The Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees announced on Thursday it had unanimously voted to renew Mark Keenum’s contract as president of Mississippi State University for another four years to 2025.
Keenum’s salary will remain $800,000 per year, matching University of Mississippi Chancellor Glenn Boyce as Mississippi’s highest paid college president.
The portion of Keenum’s salary paid for by the state of Mississippi, however, will increase to $400,000. The other half will come from MSU’s Foundation. The state’s universities typically supplement presidents’ salaries through their foundations, which are considered private entities that raise private funds.
Previously, the state of Mississippi paid $300,000 toward Keenum’s salary.
“I appreciate the fact that the Board of Trustees wants to see the strong momentum we have at Mississippi State continue in the years to come,” Keenum said in a press release sent by MSU. “I also appreciate the confidence they have placed in me, and I look forward to continuing to work with them and all of our many stakeholders.”
The vote was taken over a month ago in an executive session at the board’s Sept. 16 regular meeting. Tom Duff, the vice president of the board, made the motion to renew Keenum’s contract.
Duff also moved to include a new provision in Keenum’s contract directing MSU’s Foundation to pay out up to an additional $800,000 in “retention pay” if Keenum remains employed as president through 2025.
“It is wise on the (MSU) Foundation’s part to incentivize stability and continuity in leadership as the institution moves forward,” J. Walt Starr, the IHL board’s president, said in a press release.
IHL’s press release notes that Keenum did not request this additional pay, but the board saw “the wisdom in taking steps to invest in retaining the effective and visionary leadership that Dr. Keenum has brought to MSU.”
Keenum wrote in an Oct. 15 letter to Hines Brannon, the chairman of MSU’s Foundation, that he would like “a majority — if not all” of the additional retention pay to go toward student scholarships, according to MSU’s press release.
“As you know, one of my passions personally is to grow our support of student scholarships,” Keenum wrote. “While I know any possible action on the retention incentive item is several years away, I wanted you to know of my desire to make this investment in our students.”
Three football teams have canceled games with mighty Greenville Christian, the state’s top-ranked high school football team. All have cited small rosters, injuries and concern for the health of their players.
That has caused Saints coach Jon Reed McLendon to search in vain far and wide — as far away as Washington D.C. and south Florida — to fill open dates.
But McLendon did not have to look far to find Friday night’s foe. The Delta Streets Academy Lions are about 50 miles east, down Highway 82 in Greenwood. The game has been scheduled for months. Despite long odds, Delta Streets is not begging out.
Rick Cleveland
If a betting line existed on the game, Greenville Christian would be favored by 40 points or more. The truth is, McLendon probably could name the score Friday night and make it happen. But that’s not the point, Delta Streets executive director T. Mac Howard and his second-year football coach Travis Upshaw say.
“We signed up to play this game and we’re going to play it,” Upshaw said. “We are not teaching our guys to quit.”
Perseverance is one of the school’s five stated and published core values, with this addendum: “We work hard even when we fail.”
Says Howard, the school’s founder, “We are building character here. Part of that is the discipline to do what you said you were going to do. We said we were going to play. We are going to play. Wins and losses are not what define us. We are developing young men.
“These young men will face difficult times later in life, maybe with their marriages or with their jobs or with life in general. We all face them, right? You do. I do. We all do. You can’t just quit, you know. You got to face up to them.”
Ahmaude Jones, 12, works on homework during Study Hall under the watchful eye of Study Hall monitor O’Ryan Patterson at Delta Streets Academy in Greenwood, Wednesdsay, October 20, 2021. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Some facts about Delta Streets:
The school is just nine years old, the brainchild of Howard, who grew up in the Barnett Reservoir area and played football and baseball at Northwest Rankin before attending Mississippi State, where he was a football walk-on under Sylvester Croom.
Delta Streets, located in downtown Greenwood in a partially renovated (and still being renovated) automobile dealership, has an enrollment of 95, all boys, in grades 7 through 12. The school currently has no football field or gymnasium. The football team usually practices in an open field behind a nearby church.
