This week is Teacher Appreciation Week. It’s well deserved. Mississippi’s educators play a pivotal role in shaping our future every day in their classrooms and communities.
As the father of two young children at a Mississippi public school, I see that dedication first hand. My son’s teacher, Mrs. Taylor, and my daughter’s teacher, Mrs. Dell, go above and beyond, investing not only in academic success but in helping to nurture and guide students in their character and social development.
But being a teacher is tough. On a daily basis, Mississippi’s teachers deal with challenges that have nothing to do with math, science, or reading. They are part counselor, part disciplinary, and part record keeper. There are children from broken homes, children suffering from poverty, learning disabilities, and language barriers—all having to be navigated carefully.
In our cancel culture, there is also the constant concern of being labeled woke, or not woke enough, of lawsuits and of outrage. While parents have every right to be concerned about what is taught their children and families should have both a voice and options, it’s important that we realize that most Mississippi teachers aren’t all that different than the communities they call home. They attend church on Sundays and are at the ball fields on the weekend.
The overwhelming majority of teachers are not trying to indoctrinate our students with radical agendas. They’re trying to teach. We ask a lot of them, all while often limiting their ability to teach in heavily regulated and regimented environments, where the only thing that matters is a test score at the end of the year.
But our children are more than test scores and teachers are more than test proctors. No one knows their students better than the men and women who step into the class each day. We should trust them to do the job they were called to do. It’s why Empower started the “Let Me Teach” campaign to highlight the challenges in the profession and the exemplary people who are fighting through them to make a difference.
I was thinking this morning about two teachers that made a huge difference in my life, and my favorite teacher, who never taught me (at least not in the classroom). Mrs. Reynolds was my high school English teacher for two years. She instilled in her students the importance of thinking for themselves and digging deep into literature to better understand the world. Mr. Vice was my history teacher for two years. He made the past come to life with novel exercises, like writing and performing rap songs about the bubonic plague. Both fostered in me intellectual curiosity and the desire to become a lifelong learner.
My favorite teacher, though, is my sister, Carva. For the last twenty-five years, she has poured into countless students a boundless, inextinguishable passion, helping them overcome hurdles to reach their potential. She’s the Energizer Bunny of educators. She also taught me how to do division when I was five and still corrects my grammar on social media. So, there’s that.
Each of us have those stories and those teachers in our lives who made a difference. Empower got to show a little appreciation this week by bringing donuts and ‘thank you’ letters to local schools. My daughter showed her appreciation to Mrs. Dell in the letter above. I hope you’ll find some time to express gratitude, as well.
Katie Blount, executive director of the state Department of Archives and History, said that the Two Mississippi Museums “stand at the intersection of Gov. William Winter’s three greatest passions: history, education and racial justice.”
It was at those museums — the civil rights and history museums in downtown Jackson on Tuesday — that Mississippi paid its final respects to Winter, the 58th governor and conscience of the state. Winter died in December 2020, a few months before his wife and partner of 70 years Elise passed away.
Former President Bill Clinton, whose terms at governor of Arkansas partially coincided with Winter’s tenure as Mississippi governor in the early 1980s, was among the about 800 on hand Tuesday to honor both the Winters at the Two Mississippi Museums.
“We were neighbors and so much more,” said Clinton, who at age 75 is about 22 years younger than Winter was when he died. Clinton went on to say that the Winters “had the most unusual balance. They were highly intelligent, highly energetic and openly ambitious and as good as gold because their ambition was for something worth being ambitious about.”
The Winter family decided not hold a public service for the Winters during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it would have been a tragedy to completely forgo such an event considering the Winters were part of the fabric of Mississippi for more than half of century.
Winter was elected to the Mississippi House in 1947 and later served in a litany of statewide offices, culminating with his tenure as governor. It was during that tenure that his crowning achievement was realized: the Education Reform Act of 1982, which enacted public kindergartens and a host of other improvements to the state’s schools.
As Clinton pointed out, Winter lost two elections for governor before finally capturing the seat. Those losses were attributable in large part to Winter’s moderation on the issue of race.
“When we were governor, it was rare for someone who was actually winning (elections) to stick his neck out on civil rights and have a good time doing it,” said Clinton, referencing that “Bill,” as he called Winter, always remained upbeat despite those two losses. He attributed Winter’s positive disposition to Elise.
While the Winters had a long political career, they might have been as influential after leaving office. Elise was active in Habitat for Humanity and played a key role in the development of the program in both the state and nation.
