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The post Marshall Ramsey: Mask Mandate Expanded appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Hugh Freeze and Liberty University host Southern Miss on Saturday. (Taylor Irby/The News & Advance via AP, File)

Nearly 14 months ago Hugh Freeze made his coaching debut at Liberty University, watching the game from a hospital bed in the Liberty press box.

He was experiencing excruciating back pain that all but paralyzed him. Making matters all the worse, the Liberty Flames were pretty much doused 24-0 by Syracuse. That’s right: Liberty scored as many points as you and me.

Now then, fast-forward to his past Saturday. Freeze’s Flames traveled to Syracuse to play the Atlantic Coast Conference Orange in a return match. Freeze’s back has long since healed. Final score: Liberty 38, Syracuse 21. It was not that close. Liberty, missing its starting tailback and two starting wide receivers, rolled up 520 yards, 338 of that on the ground, in controlling the clock and the game. The victory moved upstart Liberty to a perfect 5-0 record. It was Liberty’s first-ever victory over an Atlantic Coast Conference team.

Rick Cleveland

And all that just reinforces what we have known here in Mississippi for a while: Whatever else you may think of Freeze from his mercurial five seasons as Ole Miss head coach, the man can ever more coach football. He’s a ball coach. His players play hard and his plays work. No lesser an authority than Nick Saban largely credits Freeze for transforming the Southeastern Conference from a power-oriented league to a spread-the-field, fast-break offensive style. “If you cant beat ’em, join ’em,” is the way Saban put it.

Whether Freeze has been the head coach at Lambuth, Arkansas State, Ole Miss and now Liberty, many, many teams can’t beat him. Nevertheless, this turn-around at Liberty has been impressive.

Freeze recovered from the bad back and an 0-2 start last September to guide Liberty to an 8-5 record and a bowl victory last year. The Flames are 13-3 since last season’s 0-2 start.

Next on Liberty’s schedule: a home game with Southern Miss this Saturday, and there are more angles at work here than in an octagon.

You see, Freeze graduated from Southern Miss. So did his wife Jill. Hattiesburg is where they met.

That’s just part of it. When Jay Hopson resigned at Southern Miss after the first game of the 2020 season, immediate speculation on his immediate successor centered on Freeze. Never mind that Freeze reportedly makes four times as much at Liberty as Hopson made at Southern Miss. Many, including Paul Finebaum, called Freeze a perfect fit at USM. Finebaum went so far as to say, “My gut feeling is that he would take the job… .”

Freeze, as you might expect, publicly pooh-poohs any suggestion that he would leave Liberty to come back to Mississippi and to his alma mater.

“I have an awesome job here at Liberty,” he said by phone Monday afternoon. “I am so thankful to have the opportunity to coach here. My sole focus professionally right now is to help Liberty have the best football team we can possibly have. Besides that, I make it a habit not to talk about other people’s coaching jobs.”

My educated guess is that Freeze, at the least, is mightily intrigued by the idea of returning to Mississippi and to his alma mater.

But the Southern Miss job currently belongs to 30-year-old Texan Scotty Walden, the youngest Division I coach in the nation. Walden’s Golden Eagles are 1-3 in this craziest of seasons, having won for the first time Oct. 3, 41-31, at North Texas. Since then, USM has had consecutive games postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. All in all, Walden, who coaches as if he just downed a case and a half of Red Bull, has done an admirable job in holding things together amid the coaching change, COVID and the turmoil of an 0-3 start.

Freeze said Monday he has had little time to watch tape on Southern Miss but that his first impression was how athletic the Eagles are, especially at wide receiver and in the defensive secondary.

“Those wide receivers, man, those guys are big-time,” Freeze said. “They are a challenge. And Jack Abraham, the quarterback, I had him in a bunch of camps at Ole Miss. He’s accurate, he’s competitive and he’s a leader. I have all the respect in the world for him.”

Freeze also respects the Southern Miss football program, dating back to his days as an undergraduate, when he tried out unsuccessfully for Hill Denson’s baseball team. “I just wasn’t good enough,” he said.

Freeze instead concentrated on his studies and his position as the president of the Baptist Student Union. Yes, he said, he did attend football games when Curley Hallman was the head coach and Brett Favre was the quarterback and Southern Miss defeated the likes of Alabama, Auburn and Florida State, all on the road.

“I remember that big sign over the practice field that said, ‘Southern Miss football: Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime,’” he said. “And they meant it, they weren’t scared of anybody.”

Freeze said he got to know Favre back then and they have become friends.

“I expect to get a text from Brett this week because he loves to needle you,” Freeze said.