The school’s enrollment is about 75% African American and 25% Hispanic. The football team has 18 players, but only 14 of those are 10th grade or older.
There is a strong emphasis on both Christian faith and discipline. Discipline is non-negotiable.
“We are not a fit for everybody,” Howard said. “If a student can’t or won’t follow our rules and values, they move on. Typically, they go back to public school.”
T.Mac Howard at Delta Streets Academy he founded 2012 for at risk young males in Greenwood. The school provides a Christian-based education for grades 7 – 11. “We’re working hard to give these kids a chance,” said Howard, Wednesday, October 20, 2021. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Howard, himself, formerly taught and coached at Greenwood High School, where he was dismayed with the lack of discipline — more specifically, he says, the lack of demand for discipline.
Delta Streets began the school year with 105 students. Ten have moved on. On the other hand, enrollment has steadily increased year to year.
Al’Javeez McGhee, who goes by AJ, is the team’s slender, 17-year-old senior quarterback who ran afoul of the school’s rules in the seventh grade, came back a year later and, said Howard, has blossomed as a student, athlete and citizen.
“AJ is going to be successful in life, no matter what he chooses to do,” Howard said.
McGhee, soft-spoken to the point coaches have had to insist he bark the signals, wants to be a scientist. Currently, he takes two college courses at nearby Mississippi Delta Community College and plans eventually to attend a four-year university.
Delta Streets, McGhee says, “has equipped me to be a better person. My teachers have pushed me. My mom pushes me. I have learned so much here.”
McGhee has known and competed athletically against many of Greenville Christian’s players for much of his life. Earlier this fall, he traveled to Ridgeland to watch the Saints dismantle defending MAIS state champion Madison-Ridgeland Academy 58-32. So he knows what his team is up against.
“Oh man, they are really, really good,” said McGhee, who is realistic about his and his team’s goals Friday night.
“I just want to compete,” McGhee said. “We want to score against them, put some points on the board — not many teams do.”
Delta Streets Academy head football coach Travis Upshaw at football practice in Greenwood, Wednesday, October 20, 2021. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Upshaw, the head coach who once played as a 380-pound nose tackle for Texas State and later in the Arena Football League, says he has set some realistic goals for Friday night in terms of first downs, defensive stops and other statistical categories. He once played a game against nationally ranked Texas A&M when he was at Texas State, which was then a division below A&M and given little chance to compete. “But we were down only three points at halftime, and eventually lost a close game in the fourth quarter, but we were competitive,” he said.
Upshaw said he and his Texas State teammates left College Station feeling better about themselves and eventually finished the season ranked No. 4 in Division I-AA, winning two playoff games. He would dearly love for his small pride of Lions to have a similar experience Friday night.
Delta Streets Academy running back Jaylin Lewis Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Realistically, this matchup is far more one-sided than that one years ago in Texas, but running back Jaylen Lewis, the Lions’ best player, is eager to play. He ran for 240 yards and four touchdowns in a 33-20 victory over Rossville (Tenn.) Christian Academy last week.
“I want to compete,” Lewis said. “I want to show what I can do. I know how good they are, but I am not scared.”
Upshaw says his team is making strides. The Lions are on a modest two-game winning streak. Two weeks ago, in a 13-8 victory over Riverside, Cristian Ledesma, a 10th grader, kicked the first extra point in school history.
“We’re taking it one step at a time,” Upshaw said, chuckling. “How about that? The first extra point in school history.”
Both Howard and Upshaw believe Delta Streets’ best days are ahead for both the school and the football program. Renovation continues on the converted auto dealership, adding classrooms. The hope is to eventually expand to lower grades.
Plans are proceeding on a $2.2 million gymnasium, which will be located on campus. Approximately $1.65 million has been raised, and, Howard says, “That’s going to happen.”
A football field is also on the drawing boards, which would be located adjacent to the school buildings. That’s a $1.4 million project. Howard is constantly raising money. Individuals, companies and churches have donated to the school, including a $1 million donation from one individual toward the gymnasium.
