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Supporters of the state flag rally at the Mississippi State Capitol in 2016. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

Let voters decide.

This has long been a refrain from many elected state leaders when they’re asked about stripping the Confederate battle emblem from the Mississippi state flag.

It’s been echoing through the halls of the state Capitol in recent days as Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage population of African Americans, is again in the national spotlight for having a symbol tied to white supremacy in the canon of its official banner.

While a popular vote on the flag might sound like a nod to egalitarian ideals, for many state lawmakers — and the last three Mississippi governors — calling for a referendum on the flag or noting that one was already held in 2001 has been something of a dodge. It appears to be a way to sidestep taking a clear stance on an issue that has roiled the state for decades.

“I believe very strongly that if we’re going to change the flag, the people of Mississippi should be the ones who make that decision,” Gov. Tate Reeves said in a press conference on Thursday. Asked repeatedly, he otherwise refused to say whether he favors changing the flag, or even how he might vote in such a referendum despite it being a predominant issue during Reeves’ entire political career to date.

Many state officials and political observers have noted that holding another public referendum on the flag would garner Mississippi much terrible worldwide publicity, no matter the outcome. As Mississippi Today this week polled legislators on the flag, quite a few of the dozens who publicly said voters should decide candidly lamented the prospect of such a national spectacle.

Others say that in a representative democracy, it’s the job of elected representatives to decide such issues – that our founding fathers were just as afraid of “tyranny by majority” as they were of despots. If everything were decided by direct referendum, there would likely be no civil rights. Government would not be able to levy taxes. The most populous areas of the nation and our state would dictate everything.

“As senators and representatives, we have been sent to the Capitol to lead, to make decisions,” said state Sen. Angela Turner Ford, D-West Point, chairwoman of the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, which supports changing the flag and opposes having a referendum. “… Why not go on and address this issue while we are here in Jackson? We decide on spending billions of dollars, on state laws. It’s our job.”

Ford noted that the Legislature several years ago changed the state seal, without any hue and cry that it should go to a referendum. Similarly, the current state flag was adopted by lawmakers, not voters, in an 1894 special legislative session.

Andy Taggart, longtime Mississippi politician, author and patriarch of the state Republican Party, has been an outspoken supporter of changing the flag. He believes the Legislature should change it.

“There’s no question in my mind, if Jim Crow laws were put to a public referendum of Mississippi voters in the 1950s and 60s, those laws would have been left in place,” Taggart said. “We elect legislators to make hard decisions — about raising or lowering our taxes, to borrow or not borrow millions of dollars in public debt.”

Taggart continued: “What ought to happen is the Legislature ought to retire our state flag, with dignity. We have a new state history museum, let’s have a lovely, dignified retirement ceremony for the flag … The fact that this happens to be an emotional and hard issue is not a reason for the Legislature not to gut-up and do it.”

Taggart said he believes lawmakers pitch a referendum as “a dodge,” but “I don’t fear it the way some people do.” Taggart said he believes Mississippians would vote to change the flag.

“While I wouldn’t like to air our dirty laundry in such a public campaign, I’m confident people want to change our flag,” Taggart said. “… If it is sent to a public referendum, I will embrace it as much as I can and work to prevail on the vote.”

This week, Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said: “I have been, and I am today, in favor of placing a decision on Mississippi’s flag on a statewide ballot …  It is time for this controversy to be resolved. I believe the flag which represents me and my grandchildren should reflect all of our citizens’ collective future, as determined by those who will live under that banner.”

House Speaker Philip Gunn, the most prominent Mississippi GOP lawmaker to definitively call for changing the flag, said on Friday his opinion hasn’t changed.

“The options we’ve got are for the Legislature to take the leadership role, or put it to a referendum,” Gunn said. “… I’ve always maintained that I feel the Legislature should take the leadership role.”

But Gunn said the realpolitik is that it does not appear there are enough votes in the Legislature to do so, at least in this session, which is set to end next week. He said there is some discussion about pushing the issue to a referendum.

“We are continuing to have those conversations and monitor votes,” Gunn said. “… If all we can get is a referendum, then so be it.”

