want solutions. It’s just, it’s so hard to make happen.”
This story is part one of a series examining Mississippi’s child support enforcement program. Parts two and three will publish later this week.
