Temperatures are in the low 70s under mostly clear skies to start our Tuesday. Expect sunny skies today, with a high near 95. Heat index will be near 100. Calm wind becoming east southeast around 5 mph. Tonight will be mostly clear, with a low around 72. Wednesday will be sunny and hot with heat index near 107!
Take precautions to stay cool & hydrated seriously if spending any time outside. Do NOT leave pets/kids in a hot car for any period of time. The only relief this week? A few scattered thunderstorms possible Thursday.
When Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill announced last month that she found 162 college-aged COVID-19 cases that were not included in Lafayette County’s total tally from the Mississippi State Department of Health, confusion erupted.
The University of Mississippi, located in the county, tweeted that Tannehill’s announcement was the first they’d heard of it. The state health department balked initially, reiterating that county-of-residence — in college students’ cases, usually where their parents live — dictates where their case will show up, but said they’d work with college towns to improve their unique reporting situations.
This is a problem for Tannehill and leaders in college towns across the state, as “contact tracing,” or efforts to track individuals with an infectious disease and who they’ve interacted with, are falling short. The issue, according to Tannehill, is that she needs to make policy decisions based on real-time positive cases currently in Oxford, especially with the transient nature of college-aged students.
“As a city leader trying to determine what our path forward looks like — what we need to identify quickly are trends, we need to be able to go back to clinics and get an idea for ages, then track back — that’s what we’re looking at. Whether it’s eight or nine cases won’t change policy, but we need ways to identify trends as this continues to be 18-24 year-olds that we believe are people that are just having parties,” she said.
Almost a month later, she says she still doesn’t have all of the data she needs. A few days after her case discovery led to a call with the health department, she realized she wasn’t going to get an accurate-enough count from their reporting. She reached out to 14 local clinics and asked them to start digitally submitting test and result data to her office daily. Nine are now actively sending her daily case numbers.
Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill
“I hate to take that approach because I hate to be another burden on these clinics for another report that they have to do every day. I’m talking to these nurse practitioners whose clinics close at 7 but they’re there at 10:30 to 11 every night doing charts for the Department of Health — especially if the Department of Health has that information that they could be sharing with us. It doesn’t seem efficient of us to ask the clinics to take another step to report,” she said. “But we can’t make these decisions in the dark.”
The numbers she has collected – 437 total cases as of Monday, more than half of which are not from Lafayette County – still don’t match the health department’s reporting, which showed 409 cases at the same time for the county. The numbers will likely never match due to reporting inconsistencies, but the discrepancies reiterate that no entity has a full picture of active, local cases. The health department says they were the last to know.
“The clinics knew before we did,” said Thomas Dobbs, state health officer, adding that due to reporting lags, clinics should directly contact the state health department if they see an uptick in cases, or even tests. Dobbs also confirmed the cluster spawned from a fraternity rush party.
Tannehill told Mississippi Today Tuesday that the numbers she has collected on her own influenced the city’s decision to halt reopening plans and scale back to “phase one” where indoor gatherings are limited to 10 people without social distancing and 20 with it. Masks are still mandated in the city. “We wish the state would because the county doesn’t,” she added. “That makes it very inconsistent.”
“We have had a lot of good conversations (with MSDH) and we’re sharing with them the data that we decided to go ahead and collect, because we are still not getting that data from MSDH.”
The delay in sharing results has plagued coronavirus reporting, and with it tracking, since the pandemic started and has only gotten worse as Mississippi cases hit record highs late June. Between a person developing symptoms, getting tested and receiving a positive result, days can pass – often eclipsing almost half of that person’s contagious period. If they haven’t self-isolated during that time, they’ve likely spread it. Additionally, the state health department is the last to receive the results, which first go back to the clinic and patient, Dobbs says.
Dobbs told Mississippi Today that the state health department does not have enough contact tracers – who are also responsible for case data entry – to keep up with ongoing case increases.
Nationally, test lags are popping up again, harkening back to early April when test shortages and delays wreaked havoc on providers, labs and patients. Dobbs says the state lab is still maintaining steady turnaround times. But one of the nation’s largest labs, Quest Diagnostics, recently announced unprecedented demand for testing has pushed past capacity, resulting in most patients waiting an average of 5 days for test results. Mississippi has never released timing or location of tests, but until recently has kept the total number of tests conducted updated regularly.
In the last few weeks, Mayor Tannehill said MSDH did start sharing more information regarding contact tracing efforts in Lafayette that resulted from case investigations locating young people in Oxford, despite their county of residence.
