OurTupelo

Amid the 2020 pandemic, Andrew Jones suffered a series of crises. 

The one-time youth cheerleading coach in Mississippi’s Pine Belt entered an addiction treatment facility. There, he was diagnosed with several mental health disorders.

Then, another troubling diagnosis: He had HIV, the virus that can cause AIDS.

He had never been in trouble with the law before, but was arrested in December 2020 on a burglary charge and booked into the Jones County jail.

A month later, Jones was dead. He died from HIV, the state medical examiner ruled.

The jail never gave him the lifesaving medication he’d been prescribed, his family’s lawsuit claimed.

Jones was one among a wider but mostly unknown number of jailhouse fatalities across the state.

At least 46 people have died in Mississippi’s county jails since 2020, according to lawsuits, news reports and law enforcement records reviewed by The Marshall Project-Jackson. But those lost lives do not appear in any official statistics or records.

Mississippi has long failed to count and report all deaths in local jails that serve the state’s 82 counties, despite a federal requirement to do so. These often dangerous facilities operate virtually free of any state oversight.

“If we don’t understand why people are dying, we can’t prevent it,” said Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans and a widely recognized authority in the study of deaths behind bars.

Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, states must report all deaths in state prisons and local jails, as well as people who die in the process of being arrested. 

Across the country, these reports are often incomplete. After obtaining five years of unredacted death records maintained by the Justice Department, The Marshall Project found hundreds of deaths were missing and others were inaccurately or incompletely described. In a sample of 1,000 death records, The Marshall Project found that 75% did not meet the Justice Department’s own standard for an acceptable level of detail. 

A key source of data gaps in many places? Local jails. 

Even so, Mississippi still fares worse in its reporting than most of the country. It was one of only four states with locally managed jails to report fewer than 10 deaths in those jails across five years of national records reviewed by The Marshall Project. 

Of those states, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota all acknowledged in 2023 filings submitted to federal authorities that local jail deaths are largely absent from their reporting. 

Within the last year or so, state officials have begun more concerted attempts to collect records of local deaths even when local agencies don’t report them, according to leaders at the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, the state agency responsible for reporting obligations under the federal DCRA requirements. 

“I think everybody sees the value in the data,” said DPS Commissioner Sean Tindell, but he said many of the state’s hundreds of local law enforcement agencies find the reporting requirements burdensome. 

Mississippi does report state prison deaths, which have drawn scrutiny, including federal investigations that in 2022 and in 2024 found constitutional violations. 

Without that same data at the local level, solutions can be scarce to problems like the ones that allegedly led to the death of Jones. His family’s lawsuit claimed better healthcare could have saved his life.

That lawsuit’s allegations described the jail’s medical treatment “orders of magnitude below typical care,” said Dr. Anne Spaulding, who reviewed the lawsuit’s claims for The Marshall Project – Jackson. She is an associate professor at Emory University and was a former medical care care director for the prison and jail system of Rhode Island before holding a similar position in Georgia.

A nurse at the Jones County jail failed to obtain lifesaving drugs for Jones in December 2020 and January 2021, the lawsuit claimed. The county and other defendants, including the nurse, denied wrongdoing in court filings. In February 2025, a judge dismissed the lawsuit after key defendants settled. The settlement terms were kept confidential. 

In 2021, Jones County brought in outside healthcare. The county first contracted with a local hospital and later with a Gulf Coast-area medical firm. The change in medical staffing followed the deaths of three detainees that occurred in less than a year, including that of Jones.

To stop local jail deaths, broader solutions must be based on data from those jails, said Madalyn Wasilczuk, a law professor in South Carolina who spearheads a transparency initiative there around in-custody deaths. 

That’s because local jail deaths tend to occur for different reasons than prison deaths. The Justice Department, for example, has found that jail deaths are most commonly linked to suicide or drug and alcohol intoxication.

To tackle these problems, Mississippi must first count deaths that occur inside local jails, Wasilczuk said. Otherwise, Mississippi “is missing an entire piece of the puzzle.”

A death in Jones County

When a sheriff’s deputy found Andrew Jones leaving the deputy’s home on Dec. 7, 2020, his family contends that Jones was drunk and confused about where he was.

Now facing burglary charges, Jones was held in jail on a $15,000 bond while waiting for an indictment. Jones wasn’t accused of taking anything from the deputy’s home. 

When he was booked into the Jones County Adult Detention Center, near the small town of Ellisville, Jones allegedly listed his health problems: mental health disturbances that included suicidal thoughts, high blood pressure and his recent HIV diagnosis.