Otherwise, Freeze said he doesn’t expect any special feelings Saturday other than the one he always feels on a football Saturday.

“I want to win,” he said. “I want to beat Southern Miss. That’s my mindset. Heck, I love to beat my brother or my cousins at anything we play. I have lots of dear friends down there, but this week, I just want to win. That’s it. I want to win.”

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Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America

Gov. Tate Reeves speaks to media about his shelter-in-place order for Lauderdale County during a press conference at the State of Mississippi Woolfolk Building in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, March 31, 2020.

With COVID-19 cases rising again in Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves on Monday reinstated a mask mandate and stricter limits on gatherings for nine counties.

The counties under the new order are: Chickasaw, Claiborne, DeSoto, Forrest, Itawamba, Jackson, Lamar, Lee and Neshoba. Other counties will be added if they reach a threshold of more than 200 recent cases, or 500 cases per 100,000 residents over a two-week period, depending on the population size of the county.

Social gatherings in these counties will be limited to 10 people indoors and 50 outdoors, although Reeves said this will not prevent high school football games, covered in separate orders.

Reeves’ new executive order also again requires hospitals statewide to reserve 10% capacity for COVID-19 patients. If 10% capacity is not available, a hospital will have to delay elective procedures. Reeves said this worked during the summer peak to relieve pressure on hospitals.

Reeves on Sept. 30th lifted a statewide mask mandate — making Mississippi the first state to rescind such a mandate — that he had issued on Aug. 4, and he relaxed restrictions on social gatherings. Since then cases have risen.

Reeves said Mississippi’s rolling average of cases — which peaked at about 1,250 this summer — had dropped to about 500 but has now “ticked back up” to more than 600 cases. On Monday, Mississippi’s seven-day average was 766 cases, and last week saw huge one-day spikes, including more than 1,300 cases reported Thursday.

“Here in Mississippi we have seen this movie before,” Reeves said. “We know what happens if it’s allowed to get out of control. Today I will be signing an executive order, consistent with the strategy that allowed us to turn things around the last time we saw an increase in transmission.”

During the span of the statewide mask mandate, Mississippi cases plummeted, dropping by 54%.

Reeves had been hesitant to issue a statewide mask order in the summer, instead taking a county-by-county approach until state hospitals were becoming overloaded.

But Reeves said he still prefers limited COVID-19 orders to “the heavy hand of government,” and said a mask mandate “is not a silver bullet.” He has said he believes people pay more attention to limited, regional mask orders based on case spikes.

“Many of you may ask, why don’t you throw a statewide mask mandate on, and we’ll be fine,” Reeves said. “Look at the data in Arkansas and look at the data in Alabama, where they never took down their statewide mandates, and their curves look a lot worse than ours.

“… Just writing something down on a sheet of paper doesn’t slow the spread of the virus. Let’s work together, put politics aside, wear masks, stay in small groups and stay socially distant.”

Monday was the first COVID-19 livestreamed public briefing Reeves has held since he rescinded the mask mandate Sept. 30. He said, “I tried to give everyone a break from the Tate Reeves show.” He also reaffirmed that he has tested negative for the coronavirus himself since potentially being exposed to a White House outbreak during a visit there in late September.

Reeves said he believes Mississippi elections will be safe, despite Mississippi being the only state not to allow some form of early voting for all voters.

“Mississippi over the last seven or eight months has had multiple elections run in a safe, responsible way,” Reeves said. “I have every confidence going into the general election that that is going to be the case. The vast majority of voters are going to be wearing masks, and I would recommend them doing so … We just had four (legislative special elections) throughout Mississippi, and I have not been made aware of one case of transmission from them.”

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Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

About 235,000 Mississippians can’t vote because of felony convictions – the highest percentage in the nation.

Mississippi now denies a higher percentage of its residents the right to vote because of felony convictions than any state in the country, according to a recent study.

In Mississippi, 235,150 people, or 10.6% of the state’s voting age population, have lost their right to vote, according to a recent study by The Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit that advocates for voting and criminal justice issues. Since 2016, Mississippi has moved from second to first highest percentage in the nation.

Mississippi also has the third highest percentage of disenfranchised Black residents of any state in the nation: 130,500 Black Mississippians, or 16% of that voting age population, cannot vote. Mississippi is third to Wyoming (36.22%) and Tennessee (21.65%).

Both Mississippi percentages are well above national averages: total felony disenfranchisement is 2.3% nationally, and the national average for disenfranchised African Americans is 6.3%.

The Mississippi Constitution, written by white lawmakers in 1890, contains a list of crimes for which a person convicted of a felony loses voting rights. The original list of crimes deemed to be disenfranchising has been updated by official opinions from the attorney general’s office through the years to coincide with modern criminal law.

