This afternoon, I went to R and B Specialty Printing to speak with Shirley Hendrix. Her family moved to Tupelo in 1993 because they felt that it was inviting and welcoming. They wanted somewhere nice to raise their children.
Shirley says that she has always been an entrepreneur. One of her first businesses here was Shirley’s Place restaurant. She always loved to cook and her church family would come to her on Sundays, so she started a restaurant on the hill. That’s how it was known.
When her restaurant businesses closed, she went to work at Acon Graphics. She was always printing up “little happies” and giving things away. She then opened a booth at the flea market for her printed creations and business blew up. As she continued to grow in business, she opened a booth at the VF Warehouse and finally opened her store on Main Street downtown.
She created R and B Printing as a family business and something for her kids to inherit in time. Both of her kids have a great work ethic and have helped her throughout the years. Her oldest now runs his own business. Shirley has really enjoyed getting to know her clients. She is a customer-oriented person and loves to start conversations and really get to understand what they are asking for. She loves that her customers trust her enough to create her own visions sometimes. She gets their story and then gets to work with her creative side.
R and B Printing can do anything that deals with printing. Nothing is off the table. Flyers, Posters, Shirts, Window Decals. If you have a vision then they can make it happen.
Shirley advises business owners to always listen to your client. Listening is key and it will really show that you care. She always advises getting involved in your community. You should always be willing to give back to your community. She has enjoyed working with groups like United Way and Big Brothers/Big Sisters.
Gov. Tate Reeves speaks to media during a press conference Friday, April 24, 2020, at the State of Mississippi Woolfolk Building in Jackson, Miss. Gov. Reeves signed a new executive order establishing a statewide Safer at Home order to protect public health and move towards reopening the economy.
Bucking the advice of the state’s top public health experts, Gov. Tate Reeves announced Tuesday he would delay opening just a handful of schools until Aug. 17 — affecting less than 7% of the state’s student population, a Mississippi Today analysis shows.
On Tuesday Reeves issued an executive order for schools in Bolivar, Coahoma, Forrest, George, Hinds, Panola, Sunflower and Washington counties. Affected districts cannot have in-person learning until Aug. 17. Other school districts can open traditionally now, and many did or are planning to this week.
The criteria for counties chosen for the executive order include having seen 200 new cases within the last 14 days or having had an average of 500 cases per 100,000 residents over that time. It’s the same criteria he used to determine his county-by-county mask mandate, which until Tuesday included 37 counties. The governor declared a statewide mask mandate at the same time he announced the executive order.
“We have approached this in a manner in which we believe that we are doing what is in the best interest of our state, and we believe to be in the best interest of our schoolchildren throughout Mississippi,” Reeves said.
But by issuing an executive order for a specific group of students in just a few counties, less than 7 percent of the public school population in Mississippi is affected, based on enrollment data from the 2019-2020 school year. Many districts in these counties are already planning on a virtual opening or later start date.
Two of the state’s top health experts had publicly urged Reeves earlier this week to postpone reopening all schools until September.
UMMC Communications
State health officer Thomas Dobbs at a press conference at UMMC.
“As far as starting traditional school in the near future, I think it’s nuts,” State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs said Tuesday, sitting next to Reeves at a press conference. “We can’t have unmitigated risk as far as the schools go.”
Though, he added: “But do understand that especially for our youngest kids and maybe kids with learning disabilities there’s a lot more urgency of getting them in the classroom.”
Good Wednesday morning everyone! It is pleasant this morning with temperatures in the upper 60s across the area! An upper level trough is giving us below normal temperatures, along with lower humidity. We will see mostly sunny skies today, with a high near 89. Rain chances remain near zero. North wind around 5mph. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low around 66. Enjoy the nice weather, because Highs get back up to 96 degrees by Saturday!
Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
Gov. Tate Reeves and Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs speak to the media about the coronavirus during a press conference at the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, March 26, 2020.
Going against the advice of the state’s top health officer and other Mississippi medical experts, Gov. Tate Reeves on Tuesday announced admittedly “piecemeal” orders that allow most schools to reopen now even as the state sees record numbers of COVID-19 cases.
“I believe in my heart we have got to get our kids back in school,” Reeves said, and reiterated a recent theme: “I believe it’s better, whenever possible, to allow local leaders to determine plans for their schools.”