At the time, medical care at the jail was provided by a full-time staff nurse, Carol Johnston, with visits from a nurse practitioner by appointment, according to the lawsuit. Johnston was a licensed practical nurse and was providing care at the jail without the supervision required by her license, alleges the lawsuit over Andrew’s death. The county and other defendants, including Johnston, denied this claim in court filings.

Johnston has not worked at the jail since June 2021, Jones County Administrator Danielle Ashley told The Marshall Project-Jackson. The county now contracts with Health Corr LLC, which must provide nurses and medical staff at the jail throughout the week, according to the county’s contract with the Picayune-based medical company. 

Ashley declined on behalf of the county to answer other questions about the lawsuit’s allegations. Johnston did not respond to questions about those allegations. Public records from the state’s nursing board show that Johnston has no disciplinary history.

During Jones’ month in jail — the last month of his life — there were repeated opportunities to avert his death, the lawsuit claimed. 

Johnston arranged for Jones to visit a clinic in nearby Hattiesburg for an appointment scheduled before his arrest. Nine days after his arrest, on Dec. 18, a doctor prescribed Jones a pair of drugs to keep his HIV in check, Descovy and Tivicay. 

Regular access to these pills, or similar medications used to suppress HIV, is “bare minimum” care, said Dr. Tara Vijayan, a professor of medicine at UCLA who specializes in infectious diseases. Ideally, she said, Jones would have begun taking these medications soon after his diagnosis.

However, Jones never got those medications in the jail, the family’s lawsuit alleged. 

The county’s current contract with Health Corr requires that its staff administer prescribed medications.

At subsequent appointments, tests showed concerning results related to Jones’ liver and that his untreated HIV had become full-blown AIDS, meaning his immune system was significantly compromised, and he was now vulnerable to infections that would not otherwise be dangerous. 

Careful monitoring of such a patient would be required to watch for dangerous infections, Vijayan said. However, antiretroviral medications can still bring the disease under control.

Still, Jones’ prescription for the lifesaving drugs allegedly went unfilled, and Jones began to decline rapidly. 

His last day was painful, according to the lawsuit’s recounting of video surveillance from the isolation cell where Jones was confined because of his November bout with coronavirus.

Throughout Jan. 9, 2021, Andrew moved in spastic and increasingly disoriented ways, apparently losing control of his own body. He became weaker and slower.

He lay on the bed as a guard placed food on a table next to him, allegedly ignoring signs of distress. Later, another guard again allegedly ignored signs of distress after he saw Andrew trying to eat food off the floor.

Finally, later that day, guards found Andrew dead. The state medical examiner ruled his death was caused by an HIV-linked infection, exacerbated by high blood pressure.

No oversight for Mississippi jails

Jones’ death is one among a string of jailhouse fatalities that have been linked to allegations of abusive jail conditions that haven’t been reported to the federal government. 

Ten years earlier, at the same jail, Albert Graham died from heart problems.

A lawsuit over his 2010 death dragged on for years before a judge found that even if Johnston, the same nurse who treated Jones, provided slow, untimely care, it wasn’t bad enough to be considered “deliberate indifference” — the legal term for the high threshold that must be met to sue in federal court over medical care in jail.

An hour-and-a-half up the road from the Jones County jail, Kemper County has faced several lawsuits over jail deaths, settling one in 2022 over the 2018 jail suicide of a man allegedly held 52 days past his release date. On the day of his death, other detainees warned that Robert Wayne Johnson was trying to strangle himself with a shoelace. Guards allegedly placed the man into an isolation cell with the shoelaces anyway.

In George County, a nurse was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for failing to provide insulin to a diabetic man facing drug charges who died in 2014. Jail staff testified that she accused the prisoner of faking his symptoms of distress. A 2022 settlement in a civil lawsuit totaled $2.5 million — half the annual budget of the rural county. 

That George County settlement was among at least 10 settlements within the last five years involving Mississippi jail deaths.

But litigation and criminal prosecutions can also take years to resolve, letting problems linger and yielding — at best — only piecemeal accountability for local officials tasked with jail safety.

There is no state-level law requiring local jails to track and report deaths in custody, one barrier identified in the state’s memo. 

Rather than relying on a sprawling network of more than 360 law enforcement agencies to report local in-custody deaths, Tindell, the DPS commissioner, suggested a statewide system relying on county coroners to identify these deaths might be more effective. However, he said he believes the amount of data requested by the U.S. Justice Department can be “burdensome,” especially for many local officials to administer. He said collecting less information about each death could improve compliance. 

