Revenue to fund the Mississippi Department of Transportation from the 18.4-cent per gallon motor fuel tax grew nearly 40% between 1989 and 2019.
During a similar time, sales tax revenue grew by about 156% and personal income tax revenue increased a whopping 365%.
Revenue from the sales tax and personal income tax provide about 70% of the state’s share of funding for education, public health and many other areas of state government. But that revenue does not go for state transportation needs. The gas/diesel tax provides more than half of state funding for the Department of Transportation.
The fact that gas tax revenue is growing at a relatively slow rate compared to the income tax and sales tax is an example of why various groups — ranging from the Mississippi Economic Council to the Legislature’s own oversight committee — have argued that additional funds are needed to aid with the maintenance and construction on state highways. The motor fuel tax simply is not growing fast enough to keep up with inflation.
In August 2018 state leaders — then-Gov. Phil Bryant, House Speaker Philip Gunn and then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who is now governor — gave themselves a collective pat on the back for enacting a lottery in a special session and dedicating the first $80 million of that revenue annually for work on state highways. They viewed the lottery as a way to avoid raising the gasoline tax.
While studies by the MEC and others indicated an additional $300 million per year was needed to address state highway needs, everyone conceded the lottery revenue was better than nothing.
But if Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and his Senate colleagues get their way, the state will essentially be back at near nothing in terms of new revenue for Mississippi’s highways.
The Senate, with Hosemann’s support, has voted to transfer those lottery funds from the state highway system to the road and bridge needs of local governments.
In the 2018 special session, the much-ballyhooed agreement was that the lottery revenue would go toward the state system and a transfer of use tax funds from education, law enforcement and other state needs would go to local governments for transportation needs. The lottery funds going to the state system would be capped at $80 million annually, while it was anticipated the use tax funds would generate about $120 annually for local roads and bridges. And that would be a growing source of revenue for local governments, as the use tax — a tax on internet purchases — continues to grow.
Earlier this session on a bizarre night when the Senate was in session past midnight, members by a 40-10 margin rejected the bill that transferred the lottery funds from the state system to local roads and bridges. But, as is often the case in the Mississippi Legislature, seldom is an issue actually dead. Senate leaders that night took up a more comprehensive transportation bill that included the same language to transfer the funds.
The bill also increased the weight limits for large trucks carrying agriculture products and other goods and transferred the Department of Transportation law enforcement officers to Public Safety.
Senate Appropriations Chairs Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, offered what he thought was “a no brainer amendment” to remove the lottery revenue from the bill.
“We already voted this down once,” Hospon reasoned. But lo and behold, the Senate changed its mind, rejecting Hopson’s amendment and transferring the lottery revenue to local roads and bridges.
In the House, Transportation Committee Chair Charles Busby, R-Pascagoula, said he opposes the Senate plan to transfer the lottery revenue.
Busby said he feared in the August 2018 special session the lottery revenue for state roads and bridges “was a vulnerable revenue stream. People would be reaching out for it often. This is a demonstration of that. Just as I feared.”
Hosemann said the money is needed on the local level to fix bridges that will be impacted by the proposed increase in the weight limits. He said the increase in the weight limits on Mississippi’s often decrepit roads and bridges is needed to ensure the state’s farmers and others are competitive with counterparts in surrounding states. Busby pointed out that about 137 bridges on the state system will have to be posted to prevent the heavier traffic on them if the Senate weight limit increase is passed.
Without the lottery revenue, there will be less money to fix those state bridges that would be impacted by heavier weight limits. The only other revenue dedicated to the state system in the August 2018 special session is expected to generate about $20 million annually.
Fight over the lottery revenue, pitting state roads and bridges against local roads and bridges, will play out during the final days of the legislative session.
House Speaker Philip Gunn met with Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba on Friday to discuss several legislative proposals that would send the city of Jackson state funding to repair its aged and failing water and sewage system.
Meanwhile, a feud between the mayor and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann came to light this week, raising questions about whether Hosemann, a Jackson resident who has heavy influence over the state’s purse strings, is willing to provide state support to the city. Hosemann did not meet with city officials this week.
A historic winter storm in mid-February froze water plant equipment and burst many pipes, and at least 40,000 Jackson residents — mostly Black — were without water for nearly three weeks. Today, about 5,000 Jackson residents are still without water. City leaders say they need major investment from state leaders to replace its entire water and sewage system, which is estimated to cost about $2 billion.