Republican Haley Barbour, who served as governor in the 2000s, told of how Winter and Reuben Anderson, who was the state’s first Black Supreme Court justice and later served with Winter on the Board of Archives and History, brought him the plan to develop the Two Mississippi Museums. The plan was approved and funded by the Legislature during Barbour’s tenure as governor.
Barbour also recounted asking the Democratic Winter to serve on a recovery board after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2005. He said Winter played a key role on that board “because he loved Mississippi.”
It was after leaving politics that Winter because synonymous with racial reconciliation. The Winter Institute of Racial Reconciliation was developed, and he apologized personally for some of his past rhetoric, though he was universally viewed a moderate on racial issues throughout his tenure in politics.
Anderson said when the state flag containing the Confederate battle emblem was finally taken down in the summer of 2020 and Anderson symbolically accepted the old flag as chair of the Archives and History Board, his old friend “was on my mind.” Anderson said the flag would not have been taken down if not for the work Winter had started many years ago.
At the event, Spence Flatgard, the current president of the Archives and History Board, which Winter served on for 50 years, announced that $5 million had been raised for the William and Elise Winter Education Endowment to ensure that all children across the state would have an opportunity to tour the Two Mississippi Museums.
Blount said the Winters believed “all of us, especially our children, must understand who we are and where we come from. And let us be lifted by (the Winters’) hope, by their faith that in Winter’s words, ‘We use our history to develop a more stable, more just society.’”
Today Mississippi lost a giant of a man – my friend, political mentor, and early Empower Mississippi board member – Wirt A. Yerger, Jr.
His accomplishments are well documented and I encourage you to read his obituary here. Many know Mr. Yerger as the father of the Mississippi Republican Party. He was fiercely committed to both the Party and the cause of conservatism. But he was so much more. He was a Deacon, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and great grandfather. He built businesses and created jobs. He gave back to the community he loved.
He also gave time to people like me. He was simply the most encouraging person I’ve ever met. When Empower was only an idea, I went to Wirt to ask for his advice. Not only did he warmly encourage the idea for Empower, he wrote one of the very first checks to support the mission and volunteered to join our board of directors. Over the last eight years, he and I would visit often, and he never stopped telling me how proud he was of the work we were doing.
In 2009 he was honored by the Mississippi Republican Party as Chairman Emeritus and he closed out his speech by saying:
“The best advice I give to you is always choose principles over pragmatism and power. Standing on principles is not easy, you get tired and discouraged, but the satisfaction of accomplishing all you can for a better nation is worth it all.”
I send my condolences to his family as they celebrate a life extraordinarily well lived. May we all seek to be a little bit more like Wirt Yerger, Jr.
The stink of the largest public embezzlement scheme in Mississippi history goes all the way to the Governor’s Mansion.
And two years after the scandal exploded, there’s no evidence that those at the highest levels are being held accountable or that the system they manipulated is being changed to protect taxpayers in the future.
Tens of millions of dollars in federal welfare funds were misspent or stolen by state officials and contractors. Most reprehensible, that money was specifically intended to help the poorest people in the nation’s poorest state.
Bombshell revelations in Mississippi Today’s “The Backchannel” investigation, which revealed former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the scandal through many of his never-before-published text messages and other communications, raise grave questions about the origins of the misspending and the thoroughness of the investigation that ensued.
Are those truly responsible for the fraud, including those who allowed it to happen, really being held accountable, and why aren’t our leaders doing something — anything — to fix this?
Text messages show that Gov. Bryant — who had the sole, statutory responsibility to oversee the policy and spending of the state’s welfare agency during his eight years in office — was at best asleep at the wheel while millions in taxpayer funds designated for poor Mississippians flew to the pocketbooks of many people in his orbit. He admitted as much in our three-hour interview on April 2.
“Look, I’ll take my responsibility,” Bryant acknowledged. “Yeah, I was the governor. I wish I had been able to catch it.”
The Mississippi Today investigation also revealed that Bryant, after he left office, appeared poised to accept stock in a company that received welfare funds in exchange for the help he provided the company while he was governor. Bryant now says he had not carefully read the text messages he received or gave much thought to his own replies.
“Now I can clearly see why you’re following those trails. And it doesn’t look good,” Bryant said. “Should I have caught it? Absolutely. I should’ve caught it. Was I extremely busy as governor? I can’t even describe to you what it is like on a daily basis as governor.”