Another key DPS official, Public Safety Planning Director Josh Bromen, said he has made an online system available for local officials to report deaths and plans to ramp up outreach efforts to local officials about the DCRA requirement. 

Bromen also said he has begun to collect records of jail deaths from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which sometimes examines those deaths.

Federal law allows the DOJ to withhold federal funds from law enforcement agencies that don’t comply with reporting requirements, but that penalty has never been enacted.

The lack of transparency or oversight of jail deaths in Mississippi is part of a broader failure in the state to oversee local jails.

There are no jail licensing requirements in Mississippi, except for spaces used to house certain mental health patients. State officials don’t tour or inspect local jails. Grand juries routinely tour the jails, but their reports are rarely seen by anyone outside the county, are often ignored and lack an enforcement mechanism.

And when jail deaths occur, policymakers and advocates aren’t the only ones kept in the dark. The families and loved ones of those who died often have unanswered questions, said Marquell Bridges, an activist based in Mississippi and Alabama who has worked with survivors and families impacted by police and prison violence across the country. 

“That transparency is important for the families. It’s important for the community,” Bridges said. “The only way this system works is if people believe in it.”

Updated 11/17/25: This story has been updated to clarify the title and experience of Dr. Anne Spaulding.

Correction 11/17/25: A previous version of this story misstated certain allegations involving actions taken by jail guards on the day Andrew Jones died.

Sen. Jeremy England, chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, says he plans to again introduce legislation for Mississippi to join most other states and allow in-person, no-excuse early voting. He also talks about the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hear a Mississippi case challenging the counting of mail-in ballots after Election Day, and about major issues he foresees in the 2026 legislative session.

The holidays are a time to celebrate with loved ones, not falling victim to scams that can steal your cheer. Falling for a scam can lead to losing money and putting your account and personal information at risk, which can be both time consuming and costly.

Here are some common seasonal scams and tips to help protect yourself:

            •           Missed packages or problems with delivery: Expecting a package? Be cautious of phishing messages through email or text impersonating delivery services like UPS or FedEx with links to view “missed deliveries.” These links may lead to fake sign-in pages or malware-infected sites. Do not respond to messages requesting personal or financial information, including money or cryptocurrency. Be wary of unexpected packages and avoid scanning QR codes, as they may be attempts to steal your information.

            •           Online deals that are too good to be true: When shopping online or on social media, buy only from trusted websites and vendors. If purchasing on a platform or marketplace, stay on the platform to complete transactions and communicate with sellers, as protections often only apply when you use the platform. Use payment methods that offer buyer protection, and never send money to strangers or use Zelle for purchases, especially when you can’t confirm the goods exist.

            •           Phony charities preying on your generosity: The holidays are also a season of giving. Before you donate money, double-check contact and payment information for your charity of choice and watch for text, email or phone call solicitations. Like any other unsolicited message, don’t click on links or open attachments that may contain malware or attempt to steal your information.

“Scammers do not discriminate and can target anyone during this festive season. Don’t let your guard down. Always remember that if something seems off, it likely is. By staying alert and informed, we can protect ourselves and our loved ones from falling victim during this holiday season,” said Darius Kingsley, Head of Consumer Banking Practices at Chase.

Tips to Avoid Scams:

            •           Don’t send money to unknown individuals or for goods or services that you can’t confirm exist.

            •           Be cautious of friendly messages from strangers on social apps. Scammers might try to build trust before asking for money.

            •           If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Watch out for deep discounts or low prices that may be scams.

            •           If you shop on social media marketplaces, never pay using Zelle—it is the same as cash and you may not get back if there is an issue. For more information about ways to help protect yourself from scams, visit chase.com/scamspotting —it’s a free resource that offers information in English and Spanish.

Based on their recent comments, perhaps President Donald Trump and some other Republicans are getting ready to embrace universal health care. 

Universal health care involves some form of the government ensuring everyone has medical coverage at little or no out-of-pocket cost, beyond what people pay in taxes. Many countries, including much of western Europe, have some form of universal health care. 

The United States does not, even though various Democrats, ranging from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, from Kamala Harris to Bernie Sanders, have embraced some form of universal health care at some point in time.

Republicans have portrayed universal health care as the bogeyman, as socialism, as the worst thing that could happen to the United States and would eventually lead to capitulation to Russia.