Gunn met with Lumumba and Charles Williams, the city’s public works director, in the speaker’s office on Friday morning to discuss the crisis. The city of Jackson’s entire House delegation — seven state representatives — also sat in the meeting. The mayor made two main asks of the speaker, several meeting attendees told Mississippi Today:
• Support the Jackson city council’s recently approved 1-cent sales tax increase proposal, which requires legislative approval. The tax increase, implemented only within the city of Jackson, would generate about $14 million per year — nowhere close to the $2 billion needed to completely replace the city’s water and sewer system. But Lumumba told Gunn that new annual revenue, if lawmakers sign off and Jackson voters approve this summer, would be used to back large municipal bonds that would help the city make substantial repairs on the system in the short-term.
• Pass a state bond package totaling $47 million that would give the city immediate funding to begin necessary repairs on its water and sewer system. Lawmakers send cities and counties millions nearly every year in a large bond package, and city officials say they’ve been shorted in recent years by the Legislature. On March 3, Lumumba sent a letter to state and federal officials laying out the need for that $47 million emergency appropriation.
Gunn, a resident of the suburb Clinton, listened intently to the mayor, and several of the meeting’s attendees said the speaker seemed sympathetic to the city’s position. Gunn asked several questions of Lumumba and Williams. No promises were made, the meeting’s attendees said, but they all expressed optimism that future talks between the speaker and mayor would continue as the 2021 legislative session continues.
On Saturday, Jackson’s public works director, Charles Williams, acknowledged that even if it’s approved, the $47 million in bonds will not be nearly enough to protect Jackson’s water system from the kind of large-scale service disruptions seen over the past few weeks.
“This ask will help. It will get us started. But, it will not solve our overall infrastructure problems for the long term,” Williams told Mississippi Today. “We have a plant and we have a distribution system. Over the years, there have been many plans and studies for both, but we have not had the funding for implementation. You cannot fund what you don’t have.”
Meanwhile, details of tension between Hosemann and Lumumba — long whispered about in the halls of the Capitol — came to light Thursday night during a mayoral debate ahead of 2021 municipal elections. At the heart of the tiff between the lieutenant governor and mayor is control of the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, which state leaders have tried for years to wrest from the city.
“I sat down with the lieutenant governor to talk about Jackson’s infrastructure problem,” Lumumba said during the Thursday night debate, referencing a meeting that occurred before the current crisis. “We had a conversation that lasted for about an hour and a half, and he asked everyone to leave the room only to say, ‘Mayor, I need you to give me my airport, and I look at it for about $30 million.’”
Lumumba continued: “Not only am I supposed to be dumb, I’m also supposed to be cheap.”
In 2016, lawmakers approved a bill to take over the airport and replace the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority with a regional board made up of state, county, and city appointees.
That law, however, has not gone into effect after the city joined a federal lawsuit to block the takeover. That lawsuit has continued, and city officials have said the state’s motives were race-based. Currently, the city controls the airport with its own board. All board members are African American. The lawmakers who pushed and passed the 2016 legislation are white.
Many hoped Hosemann, the most powerful Jackson resident at the Capitol, would be open to helping solve the city’s water crisis. Lumumba and Hosemann did not have contact this week, nor did their staffs. But the mayor sent Hosemann the letter requesting $47 million in emergency appropriations.
The only public comments Hosemann has made about the water crisis came on Monday, when he was asked at a press event if the state should offer financial support to the city to solve its infrastructure problems.
“If you remember during Kane Ditto’s administration, he did repair work on water and sewer,” Hosemann responded, referring to the last white Jackson mayor who left office in 1997. “So what’s happened since then? The prime mover (of solving the problem) needs to be the city itself. Those people have to come up with a reasonable plan to get their water bills out on time.”
That comment has been sharply criticized by current and former city officials, with some calling Hosemann’s comment racist and a continuation of state leaders’ attitude toward Jackson and its officials.
Jackson, the state’s largest city, is at least 80% Black. Statewide elected officials are white; the state of Mississippi has never elected a Black statewide official by popular vote, and legislative leaders who control the state’s budget are white. Most of the city’s white residents like Hosemann, because of more recent infrastructure upgrades in northeast Jackson and their proximity to water treatment plants, rarely experience long-term outages.