Those data points, Tannehill says, are insufficient and further reiterate the lag Dobbs has warned about. Numbers she received from MSDH this week classified as new cases in July had quarantine periods that were listed as ending in June, she said, meaning there is a mismatch in how and when this information is reported. Most importantly to Tannehill, it paints an incomplete picture of the town’s current case transmission.
“We can’t attribute (cases) to days like they were doing,” Tannehill said of lagged cases. By the time she’s getting some of the new case information, they’re already out of isolation, she says, “We missed the whole thing.”
The health department has not provided an updated number of contact tracers, but say they don’t have enough to meet demand. Documents obtained by Mississippi Today showed about 77 daily tracers in late May, but Dobbs said he’s lost dedicated staff since then. He said Wednesday that MSDH is looking to hire at least 100 more.
While tracers were previously able to maintain a 95 percent closure rate for case investigations, it has since dropped to about 87 percent, Dobbs says. Contact tracing should locate student cases who report a different county of residence. But again, the problem is timing. “The same people that do data analysis are the same ones doing outbreak response,” he said. “We have a talented bench but it’s a shallow bench.”
In June, 681 of the positive cases were out-of-state residents, about 3 percent of all cases then. In theory, all in-state cases should eventually track back to their current location, no matter their county-of-residence listed.
“Sometimes all we get is a name, a birthday and a doctor’s name who did the test — and you can imagine how laborious it is to track back and start your case investigation when that’s all the information you have and that has to be keyed into the system,” Dobbs said. “We’re getting to them and we’re closing out the ones we can get pretty quickly, but some of them are just going on the backburner, so it’s a little bit of a juggle of where they land to be quite honest.”
UMMC Communications
State health officer Thomas Dobbs at a press conference at UMMC.
“The contact tracing and the quarantine piece cannot be a stand-alone effort, it will absolutely fail if that’s our cornerstone,” Dobbs said, reiterating that just like testing, they cannot take the place of prevention. The irony of flat funding over the last decade in the midst of a global pandemic is not lost on him either. The department’s budget has been cut by nearly 10 percent since 2016, netting flat funding since 2010.
“This is a nationwide problem that the country has full-on abandoned public health infrastructure, in ways more than money. Part of it has been this sort of false belief that health care is public health, and if we have insurance then we don’t have to have public health and nothing could be further from the truth. There are gaps that health care will never fill. Health care can’t put people on quarantine orders,” he said. “And there is absolutely zero appetite at all levels of government to fund that kind of work.”
For the University of Mississippi’s role, they say they’re also trying to work with local clinics to get a more precise view of how many students are testing positive. If a student gets tested anywhere other than the university health center, the university has no way of knowing those test results, which contributes to an inaccurate student case count. As of Wednesday, the university counted 67 affiliated cases, up 15 in a week.
“It becomes complicated especially when a student, faculty or staff member goes to an outside clinic to get tested. Of course, we will only know [their test results] if they report to us. Unless there’s a consent involved for their record to be sent over here to show that they did test positive, there’s still privacy laws and HIPAA that have to be considered before people can just share that people tested positive for COVID,” said Alex Langhart, Director of University Health Services.
Langhart said the university health center has asked local clinics to remind students who get tested to report their results back to the university so it can be documented. The university has also been working with MSDH to better coordinate finding those students and improving contact tracing.
As they make plans to re-open campus and in-person learning for the fall, the university has reduced class sizes so that students can be more spread out, required that all wear masks, installed hand sanitizing stations and implemented a host of other preventive measures.
And yet, there are still risks.
“Unfortunately, even the most well-designed campus policies won’t be enough if students don’t strictly adhere to appropriate behavior outside the classroom and off-campus,” said Mikaela Adams, Associate Professor of Native American History at the university. Adams is also a historian of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Mikaela Adams, Associate Professor of Native American History at the University of Mississippi
She fears that student behavior will lead to massive campus outbreaks, which will lead to large outbreaks in college towns.
“As students return home to their families (because they fear being sick alone on campus, because universities suddenly close, or because they are asymptomatic and don’t realize they are infected), there will very likely also be outbreaks in their home communities,” Adams wrote in a message to Mississippi Today.
She continued: “Although students may experience relatively few symptoms, the same will not be true for many of the people they infect … Such outbreaks could be particularly devastating in Mississippi since many of our students come from rural areas that do not have sufficient resources or the health care infrastructure to effectively manage an epidemic.”