Yet, Trump and others seem to be warming up to the possibility.

In recent weeks, congressional Democrats have been fighting to extend enhanced subsidies for private insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace exchange – a fight that was at the center of the 43-day federal government shutdown that ended last week. The federal subsidies pay a significant portion of the cost of the health insurance purchased on the exchange.

Trump recently posted on social media, as he is wont to do, that instead of providing these subsidies to big insurance companies, he would prefer to give the money for health care directly to the American people.

How would this work? He didn’t say, but that did not stop many Republicans from embracing the idea. And it does not appear many Republicans voiced concern about such a scheme.

But according to the Congressional Budget Office, as explained in an MSNBC article by Miranda Yaver, a University of Pittsburgh assistant professor of health policy and management, the health insurance companies received about $92 billion in federal ACA subsidies in 2023. During the same year, just the out-of-pocket costs – those not paid by the insurance companies – totaled $500 billion for Americans.

So, in short, if Trump diverts that $92 billion from insurance companies to individuals, there also must be a method to pay for the additional costs of health care Americans will incur.

The amount of the subsidies each individual would receive will not cover the cost of a serious illness or accident. Would the people facing major medical expenses be left to face the impossible-for-most task of paying those tens of thousands of dollars in health care costs by themselves? Or would they need some, gulp, insurance, to help pay for those additional costs?

Insurance, love it or hate it, exists to level the playing field. By having a large number of people on insurance, the costs paid by those with expensive medical needs are held down by those who have insurance but seldom or never have to use it.

So, all this begs the question: What is the answer for those, like President Trump, who don’t like subsidizing big insurance?

The obvious answer to that question is, drum roll please, universal health care coverage, often referred to as Medicaid and Medicare for all or a public option.

Universal health care could be fashioned a number of ways. People could be expected to provide, as Republicans like to say, some “skin in the game” by paying for some of the costs themselves.

It could be a program where, if you have private insurance and you like your private insurance, you can keep it just as long as it is not paid for with federal dollars.

President Trump and others have been obsessed with getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. The president seems upset that it is called Obamacare.

It is important to note that it was first labeled Obamacare by those who opposed the legislation that was passed way back in 2010. But now that polls show it is popular, Trump seems upset that it is called Obamacare.

As a matter of fact, he said that money for health care being sent directly to the American people “would be so exciting. Call it Trumpcare. Call it whatever you want.… Anything but Obamacare.”

Perhaps Democrats, many of whom always supported universal health care as the most logical way to deal with an often broken and complex American system, could achieve that goal by just agreeing to call it Trumpcare.

The Trump administration took down a congressionally mandated report on missing and murdered Native Americans from the Department of Justice’s website nearly 300 days ago to comply with an executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion.

It’s still not back online yet, and the senators who worked to pass the law are furious.

The Not One More Report was the product of The Not Invisible Act of 2020, which intends to provide tribes with solutions to combat the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people and educate the general public about the crisis. The act was signed into law by President Donald Trump in his first term.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a moderate Democrat from Nevada who sits on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and introduced that act, said she was “outraged” to see the report had vanished from the federal forum.

“It is astounding that an administration that actually signed these bills into law, that wants to address the issue of keeping our communities safe from violent criminals, including our tribal communities, thinks that this isn’t an important issue,” Cortez Masto told NOTUS during an interview in her Capitol Hill office.

The report was taken down amid a purge of material from federal websites that the Trump administration deemed DEI-related. Both Cortez Masto and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, told NOTUS that they reached out to the administration to inquire about restoring the Not One More Report.

Murkowski said that she wants the report restored “so that the information is out there.”

“If we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s pretty tough to say it’s a problem,” she said.

A commission including tribal leaders, human trafficking survivors, relatives of victims, and federal partners compiled the report from over 250 testimonies from tribal members about how the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people has affected their lives. It also gave recommendations on how to alleviate the crisis — like having the U.S. Marshals Service help tribal law enforcement address the MMIP crisis, the premise of legislation that Cortez Masto recently introduced alongside Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

On Feb. 3, over a dozen tribal leadership and advocacy organizations sent a letter to the administration and several high-ranking lawmakers who work on tribal affairs, urging them to preserve tribal members’ “legal status as a political class rather than a suspect racial class,” and exempt tribal nations from DEI-related crack downs. Less than a week later, Cortez Masto’s office noticed the Not One More Report was no longer available on the DOJ’s website.