Meanwhile, residents in south and west Jackson, majority-Black areas of the city, take the brunt of the city’s infrastructure failings. And because of careful legislative gerrymandering and segregated politics, Black elected officials at the Capitol have little influence over the budget process or other major policy negotiations.
Talks between city leaders and state leaders regarding the water crisis are expected to continue between now and April 4, the scheduled end of the 2021 legislative session. At least one piece of legislation that would award state bonds to the city for its water system is expected to be filed in the House next week.
Joyous New Site players celebrate a State 2A championship Friday at Mississippi Coliseum. (Photo by Randy J. Williams/MHSAA)
New Site, an unincorporated community in the far, northeast corner of Mississippi, was settled in 1899 by a Virginia-born farmer named William Cicero Denson. The Civil War veteran stopped at a place about 20 miles west of the Alabama state line, about 20 miles south of the Tennessee line. Apparently, he was precisely where he wanted to be.
Denson wrote home to his loved ones: “I have found us a new site.”
And New Site it became. Still is. In the last census, it was home to 899 people, seemingly all of whom are passionate about basketball. Friday afternoon at Mississippi Coliseum — more than a three-hour drive from New Site — at least that many red-shirted New Site fans cheered their Lady Royals to a thrilling 55-50 victory over Calhoun City for the State Class 2A championship.
Rick Cleveland
William Cicero Denson surely would have been proud. The New Site girls, mostly slightly built and with blonde ponytails, scrapped and shot their way past an outstanding Calhoun City team that had entered the championship match with a 25-1 record. This was terrific basketball — two well-coached teams, playing with precision, playing incredibly hard and playing well. New Site, 33-2, somehow prevailed.
Thus, still another Prentiss County team has earned still another state championship. You’d need a calculator to add them all up. Schools such as Booneville, Baldwyn, Jumpertown, Thrasher and Wheeler all have rich basketball histories that include many multiple championships. Kids there grow up bouncing basketballs. Few schools even field a football team, partly because many of the small schools don’t have enough boys and maybe because it’s hard to find a piece of Mississippi Hill Country 120 yards long and 50 yards wide flat enough on which to play the sport.
It is a rich piece of Mississippi basketball history that in 1969 the New Site boys, champions of Class B (the smallest division then), knocked off Jackson Wingfield of Class AA (largest) for the overall state championship. Hickory, Ind., and the movie “Hoosiers” has nothing on New Site, which once won five straight boys state titles in a row, causing one sports writer to ask a New Site fan if every yard in town had a basketball goal. Answered the gray-bearded fan, smiling, “Yeah, if it’s not in the living room.”
New Site coach Byron Sparks has been at the school for 19 years, long enough to know, “It’s a blessing to coach at a place where the people care so much about basketball.”
New Site fans nearly filled up one side of Mississippi Coliseum – and they were into it. (Photo by Tyler Cleveland)
Just a few feet away from where Sparks was speaking, many red-clad fans were hugging players, smiling and laughing through tears. They lined up to get their photos made with the championship gold ball that will go into what already must be a crowded trophy case.
When a sports writer mentioned that his team was hardly physically imposing, he laughed and replied, “Yeah, but they will fight you for that basketball, won’t they?”
And they can handle and shoot that ball, too. The Royals made 7 of 16 3-point shots, often penetrating the lane and then dishing the ball out to an open shooter. Hannah Campbell, a senior and a four-year starter, made three of four treys, scored 19 points and pulled down six rebounds to win MVP honors. This was after she scored 31 to lead the Royals past Newton in Wednesday’s semifinals.
Campbell was a freshman in 2018 when the Royals made it to the state championship game only to lose a heartbreaker. Said Campbell, “We’ve waited a long, long time for this. This is the best feeling in the world. We played our hearts out.”
Campbell had plenty of help. Ivy Loden, listed at 5 feet, 4 inches but seeming shorter, scored 15 points and drove the lane for big bucket after big bucket in the fourth quarter. When Campbell missed a free throw late with New Site leading by only two, Loden somehow rebounded, was fouled and made two free throws to make it a four-point game with only 30 seconds remaining.
Junior Lily Whitley, the only non-senior in the lineup and the tallest Royal at 5-10, scored eight points and pulled down 13 rebounds despite suffering a hard fall and banging her head on the hardcourt in the third quarter. She was clearly woozy as she was helped off the court. But two minutes she was back out there, fighting for rebounds.