Is the excuse of being inattentive or busy enough to absolve the governor of blame or allow him to avoid a more thorough investigation? His administration never would have been that lenient on welfare recipients allegedly cheating the system.
Another major revelation from “The Backchannel” is that Bryant pulled strings with welfare officials to get help for his troubled great-nephew — all while setting welfare policy that made it nearly impossible for other poor Mississippians to get the same kind of assistance.
“I remember struggling trying to help this young man,” Bryant told Mississippi Today of helping his great-nephew. “I didn’t know he was out of prison. I don’t remember the timeline, but there was no, again, no benefit to us whatsoever of helping this child except trying to save his life. I mean, Anna, if that’s a bad thing …”
State Auditor Shad White, who led the state criminal investigation without giving federal prosecutors any heads up before the first arrests were made, told Mississippi Today in October 2021 that he had not seen evidence that Bryant broke any law.
But White’s deep personal and political ties to Bryant — and the timing and announcement of the arrests more than two years ago — raise serious questions about the impartiality of that investigation. White, a former Bryant staffer and campaign manager who the governor later appointed state auditor, said he believed it was the welfare director’s duty to reject any improper requests from the governor, not the governor’s responsibility to know agency spending regulations.
Some of the loudest public outcry following our reporting raises the questions: Shouldn’t Bryant, a former state auditor who himself probed federal welfare grants, have known the agency spending regulations? And could White possibly have conducted a fair investigation of his political mentor?
Meanwhile, Mississippi lawmakers, who could drastically increase scrutiny of future welfare spending with a few meetings and the stroke of a pen, have ducked for cover, making no serious efforts in four legislative sessions to determine how this fraud occurred under their noses or to pass laws to ensure it won’t happen again.
Most members of the U.S. Congress, who annually appropriate the federal welfare funds that were stolen, don’t even appear to be aware that massive welfare fraud occurred in Mississippi and is almost certainly occurring in many other states.
Neither state nor federal lawmakers have held a single hearing to learn more about the depths of the fraud, how they could keep it from happening again or how to better spend the welfare money in the first place.
This fraud went under the radar for years because neither the state nor the federal government required Mississippi officials to show that the programs receiving welfare funds actually helped anyone. Regardless of how the funds were spent — and whether legal or not — the poor Mississippians who were supposed to receive the help got nothing.
Current Gov. Tate Reeves and his state welfare leader have worked to assure the public they’ve added safeguards and stopped the generational rush of misspending at that agency. But they’re asking for a lot of faith from Mississippi taxpayers whose distrust of government was already high before Mississippi Today’s investigation.
When asked for comment on “The Backchannel” revelations about Bryant and what they say about the current welfare agency, Reeves said simply: “It is my view that that is an ongoing federal investigation, and it would not be appropriate for me to comment at this time.”
Those words aren’t likely to reassure Mississippi taxpayers.
An executive branch operating in secrecy misspent millions of dollars for personal or political gain while abandoning the state’s poor. State investigators made such questionable decisions during their probe that they are being publicly accused of a coverup. And lawmakers won’t pass laws to stop the fraud from occurring now and in the future.
Worst of all, the Mississippians who needed the stolen money the most were ignored. As far as we can tell, they’re still being ignored. How, in good conscience, can our elected officials continue to let this happen?
“There’s just such little oversight, so things like this (systemic fraud) can happen. It’s tragic and outrageous in light of the fact that families in Mississippi who live in poverty didn’t get the help they needed,” said Carol Burnett, founder of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative.
Burnett continued: “The amount of flexibility states have with this program could be used to the benefit of people who need it. The ultimate litmus test, I think, should be the state’s poverty rate. What have we as a state done to reduce poverty rather than just move people off the welfare rolls? Unfortunately, that poverty rate hasn’t moved really at all.”
Despite the costs associated with occupational licensing, it still may be the appropriate level of regulation. Occupational licensing exists to ensure quality of service and protect health and safety. In some cases, the benefits of properly designed licensing regulations may outweigh the costs. But any analysis will require an estimation of the effect of licensing on quality and safety.
Occupational licensing has become the standard form of professional regulation, but policymakers need to consider the costs and the benefits to determine the proper level of regulation and whether less restrictive alternatives would be more appropriate.