“It’s an epidemic of violence against Native women, Native people,” Senate Indian Affairs Committee member Tina Smith told NOTUS. “If you want to solve a problem, you first have to see it and understand it, and that’s what that work was all about.”

Cortez Masto said that she and Murkowski sent a letter to the administration asking why the report was taken down. The White House responded it was taken down in compliance with the executive order, which Cortez Masto’s office specified was the “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” order issued on Jan. 20. Cortez Masto said she’s received no other information from the administration or an explanation on why it sees this report as a DEI issue.

The White House did not answer NOTUS’ question about whether or not it believes issues regarding missing and murdered Native Americans qualify as “DEI” issues and directed NOTUS to the DOJ. A DOJ spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement that the “report was removed to ensure compliance with OPM guidance regarding President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women. The Commission’s report is still available on numerous external websites.”

The spokesperson added that the “joint DOJ/DOI response continues to be posted on the DOJ’s Tribal Justice and Safety website,” and included this link to a page of “archived content” that does not include the report itself. The DOJ did not answer NOTUS’ questions about whether it intends to restore the report.

The Wayback Machine shows a PDF of the report was last available on Feb. 8. A “Page not found” message appears in its place on Feb. 9. An error message was still present on that page as of Nov. 13.

When NOTUS asked Cortez Masto why she thinks the administration has kept the report off the DOJ’s website, she said: “They think they’re a race. They are ignorant to the fact of the trust and treaty obligation that we have to our tribal communities.”

“They don’t really care about addressing the violent crime in our tribal communities and Indigenous communities, and that has been very clear to me based on their reaction to the bipartisan letter from both [Murkowski] and I, to the comments that I get in the hearings when [nominees are] before me,” she continued.

Smith also described the administration’s re-classification of Native American nations from sovereign states to groups subjected to DEI.

“The Trump administration continually, and seems to me, purposefully, misunderstands the difference between Native people and tribal nations and other important and big groups in this country,” Smith said. “Tribal nations are not just another constituency. They’re sovereign nations, sovereign people, and it’s just so offensive to see that the administration isn’t interested in understanding what’s causing this epidemic of violence and what we should do about it.”

Cortez Masto said she wanted to “make it very clear to this administration” that this is not a DEI issue, and that the recommendations in the report will still continue to inspire more of her legislation.

“They can try to keep it off of the website, but the report’s there.
The recommendations are there. The commission, I’m assuming, is still happening, and we’re still going to move forward to address it,” she said.

This story is provided by a partnership between Mississippi Today and the NOTUS Washington Bureau Initiative, which seeks to help readers in local communities understand what their elected representatives are doing in Congress.

Mississippi is one step closer to receiving nearly $41 million from the prescription pain manufacturing company Purdue Pharma after a federal bankruptcy judge in New York said he will approve a plan to recoup billions of dollars from the Sackler family for its role in contributing to hundreds of thousands of American overdose deaths. 

Purdue developed and patented the drug OxyContin in 1996. The prescription painkiller is an opioid, a class of drugs that can relieve pain but can also be highly addictive and debilitating. For years, company officials and the Sacklers, the family that owned the company, downplayed the risk of OxyContin, even as evidence mounted that its frequent prescriptions were leading to more overdose deaths across the country.

Although physicians prescribed fewer bottles of OxyContin and other opioid painkillers over the last decade, research indicates the legacy of Purdue’s marketing campaigns continue to jeopardize American lives. People addicted to prescription painkillers often switched to using illicit opioids, like heroin and fentanyl, when pills became less available. A 2023 Yale study found that states where the company’s marketing was less regulated continue to have higher rates of fentanyl overdoses and infections related to injection drug use, such as hepatitis C.

The company has pleaded guilty for its marketing of OxyContin in the past, but it and the Sackler family have largely avoided the large national lawsuit payouts other companies have agreed to by filing for bankruptcy in 2019. A previous proposal would have required the family to pay up to $6 billion throughout the United States, but the Supreme Court rejected that settlement in June 2024 because of its civil lawsuit protections for the Sacklers. 

The new settlement, agreed to by state attorneys general in June, instructs the Sacklers to pay $7.4 billion to the states and doesn’t include the same legal shields for the Sacklers. Mississippi is set to receive its nearly $41 million share of that over the next 15 years. 

If finalized, Purdue’s payout brings Mississippi’s contributions from companies to around $421 million in reparations for their roles in the opioid epidemic — a public health catastrophe that has killed over 10,000 Mississippians. Health services in the state responded to close to 5,500 non-fatal overdoses just in the first seven months of 2025, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health.