“I had to play,” she said. “Had to.” You could tell she meant it. To borrow from the SEC, in a Prentiss County place like New Site, it just means more. And that’s nothing new.
The funds went to schools, universities and education organizations providing support to Mississippi students in the areas of social and emotional learning, online learning, device access and returning to in-person learning.
“We know that the GEER application required a lot of effort, and we received many quality applications from across the state,” said Bailey Martin, press secretary for Reeves.
The U.S. Department of Education announced the nearly $3 billion in GEER funds in April 2020 to “quickly be made available to governors to ensure education continues for students of all ages impacted by the coronavirus national emergency,” the department said in a press release at the time.
The funding is meant to provide relief to schools identifies as having been most significantly impacted by COVID-19. It may also go to colleges and universities in need.
Mississippi received a total of $34.6 million in GEER funds last year, and Reeves prioritized two general categories for the funding: educational services for children under 5 years old and innovative educational solutions for students of all ages.
There are a total of three funding rounds, or chances to apply for the money. For the first round, the governor’s office awarded $5.4 million for educational services for children under five years old. This second round, in which the governor’s office awarded $23.4 million, was for innovative opportunities in education. Early childhood applicants who didn’t initially receive money in the first distribution have another chance to apply for remaining money in a third round.
About $6 million remains in the pot to be distributed.
In the latest round of funding, Mississippi State University received $4.3 million for 15 different projects to address several pandemic-related needs. These include improving online learning for K-12 and higher education students and providing mental health services and supporting at-risk students such as those with dyslexia and autism through an Autism and Developmental Disabilities Clinic.
The university is also using funding to expand a program that provides support to Mississippi State students nearing graduation who are in need of financial assistance to complete their degree.
“The proposals funded will not only support MSU students, but provide meaningful resources for our state’s K-12 students and teachers,” said Julie Jordan, vice president for research and economic development at Mississippi State. “We pride ourselves on leveraging our expertise to work with partners across Mississippi to make an impact.”
The University of Mississippi received about $3.8 million for four projects, including expanding its Mental Health Counselors on Campus program. This will provide counseling services to 400 public school students and an initiative designed to accelerate reading achievement for 1,000 kindergarten through fifth grade students from low-income families.
Several other public and private colleges and universities, including Mississippi College’s School of Education, received funding for projects.
Mississippi College is using the $1.1 million it received to launch an Online Instruction and Design program that aims to help teachers develop and conduct standards-based, technology-supported lessons for students. Teachers can take individual courses to satisfy licensure renewal and may also receive a certification after taking a certain combination of the courses, and 30 hours of coursework could be taken in order to achieve a master’s degree.
The North Mississippi Education Consortium — a partnership between 44 north Mississippi school districts, three community colleges and the University of Mississippi’s School of Education — received around $1.5 million to provide research-based programming or curriculum for students at schools or education-related entities.
The consortium is partnering with Edgenuity, a company that provides K-12 online coursework, to offer social and emotional curriculum to around 144,000 public school students across the state, said Director Jimmy Weeks. They will also be providing professional development for early childhood educators around supporting children who have experienced trauma during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The consortium also received another $170,744 to provide support for at-risk groups such as students with developmental delays including autism and dyslexia.
Lobaki, a Jackson-based company that develops educational and training “extended reality” experiences, received almost $800,000 for online learning.
Mississippi, along with other states, will also see another wave of federal COVID-19 relief funding for education after Congress passed the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA). These stimulus funds also include GEER funding, and Mississippi is set to receive almost $47 million. Of that, roughly $31 million must go to private and independent schools.
Reeves’ office said the leftover $15.5 million will be distributed as soon as the first pot of GEER funds have been used.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is one of the most powerful residents of Jackson, where about 40,000 of his neighbors — mostly Black — are in their third week without running water after a historic winter storm froze plant equipment and burst many water pipes.
The ongoing water crisis is the result of decades of inaction from city leaders, who put off routine maintenance and meaningful infrastructure repairs as the city’s tax base and revenue collections diminished. Current and former city leaders, having dealt for decades with aging and brittle pipes, say they need investment from the state and federal government.
Many are placing their hope for financial support from the state with Hosemann, who lives in northeast Jackson and wields significant control of the state’s purse strings. He was asked this week about whether the state should step in and help.