Oxford’s situation is not unique. Any city with hubs of young, transient people likely don’t have a full picture of active cases due to reporting processes and asymptomatic case load. That, on top of unknowns about college reopening protocol worries Beckie Feldman, parent to 18-year-old twins headed to Mississippi University for Women in Columbus this fall.
“As a parent of two kids, I’m terrified,” said Feldman, 53, whose husband is more vulnerable to complications if he contracts the virus. “I want them to go to school obviously, but then COVID-19 hit, as a parent you’re thinking, they’ve got to get their education — but can you take a year off?”
Photo provided by Feldmans
Beckie Feldman with her twins Katie and Nate, 18, after their high school graduation. Feldman worries about sending the twins to college in Columbus in the Fall, due to ongoing increases in COVID-19 numbers.
Feldman’s family is still planning on the twins going, but will keep an eye on Columbus’ numbers. But similar to Oxford’s lag, she knows the data she can access online is likely not the full picture of transmission, “It may be that when they come home, they stay in their bedrooms and I’ll talk to them from 6-feet away. It’s nothing that I ever considered experiencing and I know that everybody’s feeling that way,” she said, adding that she feels lucky to be able to take extra precautions, but still worries if they’re enough. “We’re sending them with lots of frozen food and paying extra for a private dorm room so they don’t have to share with anybody, we think that’s worth it,” she said. “I just hope that peer pressure won’t work into the scenario.”
Adams, the professor, echoes Feldman and says it’s a balance for schools and families, but worries about the end result.
“I understand that universities are currently facing very difficult decisions. There is a strong fear that if campuses don’t reopen, students will choose to defer their enrollment or make other choices about their education,” Adams said. “I, like other faculty and staff members, dread the financial consequences of these choices … But, what I dread even more than those financial consequences is the loss of life that I feel certain will accompany campus reopenings.”
In May 2000, Ronnie Musgrove, coming off a razor-thin win the year before to capture the office of governor, had just enjoyed a successful legislative session where his teacher pay raise proposal, still the largest in state history, was approved.
He was riding high when in early May when the Mississippi Supreme Court delivered a bombshell – the state had no official flag. In an opinion written by then-Chief Justice Edwin Pittman, head of the state’s highest court, he ruled that the flag approved by the Legislature in 1894 was inadvertently repealed in 1906 and that in fact it was a “political decision “ for the current Legislature and governor to decide whether to maintain the old flag, which included the controversial Confederate battle emblem in its design.
Musgrove’s effort to replace the flag, though unsuccessful, has to be considered one of the key factors leading to his defeat three years later to Republican Haley Barbour. Barbour campaigned on the issue and helped to distribute signs throughout the state instructing Mississippians to “Keep the flag. Change the governor.”
Nineteen years later the state has furled the old flag and the citizens will vote in November on a new design that, by law, cannot contain the Confederate battle emblem.
“I thought it was a great day for Mississippi even though it’s been a long time coming…,” Musgrove said of action by the Legislature in late June to replace the flag. “Sure, back 19 years ago I played a political and personal price for being for a new flag. But the reality of the matter is we had the flag for 126 years, and we have been paying the price for that period of time.”
In 2001 the issue of the flag was thrust upon the state in large part by the Supreme Court. There had been efforts to change the flag by African American politicians and civil rights leaders, but the demand for change paled in comparison to what was apparent in recent months as protests and concerns over systematic racism grew. In addition, Musgrove said among those wanting to maintain the old flag there was “…Anger, vile people being really contentious about the issue compared to what we saw now.”
Another key difference, he said, is that in 2001 the leadership of the Legislature had no interest in voting to change the flag. The successful effort to change the flag would not have occurred this year if not for the behind-the-scenes work of Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, and House Speaker Philip Gunn. Musgrove, the state’s last Democratic governor, praised the leadership of Republicans Hosemann and Gunn, and also of Gov. Tate Reeves, who objected to the flag being changed unless by referendum before finally agreeing to sign the bill to remove the banner.
Kayleigh Skinner, Mississippi Today
Former governors Ronnie Musgrove, left, and William Winter attend the opening ceremony for the two museums Saturday in Jackson.
In 2000 after the Supreme Court ruling, Musgrove appointed a commission led by former Democratic Gov. William Winter and Tupelo businessman Jack Reed. Reed, the 1987 Republican nominee for governor, and Winter had been long-time friends and allies on such issue as improving education and racial relations.
Winter and the family of the late Jack Reed, whose department store was boycotted in the early 2000s because of his work on the flag commission, celebrated the action to replace the flag.