Purdue’s settlement is subject to similar rules as the previous opioid lawsuits — 70% must be used for future strategies to address addiction, and the remaining 30% can be used for any other public purpose. 

The Legislature and 147 Mississippi local governments will split that 30%, or $12.3 million. So far, few of those local governments’ leaders have chosen to use their money to address the crisis Purdue and the other companies contributed to. Those decisions and delays in the state portion of the opioid settlements have led to Mississippi having committed less lawsuit money to prevent overdoses than every other state in the country as of this summer — both in total dollars and as a percentage of settlement shares.

The 70%, or $28.7 million, that does need to be spent on addiction-related purposes will be overseen by Mississippi Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council. The council has been meeting over the past few months, and state law says the council is required to recommend how the Legislature should spend the funds by Dec. 7 of this year.

The Okolona Municipal Separate School District is under state control for the second time in 15 years. 

The Mississippi Board of Education voted to take over the school district during a special called meeting Friday. District officials had reached out to the state education agency on Oct. 30 because the school system couldn’t make its November payroll. 

“This was a difficult but necessary decision to protect the educational interests of students in Okolona,” State Superintendent Lance Evans said in a statement. “The financial challenges facing this district have reached a point where state intervention is required to ensure students continue to receive the education they deserve.”

Over the past two weeks, Mississippi Department of Education officials have been meeting with district leaders to determine the financial state of Okolona schools. The district sent the agency some paperwork that show a budget shortfall of more than $100,000, but other financial documents, such as payments to vendors, were incomplete, according to information state education officials presented.

Education department officials discovered that the district hasn’t had a financial audit since 2021, and has been outspending since fiscal year 2023-24. 

“That’s part of the work … for our staff to perform, really, a forensic account and review of their finances,” said Kymberly Wiggins, the agency’s chief operating officer.

The state board determined today that the district’s situation was critical enough to warrant a takeover, citing ongoing insolvency and a pattern of financial mismanagement and accreditation violations. Effective immediately, John Ferrell, the agency’s chief of school and district transformation, will become Okolona’s interim superintendent. The district will get financial relief through the state’s school district emergency assistance fund. 

Without intervention, Okolona schools would continue to have “an inadequate and unstable educational environment, thereby denying the students of the district the opportunity to learn to excel and to obtain a free and appropriate public education,” said Matt Miller, president of the state board of education.

The state took control of the district in 2010 for similar financial issues and accreditation violations. Okolona was also academically failing then. The state returned the district to local control in 2012.

The Okolona district enrolled 517 students in 2024-25, a decrease from 688 students in 2010, the year of the last state takeover. More than 90% of the students are Black.

The state Department of Education has taken over 18 school districts since 1996. Four of those — North Panola, Oktibbeha County, Tunica County and now Okolona — have been taken over twice.

In addition, two districts — Yazoo City and Humphreys County — were consolidated and put into a different form of state supervision in 2019. They remain under state control, but they were separated earlier this year. The two districts are not included on the department’s list of takeovers.

“This is a total shock to me,” said Okolona Mayor Sherman Carouthers, a lifelong resident of the area. “We’ve seen so much improvement. You’ve really caught me off guard. This is something I’m going to have to process.”

Since 2017, the district’s academic rating has improved from a D to a B. 

“The educator part of the district has done quite well,” state board member Mary Werner said during the meeting. “But the leadership has failed miserably.” 

Barbara Carouthers, an Okolona school board member and a distant relative of the mayor, would not answer questions when reached by Mississippi Today.

Superintendent Paul Moton and the majority of the Okolona school board could not immediately be reached for comment.

Clarification: This story has been updated with additional details about school district takeovers.

A federal court Thursday halted, for now, a rate increase the manager of Jackson’s beleaguered water and sewer systems has for months said is necessary to keep the utility afloat. 

U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate said he needed more time to make a decision, adding he would have an update on the matter by the next hearing on Nov. 19. 

JXN Water also received news Wednesday that Congress approved to set aside $54 million for daily operations, Ted Henifin, the manager of the third-party utility, said. Lawmakers had already awarded the funds to the city, but initially did so only for capital projects. 

Since 2022, the utility has made relatively fast strides improving water pressure throughout Jackson as well as repairing burst sewer lines across the city. Moreover, for the first time in a decade, the water system is compliant with all federal drinking water regulations, Henifin said last week. 