There are only five seniors on this year’s football team, and the middle school team, which defeated Greenville Christian recently, has better numbers and potential. Several 8th and 9th graders dress with the varsity team.
None of that will help Friday night.
“We’re going to go out there and compete,” Upshaw, the coach, said. “We know what we are up and against. All we can do is our best.”
And here’s the deal: Friday night’s game is for the division championship. Greenville Christian is 8-1 overall, compared to Delta Streets’ record of 3-6. But both teams are 2-0 in their respective MAIS Class 3A division.
If Greenville Christian wins as expected, the Saints will have a first round bye in the playoffs. Delta Streets would play in the first round. And should the Lions win that playoff game? There’s a good chance the would play Greenville Christian again.
The problem: Nearly half of Mississippians are at risk of eviction or foreclosure, according to U.S. Census data — the fifth highest percentage in America. “We are in a mass scale affordable housing crisis, a mass scale eviction crisis,” an NAACP organizer says.
The solution: Mississippi has received $200 million in federal rental assistance — grants intended to reach both tenants and landlords so renters can keep their homes and landlords can continue to have income.
The hang-up: The Mississippi Home Corporation, which administers the federal grant money, has operated very slowly and the federal government may take back money if it is not spent soon.
The accountability: Scott Spivey, director of the Mississippi Home Corporation, told Mississippi Today his organization has implemented several measures to speed up the process of doling out the rental assistance. But several community organizers across the state say more needs to be done.
Leaders managing Mississippi’s rental assistance program are working to more effectively get the federal money to tenants and landlords. (Photo credit: Julia James)
After a slow start that has been scrutinized nationally, the organization tasked with distributing federal rental assistance in Mississippi is scrambling to get the money into the hands of tenants and landlords before the federal government takes some of it back.
About 46% of Mississippians are at risk of eviction or foreclosure, according to Census data — the fifth highest rate in the nation. But Mississippi is middle-of-the-pack nationally in terms of getting federal rental assistance money out the door.
“We are in a crisis. We are in a mass scale affordable housing crisis, a mass scale eviction crisis — which disproportionately affects communities of color,” said Matthew Campbell, field organizer with the NAACP. “We have a rental assistance program to help alleviate some of that, but the funds have not reached people quick enough.”
The problem stands to most directly affect some of Mississippi’s most marginalized communities: To date, 80% of the applications for Mississippi’s rental assistance program have come from women and 86% of them from Black residents.
Eight months after payments were made to state and local governments across the country to run emergency rental assistance programs, the U.S. Treasury Department has laid out a plan to recoup funds if spending benchmarks haven’t been met.
Mississippi was at risk of having to send back large chunks of the federal rental assistance money — up to 10% of the total amount it received — if the state hadn’t spent at least 30% of their grant by Sept. 30.
Mississippi did not meet that benchmark, but the Treasury gave programs a grace period until Nov. 15 to get their spending up to speed. As of Oct. 10, Mississippi had obligated $43.6 million — about $7 million shy of the 30% benchmark.
The extension appears likely to save Mississippi from having to give any money back to the feds during this first round. However, the Treasury will be increasing the spending benchmarks by 5% each month, meaning Mississippi must continue working quickly to distribute the funds.
“We’re going to do everything in our power to try and keep as much money in Mississippi as we can to meet the benchmarks, stay within the guidance, and to keep this program going,” Scott Spivey, director of the Mississippi Home Corporation, told Mississippi Today.
The Home Corporation has made multiple adjustments since the slow beginning of the rental assistance program, Spivey said when pressed on what the state was doing. These changes include:
Boosting advertising across the state in efforts to inform renters and landlords about the program
Hosting in-person events intended at walking tenants through the difficult application process.
Changing the application process to allow individuals in 50 counties to apply without income documentation.
Spivey said that it takes 4-6 weeks from receiving a completed application to a payment being made, a wait time that they are trying to trim down. However, the “completed” there is a big caveat, because the majority of applications that they receive have issues or are missing information, which extends wait times even further.