The post Leaders consider letting Mississippi voters decide fate of the state flag. Are they sidestepping? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Black Joy as Resistance! Juneteenth Celebration was held on Farish Street in Jackson Friday, June 19, 2020. The Fertile Ground Project sponsored the free event which was hosted by Black Lives Matter Mississippi and ‘Sipp Talk. The event included a mural reveal by artist Adrienne Domnick, food trucks, live performances and music. Juneteenth is a national holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. Here are images from the Jackson event. 

The post Photo Gallery | Juneteenth Celebration appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Photo by Sherry Lucas

Susan Haltom, the garden curator who’s been with the Welty Garden for decades and the co-author of “One Writer’s Garden,” retires at the end of June.

Droplets bead on yellow daylilies in the Welty Garden, and morning dew clings to Susan Haltom’s sneakers, but that does nothing to dampen the cheeriness of either.

Haltom whips out pruners and dead-heads yesterday’s blooms, introducing the perennials as originals planted by Eudora Welty’s mother, Chestina, and later, Eudora. Every flower here has a story. Many have multiple tales, trickling through the generations who’ve tended, studied and found solace and inspiration here — Chestina the garden designer, Eudora the writer and plantswoman, Haltom the garden curator and preservationist.

Haltom stops at the stand of tiger lilies for a similar bit of maintenance and a sprinkle of literary references, and she slows past the Nicotiana to consider not only the flowering tobacco plant’s blossoms, but also its place in a Welty story.

Haltom retires at the end of June after more than 25 years here. She’ll continue to advise those entrusted with the garden’s care, including the Cereus Weeders, her core group of volunteers named for the night-blooming cereus plants on the side porch of Eudora Welty House.

From that porch, every view conjures a historical tidbit or botanical observation. The now-towering cedar trees were just six feet tall when they were planted nearly a century ago. The gardenia blooms, just out of fragrance range, would be the first to sniff out a memory.

Haltom had an art degree, gardening mentorship from her mother-in-law (Glenn Haltom of Natchez), and a part-time job at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History when she was tapped to help in the Welty Garden in 1994.

Welty was then in her 80s. “Here’s her big quote to me: ‘I can’t bear to look out the window and see what has become of my mother’s garden,’” Haltom recalls. She’d lost her treasured yard man of 40 years to retirement, his replacement was a “mow-and-blow-and-go guy,” and Welty didn’t know what to do. Haltom didn’t either, at first. But research — including conversations with Welty, and later, her correspondence and photographs, and her mother’s garden notebook — and a strong network of knowledge and support fueled the 10-year garden restoration.

“So, it is authentic, just like Eudora was.”

In one of the earliest hands-on moves, Luther Ott, then Stewpot Community Services director, got a couple of the charity’s clients to help, and, along with Haltom, they pulled poison ivy for four months to uncover some of the garden’s “bones” below. A later part of the restoration, to get to the clubhouse where Welty and friends acted out dramas, required digging out a gully “so solid with bamboo you couldn’t even get through there,” Haltom recalls. “It’s been so much fun!” she laughs. “But I didn’t know in 1994 how I would get there.”

Garden preservation was a new discipline at the time — distinguished by its efforts to retain historic appearance and character, its reliance on historic documentation, its contribution to a historic property’s interpretation and more.

Photo by Sherry Lucas

Yellow daylilies at Welty Garden greet the summer sunshine.

Invaluable in the restoration effort, Haltom says, was advice and support from the Garden Conservancy, Southern Garden History Society (Haltom is a past president), the Welty family, The Eudora Welty Foundation, and particularly Evelyn and Michael Jefcoat of Laurel (“My champions,” she says). The Jefcoats’ support included the arbors and trellises made of tubular steel (rather than rot-prone wood) designed by preservation architect Robert Parker Adams to exactly match photographs of the original garden, restoration of the little clubhouse and Haltom’s book on the garden.

People often ask Haltom if, in those late years before her death in 2001, Welty could look out the window and see the work in progress? “Not exactly,” Haltom says. “But she knew that someone — me — had its best interests at heart.” Most of that time, Haltom would come and work by herself, keeping the garden under observation, then go inside and visit with Welty. She never took notes – until she got in her car to leave, and then she’d scribble madly from memory.