“If you remember during Kane Ditto’s administration, he did repair work on water and sewer,” Hosemann responded, referring to the last white Jackson mayor who left office in 1997. “So what’s happened since then? The prime mover (of solving the problem) needs to be the city itself. Those people have to come up with a reasonable plan to get their water bills out on time.”
Hosemann continued: “Where do you start? What are the most complicated places? What’s your plan to do that? How much money is it going to take, and how do you even pay for it? I haven’t seen any of that. Clearly, it’s not the state. The city is the city of Jackson. It elects its mayor, it elects its city councilmen. And those people need to come up with a plan.”
With his answer, Hosemann joined a decades-long chorus of statewide elected officials who misrepresent the causes of Jackson’s infrastructure problems and are reluctant to offer long-term solutions. Mississippi Today spoke with several of the state’s top leaders this week about the current water crisis, and all of them echoed similar sentiments.
Jackson, the state’s largest city, is at least 80% Black. Statewide elected officials are white; the state of Mississippi has never elected a Black statewide official, and legislative leaders who control the state’s budget are white. Most of the city’s white residents like Hosemann, because of more recent infrastructure upgrades in northeast Jackson and their proximity to water treatment plants, rarely experience long-term outages.
Meanwhile, residents in south and west Jackson, majority-Black areas of the city, take the brunt of the city’s infrastructure failings. And because of careful legislative gerrymandering and segregated politics, Black elected officials at the Capitol have little influence over the budget process or other major policy negotiations.
Now 17 days since Jackson’s current water crisis began, an estimated 11,000 households, or around 40,000 people, are still without running water. City officials cannot say definitively when water service will be restored. At least 80 water main breaks and leaks have been reported across the city, and the entire city remains under a boil water notice. Crews completing the repairs have described city pipes, some over 100 years old, as brittle, underscoring the need for a vast overhaul of the city’s aging infrastructure.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has estimated a complete water and sewer replacement project would cost around $2 billion, more than six times the city’s annual budget. On Wednesday, Lumumba wrote a letter to state and federal leaders asking for an emergency appropriation of $47 million to make necessary repairs to solve this current crisis.
“The city of Jackson, like most cities, is under-resourced and not capable of making these corrections based on our own budgetary ability,” Lumumba said during a Wednesday night interview on MSNBC.
Even after water service is restored to the whole city, future crises of this magnitude are all but certain without that overhaul. The years of dedicated investment and work this would take are more than any city could handle on its own, especially one with a gutted tax base — due in large part to outmigration of white residents and business owners who began leaving the city in the 1980s.
Ditto, the city’s last white mayor that Hosemann referenced this week, struggled mightily to maintain the aged infrastructure his white predecessors failed to maintain. One of the worst water crises during Ditto’s tenure as mayor was in 1989, when thousands of the city’s residents were without water on Christmas Day after record low temperatures burst pipes. Hosemann’s comments about Ditto’s tenure have been sharply critiqued in many circles this week.
“I was disappointed that we have leaders in our community who are spreading this kind of misinformation,” Harvey Johnson, Jackson’s first Black mayor who succeeded Ditto in 1997, said of Hosemann’s comments. “It’s a criticism that was misplaced and unfounded. It just perpetuates, in my opinion, this whole notion that Jackson, as a Black city that has Black leadership, can’t do anything themselves. That’s the furthest thing from the truth, and I take offense to that. I’ve been in the venues of public service for 40 years, and have prepared myself to deal with the problems of local government and how to address those problems.
Johnson continued: “For someone (Hosemann) who has a limited perspective on that, I just take exception when they start spouting out those things.”
And while many scoff at providing state assistance, leaders in the city acknowledge they can’t rebuild their infrastructure without that help. As the state’s largest and capital city, anchoring the only true metropolitan area of the state, Jackson’s problems are the state’s problems, they argue.
“State leaders need to understand the importance of the city of Jackson when it comes to the growth of our state in economic development, education, healthcare and other business opportunities,” said state Rep. Chris Bell, a Democrat from Jackson. “Jackson is the tree trunk, and the rest of the state are the branches. If the trunk dies, the branches die. So we need to make a concerted effort to make sure the roots are healthy and strong.”
With no long-term solution in sight, Jackson residents continue to suffer and national news crews descend upon the city to cover the crisis. Meanwhile, state leaders continue to put the impetus on the city to fix its own problems. Top leaders interviewed by Mississippi Today this week said they haven’t heard from city leaders directly about the notion of helping, and some expressed concern about stepping in without an ask.