Disenfranchising crimes include: arson, armed robbery, bigamy, bribery, embezzlement, extortion, felony bad check, felony shoplifting, forgery, larceny, murder, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, rape, receiving stolen property, robbery, theft, timber larceny, unlawful taking of a motor vehicle, statutory rape, carjacking and larceny under lease or rental agreement.

There are other crimes, such as crimes connected with the sale of drugs, where a person convicted of a felony does not lose the right to vote and actually is eligible to vote while incarcerated.

Felony disenfranchisement language was added to the state Constitution in the 1890s as one of several attempts to prevent Black Mississippians from voting. With African Americans still being disproportionately convicted of crimes, that continues to be the effect of the disenfranchisement language.

A 2018 analysis by Mississippi Today found that 61% of the Mississippians who have lost their rights to vote are African American, despite the fact that African Americans represent 36% of the state’s total voting-age population.

Most states restore voting rights for people convicted of felonies at some point after they finish their sentence or complete their parole and probation. But in Mississippi, people convicted of many crimes — some of the crimes violent, and some not — never have their rights restored unless done so by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Legislature or by a gubernatorial pardon.

READ MORE: Not all ex-felons are barred from voting in Mississippi, but no one is telling them that.

Legislation to automatically restore voting rights to felons at some point after serving their sentence is introduced most years in the Legislature and in past years has passed one chamber, but died in the other. There are federal lawsuits pending claiming that permanent disenfranchisement violates the U.S. Constitution.

In the 2020 session, the Legislature restored the right to vote to six felons. In 2019, legislators restored suffrage to 16 – the most since 2004 when voting rights were restored to 34. Between 2000 and 2020, the Legislature averaged restoring voting rights to 7.3 felons per year.

In a 2016 study, The Sentencing Project estimated that Florida was first in the nation for total felony disenfranchisement at 10.4%, and Mississippi was second at 9.6%.

Florida voters approved a citizen-sponsored initiative in 2018 to restore voting rights to most after their sentences were completed. Still, 7.7% of Floridians convicted of felonies have not had their rights restored in large part because they have not paid off fines and fees mandated by the Florida Legislature.

But no such major reform has passed in Mississippi.

“Mississippi is one of those states with indefinite disenfranchisement, essentially lifetime disenfranchisement,” said University of Minnesota professor Christopher Uggen, the lead researcher on the Sentencing Project report. “Many of the other states have pared back those restrictions… In Mississippi, it is for life.

“That means if you had a felony conviction in 1972 you are still locked out of that process without some extraordinary effort,” Uggen continued. “And frankly the number of restorations in Mississippi, the people who go through the formal process, is tiny. Clearly, in my view, this is a vestige of the long civil rights process where we had very restrictive laws in the 19th century, and some of them exist today.”

The Sentencing Project held a recent conference call to release the report that detailed how the number of disenfranchised felons had dropped from more than 6.1 million in 2016 to about 5.2 million in 2020 as states like Florida and others have reformed their laws. In many states, governors have issued executive orders restoring rights to thousands of felons.

Shahur Abdullah, who served 41 years in prison in Nebraska and founded JustUs 15 Vote, had his rights restored when the state of Nebraska changed its law from a permanent ban to a ban for two years after being released from prison. He said voting was particularly important to him because his father, a Mississippi native, was not able to vote in his home state after fighting for the United States in the Korean Conflict. Abdullah’s father later moved his family from Philadelphia, Mississippi, to Nebraska.

“Given my own personal history, and this country’s history of systemic racism and white supremacy, I felt the full weight of my ancestors behind me when I voted for the first time,” Abdullah said. “We ought to remember that this country was founded on the principle of no taxation without representation. I was immediately required to pay taxes upon my release from incarceration, but my vote wasn’t accepted. This should never be the case.”

The post Study: 11% of all Mississippians, 16% of Black Mississippians can’t vote because of felony convictions appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A new charter school will be opening its doors in Canton in the 2022-2023 school year.

The Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board last week approved SR1’s application to open the SR1 College Preparatory and STEM Academy. The school will serve kindergarten and first grade in its opening year, then expand each year after to serve kindergarten through fifth grade. The school would serve 450 students once expansion is complete.

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Tamu Green, founder of SR1 (Scientific Research)

SR1 (Scientific Research) was founded by Tamu Green in 2005 and collaborates with public and private partners to decrease disparities in Mississippi, specifically among minorities. The group applied to open a school in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and was denied, but has since worked with the board to address deficiencies.