A number of studies have examined the effects of occupational licensing laws. Quality can be difficult to measure for many services, so the professions covered are limited. On the whole, there is little evidence that occupational licensing improves the quality of services or protects the public health and safety. The chart below summarizes the literature on occupational licensing and quality since 1980. Only one piece finds evidence that licensing has a positive effect on quality.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, “Occupational regulation can be especially problematic when regulatory authority is delegated to a board controlled by active market participants,” which is precisely what occurs under occupational licensing as currently designed. Members of the regulatory authority, the licensing board, are almost exclusively composed of members of the profession in that field. Some expertise is warranted. For instance, some knowledge of medicine is necessary for members of the medical board to design appropriate standards. However, having members with a financial interest in the regulation and enforcement actions of the board will likely result in self-serving decisions, ones that protect professionals rather than the public, even if the board members are well meaning.
Licensing boards can adjust licensing standards, making them more onerous. For instance, boards have been found to adjust the pass rates of licensing exams in response to a larger pool of applicants. This allows them to directly limit the size of the profession, increasing their wages. Additionally, they can use the state legislature to limit competition. State professional associations, especially those backed by the legitimacy of a licensed profession, are in a good position to lobby legislatures. Each member of a licensed profession stands to gain much more than a member of the public from increasing requirements. Thus, professionals have a greater interest in applying political pressure. One of the most important factors determining whether a profession is licensed is the degree of political influence the profession places on the legislature.
While boards are designed to ensure quality through the monitoring of professionals, they often fail to live up to this purpose. Boards often do not directly observe professionals, instead relying on complaints from the public. Of these complaints, only a small fraction are investigated and result in disciplinary action.
There are also cases where occupational licensing can cause quality to deteriorate or make consumers less safe. Because occupational licensing increases the costs of services, some consumers are forced to go without. Others will perform the tasks themselves, or have an unlicensed friend perform them. For instance, in places where licensing reduces the number of journeyman electricians offering their services, the number of electrocutions is higher. Thus, we have evidence that licensing can reduce quality by forcing consumers to perform services themselves. In a similar estimation for plumbers, they found that in locations with fewer plumbers, there were higher retail sales of plumbing supplies per house. This suggests that again, individuals are performing plumbing services themselves, with the assumption that the services will be lower quality than from a professional plumber.
More stringent licensing standards for real estate brokers are associated with inferior service (longer times to sell properties) in rural areas. This suggests that in situations where licensing standards cause a large shortage, the shortage can cause quality deterioration, the exact opposite of the purpose of licensing.
There is also growing evidence that the public does not care about licensing status when they have access to other information about service providers. With the growth of peer-to-peer rating websites, consumers now have access to much more detailed information about professionals. Recent research has examined how much consumers weigh licensing status compared to reviews from past consumers. Using data from an online platform for residential home services, they find that licensing status has no impact on consumers’ decisionmaking process. Rather, consumers largely based their decisions on the service provider’s review rating and prices.
In a poll of consumers from the platform, only 61 percent knew the licensing status of their professional, and most consumers learned about licensing status when signing the contract, not while reaching the decision to offer the job to that contractor.
You can help reform occupational regulations. Please sign the petition below.
Registration is now open for GRAMMY Museum® Mississippi‘s Summer Session FastTrack — a weeklong day camp that will give young musicians ages 9 to 14 insight into the creative and technological processes of recording and performing music.
The camp will take place from June 27 through July 1 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The cost is $25 per child, and the deadline to register is June 4 at 5:30 p.m. CST. Sponsors for Summer Session FastTrack include Hard Rock Biloxi, Maddox Foundation, Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, Entergy, and Mississippi Arts Commission.
“We are so excited to host our Summer Session FastTrack weeklong day camp for young musicians, and we’re thankful to our wonderful partners for making this experience possible,” said Emily Havens, Executive Director of GRAMMY Museum Mississippi. “We call it ‘fast track’ because these young music makers are going to learn so much about the process of recording and performing music in a short amount of time. We’ll also dive into the influence of Mississippians on American music. It’s going to be a fantastic week of music and learning.”
Taking place at GRAMMY Museum Mississippi, the weeklong day camp will give participants the opportunity to:
Learn about the influence of Mississippians on American music and our cultural heritage
Study work by Mississippi artists featured in the Museum
Receive instruction on recording techniques, music production and live performance
Explore song structure, harmony, melody, lyric writing, and vocal technique
The participants will also collaborate with industry professionals and each other for a final production inspired by the Mississippi artists featured in the Museum. The final production will be featured on the Museum’s social media channels.