The Home Corporation has five full-time employees processing applications and contracted with Balch & Bingham, an Alabama-based law firm, for expanded processing power. That contract for $3.8 million, which has been the subject of scrutiny by the Washington Post and local community members, constitutes about 20% of the program’s total administrative budget.
While the Mississippi Home Corporation works to bolster its efforts, several community organizers who spoke with Mississippi Today say more needs to be done.
“It’s a pattern of delay, delay, delay, and ultimately late means never,” said Jeremiah Smith, an activist and organizer with the 662 Tenants Union.
Smith said communication issues with the rental assistance program have been an issue for the tenants he’s worked with, including being put on hold for multiple hours when calling the helpline. Tenants are also required to have an email address to apply for the program, which Smith said can be a barrier for many applicants; the Treasury does not require Home Corporation to collect email addresses from applicants.
Smith pointed out that while eliminating income documentation did help, the self-attestation forms (legally promising that you meet the program criteria) can still be logistically difficult to complete, limiting people’s ability to apply. The digital application includes three PDFs that must be printed out, completed, scanned, and re-uploaded, which can be difficult for older applicants or those with limited access to technology.
While self-attestation is required by the Treasury, Smith suggested making these forms native to the application and allowing them to be digitally signed, as is permitted in other parts of the application.
“If I was an individual renter, just trying to do it at home without assistance, I would have given up so long ago,” Smith said. “Especially if I was trying to do it on a cell phone. I would have assumed that the portal was broken or that I couldn’t understand it and I would have given up, which I think has happened to a lot of people.”
Campbell, who has hosted six rental assistance clinics through the NAACP, does not feel he has seen a properly robust field operation from the Home Corporation. He said community organizers in the state have stepped in to try and fill that gap, but he emphasized the need for more direct programming from the Home Corporation.
“A lot of people that we’ve encountered at our rental assistance clinics find the documentation and the readability/verbiage of the application difficult,” Campbell said. “We’ve found that direct, hands-on assistance assuages the difficulty of the process and reduces the number of incomplete applications.”
He is also concerned that the processing delays are hurting the program’s ability to attract more applicants.
“Some of the questions we’ve received at our rental assistance clinics are about the legitimacy of the program: ‘Is this program legitimate? Am I actually going to receive assistance?’” Campbell said. “One of the things I’m concerned about is that somebody who has applied for this program and it’s taking weeks for them to get processed — they might know somebody else who is in need of rental assistance, but because it’s taking so long for their friend to be processed, that other person won’t even bother to apply.”
The Home Corporation has received over 65,000 started applications and 25,386 submitted ones. Rivers Ormon, communications officer for the Home Corporation, acknowledged that this disparity is due, in part, to the online application being difficult for some people. She said the organization is working to decrease the size of the gap.
Pam Chatman, founder of Boss Lady Workforce Transportation, has also been helping tenants apply for assistance so that they can be processed faster and avoid application issues. Chatman partnered with the Home Corporation to host a rental assistance fair on August 11 in Cleveland, with almost 500 people in attendance.
Chatman thinks that the Home Corporation is working towards the mark, but that continuing to advertise and market the program should be a major goal.
“I have gotten several hundreds of phone calls of tears and crying and shouting, just overwhelmed that it has all been processed and their rent has been paid through 2022,” Chatman said. “We know that the program works, we know that it is successful, and we’re just trying to do our part to assist those families that are in dire need and make sure their application has been filled out correctly.”
Note: To apply for rental assistance, visit ms-ramp.com. If you live in Harrison County, you may also contact the Open Doors Homeless Coalition at 228-604-8011. For rental assistance in Hinds County, visit hindsrentalaid.com or call 601-514-0137.
Dr. Alton Cobb, Mississippi’s legendary long-time state health officer and the first director of Mississippi’s Medicaid program, died on Oct. 14th just shy of his 93rd birthday. He spent his lifetime promoting public health in the state.