But without added revenue, JXN Water said it will continue to lose money and be unable to address sewer system repairs, including two major, ongoing overflows – one on Mill Street and another on I-55 near Home Depot.

Since the spring, Henifin has pleaded with the court for a rate increase after JXN Water ran out of its initial $150 million allocated for daily system upkeep. The hike would raise the average Jacksonian’s monthly bill – which includes costs for drinking water as well as garbage pickup and wastewater – by 12%, the utility says. 

City officials, including Mayor John Horhn as well as all of the Jackson City Council, have argued the utility shouldn’t be able to charge more until it collects payments from a broader swath of the city. 

Even if JXN Water had a 100% collections rate – it currently sits around 70%, far below the national average of over 90% – those bills wouldn’t yield enough revenue to keep the utility from losing money, Henifin has repeatedly told critics of his proposal. 

Jackson officials, attorneys for the ACLU, and Rep. Fabian Nelson, a Democrat whose district includes south Jackson, all spoke against the rate increase during a status conference in front of Wingate on Thursday. Wingate appointed Henifin to lead the city’s water recovery in 2022. 

Jackson City Attorney Drew Martin criticized JXN Water for not considering sooner its revenue needs. This increase would mark the second rate hike since Henifin took over. The manager previously has said it took a while to realize how much money the system needed to function. 

“What we hear from residents is ‘you can’t just spend money first and assume we can afford it,’” Martin said Thursday. 

In September, the utility ramped up its collection efforts, shutting off about 1,800 accounts. JXN Water has disconnected 4,403 total accounts since the start of 2025, adding it plans to continue disconnecting 500 to 1,000 accounts per week. It did not say how many accounts have since caught up or have been reconnected. The utility said it plans to have “worked” all accounts by mid-2026. 

In a court filing last week, Nelson submitted letters from constituents with thousands of dollars in water debt. After not receiving a bill for the first time in years, they couldn’t afford the down payment JXN Water requires to keep their taps on, the letters said. 

For others who wrote in, the utility told them they had high charges because of a leak at their home, although some claimed to have hired plumbers who told them the opposite. Some constituents complained of rude representatives from the JXN Water call center. 

Wingate himself said he called the center as an experiment and got conflicting answers from different operators. Henifin admitted Thursday the utility needs to better train its operators, which he said would begin around the new year.

 “JXN Water has forgotten about the people and the citizens,” Nelson told the court while also praising the progress Henifin’s team has made so far.

The utility initially planned to send a notice of the rate increase to customers on Nov. 15 and for the change to take effect Dec. 15. In Wingate’s 2022 order that put Henifin in charge, the language doesn’t say the manager needs the court’s approval to implement a rate increase.

But at the eleventh hour of Thursday’s conference, Wingate enjoined, or stopped, Henifin from moving forward. JXN Water attorneys said they would need a decision by the end of November to enact the rate hike by the end of 2025, leading to the judge setting the next conference for Nov. 19. 

The two-day hearing, which began last week, looked in-depth at a number of issues, including both the city and JXN Water alleging the other owes it money.

‘More than frustrating’

Henifin on Thursday discussed the city’s water debt, which as of October was $6.9 million. Most of that is from leaks at the Jackson Zoo, which should be fixed in the next two to three weeks, Jackson’s chief administrative officer Pieter Teeuwissen said.

But in the meantime, Henifin said, JXN Water has held “hostage” $6.3 million the utility owes the city in sanitation fees. Because residents pay for garbage pickup in the water bill, that money first goes to JXN Water. 

Wingate questioned the utility chief about withholding those funds. Henifin said JXN Water has spent the money to help keep its daily operations afloat. When the judge asked Henifin what authority allowed that power, he admitted he had “none.” The manager said the utility will pay back the city once Jackson pays its water debt. 

Teeuwissen and other city officials criticized JXN Water, saying not having sanitation revenue puts a strain on Jackson’s budget. Martin, the city attorney, said “it is more than frustrating” to hear Henifin withheld the funds without any authority. 

JXN Water’s books and help from the Legislature

Horhn reaffirmed his stance Thursday against the proposed rate increase. The mayor is hopeful the state Legislature will work with him in the 2026 session to find other streams of revenue to invest into the water and sewer systems, and said it’s premature to raise rates before seeing what that may look like. 

Horhn offered several suggestions to lawmakers in October, such as raising the sales tax or diverting funds from the Capitol Complex Improvement District.

City officials also appealed to Wingate to allow access to JXN Water’s financial records, stating they couldn’t agree to a rate increase without having that information. 