Registration is required to attend the Summer Session FastTrack. Limited space is available. Parents can register their children for the camp at grammymuseumms.org. The $25 cost includes lunch and snacks that will be provided during the camp. Registration is open now through June 4, and a deposit is required at registration.
For the first time since the launch of a federal grant to expand reproductive health care decades ago, the state health department won’t be running the program in Mississippi. Instead, a nonprofit will.
For years, Jamie Bardwell and Danielle Lampton worked at the Mississippi Department of Health, learning how the state’s family planning programs worked– or didn’t.
They left the Department in 2018 and founded Converge, a nonprofit focused on reproductive health. Their team conducted training for Mississippi health care providers and helped clinics learn how to affordably expand birth control offerings.
Then, earlier this year, Converge beat out the health department to win a critical $4.5 million federal grant, called Title X, to provide family planning services around the state.
Access to Title X-funded services in Mississippi has long been more theoretical than universal. Patients sometimes struggled to get through to clinics over the phone, even though the health department offered family planning services at almost every county health department. Wait times for appointments could be long. And most people wound up with less effective methods like the pill or male condoms, instead of long-acting IUDs or implants.
In Mississippi, a majority of Title X patients are at or below the poverty line, and a majority are uninsured, according to federal data.
Over the last decade, Converge’s cofounders say, they have learned Title X’s complicated rules and regulations and built relationships with providers and patients they hope will enable them to ensure every Mississippian has real access to high quality care.
“It has taken us that long to be experts in this topic,” Bardwell said. “And it’s a topic and a subject area that there aren’t many people in Mississippi that are clamoring to be experts on.”
They plan to offer services at a smaller number of clinics than in the past, prioritizing areas with the highest need rather than the biggest population. Scott County, for example, is a target area because it has no federally qualified health center focused on serving people without health insurance.
They also want to add telemedicine so people can get birth control prescriptions without having to make a trip to a clinic.
“We see Converge as one of the primary drivers for change in how people get family planning care,” Lampton said. “And most importantly, in increasing how much family planning care is person-centered, by which we mean, care that is about the preferences, the desires, the values and needs of the patient.”
June Gipson, president and CEO of Open Arms Healthcare Center in Jackson, is cheering: Her clinic, which focuses on serving marginalized people, has been a Title X subgrantee for about five years, and she expects to see changes under Converge.
“They care,” Gipson said of Converge’s co-founders, whom she has known for years. “They actually care about women.”
Just after the change, the number of Georgians using Title X services fell from 115,000 to about 86,000. But by 2020, the program served 170,000 people–the largest number of patients in any year since 2006.
In Georgia, state leadership said it was “deeply concerned with the federal government’s decision” when it lost Title X funding. In Mississippi, the health department is striking a different tone.
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs told Mississippi Today that reproductive health care has been transitioning away from county clinics for decades and that the department is “excited” that Converge will be able to expand partnerships with other providers.
“We are working with Converge to ensure a seamless transition in service delivery,” he said.
He added that the department received an extension on previously unused grant funds that will allow the state clinics to operate for at least a year while Converge sets up its network.
Many of the barriers to accessing reproductive health care in Mississippi are the same ones that limit access to all health care. Particularly in rural areas, there simply aren’t enough doctors and nurses. People without transportation may not be able to get to a pharmacy to pick up a birth control prescription.
And if providers don’t want certain patients to have birth control, they don’t have to give it to her.
“Title X alone is not going to solve all of the problems,” said Caroline Weinberg, the founder of Plan A, a mobile clinic focused on reproductive health care in the Delta. “But money helps everything.”
Danielle Lampton, left, and Jamie Bardwell pose for a portrait at Converge: Partners in Access in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Since 1970, Title X has funded clinics around the country to ensure all Americans can access birth control and family planning services. Services can include birth control, sexually transmitted infection (STI) tests, breast and cervical cancer screening, basic infertility treatment and more. Patients with family incomes below the federal poverty line pay no fees for services, while others pay on a sliding scale.
The health department has administered the program in Mississippi at least since the late 1970s, if not earlier, offering some level of services at nearly every county health department. It also distributed funds to eight subgrantees in 2021, mostly federally qualified health centers.
But in 2018, even before the pandemic and Trump-era regulations battered Title X programs across the country, the program served only about 25,000 Mississippians, a small fraction of the state’s women of reproductive age.