“We only wish that he were here to toast this momentous day with his great friend Gov. William Winter,” the Reed family said in a statement.
In true character, the 97-year-old Winter hailed the replacement of the flag, but looked to the future, saying, “The battle for a better Mississippi does not end with the removal of the flag.”
It was in reality the commission that recommended to the Legislature that the issue be placed on the ballot. But that recommendation was made with the understanding that it would be near impossible to get through the legislative process a bill to change the flag.
And it also turned out that replacing the flag via referendum was not doable. The old flag garnered 64 percent support in the 2001 referendum.
Musgrove said he remembers then-House Speaker Tim Ford telling him “we are absolutely not going to pass a new flag. And I told him I was absolutely not going to sign a bill with the old flag in it. So, we had a standoff and the only way we were able to work through that standoff was to put on the ballot a referendum by the people. It was not the path I wanted to take. It was not the best path to take. But at the time it was the only path that would move us down the path to a decision.”
Who would have known that there would be a clear path to change the flag 19 years later?
Four years ago, three big tech companies had plans in the works to beam internet down to Earth from the sky, and each scenario sounded wilder than the next. SpaceX requested permission to launch 4,425 satellites into orbit to create a global internet hotspot. Facebook wanted to use solar-powered drones and laser-based tech to shoot wifi to antennas. And Google’s Loon was building giant balloons to house solar-powered electronics that would transmit connectivity down from the stratosphere.
As incredible as it all sounds, two of these schemes have started to come to fruition. Loon balloons made their (non-emergency) debut in Kenya this week, with 35 balloons transmitting a 4G signal to 31,000 square miles of central and western Kenya. And SpaceX is in the process of signing up beta testers for its internet-via-satellite, with over 500 satellites currently in orbit. Facebook, however, stopped work on its internet drones in mid-2018.
Here’s a quick refresher on how the Loon and SpaceX systems work.
Big White Internet Balloons
Loon balloons are made of polyethylene, one of the most common plastics around (it’s in grocery bags, plastic bottles, kids’ toys, etc.). They’re 15 meters (49 feet) wide, and designed to hover in the stratosphere 20 kilometers (12 miles) above Earth. They’re launched by a custom-built crane that’s pointed downwind.
Specially-developed software uses predictive modeling of stratospheric winds and decision-making algorithms to shift the balloons as needed for a more reliable connection down below (balloons need to be within 40 kilometers of users for the service to work). The software constantly learns to improve the balloons’ choreography and thus the network’s quality, and the system can function autonomously.
The electronics inside the balloons get a wifi signal from a local telecoms partner at a ground station. In Kenya, Loon partnered with Telkom Kenya, the country’s third-largest carrier. The signal gets relayed across multiple nearby balloons that transmit it back down to peoples’ phones and other devices. Each balloon can cover an area of 5,000 square kilometers (a little under 2,000 square miles, or about the size of the state of Delaware).
A field testing session in Kenya in late June registered an upload speed of 4.74 Mpbs, a download speed of 18.9Mbps, and latency of 19 milliseconds. For comparison’s sake, the average speed in the US is 52 Mpbs upload and 135 Mbps download; so service will be a bit slower in Kenya. One other small problem: since the electronics in the balloons are solar-powered, they only send down a signal during daylight hours; service is currently available from 6am to 9pm.
Signals from Starlink
Just this past week, SpaceX launched 57 more of its Starlink satellites, bringing the total in orbit to over 500. It’s a fraction of the planned total of 4,425, but a pretty solid start. The satellites are orbiting 715 to 790 miles above Earth’s surface. Each one weighs 260 kilograms, about as much as a small car, and can reach an area 1,300 miles in diameter on the ground at a speed of one gigabit per second.
SpaceX plans for the first 1,600 satellites to be at one orbital altitude, followed by 2,825 more to be placed at four different altitudes. Each satellite is estimated to last five to seven years.
In late June SpaceX announced it was looking for beta testers for its internet service. You can sign up on Starlink’s website, and you’ll be notified if testing is going to take place in the area where you live. The company plans to start at higher latitudes (like Seattle, according to a May 7 tweet from Elon Musk), then move progressively southward.
Internet for All
According to the Alliance for Affordable Internet, over half of the world’s population now has internet access—but a large percentage of that is low-quality, meaning they can’t use features like online learning, video streaming, and telehealth. A 2019 report by the organization found that only 28 percent of the African population has internet access through a computer, while 34 percent have access through a mobile phone.