While Henifin last week agreed to do so, he later asked to condition that access to prevent records from becoming public. Without context, he argued, it’d be easy for someone to misinterpret the numbers. The 2022 order gave Henifin the power to run the utility without being subject to public record laws. 

After initially pushing back on the conditions, the city said it would agree to a protection order preventing the records from becoming public without Henifin’s approval. 

Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.

When legislators talk about “school choice” and diverting public dollars to private schools, they often package it as empowering parents. But often overlooked in the conversation is that after years of underfunding and unfair criticism, Mississippi’s public education is seeing measurable success.

According to the latest Kids Count Data Book, Mississippi was ranked 16th in the nation for K-12 education. Our fourth graders have led the nation in reading and math gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rankings, and graduation rates have reached historic highs.

There are so many wonderful things happening in Mississippi public education. Now is not the time to pull away from a shared system that is working. Vouchers and unaccountable “choice” schemes threaten the progress of the many in favor of a few.

The adage “it takes a village to raise a child” has never been truer. Educators are not seeking to replace parents but to partner with them. Schools consistently plead for parents to be active participants in the educational process.

Public schools are our community’s schools, run by local boards, funded by taxpayers and accountable to the public. Suggesting that only private schools or home options are legitimate undermines our collective investment that ensures every child, regardless of income or zip code, has access to quality education.

Mississippi’s recent gains were not driven by privatization. The state directs a very small percentage of kindergarten–12 funding to private programs. Our progress stems from intentional public investments in early literacy, Pre-K expansion, teacher support, accountability and local district innovations.

Yet, Mississippi has chronically underfunded its schools. Since the Mississippi Adequate Education Program was created in 1997, legislators only fully funded it twice, leaving a cumulative shortfall exceeding $3.3 billion.

Even in 2023, despite revenue surpluses, education was shorted by $161 million. The newly created 2024 Mississippi Student Funding Formula provided roughly $50 million less than full MAEP funding would have delivered.

We cannot afford to carve public money away from schools already asked to do more with less. Each diverted dollar reduces resources for classrooms, support staff, fine arts programs, counselors, nurses and special education.

Who truly benefits — and who loses — when vouchers enter the system? These programs primarily serve affluent families already able to afford private school tuition. They cluster benefits in urban areas, where private schools are more abundant, leaving rural Mississippians with fewer options and underfunded local schools.

When voucher programs win, public-school students and their teachers lose — facing larger class sizes, fewer resources and diminished support in the classrooms where most Mississippi children learn.

Public schools are accountable through testing, audits and transparency. Voucher-funded schools, however, are rarely held to the same standards. Many select their students, exclude those with disabilities or cloak financials in privacy.

Public dollars deserve public oversight. If a school takes tax money, it should be held to the same accountability expectations as every Mississippi public classroom. 

Other states offer clear warnings. In Tennessee, voucher students underperformed compared to their public school peers. In Arkansas, costs ballooned and private schools hiked tuition, excluding low-income families. Louisiana’s choice expansion deepened budget gaps.

Mississippi should learn from these examples: When states funnel public money into private schooling, inequality grows while outcomes stagnate.

Rather than dividing limited resources, Mississippi should double down on what works.

We should:

• Fully fund the Mississippi Student Funding Formula so districts can operate reliably.
• Expand early literacy and math intervention programs.
• Support teacher recruitment, retention and development, particularly in rural areas.
• Strengthen support for special education, fine arts education, counseling and technology.
• Encourage innovation through magnet programs, dual enrollments and career tech centers within public systems.

Proponents of vouchers call “choice” freedom, but real freedom is not abandoning public responsibility. It is building a society where every child, regardless of income or geography, can attend a great public school.

Mississippi’s progress proves what collective investment can achieve. We should not dismantle progress with policies that favor the few. Public dollars belong in public schools.

The real choice before us is simple: a future where all children succeed, or one where some succeed at the expense of others. That’s a choice we must not accept and must do our due diligence to fight against.

Bio: Louise Smith, 2023 Mississippi Teacher of the Year and 2024 NEA Foundation Horace Mann Award Winner, is a band director on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She has been featured on the cover of NEA Today, where she talked about teacher trauma and stress, and in US News and World Report, where she was named  as one of the “Twenty Professionals Who Made a Difference During the Pandemic.” In her spare time, she enjoys playing her flute in the Coastal Winds Wind Ensemble and traveling the world with her husband.