The health department commissioned Converge to assess the quality of its family planning services in 2019. The report documented basic problems that had serious consequences for patients, as first reported by Erica Hensley for Rewire News Group and later obtained by Mississippi Today through a records request.
Referring to the landscape of family planning care in Mississippi, Lampton said the state has ended up “with a broken system that gets an F.”
When patients called during working hours, the phone could ring with no response. Or the patient could be put on hold until the line would cut off.
Staff gave incorrect information about service costs, saying things like “You will get a bill if you have no insurance” instead of explaining that fees vary by income and are waived for people below a certain income level.
At the time, the health department required patients to come in for an exam before receiving a full supply of birth control. But it could take months to get an appointment.
“In that time period a patient would go without birth control and possibly experience an unplanned pregnancy,” the report noted.
A study published in December 2021 by the Mississippi Reproductive Health Access Project at the University of Texas at Austin summarized findings from 498 “mystery client calls” to health department sites, federally qualified health centers and private practices. Sometimes clinic staff said patients couldn’t choose the type of birth control they’d receive.
“It is up to what the doctor wants,” one caller was told.
The Converge report found some clinics were running out of condoms.
“Within any operation there will be anecdotal issues and opportunities to improve on standardization and customer service,” Dobbs said. “Staffing shortages have exacerbated issues no doubt. Having Converge as a partner will allow us to better focus our resources of specific need. We are also restructuring our oversight structure in counties to ensure better quality.”
The COVID-19 pandemic caused family planning visits to health department sites to drop somewhat, but it was state policy that pushed a broken system closer to collapse.
Hensley reported for Rewire that Mississippi was one of at least four states to use an emergency rule to get federal authorization to divert Title X staff to COVID-19 response. Data provided by the health department shows the steepest decline in visits came nearly a year into the pandemic: Hensley reported the department had shifted staff to the vaccination rollout.
!function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;rFrom December 2020 to January 2021, total visits to health department sites fell 33%. The next month, they dropped another 45%.
Visits ticked up again the rest of the year, but by the end of 2021, the number of family planning visits to county health departments had fallen by about 30% from 2020.
Dobbs said the state’s “severely depleted” health workforce had been tasked with extraordinary duties, particularly early in the vaccine distribution effort.
“These public health heroes worked countless overtime AND ensured TB, STIs and other challenges were addressed,” he said. “Although follow-up appointments were delayed, refills were maintained to ensure continuity of treatment.”
Wyconda Thomas opened Healthy Living Family Medical Center in Gunnison, a town of a few hundred people in Bolivar County, in 2018. The nurse practitioner grew up in Rosedale, eight miles away, and wanted to serve the community that raised her.
She calls herself a one-stop shop, and her clinic motto is “Delivering quality care where it’s needed most.” The nearest hospital is 30 minutes away.
“The ambulance service, it used to come to Rosedale two days a week,” she said. “So you had to pick which day you had a heart attack.”
These days, she doesn’t see the ambulance stationed in Rosedale at all.
Thomas became a Title X subgrantee in 2021. In her first year, health department data shows, her clinic reported 426 family planning visits– more than all but two other sub-grantees and five county health departments that year. The $40,000 grant enabled her to add family planning services for the patients she was already seeing regularly.
She also sees a lot of teenagers, and during their well child exams, she takes the opportunity to offer some basic information.
“We also include the family planning of just education about their bodies, changes in their bodies, what their bodies are capable of, which is getting pregnant,” she said. “We discuss the different types of birth control if they’re interested in that. We talk about how to avoid pregnancy.”
Lack of access to care and lack of information are related. “People can’t know a lot about what they don’t have access to to begin with,” Tyler Harden, Mississippi state director at Planned Parenthood Southeast, said.
Thomas sees that link every day with her patients, who rely on her for information about their options, the potential side effects of different contraceptive methods, and her thoughts on what might work best for them.
“If they don’t know something, it falls on me,” she said.
Converge leaders say they plan to actively promote services, rather than waiting for patients to find them. And they want to give patients information, too.
“We wanted patients to be able to see things before they even get to their visit,” said Jitoria Hunter, director of external affairs. “Like how to talk to your providers and looking at the different methods that they have access to.”
Current and prospective subgrantees are waiting to see what changes under Converge.
Thomas said she would like to see more opportunities to attend trainings and conferences.
“Just like resources where I could go and learn more to take back to my patients,” she said.