“Do you interfere when you are not asked to? That could be not taken well by some if you do,” Rep. Trey Lamar, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told Mississippi Today.
In terms of state funding, Lamar said there could be opportunities to help the city, “but that depends on what the definition of help is.”
“I don’t think there’s any appetite to help Jackson in the form of a handout,” Lamar said. “Number one, we need to be shown proof that the city is incapable of fixing this problem on their own. I don’t know that legislative support would be there for a handout, but there might be other ways the state could help ensure the work is done if the city were financially responsible for it with the state’s help.”
Gov. Tate Reeves, while answering questions about Jackson’s water crisis on Feb. 23, bluntly reminded listeners that the state doesn’t run Jackson’s water system but vaguely added, “Perhaps we should.” The governor hasn’t acknowledged that comment or the possibility of a state takeover since, and his office has not answered several follow-up questions about it from Mississippi Today.
But during a press conference on Tuesday, Reeves said that “most things should be on the table” when asked if he supported a proposal that would allow the city of Jackson to increase its sales tax by 1% to pay for infrastructure repairs. Then he quickly pivoted to the city’s water billing woes.
“I do think it’s really important that the city of Jackson start collecting their water bill payments before they start going and asking everyone else to pony up more money,” Reeves said. “I think that’s been a long standing challenge for the city. I think they will admit that. Clearly their billing system is flawed at best.”
The governor is correct about the city’s water billing challenges. In 2012, the city signed a $91 million contract with Siemens, an international company renowned for its work on municipal water and sewer systems. The contract, the largest in city history, included the installation of new water meters and a modern billing system.
But that contract turned out to be one of the biggest failures in the company’s and city’s history. Siemens failed to deliver on its promises, which led to widespread billing issues and thousands of faulty water meters. Many Jackson residents received inaccurate bills, while others stopped getting billed at all. This left the city with a deficit of around $2 million each month in water collections revenue, and the billing problems continue today.
The city filed a lawsuit against Siemens in June 2019, eventually seeking $450 million in damages. The two parties reached a $89.8 million settlement in March 2020, but that didn’t erase the systemic problems Siemens left behind or recoup the hundreds of millions in water revenue the city lost.
Doing what little they can with limited resources, Jackson’s city council on Tuesday approved a proposal for the 1% sales tax increase to help pay for water and sewage system improvements. That local tax increase requires approval from the Mississippi Legislature, which is controlled by Hosemann and House Speaker Philip Gunn, a resident of Clinton.
If the proposal receives legislative approval, it will be placed on a ballot referendum for Jackson residents. However, even if the water tax gets the go-ahead, it would take nearly 143 years for it to generate enough revenue to fund the much-needed water and sewer improvements.
Though lawmakers have long been apprehensive to work with the city, they have passed several measures in recent years to help solve some of the city’s problems. Lawmakers signed off on a one-cent sales tax increase in 2014, giving Jackson new revenue that no other Mississippi city has for infrastructure repairs. The tax has generated around $14 million each year in additional tax revenue. But city leaders, who have opted to spend that additional revenue on less expensive road repairs and repaving instead of replacing pipes beneath the streets, have been criticized for their handling of those funds.
Lawmakers also created the Capitol Complex Improvement District in 2017, which diverted sales tax revenue to fund new infrastructure fixes in Jackson. The aim of the legislation was for the state to pay its fair share for repairs in areas of the city where the state has offices and conducts business.
“I think everybody is frustrated with the city’s plight,” said state Sen. John Horhn, a Democrat from Jackson who worked with state leaders on the 1% sales tax and the Capitol Complex District legislation. “The people who live here are. The people who visit are. Legislators are frustrated. They don’t have confidence in much of the city’s elected leadership. That makes them reluctant to help the city.”
Horhn, who has run unsuccessfully for Jackson mayor several times, said the state’s elected leaders have a long-standing “love-hate relationship” with the city, inspired by decades of neglecting the infrastructure system.
“Part of it is urban-rural. There is a racial overtone,” Horhn said. “There is a sense that the quality of leadership in the capital city is the reason for the problems. A lot of people (at the Capitol) have lost confidence in the elected leadership in Jackson.”
During his interview on Monday, Hosemann launched into an aside, unprompted, about crime in the city of Jackson. While the city saw a historic high in homicides in 2020, white politicians have a long history of exploiting the city’s crime struggles when brushing off calls to help the city.