The board also denied an application by Voices for Education to open a school in the North Bolivar Consolidated School District.

The board followed the recommendations of School Works, an educational consulting group out of Massachusetts hired to evaluate the applications.

Charters are public schools that do not charge tuition, and are held to the same academic and accountability standards as traditional public schools. By law, charter schools have the capacity for more flexibility for teachers and administrators when it comes to student instruction. Unlike traditional public schools, charters do not have school boards or operate under a local school district, although they are funded by school districts based on their enrollment.

Charter schools can apply directly to the authorizer board if they’re planning to open in a D or F district. If an operator wants to open in an A, B, or C district, they need to get approval from the local school board.

Each year the authorizer board goes through a months-long process to screen potential operators and grant them the authority to open a school in Mississippi. This year the timeline for the 2020 application cycle has been slightly pushed back because of the pandemic.

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Mississippi has fewer persuadable voters per capita than any other state. Can Mike Espy persuade the unpersuadable to win the Senate race?

Mississippi is nicknamed the hospitality state, but when it comes to voting, it is the state of entrenchment.

Mississippi is the most inelastic state in the nation when it comes to voting, according to a study by the FiveThirtyEight political blog. In simpler terms, the hospitality state has fewer persuadable voters per capita than any state in the nation. Only the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., a Democratic stronghold, has fewer persuadable voters, based on the updated study.

The lack of persuadable voters highlights the obstacles faced in Mississippi by Democratic candidates and Mike Espy, specifically, in his race against Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. In a sense, all the momentum appears to be on Espy’s side. He has raised far more money than Hyde-Smith this year and is dominating the television airwaves across the state.

Yet the Cook Political Report, a national political website that forecasts elections, ranks the Mississippi Senate race in the “solid Republican” category. The aforementioned FiveThirtyEight gives Hyde-Smith a 91% chance of winning.

The national forecasters give Democratic Senate candidates in Kansas, Montana and Alaska better odds of winning than they give Espy. What gives? Are those states more Democratic than Mississippi? In the 2016 presidential election, Trump won Mississippi by 18%, compared to more than 20% in Montana and Kansas and by almost 15% in Alaska.

The issue, according to FiveThirtyEight, is not that Mississippi is more Republican than those states, but that it has fewer voters willing to cross party lines. The blog says elastic voters are more likely to be swayed by political events — the economy, a scandal, a pandemic.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend here is how inelastic the country is as a whole. The study describes Mississippi and many other Southern states as having “ lots of white evangelical Protestants and white voters with conservative views on racial issues who rarely if ever vote for Democratic candidates.” The study identifies Kansas, Montana and Alaska as very white states, but “not as evangelical or racially conservative.”

Another issue that might make Mississippi a little different than states like Kansas is that Mississippi also has a high number of Democrats who also are difficult to persuade to cross party lines. Generally speaking, the vast majority of those unpersuadable Democrats are Black voters.

While not giving some of the Southern Democratic Senate candidates as much of a chance as it gives the Democrats in Kansas, Montana and Alaska, FiveThirtyEight does say the high percentage of Black voters in those Southern states gives Democrats a chance in an election cycle where it appears all the momentum is on the side of the Democrats.

A key caveat for Espy, though, is that there are more persuadable Republicans than Democrats in Mississippi. To win in November, Espy has to entice people to the polls who do not normally vote.

Many believe these are progressives who have not been enthused with the generally conservative Democrats who have run for statewide office in Mississippi. Espy, who has largely centered his 2020 campaign on race and social justice, has tried to attract those voters by embracing the national Democratic ticket to an extent that most Mississippi Democratic statewide candidates have not in past election years.

In addition, Espy must convince a small percentage of those Mississippi Republican voters to come over to his camp. Espy is trying to do that with recent ads touting the need to change the state’s trajectory to ensure young people do not leave the state, and by highlighting his willingness to work across party lines, like he did in the 1980s and 90s with Republicans like Sen. Thad Cochran and President Ronald Reagan.

To win, Espy must do both of those things: inspire new, mostly younger progressives and convince some of those traditionally unpersuadable Republicans.

Espy maintains that he will win if Black voters in the Nov. 3 election make up 35.5% of the total vote, and that if he increases his share of the white vote from the 18% he garnered in his 2018 Senate special election against Hyde-Smith to 22%. Based on early absentee voting numbers, there is a strong likelihood that the African American turnout will be higher than the 32.5% the Espy campaign says he earned in the 2018 special election.

If that’s the case, that might leave Espy just needing to persuade those unpersuadable Mississippi voters to win. It’s a tall task, but time will tell if it’s possible.

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