Gipson expects Converge to be more responsive to subgrantees’ questions and suggestions. She hopes the program will offer less red tape and more support for innovations.
Before joining Plan A as program coordinator, Desiree Norwood served as mayor of Sunflower in the Delta, and saw firsthand how people living in communities with few options for health care reacted to a visit from the mobile clinic. Plan A hopes to apply for and receive funding under Converge.
Norwood said her understanding is that Converge “would fund small, innovative programs, such as Plan A, those programs that are rooted in the community.”
Converge is taking over Title X administration just as the Supreme Court looks set to overturn or substantially weaken Roe via a ruling in a Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
But in Mississippi, Roe didn’t fully protect abortion access anyway. Just one clinic remains open, down from 13 in 1982.
Now, reproductive health advocates see an effort to blur the line between abortion and contraceptives: In Missouri, some Republicans have argued that IUDs are “abortifacients.”
And the Title X program has already been a target in the past. In 2019, a Trump administration regulation prohibited grant recipients from referring patients for abortions, causing about a quarter of all sites to leave the Title X network.
To be effective in the future, Converge may have to do more than expand access to good health care. The organization may also have to defend Mississippians’ right to birth control.
“I think it’s really important that everyone knows that seeking family planning care at a Title X site is legal,” Lampton said.
“If Roe is overturned, family planning care is probably next on the agenda,” Bardwell added. “It’s about reproductive autonomy. It’s not lost on us that we have to make sure people know, like Danielle said, this is health care. This is basic health care.”
Gov. Tate Reeves on Thursday vetoed state spending recently passed by lawmakers for major upgrades to a Jackson park, the capital city’s planetarium and several other earmarks lawmakers made in a massive capital projects bill.
“Jackson is not one suburban golf course and one planetarium away from thriving,” Reeves said, adding the city should focus on its crumbling infrastructure and crime. “Until then, these projects would never be viable.”
Flush with federal pandemic stimulus cash and state surpluses largely generated from trillions in federal spending, the Legislature this year had billions extra to spend beyond its $7 billion general budget. Lawmakers directed money to hundreds of projects statewide.
During a Thursday news conference, Reeves said his office made a “diligent, thorough” review of legislative spending and he used his veto stamp on items that were “not the most appropriate way to spend your hard-earned dollars.”
Reeves praised hundreds of millions of dollars legislators directed to water and sewerage projects, road and bridge work and other infrastructure “that sustains society.” He said they are sure to have a generational impact on the state. But he said spending on “golf courses, private pools … city and county office buildings” and $7.5 million earmarked for three private companies without going through the state’s incentives vetting process were untenable and “bad expenditures are bad expenditures.”
In a recent interview with Mississippi Today, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba had also criticized the state spending $13 million on a project that included the golf course. But he had also criticized the state not spending more on Jackson’s infrastructure needs.
Reeves said the state was willing to match Jackson’s water and sewer infrastructure spending, and criticized the city only putting up $25 million of the $42 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds it received for such work.
“I am very disappointed in how the city of Jackson and Hinds County have spent ARPA funds,” Reeves said. “… The only reason Jackson is only receiving $25 million (from the state) is because it only put up $25 million to match.”
The largest of the partial vetoes was the $13.25 million going for an ambitious LeFleur’s Bluff State Park upgrade that would develop a park, 10-hole golf course, bike and walking trails to connect museums in the area, such as the Mississippi Children’s Museum, the Sports Hall of Fame and Natural Science Museum, and develop various other recreational activities.
Reeves said he supported much of the project and hoped to work on developing it in the future, but he opposed the development of a golf course as part of the project. He said there are public golf courses already in the area, and the previous golf course at LeFleur’s Bluff State Park and courses and other state parks had not been successful.
“There are many parts of the project I can be supportive of, but the reopening of a golf course I cannot,” he said.
Reeves did not rule out placing the project on the agenda for any special session he has to call later this year for another issue. The governor has the authority to set the agenda for a special session. In the past, though, legislative leaders have taken up vetoes in special session even if there were not on the governor’s special session agenda.
The Legislature also would have the option to take up the vetoes at the start of the 2023 session. It takes a two-thirds majority of both chambers to override a veto.
Many of the items vetoed by the governor were for items in the city of Jackson.
Those Jackson vetoes in addition to the LeFleur’s Bluff project are:
250,000 for work at the Briarwood pool.
$1 million for a parking lot at the Jackson Convention Center.
$2 million for the city of Jackson planetarium.