Hosemann argued that the Legislature is already shouldering undue burdens from the city of Jackson and Hinds County, citing a pending Senate bill that would give Capitol Police jurisdiction over the parts of Jackson and federal CARES Act funds spent on the Hinds County court system. Four special judges were appointed in July to help try the backlog of Hinds County cases that built up during the early months of the pandemic.
“They have cases going back to 1997,” Hosemann said of the Hinds County courts, which hear cases from outside the city of Jackson. “People are not getting tried, and people are dying. There’s murder in the streets here.”
Eventually circling back to the water crisis, Hosemann downplayed any notion of the state stepping in.
“The Legislature is doing its part, we’re doing stuff every day to help our capital city,” Hosemann said. “I live here, my children live here, my grandchildren live here. Some of this, they need to get their water bills out. I will tell you that there are a myriad of problems. To answer your question, no one has contacted us about taking over Jackson’s water.”
Mississippi Today reporters Geoff Pender, Bobby Harrison, Alex Rozier and Anna Wolfe contributed to this story.
CLEVELAND — When it became clear that 384 students unenrolled from the public schools here and weren’t coming back, the already underfunded district was left with a prospective $1.7 million budget shortfall.
Superintendent Otha Belcher Credit: Cleveland School District
Superintendent Otha Belcher said in a January community meeting that to cover the shortfall, he first considered not filling vacancies in the central office. Then he did the same for the maintenance department, the transportation department and teacher vacancies at the individual schools.
“We asked everybody to give up something,” Belcher said.
It still wasn’t enough.
Now, the district’s pre-kindergarten program is likely to be cut from seven classes at four different schools to four classes at two different schools. At maximum capacity, it will be able to serve 80 children, with 20 4-year-olds per class.
In an urban setting where early learning options are plentiful, losing three pre-kindergarten classes might not be significant. But in rural areas where educational outcomes already suffer and a strong public school system can make or break a town’s viability, parents feel the loss of even three pre-K classes is immense.
“(People) will never consider coming to a town that doesn’t have a strong foundational elementary school program. If we cannot offer a pre-K program to them that is valid and not overcrowded, we’re not going to get people to move here. We’re going to lose even more students,” said Sayward Fortner, a parent at the Cleveland School District, during a Jan. 26 community meeting.
These pre-kindergarten programs are lauded in the community not just because they benefit kids, but because they create more equity within the school system, help combat white flight, and contribute to the overall economic well being of the small Delta town.
As word spread about cuts to the pre-K programs, so did outrage among parents.
While 384 children — or more than 10% of total enrollment — is a staggering amount to lose from a district Cleveland’s size, it’s not an issue unique to this Delta district alone. Public schools across Mississippi are experiencing similar trends.
Some parents faced with decisions about where to send their kids to school during the pandemic opted for homeschool, private schools, or other options. Overall, the state’s public school system lost 23,000students this year.
This is problematic to the public school system for many reasons, the most immediate being the budget hole it creates. Public schools are funded in large part based on average daily attendance, meaning the more students that are enrolled in a school district, the more funding that district receives. This school year, districts on average receive $10,655 per student, though that number varies by district.
A bill is working its way through the Legislature that could temporarily fix the budget shortfall by funding schools based on 2019-20 enrollment numbers. Even if that bill does pass, there are no promises that it would renew to the 2021-22 school year. The same budget shortfall conundrum could present itself again next year, Belcher has said.
He told parents that the district won’t know the final amount they’ll be funded from the state until April or May; they need to plan as if they’ll have $1.7 million fewer to work with next year.
“It’s just a tough deal for everybody in the state. So do we know what the budget is going to be exactly? No we do not. Do we need to prepare? Yes we do. Because it is not moral for you to go to (a teacher) in the month of May and tell them that they do not have a job (next year),” Belcher said.
The issue is further complicated because some of the pre-kindergarten programs are part of an Early Learning Collaborative — a statewide initiative that helps school districts pre-K programs forge partnerships with private preschools and Head Start programs. Head Start provides low-income, pre-kindergarten age children with kindergarten readiness support. These collaboratives are funded out of a separate pot of money and are also waiting to see how much funding the Legislature gives them.
By the time final funding amounts are settled, it will be too late, community members say. Parents will have already had to make decisions about where to send their children for pre-kindergarten.