As legislative leaders wait to see if Gov. Tate Reeves will call lawmakers into special session to vote on a medical marijuana proposal, groups opposed to legalized cannabis — who typically have the governor’s ear — are making a push against it.
The Mississippi-based Christian fundamentalist nonprofit American Family Association has issued a Q&A memo on the medical marijuana proposal with a headline claiming it’s “Worse Than You Could Imagine.”
The eight-page memo, which contains some inaccurateclaims about what lawmakers have agreed to, says the proposed medical marijuana program would harm state employers, property owners, churches and religious organizations, and would allow medical marijuana users “to just sit on the couch and collect welfare.” It also says using marijuana “is immoral,” it “significantly compromises a person’s ability to act rationally (unlike a glass of wine, for instance),” and “THC fosters drug dependency and addiction.”
On Thursday, First United Pentecostal Church of Brandon is hosting an event for state law enforcement officers sponsored by the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association and Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police to cover “Policing in a State with a Medical Marijuana Program.” The director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and an assistant district attorney from Oklahoma will keynote the event.
Oklahoma’s medical marijuana program is so open it resembles recreational use, with about 10% of the population issued a card allowing cannabis use and more than 2,000 dispensaries in the state. Mississippi lawmakers heard from Oklahoma officials during summer hearings and said they heeded warnings from them when drafting Mississippi’s more conservative program.
Meanwhile, medical marijuana proponents have held rallies across the state in recent weeks. One group called “We are the 74” has called on its members to “occupy” the Governor’s Mansion starting this week. So far, only a sparse group of people has encamped outside the mansion in downtown Jackson.
House and Senate negotiators worked through the summer crafting a medical marijuana program to replace the Initiative 65 program that voters passed, but the state Supreme Court shot down over constitutional issues.
Reeves, who has sole authority to call lawmakers into special session, had said he would do so once lawmakers had reached consensus on a draft bill. They did so in September, but Reeves has given lawmakers a last-minute laundry list of things he did not like in the bill.
Legislative leaders said they have conceded many of Reeves’ requested changes but that others are unreasonable. As governor, Reeves can’t control what lawmakers pass, but could veto any measure after the fact.
Republican Reeves, in his first term as governor, has sought support of, and input from, the AFA and other right-leaning religious groups and law enforcement organizations. He has said he opposes medical marijuana, but said he would call lawmakers into session to adopt a program to abide by the will of voters who overwhelmingly passed Initiative 65.
Legislative leaders said that if Reeves does not call them into special session as promised, they will take the issue up in the regular legislative session that begins in January.
Deuce McAllister, one of the busiest guys around, joins the Cleveland boys to discuss the football weekend that was and what is coming up this weekend.
Attorneys representing 600 Jackson children filed a federal lawsuit this week claiming they had been exposed to lead for years and that numerous officials in the city of Jackson and state of Mississippi attempted to cover it up.
The suit alleged that city and state officials — including current Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, former Mayor Tony Yarber and officials at the Mississippi State Department of Health — made “conscience-shocking decisions” and “showed deliberate indifference” that exposed the plaintiffs to lead.
The suit says that the city learned of its lead problem within its water well system in 2013 and was warned again in 2014. But instead of addressing it, the city attempted a quick fix that worsened the problem. The suit alleged that after the city learned of the higher lead levels, it quietly switched back over to the well system. Residents were kept in the dark the whole time, the suit says.
The plaintiffs in the case are children living in Jackson who attorneys say have been exposed to lead for years. Corey Stern, who was an attorney for plaintiffs in the Flint, Michigan, water case, is representing the Jackson children.
“Flint wasn’t a one-off — it was the canary in the coal mine that opened our eyes to water crises playing out in cities across America,” Stern said in a press release. “Jackson is yet another tragic and horrifying example of a city failing to do right by its residents and ensure they have clean access to drinking water.”
The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday against the city of Jackson, the Mississippi State Department of Health, Trilogy Engineering Services, and numerous current and former city and state officials “for allowing the city’s drinking water to become contaminated with lead.”