Reeves said the planetarium is currently closed and questioned whether providing an additional $2 million would sustain the project.
In a statement, David Lewis, Jackson’s deputy commissioner of cultural affairs, said, “We are shocked and discouraged by the news about the governor vetoing the $2 million funding for the Planetarium. We are hoping to open a line of communication with the governor’s office to review our options.
“The Planetarium project is one that takes a beloved facility and brings it back to life for Mississippians to visit, be inspired by and to learn from. We know that our project will infuse STEM learning principles into our exhibits, bolster our growing tourism product by attracting national visitors, and strengthen the redeveloping downtown fabric in the Capital city.”
Other vetoes are:
$1 million for golf course improvements at the Scenic River Development.
$500,000 to the city of Greenvillle to develop green space next to the federal courthouse.
$1 million to help with renovations of Pascagoula city offices.
$50,000 for Arise and Shine Inc. in Copiah County.
$200,000 to Summit Community Development Foundation.
A combined $7 million for three companies.
In providing funds to the companies, Reeves said the Legislature bypassed the normal process of applying for funds for expansion projects with the Mississippi Development Authority and being vetted.
The vetoed items were part of a massive bill that totaled $223 million for projects throughout the state. Reeves said he approved near 90% of the projects that dealt with improvements to infrastructure and items that improved the quality of life. Multiple county courthouses received funds for renovations as did various museums and other projects throughout the state.
During the Thursday news conference Reeves said he wanted to stressed not the vetoed items, but the legislation signed into law that made a difference for the state in terms of primarily infrastructure improvement.
“We’re strengthening our roads, bolstering our bridges, and increasing access to clean drinking water,” Reeves said. “These investments will not only help us pave roads but pave the pathway to economic prosperity. By building better roads and constructing stronger bridges we give Mississippians the tools necessary to run their businesses, provide for their families, and get to work safely.”
The governor highlighted federal fund the state received to combat COVID-19 being used for water and sewer projects throughout the state. He also touted legislation he signed providing the Department of Transportation $1.43 billion, its largest appropriation ever. Reeves said the funds can be used, in part, to draw down federal funds that were part of the infrastructure package passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden.
While Reeves vetoed various items he described as “wasteful” spending, he said he allowed to become law without his signature the pay raise for state elected officials. The pay raise will go into effect in 2024 after the 2023 elections.
Reeves said he decided to approve the pay raise because of another state law that prevents employees of elected officials from earning more than the top elected official. He said that makes it difficult for some government officials to hire competent employees for some positions, like staff attorneys or financial advisers in the treasurer’s office.
Reeves said he intends to donate his raise to charity if he is reelected in 2023.
In the wake of criminal contempt allegations made against Ms. Bevily’s support team by the Claiborne County District Attorney’s Office Thomas Bellinder has entered a Notice of Entry of Appearance as a new member of her criminal defense team. Bellinger’s website states,
“Thomas Bellinder is a native of Manhattan, Kansas and Brandon, Mississippi. Mr. Bellinder worked several years under the mentorship of Dennis C. Sweet, III before founding the Bellinder Law Firm. He specializes in trial work with the focus of his practice being civil insurance litigation, typically handling the claims of injured individuals.”
Bellinder was once a protege of Dennis Sweet III. The remaining pretrial motions will be heard at 9:00am on May2nd, 2022 in the Monroe County Circuit Courthouse. Jury selection will also be on Monday May 2nd. The trial is expected to begin Tuesday morning. To read all publications by HPNM on Mrs. Bevily, click here.
JACKSON, Miss. – Governor Tate Reeves has signed State Auditor Shad White’s bill that now requires Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) investigators to report any fraud at DHS to the State Auditor’s office.
Senate Bill 2338, now law, requires the fraud investigation unit at DHS to report “to the Office of the State Auditor . . . any suspected civil or criminal violations relating to program fraud, embezzlement or related crimes.” This comes on the heels of guilty pleas by Nancy and Zach New, who fraudulently handled millions of Mississippi welfare dollars from DHS in the largest public fraud in state history.
“The Legislature and Governor Reeves knew this was a common-sense idea,” said Auditor White. “I want to thank Gov. Reeves and legislative leadership, along with Senator Brice Wiggins and Representative Angela Cockerham, who handled the bill. Their hard work ensures that the State Auditor’s office can continue to stop misuse of taxpayers’ money, as we did in the case of the News.”