“I’m telling you, you are going to have families that leave the school system. They’re not coming back, and then you’re losing out on those students from kindergarten all the way through (high school),” Fortner said.
Part of the urgency to maintain as many pre-K programs as possible is to maintain a well integrated school system.
Like most public schools in the south, white families with children enrolled in public schools fled to private “segregation academies” after Brown v. Board of Education made desegregation law.
Cleveland School District is one of the last in the Delta to maintain a somewhat integrated public school body. The white population has steadily fallen since 2017when a federal desegregation order mandated that the majority Black high school merge with the other high school that was about 60% Black and 40% white at the time.
Parents say that the advantage of having numerous thriving pre-K classes in the Cleveland School District is that families enroll their children in the public school system early on and usually keep them there until high school graduation. If they enroll their child in the private school’s pre-K because there’s not enough room at the public school, they’re likely to stay there.
“We have Bayou Academy (a private academy in Cleveland) out there marketing their pre-K program to get students in. And once they’re in those programs, those parents do not want to bring their children out,” Fortner said at a February school district meeting.
There are currently 98 children enrolled in Cleveland School District’s pre-K program spread across four schools: Bell Elementary, Hayes Cooper, Nailor Elementary, and Parks Elementary. The year before the pandemic, there were 115 children enrolled in the district’s pre-K classes.
Under the new configuration there would be a total of four classes at two schools that could accommodate at most 80 children with 20 per classroom.
Though this is technically allowed under state guidelines, parents take issue with the idea of keeping 20 4-year-olds in one classroom.
“(That) is not ideal for anybody,” Fortner said.
Aside from that, parents who have been vocal about this say eliminating pre-K programs from two of the schools presents equity issues; the problem is not as much about losing white families as it is about ensuring a supportive school district for all who are enrolled.
Mark Gooden, Columbia professor in education leadership, also asserted that an equitable school system is one that ensures the most vulnerable students have access to the best resources possible.
“The most vulnerable populations more often than not, are going to be most likely poor children of color who are of lower socioeconomic status. And so you can say the quality of your school district is really correlated with the success of those kids. So therefore, if you are successful for those kids who normally wouldn’t get full access to the curriculum, then you are moving toward equity,” he said.
While the enrollment at Parks, Bell, and Hayes Cooper averages at 46% Black, Nailor is 94% Black. The proposed plan would eliminate the pre-K classes at Nailor and Parks; children zoned for these schools wouldn’t have the same early learning opportunities at their schools as the other schools would have.
Cutting out these pre-kindergarten classrooms at this school creates three groups of students.
Fortner, the parent, says: “You have one group who can afford private school or relocation…you lose them and you lose money that they would be bringing into our system. You have (another group of) students who can’t qualify for Head Start, and are depending on this. You’re telling them they’re just out of luck. Or you have students who can qualify for Head Start and you’re telling them, you can go there, you’re not worth a (pre-K) program.”
Belcher has responded that pre-K programs at those two schools were chosen to be cut because the enrollment was already low there. He also said that Head Start programs involved in the Early Learning Collaborative incorporate curriculums that the pre-K classes use.
Parents remain unsatisfied with that answer.
“There’s a larger picture at play here and that is the strength of our public school system,” said Rori Eddie Herbison, parent of a middle schooler and member or president of several parent committees.
To her, the thought of any child not getting to experience what her child experienced in Cleveland’s pre-K program is devastating.
“I have said from day one, that (my child’s pre-K) teacher was the one that sewed the wings on her so lovingly and with so much nurture on her that she was ready to fly. And the thought that someone in this community will not be afforded that experience is heartbreaking. And it’s beyond the emotion of the heartbreak. It’s destructive to the growth of the public school system,”
And whatever destructs the school system destructs the community in general. That’s why some feel that as Cleveland’s population has fallen every year since the 2017 desegregation order, as the Delta continues to not be prioritized by the state for economic incentive plans, and as educational outcomes in the region continue to lag, the school district cannot afford to lose three pre-kindergarten classes.
“All of it works hand in hand. I think, here in Mississippi, particularly in the Delta when you look at the plainly stated data-driven statistics of where we are … with poverty lines, median incomes, teenage pregnancies, high school completion that leads to college attendance — those facts directly correlate with the public school system. So the better our public school system can be, the better some of those statistics can be,” Eddie Herbison said.