Reeves is issuing an executive order to “pump the brakes” for grades seven through 12 in eight COVID-19 “hot spot” counties. The schools in Bolivar, Coahoma, Forrest, George, Hinds, Panola, Sunflower and Washington counties are affected by the executive order, which pushes their start date to Aug. 17.
The order only applies to public schools, and schools that are already slated to reopen virtually can do so. Reeves’ order will require students and staff to wear masks in all schools and he also issued a statewide mask mandate — previously only 37 of 82 counties were under a mask mandate.
A Mississippi Today analysis shows the executive order affects less than 7% of students in the public school system, based on enrollment data from the 2019-20 school year. Many districts in these counties are already planning on a virtual opening or later start date.
The announcement comes as some schools in Mississippi have already reopened traditionally, and the state’s top health officials have come out publicly advocating for the governor to delay the return to the classroom.
“The governor’s plan, in its current form, is reckless and irresponsible,” said Erica Jones, president of the Mississippi Association of Educators, which has asked to delay schools opening until at least Sep. 1. “It ignores the advice of the state’s top medical officials and is putting students and educators and their families at risk.”
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs last week had joined a chorus of other health officials and groups calling for Reeves to delay in-person schooling until early September. Dobbs had called earlier reopening, “crazy,” and said, “There’s nothing magic about August.”
On Tuesday, as he sat with Reeves at a press conference, he was less emphatic and said, “Let’s just behave for a couple of weeks. Our kids have got to get back to school.”
But Dobbs on Tuesday also said, “Quite honestly I believe some of the (schools’) plans could use a lot of work.”
School districts had to choose between in-person, virtual, or hybrid reopenings and submit plans to the Mississippi Department of Education by July 31. Reeves, who is the only person with the authority to delay school at the statewide level, said he spent the last few days reading 598 pages of reopening plans which led him to believe there was cause for an executive order.
“There will be plenty of time for Monday-morning quarterbacking,” Reeves said as he bristled at some media questions Tuesday. “My decisions are in real-time, based on what I think is best for the state of Mississippi.”
The governor acknowledged there was risk in this decision.
“Are there risks? Sure there are. I’m aware of those risks and still believe this is the best decision for our state.”
More than 465,000 children attend public schools in Mississippi, and more than 30,000 teachers and thousands of other staff are in the building with them each day.
Aliyah Shivers teaches fourth grade at Booker T. Washington Elementary in Clarksdale Municipal School District. She is also a parent to two toddler boys and thinks the governor should delay reopening all schools.
“Even though we’re virtual, the teacher may end up going in the classroom, so I’m forced to take my kids to daycare and they’re at risk to bring it back home,” Shivers said Tuesday. “(Reeves says) kids don’t carry the virus as much as adults, but they still can get it and bring it home. It’s just not safe.”
Mississippi’s statistics are not comforting either — Mississippi currently has the highest COVID-19 positivity rate in the country and the third-highest daily new case rate. Hospitalizations for the virus continue to rise, and the daily patient rolls nearly doubled in the past month.
“The numbers are constantly rising,” Shivers said. “I don’t see them going down anytime soon and I don’t see us trying to control it and we expect the kids to wear a mask and keep their hands clean and stay away from their friends?”
“Today I was really hoping (Reeves) would say we’re going to go to school virtually all over the state until we start seeing a major decrease in the cases,”
Trent Chess teaches at Coahoma Early College High School. He thinks districts should go virtual for the first nine weeks of school to give the state time for cases to decline.
“I just really think it’s crazy and it’s very risky,” to return to in-person schooling right now, he said. “I think we’re seeing more and more cases and more and more deaths associated with it and we just really don’t need to expose the children any more or us (as educators) any more than what we’re already exposed.”
In Bolivar County, the Cleveland School District has already delayed its hybrid start date to Sept. 8. Parent Latoya Shepard has two children enrolled in the district, and on Tuesday called the governor’s decision “pompous, arrogant and heartless.” Though she understands the governor is doing the best he can, she’d really hoped he would announce an all-virtual return to school until the state started seeing its case level drop, she said.
“My heart goes out to every parent in this state because we don’t know what we’re sending our children into,” she said.