Though expanding internet to the whole of the world’s population will come with some drawbacks (such as more channels for misinformation or hate speech, and not being able to go anywhere to truly “unplug”), the broader consensus is that the internet will serve as a greatly empowering and liberating force, giving people instant access to information and enabling countless business and learning opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
We probably didn’t think this would happen via giant balloons and thousands of satellites, but it won’t be the first time the developing world leapfrogs right over cumbersome, outdated technologies. If SpaceX and Loon continue on their current trajectories, it will only be a matter of time—and not all that much of it—before we’re living in a planet-wide internet bubble.
TUPELO- Following Mayor Jason Shelton’s executive order, all people inside the Tupelo city limits must now wear a mask in indoor public buildings. Not all Tupelo residents are happy with this.
“It sends a mixed message,” says Rusty Rollingham. “I work hard to give people a certain impression about myself, and wearing a mask just disrupts all of that.”
Rollingham was asked to elaborate.
“Well as you can see by my shirt, I am a supporter of the ALL LIVES MATTER movement. BUT, if I were to wear a mask, then it would appear that I actually mean that seriously and care for everyone’s well-being; it would seem like “ALL LIVES MATTER” is a creed I truly strive to live by and not just thinly-veiled racism.”
Additionally, Rollingham believes that a mask would truly interfere with his everyday life.
“Before the ‘virus’,” he goes on to explain with air quotes, “I could go out to the bar with my buddies and laugh at how stupid science is while breathing each other’s air. But now, if I show up to a bar wearing a mask, people will think I’m a rational person who may not always understand science but still believes it and trusts the experts who actually know what they’re talking about. They’ll think, ‘Dang, that there Rusty must not be getting his information from Facebook no more; he obviously has respect for and values all lives.’ And I just can’t have people thinking that.”
Rollingham was asked his opinion on the effectiveness of masks.
“If the virus was real, a mask ain’t gonna stop it. Bill Gates just wants to thin the population out by making people breathe their own carbon dioxide. Now I know it sounds stupid that a mask is too porous to minimize viral transmission but can magically keep oxygen, which is atomic and therefore smaller than a virus, from getting through, but that’s what I believe. And making me wear a mask is taking away my right to look like a dumb dumb.”
This week on our Facebook page we asked the question to all of you that participate in simply sitting in the audience and enjoying gospel music. The question was: Does how a group or soloist dress determine how they are received? The answer to our question from you was interesting. 100% it seems that no one is interested in seeing anyone present their message in a suit anymore. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. A good many of you stated that you wanted them to be casual but comfortable. Some of you went a little further to describe casual as not shorts but a nice pair of slacks or even jeans and a nice shirt. A few people who are members of actual groups said that the possibility of over dressing is not a good thing in their opinion.
Does what you wear in front of people matter? As a matter of fact – it does. If you remember a few podcasts back we talked about your presence on stage as being ministry oriented or entertainment and how we did our best to tackle that? Well, as it turns out – how you dress communicates your message just like singing the right song or how you present the message you are trying to present.
In fact, what you wear can actually make the difference in how you are received by an audience. Over the years a lot of smart individuals studied this and found that your audience subconsciously becomes attentive or is not fully attentive merely based on what is in front of them at the moment. It’s not only the clothes you are wearing – but the colors AND how those colors are contrasting with the lights and the background. When asked about it people tend to say they don’t care, but in the moment what they do isn’t being registered the same way as when they are asked about it.
Here is an exercise. When you are getting ready to go to an important meeting do you pick a wardrobe that is comfortable or that makes you feel confident – or both? Do you think for a moment about the situation you are about to walk into? If you are going to be in front of an audience does that play a roll in how you pick your wardrobe?
It almost sounds silly when you say it out loud, but it’s the truth. We have all heard the saying; “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” We discussed this as well in our podcast about approaching your set list and the importance of a first song. Now, you have gone out of your way to study your sound system, learn your music, create a set-list that speaks the message you are trying to convey, and now you want to tell me that what you are about to wear in front of your audience doesn’t matter? It all matters. BUT, it does NOT have to be complicated.
Why do quartets wear suits? I bet no one has every really thought about why? Think about it for a second. Quartets became popular during a time when going to church meant you wore your absolute best and then some. People already dressed a certain way during the week, but on Sunday’s they did better than that out of respect. Therefore, when quartets came along it was only natural to look your very best for church since that was the type of music they were doing. They usually wore the same type of suit, same tie, and same shoes. The look of uniformity was attention getting to say the least. They were presenting themselves as 4 people doing 1 specific thing and therefore the uniformity in what they wore made that statement. This isn’t just the norm in gospel music but in other forms of music like classical and jazz. The bottom line is that what you wear in front of your audience matters – more than you think.