“‘Don’t make the garden something it wasn’t’ — that was Eudora’s dictum to me,” Haltom says. “To me, that meant that she didn’t want it all gussied up, or made into something fine and grand, like Longwood Gardens or the Biltmore House, or any of those bigger gardens that were not what she used as inspiration.

“It was very personal to her. Very personal.” Welty’s mother was the garden designer, focused on spatial relationships and continuity of bloom throughout the year. “Eudora loved looking closely at the flowers, and noting their habit and detail, the fragrance — everything that went toward … the personality of that flower.”

Flowers became character names and keys to a sense of place in Welty’s stories. “She would recognize that flowers, at this time, were ubiquitous, because women had attained the garden. … They didn’t have to be out there every Monday, boiling clothes.

“This time, in the ’20s, women had gotten the vote. And, they were driving automobiles. There were telephones in the home, and they could call each other,” Haltom says, tying the garden’s design and official period of significance, between World War I and World War II, to the era’s innovations, societal changes and women’s growing sphere of influence and community of creativity.

By then, women were sharing plants with each other. Garden clubs grew out of the already decades-old women’s clubs that galvanized personal and community improvement, through education and the charitable works of organized volunteers.

When the Great Depression came, gardens became their places of solace, as well as creativity, Haltom says. “In unusual times, like we’ve got now, many people have gone back to their gardens again. … And, that’s a good thing.”

Susan Haltom checks on the tiger lilies that grow at Welty Garden.

Welty Garden, restored to its 1925-1945 period of significance, opened to the public in 2004. It wasn’t finished, Haltom notes, adding that a restored historic garden never is. It’s always changing, as trees grow and the canopy changes. Preservation and maintenance of a historic garden, different from landscape maintenance, is an ongoing process requiring attention to detail. The garden survived the Great Depression and carried the Welty women through many hard times; she can’t help but worry about its future in the face of budget cuts.

Jessica Russell, in the relatively new MDAH position of garden projects specialist at Eudora Welty House & Garden, takes up the garden focus role. Russell helped launch an Instagram account highlighting the garden’s “parade of bloom” (in Welty’s words), boosted the garden’s presence in the redesigned website that now includes a colorful Bloom Calendar, and worked with Haltom and staff to develop a dozen signature plant labels to showcase their special connection to the author. Russell aims to increase and diversify the garden’s volunteer base. “She understands the big pictures,” Haltom says.

“One of the things that’s important to me, is just making sure that the culture of advocacy for the garden extends even beyond our staff, at higher and higher levels,” Russell says, noting that Eudora Welty House & Garden director Lauren Rhoades is also a big advocate for the garden.

Last fiscal year (July 2018-June 2019) Eudora Welty House & Garden had 5,192 on-site visitors, more than half of them on guided tours. The site’s largest programs — the Bettye Jolly Lecture, Jane Austen film screenings, Jazz Night, plant sale and Scholastic Awards Program — are always outdoors. Public hours for Welty Garden are now 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays because of the pandemic. The entire site, including Eudora Welty House and Visitors Center, reopens for tours July 7, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays.

“This garden reaches people because it’s approachable,” Haltom says, “because it looks like their grandmother’s garden, or their aunt’s garden, or someplace they can recognize the sense of place. This is Mississippi.” She’s seen visitors walk through and cry. She’s heard others say, “This is just like I stepped into ‘The Optimist’s Daughter,’” Welty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short novel.

“It has been one of the great blessings of my life to be associated with this.” Haltom has shared the garden’s story in 250 lectures — its restoration story, the nuts and bolts methods, the women’s club movement and more — from Texas to Pennsylvania, and in the book “One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place,” co-written with Jane Roy Brown and richly photographed by Langton Clay.

“What resonates with everybody is the story, whether it’s what Eudora wrote, the story of her life, the story of this garden through the years,” Haltom says. And while she worries about the details, the story is the key. “And, we want the story to go forward.

“The garden is a container of memory,” she says at one point, a comment that reminds her of a Welty quote on the topic. Perhaps it’s this one: “The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.”

The post ‘The garden is a container of memory’: Curator who restored Welty Garden is retiring appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, left, and House Speaker Philip Gunn speak to media concerning the legislative session and the coronavirus Tuesday, March 17, 2020.

As pressure mounts to change the state flag, which features the Confederate battle emblem, legislative leaders spent the day Friday discussing several options, including adopting a second official state flag or letting voters decide the current flag’s fate.

Speaker of the House Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, as well as top ranking lawmakers on both sides of the building, met to discuss the issue on Thursday, according to several people with direct knowledge of the meeting.

Multiple sources on Friday told Mississippi Today that one option lawmakers are considering is some type of referendum to allow a vote of the people on the issue. The exact details of that potential referendum, including when the vote would occur and what exactly would be placed on the ballot, remain undecided.

A second option being discussed is a possible two-flag solution. In the past, some legislators have discussed retaining the current flag but also officially adopting another banner. Under that approach, governmental entities could then choose to decide which banner to display.

Gov. Tate Reeves, who would have to sign any legislation that passed in coming days, did not discount the possibility he would support the two flag option in a press conference on Thursday.

Gunn, the most prominent Mississippi Republican official to definitively call for changing the flag, didn’t talk on Friday about specific options being discussed, but he said his opinion on the issue hasn’t changed.

“The options we’ve got are for the Legislature to take the leadership role, or put it to a referendum,” Gunn said. “… I’ve always maintained that I feel the Legislature should take the leadership role.”

But Gunn said the realpolitik is that it does not look like there are enough votes in the Legislature to act on its own, at least in this session, which is set to end on Friday. He said there is still some discussion, including about pushing the issue to a referendum.

“We are continuing to have those conversations and monitor votes,” Gunn said. “… If all we can get is a referendum, then so be it.”

Senate Appropriations Chairman Sen. Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg and one of the few Republican legislators to take a public stance for changing the flag, said that discussions at the Capitol on the issue are ongoing but change “hour by hour.”

A recent survey by Mississippi Today indicates that many Republicans, who hold a supermajority in both the House and Senate, do not favor the Legislature changing the flag on their own.

“The Mississippi Legislature has no business stripping the people of our state from having a voice in this matter,” said Rep. Dan Eubanks, R-Walls.

Many lawmakers, however, oppose a referendum on the issue, saying it is the constitutional duty of the Legislature to act. The issue was placed before Mississippi voters in 2001, and 64 percent of those voters opted to keep the current flag. There’s a feeling among many lawmakers that if a vote of the people were to go similarly, conversations about changing the flag would be buried for years to come.

But in recent days, both the Southeastern Conference, which includes the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State as members, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have said they will keep postseason athletic events from being hosted in the state until lawmakers change the flag.

The NCAA ruling, which would include college baseball and women’s basketball regionals, would impact the state’s public and private universities and colleges.

Andy Taggart, longtime Mississippi Republican politico and vocal proponent of changing the flag, said he believes voters would approve a proposal to change the flag if the Legislature placed it on the ballot. Still, he said he prefers the Legislature tackle the controversial issue themselves. As far as having two flags, he said: “I think a two-flag option is a very poor choice.”

“When I was in high school in the mid-1970s, we had a black Mr. Moss Point High School and a white Mr. Moss Point High School,” Taggart said. “… To say we ought to have two state flags is just wrong. There was some talk of adopting an additional state flag with the view that over time the current one would sort of atrophy away. I just don’t think that is a defensible position at all.”

Taggart continued: “We ought to be willing to say to the people of our state who are hurt by or offended by the Confederate emblem that it is no longer representative of our state in any way.”

The post Facing growing pressure to change state flag, lawmakers consider adopting second official flag or letting voters decide appeared first on Mississippi Today.

What began as a day that felt victorious for everyone who wanted the Confederate monument relocated from its prominent position at the University of Mississippi quickly turned confusing and disappointing.

After the the Board of Trustees of the Institutions of Higher Learning voted on Thursday morning to relocate the Confederate monument at the University of Mississippi, a rendering of what appeared to be a plan for the relocated statue began circulating. The rendering depicts the monument in the center of a broad brick pathway on a manicured landscape surrounded by in-ground lighting that would presumably illuminate it.

University of Mississippi

This is an unofficial artist’s rendering of what the Confederate monument site could look like at the University of Mississippi once the monument is moved.

“There’s a bench in the picture. Are you going to sit down on the bench and look at it? That’s not education, that’s glorification,” said Josh Mannery, Associated Student Body president at UM. “I think that somehow if this ends up being true they managed to make the relocation worse.”

The university responded that the renderings being widely shared are not the official plans for the cemetery, but an idea of what the plan could be. 

“These are an artist’s renderings, and the plans have continued to evolve since the renderings were completed,” a university spokesman told Mississippi Today in a statement. “These renderings were used as supporting documentation in the university’s submission and in conversations between Chancellor (Glenn) Boyce and the (IHL board) to offer visuals of what the site could look like in accordance with state law, which allows a monument to be moved ‘to a more suitable location if it is determined that the location is more appropriate to displaying the monument.’”

A group of student activists worked for months to get the Confederate monument moved from the heart of campus to the on-campus cemetery. The cemetery, which holds unmarked graves where hundreds of Confederate soldiers are said to be buried, is located in a quiet corner of campus, tucked behind the old basketball arena and some parking lots.

University of Mississippi

This is an unofficial artist’s rendering of what the Confederate monument site could look like at the University of Mississippi once the monument is moved.

The monument’s relocation and cemetery upgrades are expected to cost $1.15 million, which will be privately funded, according to information shared with the IHL board this week.

“The university’s privately funded plan proposes relocation to the University Cemetery because a cemetery is sacred ground that serves as the final resting place of the fallen,” the university’s project proposal, submitted this week to the IHL board, stated. “For that reason, cemeteries have long been deemed appropriate places for war memorials … and the relocation of the monument immediately adjacent to the cemetery would place the monument in a broader and more proper historical context.”

As part of relocating the monument, the university will construct a well lit, brick path to the monument, which was placed on the campus by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1906. A new marker will also be added to the cemetery to “recognize the men from Lafayette County who served in the Union Army as part of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War,” the proposal states. Cameras will be installed around the cemetery to allow the University Police Department to monitor it.

The university’s clarification about the renderings this week did not assuage frustrations and concerns from students and faculty this week.

Anne Twitty, associate professor of history at UM, was a member of the committee that in part was tasked with creating plaques that contextualized vestiges of slavery and the Confederacy around campus.   

“Just the second you think that you finally achieved your goal, you find out that there’s now a new front in what seems like a never ending war,” Twitty said. “That’s very frustrating. And it’s like all this is happening because they weren’t transparent with us. They didn’t tell us what was going on. And they promised us that they would.”

Twitty has raised concerns about the lack of transparency around the relocation process and the plan for the relocation itself. Aside from the overall design which some feel exalts the Confederate monument, the plan also includes headstones to acknowledge the other Confederate soldiers buried there.

“This fantasy that you can go into this resting place and put up headstones when you don’t know exactly who was still there, and when you don’t know where they’re located on that plot — that strikes me as deeply offensive,” Twitty said. “I think what that rendering sort of suggests is a kind of Confederate-palooza that the university wants to establish in its back forty and it just means that they’re replacing one site for Lost Cause nostalgia, which is currently at the entrance to our campus, with another one.”

Students also felt misled, misrepresented and generally left out of the conversation about the rendering that was drawn up.

“I’m disappointed again that I’m finding out about it the day of the relocation,” Mannery said. “It just seems like student input wasn’t valued.”

Arielle Hudson, one of the co-authors of the student resolution that put this entire process in motion, noted that part of the proposal submitted to IHL listed a variety of student groups who had endorsed the plan.

“None of the campus constituency groups have even seen these updated plans so we wanted to make it clear that this was not endorsed at all and that we are not in support of making the cemetery into a glorified shrine of the Confederacy,” Hudson said.

The post ‘Glorified shrine of the Confederacy’: UM students, faculty fume over unofficial plans to renovate Confederate cemetery appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today

Courtney Webster, center, is surrounded by family members after Greenville High School’s graduation Thursday, May 21, 2020.

For the past decade, the Mississippi Department of Education manipulated graduation rates and has been “apathetic” about taking initiative to reduce the dropout rate, an investigation conducted by the state auditor’s office found. The Mississippi Department of Education denies these assertions.

Shad White speaks at the Westin Jackson Tuesday, November 5, 2019.

“Mississippi’s teachers, parents, and administrators have worked together to improve our graduation rate over the past few years, and that’s a commendable, important achievement,” State Auditor Shad White said in a release. “But some of that improvement in the graduation rate, is just due to a change in the way MDE calculated the graduation rate. You have to be honest about it.”

The 17-page performance audit claimed the department didn’t accurately report graduation rates to the Mississippi State Board of Education or create the Office of Dropout Prevention, which was tasked with overseeing the statewide dropout prevention plan and increasing graduation rates.

In a 41-page response, state superintendent Carey Wright denied or clarified many of the report’s assertions.

Kayleigh Skinner, Mississippi Today

State Education Superintendent Carey Wright

“…the MDE emphatically denies the use of inapplicable graduation rate data when reporting to the State Board of Education and to the general public,” the letter, dated June 18 said. “The MDE has gone to great lengths to ensure accurate data (sic) is presented to the SBE and the public, and we take great umbrage at allegations to the contrary.”

The report said graduation and dropout rates were calculated to include repeaters, or students who repeated 12th grade until 2007, when the state board of education changed the way these rates are calculated and repeaters were no longer factored into the rates. According to the report, this altered the calculations to push Mississippi’s graduation rate to increase by nearly 10 points, from 61.1 percent to 70.8 percent within two months. The department didn’t alert the Legislature of the amended changes or amend the changes in the statewide prevention plan, the report said.

In response, Wright included documentation from 2007 that shows the department changed the way graduation rates are calculated because it had to due to a change in federal law. Before the change in 2007, graduation rates included students earning traditional diplomas and special education students earning occupational diplomas. But those special education students were removed from graduation rate calculations because federal requirements include “only students graduating from high school with a regular diploma.”

The department’s response said this change had a negligible effect, dropping the graduation rate for the 2004-2005 graduating cohort from 61.1% to 60.8% statewide. The response did not specifically address the auditor’s assertion that the department increased the statewide graduation rate by ten points in two months.

In Mississippi, the graduation rate is calculated in a “four-year cohort,” meaning, rather than count the number of students who graduated in a specific year, instead, this figure is calculated based on the students who started in the ninth grade and made it to 12th grade. This allows for a graduation rate of a full cohort rather than one 12th-grade class, and is “considered a more comprehensive picture of the issue of students’ persistence and high school completion,” according to the department. For example, the 2020 graduation rate represents the students who entered the ninth grade for the first time in the 2015-16 school year. Separately, the annual dropout rate is the number and percentage of students who drop out during one school year.

“Given the tremendous progress Mississippi students, teachers and schools have made over the past six years, it is disheartening to read a report that focuses on outdated procedures that have not been effective,” Wright said. “The State Board of Education Strategic Plan has modernized the state’s approach to education, which has resulted in historic and sustained student achievement across Mississippi.”

The state’s high school graduation rate is something department officials and politicians have lauded in recent years. That figure reached an all-time high for the 2018-19 school year, the most recent figure available, at 85 percent, while the dropout rate reached an all-time low of 9.7 percent, according to the department. There are some discrepancies in this figure, however — some schools with F ratings and very low proficiency rates have some of the highest graduation rates. When asked about this last fall, Wright acknowledged this was a concern.

“That is something we are looking at at the department level, to be honest,” Wright said at the time. “It’s hard to believe you have a high graduation rate when you have low proficiency rates.”

The report also said out of 139 local school districts, 73 percent of dropout prevention plans did not meet the department’s requirements. Nearly half of the graduation plans were not being monitored by the department; and 71 percent were not evidence-based, according to the report. It also stated the agency does not monitor if evidence-based programs are effective.

The department acknowledged it “does not have an individual dedicated solely to dropout prevention,” but the agency does have an Office of Dropout Prevention that operates within the Office of Secondary Education. The department also has a strategic plan surrounding long-term student achievement and outcomes, and the state board of education “established a long-term graduation goal of 90% by 2024-25,” Wright included in her response to the auditor’s report.

The auditor’s office had a list of recommendations for the department, including: re-establishing the Office of Dropout Prevention and hiring a director; updating the statewide dropout prevention plan and annually approving local plans; collecting data to measure areas for improvement in dropout prevention; and changing the statute to increase the graduation rate goal, benchmark years, among other suggestions.

Graduation rates for the most recent school year, 2019-20, will not be available until later in the year or early 2021.

The post State Auditor alleges Department of Education manipulated graduation rates appeared first on Mississippi Today.

MS.gov

Mississippi state flag

So, the NCAA announced on Friday that Mississippi teams can no longer host college baseball and basketball regionals until the state changes its flag. That’s a big deal. And it will put the Mississippi teams at a competitive disadvantage. It’s bad for our universities, for our athletes, for our fans, for everybody.

That comes a day after the Southeastern Conference joined an ever-growing list of organizations that openly oppose any semblance of the Confederate battle flag. You know, the one that takes up the upper corner of the Mississippi state flag and the one that flies at Ku Klux Klan and Skinhead rallies.

Mississippi State and Ole Miss, the two SEC schools in Mississippi, refuse to fly the state flag. So do the other six state-supported universities. So do the cities of Oxford and Starkville. Hattiesburg, too. Jackson, the state’s largest city won’t fly the flag. It came down this week in Gulfport, the second most populated Mississippi city.

Rick Cleveland

Question: What good is a state flag if so many won’t fly it?

All other southern states have cut ties with the Confederate battle flag. NASCAR, which has been a haven for Confederate flags throughout its history, has banned the banner. Here in Mississippi this week, the Delta Council, which opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, came out in favor of changing the flag.

There’s more.

The NCAA announcement came after a group of former Mississippi college athletes Thursday petitioned the NCAA to stop holding post-season events until the state changes its flag. It shouldn’t take sports to influence our legislature and governor to change our archaic flag. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

It’s time, Mississippi. More to the point, it’s past time.

•••

Long-time readers know where I side on this Mississippi flag controversy. And the fact is, I don’t want to change the flag because of how those outside the state perceive us. I want to change the flag because it is the right thing to do. In 2015, I signed a letter in a full page ad in the Clarion Ledger petitioning for flag change, along with many of the state’s sports heroes, coaches, athletic directors, writers, performers, educators and business leaders. Archie Manning signed it. So did Bailey Howell. So did Boo Ferriss, Jimmy Buffett, John Grisham, Morgan Freeman, Richard Ford, William Winter and many others.

The letter in the ad told of the history of the Confederate battle flag and the Mississippi state flag. How the battle flew over Rebel forces in the Civil War. “The Rebel flag was never meant to fly over state capitols. It was a battle flag, usually carried by a color sergeant at the head of a regiment. With its bright red background and blue ‘southern cross,’ it was meant to be seen through the smoke of battle and to serve as a rallying point. …Thirty years later, in 1894, Mississippi redesigned its flag and incorporated the Rebel emblem in its canton.”

Important to note, there was no vote to change the flag back then. The Legislature passed a bill to change the flag and Gov. John Marshall Stone, a Confederate veteran, signed off on it.

And so it has remained. In 2001, a state referendum was held and Mississippi voters overwhelmingly rejected a clumsy design in favor of the old flag. I wrote a column prior to that referendum stating my thoughts on why we needed a new flag. “Many old flag supporters talk about supporting our heritage. Whose heritage? Look around. One out of every three of us (it is now more) is black. My great grandfather fought for the Confederacy, but my Mississippi heritage is more about manners and civility – about treating people the way I want to be treated – than a piece a cloth. Anything that offends so many Mississippians offends me.”

•••

The old flag is coming down – if not in this session of the Legislature, then some day soon. It will eventually happen because it is the right thing to do. I don’t know how another referendum would go. I do know that many minds have changed over 19 years, and I do know that many of today’s voters hadn’t even been born in 2001.

I also know it doesn’t have to come down to a referendum. Three men – Tate Reeves, Delbert Hoseman and Philip Gunn – can make it happen. And all three know it is the right thing to do, that the state would surely benefit from a change. The Confederate battle flag, in any form, has no place other than a museum in 2020.

In 1865, in surrender, Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate army, told his soldiers, “It’s time to furl the flag boys.”

Folks, that was 155 years ago.

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