“They have a fire drill, they have a drill for an active shooter is on the campus,” she said. “They have all of these drills, but what are you going to do when a child – are you waiting on a child to die in the district? That is my concern. When is he going to do something?”
As concern over climate change and rising temperatures grows, the airline industry is taking heat (pun intended). Flying accounts for 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions; that’s lower than car travel and maritime shipping, but still a chunk worth acknowledging.
In some parts of the world people have started “flight-shaming,” that is, giving up air travel themselves and encouraging others to find alternative means of transport that are more climate-friendly. Sweden’s national flygskam campaign, which started in 2017, even led to a nine percent decrease in domestic air travel.
It’s possible to cut back on air travel, but given the globalized nature of business, the economy, and even families and friendships, we’re not going to stop needing a fast, relatively pain-free way to get across countries or around the globe; some things simply can’t be done over Zoom.
An unexpected potential solution is being floated (again, pun intended) by companies that believe people will be willing to trade a lot of time and money for a more planet-friendly way to travel: by airship.
What’s an Airship?
The term “airship” encompasses motorized craft that float due to being filled with a gas that’s lighter than air, like helium or hydrogen; blimps and zeppelins are the most common. Airships were used for bombings during World War I, and started carrying passengers in the late 1920s. In 1929 Germany’s Graf Zeppelin fully circled the globe, breaking the trip up into four legs and starting and ending in New Jersey; it took 22 days in total and carried 61 people. By the mid-1930s there were regular trans-Atlantic passenger flights.
Airships don’t need fuel to lift them off the ground, they just need it to propel them forward. Hydrogen was initially the lifting gas of choice, as it was cheap and abundant (and is lighter than helium). But the explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937 not only made the use of hydrogen all but defunct, it dismantled the passenger airship industry virtually overnight (interestingly, though, the Hindenburg wasn’t the deadliest airship disaster; it killed 36 people, but a crash 4 years prior killed 73 people).
Since then, airships have been relegated to use for large ads-in-the-sky, and before drones became commonplace they were used to take aerial photos at sporting events.
Comeback Kid
But passenger airships may soon be making a comeback, and more than one company is already banking on it. OceanSky Cruises—based, perhaps unsurprisingly, in Sweden—is currently taking reservations for expeditions to the North Pole in the 2023-2024 season. According to Digital Trends, a cabin for two is going for $65,000.
Carl-Oscar Lawaczeck, OceanSky Cruises’ CEO, points out several advantages airships have over planes; their environmental sustainability is just the beginning. “The possibilities are amazing when you compare airships with planes,” he said. “Everything is lighter and cheaper and easier and that gives a lot of possibilities.”
Airships have fewer moving parts, and they don’t need a runway to land on or take off from. They’re far more spacious and can carry larger and heavier loads.
If you cringe at the thought of 12 hours of stiff-backed, knee-crunched, parched-air flights, imagine something closer to a flying cruise ship: your own room, a bed, a restaurant and bar, maybe even a glass-floored observation room where you could see the landscape below drifting past in glorious detail.
Would all this make it worth the fact that 12 hours of travel would turn into 60? Airships travel at about one-fifth of the speed of planes; 20 knots versus 100. And nowadays the lifting gas of choice is helium, despite being expensive and scarce.
Join the Club
OceanSky is far from the only company pouring money into resurrecting the airship.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin also started an airship company. LTA (which stands for lighter than air!) Research and Exploration’s primary stated purpose is to build ultra-cheap craft to be used for humanitarian missions. The aforementioned lack of need for runways makes airships a promising and practical option for delivering supplies to remote, hard-to-reach locations.
To that end, Barry Prentice, who leads the Canadian company Buoyant Aircraft Systems International, hopes to use airships to transport pre-built structures for schools and housing to remote parts of Canada that lack good roads.
And earlier this year, French airship company Flying Whales (I mean, how can you not adore that name?) received $23 million in funding from the government of Quebec to build cargo-carrying Zeppelins.
Given our current pandemic-dominated reality, it’s hard to imagine a future of seamless global travel of any kind, much less on an airship. But that future will, thankfully, arrive (though when is anyone’s guess). As calls for climate action get louder and the costs associated with airships drop—as the cost of any new technology tends to do with time—we may find ourselves going retro and being ferried across the globe by giant helium-filled balloons.
Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the vice chancellor of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, at a press conference at UMMC.
A top public health official said on Monday that Gov. Tate Reeves should postpone the return of public schools as Mississippi becomes one of the nation’s worst COVID-19 hotspots and the state’s hospital capacity dwindles.
Most public schools across the state plan to resume in-person activities this week. Reeves, who is the only state official with the authority to issue a blanket order to delay the start of school, is expected to announce a decision on the matter this week.
Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the vice chancellor of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said in an interview with Mississippi Today on Monday that reopening schools would place further strain on the state’s hospitals, which are struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing number of coronavirus patients.
“Those of us in healthcare feel like we’re watching this train wreck happen, and somehow even many of our friends are blind to it,” Woodward said of the state’s recent explosion of COVID-19 cases in a phone interview. “I think most people, when they’re thinking about reopening school and the logistics of that, are starting to understand some of that stress and strain on our healthcare system.”
Woodward continued: “In my heart, I want us to get back to school. There are a lot of children who really need to be in school for a variety of reasons. However, I don’t think we’re at a point right now where it’s the right, best and safe thing to do.”
Mississippi currently has the highest COVID-19 positivity rate in the country and the third-highest daily new case rate. COVID hospitalizations continue to rise, and the daily patient rolls nearly doubled in the past month. A recent report from George Washington University shows Mississippi is one of 11 states either at or nearing a shortage of ICU providers.
Reeves spent the weekend personally assessing reopening plans of the state’s 138 public school districts, which had to submit proposals to the state by Friday. The districts, thus far, have been given free rein to decide for themselves how and when to reopen, and most have opted to resume in-person instruction within the next week.
But last week, Reeves suggested he could delay the reopenings with a statewide mandate after reading the districts’ plans.
Woodward said that Reeves should delay the reopening of schools “until after Labor Day,” and that schools should be under strict mask mandates and have more testing capabilities when they do open.
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs, Reeves’ top coronavirus adviser, also said in a Friday video session with the Mississippi State Medical Association that schools shouldn’t reopen until September.
“I was off,” Dobbs said in the video. “I thought maybe it would be the right time to start in August — until about a little while ago… I think it’s a good idea to delay school. There’s nothing magic about August.”
In recent days, Reeves has publicly warned of the dangers associated with children not returning to the classroom. Many parents are worried about how they’ll keep their jobs or handle childcare if their kids don’t start school on time. Parents and teachers alike have expressed concern over students’ wellbeing if they miss school and in-person interaction in a rural state where many districts lack the ability to provide adequate distance learning.
“The reopening of schools in this environment is a major challenge. I understand that,” Reeves said in a press conference on Thursday. “But to those individuals in our state who say the public health of the spread of the risk of the coronavirus is the only risk at play when making a decision about our schools are ignoring so many other risks that exist out there.”
Reeves continued: “We know that we are not going to mitigate 100% of the risk on either side of this equation. What we must do is look for innovative ways to reach what we all believe is the right outcome. And the right outcome longterm for kids is that they are in an environment that is loving and produces and provides an educational opportunity.”
As he weighs the schools decision, Reeves is also drawing scorn for not issuing a statewide mask mandate, as most other states have done, and Mississippi’s COVID statistics continue to worsen. As of Monday, Mississippians in 37 of the state’s 82 counties — representing more than half of the state’s population — were required to wear masks in public because of an executive order from Reeves.
Several medical professionals and local politicians have questioned why Reeves has ordered mask mandates for individual counties that are already seeing spikes in cases rather than being more proactive with a statewide mandate and stopping the virus spread before it begins.
In the Monday interview, Woodward reiterated that UMMC and most of the state’s largest hospitals don’t currently have the space or staffing to keep up with the state’s rising COVID hospitalizations.
“The thing I would emphasize is the fatigue of health care workers,” Woodward said. “They are frazzled, and they are worn out. There is no definite end in sight for the work they’re going to have to be doing. Now we know this pandemic is not going to go on for 10 years, but still you’re talking about months. For their stamina and their ability to continue to give everything they have, we need buy-in from the public with mask wearing and distancing. We need this to be taken seriously.”