Now, let’s talk a little about how we should approach this. A lot of people said on the Facebook question that if you are doing a benefit or maybe an outdoor event that you should relax it bit and not dress up too much. While we want to agree with that – AND the venue is important – what you walk on stage to sing in still impacts the message you are trying to convey. You can still dress the part, be comfortable AND not be flashy at the same time. It takes a little bit of thought and that’s the most important thing about what you are wearing says. It most importantly says that you care!
When you walk on stage to sing or present your music what you are wearing tells the audience whether you cared enough about them to be presentable. Or did you choose to wear what you did to be flashy or did you care enough at all and just wanted to be comfortable. Now – I bet we have your attention.
The type of music you are performing, the types of songs you are singing, and the message you are conveying should match how you act on stage and what you are wearing.
A great rule of thumb for us has always been: If the Pastor is wearing a suit then we need to at least meet there. We might not all wear a tie, but we are going to dress ourselves to match the level the Pastor did. Why? Because that is what the audience is used to seeing. If a tie makes us feel uncomfortable then by all means don’t wear one. Here’s the kicker – if you were invited to sing there and you have never worn a suit in your life – then chances are they already know this. You see where this is going? Your presentation started before you walked into the building.
Find a look that suits you and whether that look is going to be suits, business casual or a presentable pair of jeans. You also have to think about your audience, the lighting, the stage background and the message you are conveying. We have witnessed a lot of people that are out there singing go from suits to jeans with an attitude that they don’t care anymore. Let us remind you – that your audience does. You shouldn’t shell shock them like that. If you have a plan to present yourself a certain way at live events then you slowly work them into it. Take for example someone like Gold City – they have traditionally worn suits to present their message. The few times I’ve seen them deviate from that norm their audience seemed to be more opinionated about what they were wearing than what they were singing. Brian Free and Assurance has been deviating away from suits on stage for so long now that no one cares anymore. If any sitting President walked on screen to do a televised meeting in anything but a suit no one would ever hear the end of it and the memes would go far into the next lifetime.
What you wear tells your audience that you cared. What you wear conveys the message your songs are tying to convey. What you wear should take the emphasis off of you and help the audience listen to the message in the music. What you wear should not distract anyone during your time in front of them. What you wear should not create a conflict with your audience. There have been times traveling with the quartet that we were invited to sing at churches. The person that was our contact at the church would make it completely clear that if we even thought of putting on ties that we’d be asked to leave. (in a joking but serious sort of way).
We have said all of that in hopes that you begin to take it seriously for your own ministry or message. Understand that whether you are singing in a large fancy venue – church or theater; a nursing home, benefit at the community center; or on a facebook live presentation – what you are wearing matters equally as much as how your sound, what you sing and how effective you have mastered your sound system. Remember that! Because IT ALL MATTERS!
If you would like to discuss this further – comment on our podcast – on this YouTube podcast or Facebook. DON’T forget to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, our Facebook page and shoot us an email at shayandmichi@gmail.com. In the next few weeks, we are looking for anyone that will video their performance for an upcoming podcast. We will present your video and during your performance talking about ways to improve or even just to brag on how well you do. We’ve had a few people on Facebook point us to their videos so if you want to take part in that – let us know!
Helping you further the message MATTERS TO US! Thanks for watching!
Temperatures will be in the low to mid 70s Sunday morning. There could be multiple chances of showers/ thunderstorms on our Sunday. Im keeping a 50% chance in the forecast at this time. A few of these could be strong to severe. The Storm Prediction Center has North and Central Mississippi in a Level 1 out of 5 severe storm risk. Otherwise, skies will be partly sunny, with a high near 91. West wind around 5 mph. New rainfall amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible. Sunday night there is a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly between 8pm and 10pm. Skies will then become mostly clear, with a low around 73.
These guidelines were created with a group of 10 superintendents across the state, and list three options for how schools should reopen: traditional, hybrid, or virtual.
Traditional reopening would mean students are physically present in school so long as districts can continue to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state department of health guidelines. A hybrid reopening would mean some combination of in-person instruction and distance learning. Virtual reopening would have students return to school entirely through distance learning. The state is not mandating which option districts take.
School districts must decide on an option by July 31.
Mississippi Today wants to know where our readers who are educators and parents stand on this issue. Please take a couple of minutes to fill out the below survey:
