More than 6 million African Americans in the South migrated north seeking better opportunities and a better way of life between 1916-1970. Those millions populated cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

That exodus was called “The Great Migration.”

An homage to that pilgrimage north opened this week at the Mississippi Museum of Art, where 12 artists from across the nation with ties to Mississippi will have their newly commissioned works showcased in the exhibit, “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration.”

The exhibit features work by acclaimed Black artists, including Akea Brionne, Mark Bradford, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates Jr., Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, and Carrie Mae Weems. The works explore “profound impact of the Great Migration on the social and cultural life of the United States from historical and personal perspectives,” museum officials explained.

The museum hosted an April 8 weekend opening that featured discussions from most of the artists. The weekend guests included Ford Foundation president and author Darren Walker, who spoke to attendees about the lasting legacies of the Great Migration, and ABC anchor and Mississippi native Robin Roberts.

The exhibit will be open at the museum in downtown Jackson until Sept. 11, 2022.

Here are some photos from the exhibit’s opening weekend.

The post Photos: Mississippi Museum of Art opens homage exhibit to ‘The Great Migration’ appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A major economic development organization that represents the 19 Mississippi Delta counties on Monday called for lawmakers to expand Medicaid. 

The Delta Council, long a powerful lobby that has the ear of top Republican leaders, is among the state’s first major, non-health care related organizations to recommend Medicaid expansion. Major medical groups in the state like the Mississippi Hospital Association have supported expansion for years.

The resolution was passed unanimously by Delta Council’s health and education committee. There are around 150 council members on the committee, though not all of them were in attendance.

“While Medicaid expansion is not a complete panacea for individuals, the community’s economy, health care providers, and employers, it is a critical first step that will benefit all of them in the short and long term,” the resolution reads. 

Today, the Delta Council Health & Education Committee, chaired by Dr. Cass Pennington, unanimously approved a resolution supporting Medicaid Expansion. Wade Litton of Greenwood lead a special subcommittee reviewing the issue, and brought it before full committee for approval. pic.twitter.com/5WYENqFx8z

— Delta Strong (@MSDeltaStrong) April 11, 2022

The resolution was presented to the committee after a special subcommittee studied different options for helping struggling health care facilities in the Delta.

“After we talked to the experts and people in the industry, it became obvious that the best way to do that is to expand Medicaid,” said Wade Litton, chairman of Delta Council’s Economic Development Committee and the leader of the subcommittee. 

Mississippi is one of just 12 states not to expand Medicaid despite an increased federal matching rate under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 that would provide the state with an extra $600 million per year. 

Gov. Tate Reeves and Speaker of the House Philip Gunn, two of Mississippi’s top elected officials, fiercely oppose Medicaid expansion. Reeves derisively calls it “Obamacare expansion” and has promised to never support it. Both Reeves and Gunn maintain that the state cannot afford it, despite years of legitimate research and economic studies that indicate otherwise.

At least eight expansion bills were filed during the 2022 legislative session, but none were debated or considered before dying in committee. 

If state leaders were to expand Medicaid, at least 225,000 Mississippians would qualify for health care coverage.

READ MORE: ‘It makes it hard to work’: The real cost of not expanding Medicaid in Mississippi

The Delta Council resolution repeatedly refers to the findings of a report from State Economist Corey Miller that showed expanding Medicaid would pay for itself and offer a litany of economic benefits.

According to the report, Medicaid expansion would: 

• Reduce the uncompensated care costs incurred by hospitals statewide. While these costs hurt each hospital’s bottom line, they have devastated small, rural hospitals Mississippi, particularly in the Delta.
• Create nearly 11,300 jobs a year between 2022 to 2027. Most of these jobs would be added in the health care and social assistance sector.
• Increase the state’s gross domestic product by between $719 million and $783 million each year.
• Increase the state’s population by about 3,300 to 11,500 new residents per year between 2022 and 2027. Mississippi was one of just three states in the U.S. to lose population between 2010 to 2020.

Expanding Medicaid would also help decrease the costs incurred by small businesses across the state in paying health insurance premiums for their employees, according to Litton. High amounts of uncompensated care contribute to hospitals raising the price of care, which then leads insurers to raise premiums. 

The result is a negative feedback loop that ultimately harms those paying for insurance, Litton said. 

Litton also said that Mississippi taxpayers are already helping pay for Medicaid expansion through their federal income taxes, but aren’t seeing any of the benefits from it. 

Medicaid currently covers around 780,000 Mississippians. Those include the disabled, poor pregnant women, poor children and a segment of the elderly population. Medicaid expansion would provide coverage to those making up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or $17,774 annually for an individual.

Tom Gresham, a member of the health and education committee who has previously served as chairman and president of Delta Council, said the passing of the resolution supporting Medicaid expansion shows that the leadership of the business and agriculture communities in the Delta understand the health care needs in their communities. 

“You have to have a healthy workforce and quality medical care for communities to thrive and to grow,” Gresham said.

More people left the Mississippi Delta between 2010 and 2020 than any other area of the state. Gresham said that the much-needed economic boon Medicaid expansion would provide the Delta would help encourage people to stay. 

Getting people insured would also improve access to health screenings and preventative care,  in huge savings for individuals, health systems and taxpayers, Gresham said. 

“If we keep somebody from having a stroke, think of the money we save versus if they have a stroke and they have to get on disability,” Gresham said. “That’s how we keep people in the workforce.”

READ MORE: Medicaid expansion would boost economy significantly more than legislative income tax cut, studies show

The post Influential Delta business group calls for Medicaid expansion appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Debbie Ellis knew something wasn’t right.

It was the spring of 2018 and day care providers like herself, who run centers that serve children in poverty, were in turmoil.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services hadn’t approved a single new child care voucher for a low-income working parent in five years.

And yet, the welfare agency had just bestowed a “financial windfall” on a north Mississippi nonprofit that had previously pulled in a modest annual revenue of around $1.5 million.

The new funding for the Family Resource Center of North Mississippi – which the state never publicly announced but would eventually total about $45 million – was enough for the nonprofit to open 15 new centers and increase its staff from 30 to 260 to run a program called “Families First for Mississippi.”

Ellis only knew about the nonprofit’s new cash infusion because the Daily Journal in Tupelo published an article about its recent expansion. She didn’t know where their money was coming from, but she had a hunch MDHS might be diverting funds from the Child Care Development Fund, which is supposed to supply the child care vouchers that centers like hers had stopped receiving.

The general public wouldn’t learn until two years later how much of that nonprofit’s operation was an alleged coverup for a still unresolved welfare scandal that occurred during then-Gov. Phil Bryant’s administration.

Family Resource Center is officially on the hook to repay the state $15 million, what the auditor says it misspent plus interest, though no one from the nonprofit has been accused of a crime. The founder of another nonprofit that helped run the Families First program, Nancy New, has pleaded not guilty to multiple embezzlement, bribery and racketeering charges and is potentially facing hundreds of years in prison. 

Most of the misspent money came from a federal block grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), commonly known as “welfare”, but the Families First program also received some child care funds, according to a state audit.

Ellis still believes the newspaper article, which raised her suspicions, came about because an employee at the Family Resource Center, “who did not know there was anything wrong and did not know what not to say, just spilled the beans.”

Ellis’ instinct told her that this money, which was intended to help the state’s most vulnerable residents, was instead being shoveled into a program that lacked transparency and evidence of actually uplifting people in poverty.

“I knew then, this is entirely too much money for a subgrantee and there’s something to this story. There has to be. This is a lot of money,” Ellis recently told Mississippi Today. “The girl even reported that they were building new facilities, new facilities for Families First, one for every two counties. Now, there are eighty-something counties in Mississippi. That’s at least 40 facilities. And you know full well that grant money can not be used to build personal wealth. And yet these facilities were titled to Nancy New. It was absolutely stunning.”

But Ellis had an idea for how she would use this newfound knowledge. She took to her blog.

“Approximately one-half of all children who were being served (by the Child Care Development Fund) have been eliminated due to new, draconian eligibility requirements and new, additional hurdles in the redetermination process,” Ellis wrote on the website she runs on behalf of a consortium of child care providers in the Delta. “… Delusions of grandeur, bullying, inefficiency and state issued psychobabble rule the day.”

Agency leaders had recently acknowledged that MDHS programs were likely to suffer because of budget shortfalls. “Not so for Family Resource Center!” Ellis wrote in a sarcastic tone. “Wow! We are happy for them.”

Similar to TANF, the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) is a federal block grant. States can use the development fund to provide child care certificates to low-income parents so they can go to work or to improve the quality at day care centers. 

Ellis, who opened The Learning Tree in Greenwood in 1986, relies on the voucher program to stay in business, because without it, many of the families she serves cannot afford to put their kids in child care. The department reported a voucher waitlist of more than 21,000 children in 2017. As Mississippi stopped issuing new vouchers, the state’s workforce participation rate hit a historic low of 55%.

“For those who would criticize the working poor, for those who would criticize those receiving public assistance, they need to understand these were working parents,” Ellis told Mississippi Today. “They were not at home sitting on their laurels. They were working. And because they lost their funding, they could no longer work. Now there’s a double standard in there somewhere, isn’t there?” 

The day Ellis posted on her blog about the “financial windfall” of Families First, both the welfare director John Davis, who also is awaiting trial for his alleged role within the welfare fraud scheme, and Bryant’s early childhood education czar Laurie Smith reached out to the rebellious child care provider. They wanted to know what it would take for her to stop writing about them.

“Do you have time for a lunch meeting anytime soon?” Smith texted Ellis on March 12, 2018.

Ellis said she “knew from the immediate reaction from both John’s office and Laurie, that I had hit on something with the Families First post.”

Smith was the director of the governor-appointed State Early Childhood Advisory Council. A member of the council had sent Ellis’ blog post to Smith, asking for an explanation. “None of this is true,” Smith responded.

“They knew more would be coming,” Ellis said, referring to her blog. “I couldn’t put all of the pieces together, but I had enough information to know something was very, very sinister and wrong.”

Less than two week later, Ellis met with Smith, Davis and his deputy Dana Kidd, head of the economic assistance division, at Wellington’s Buffet inside the Hilton hotel on the north edge of Jackson.

“Honestly I never got past salad. Because I had a lot of things to say,” Ellis said.

“My posts had continued to say, ‘No new enrollment. No new certificates for new enrollment.’ And so they knew that my end game was to have that funding released,” she continued. “And we were also beginning to call for forensic audits for the CCDF from 2014 to 2018. That still has not been done … Where did that money go for five years? We still don’t know.”

At lunch, Ellis said, Smith was very quiet and Davis was friendly as always.

“He asked what he could do for me to help alleviate my concern for the Child Care Development Fund,” Ellis said. “And I said, ‘You can do for me as you must do for every low-income child care provider in the state of Mississippi: release this funding today. We don’t have a lot of time.’”

They asked Ellis how long she would give them to start issuing the vouchers before she would continue blogging. Ellis said two weeks. They missed the first deadline, but three weeks after that, the department began making their way down the wait list and working parents started receiving notification they had been approved for the benefit.

“I just knew we had to have new enrollment in order for the industry to survive. And we’re still recovering from that. The only salvation for the child care industry, as a whole, as a result of their shenanigans — the nicest thing to ever happen to us was a deadly pandemic,” Ellis said. “Because of the relief funding and the stabilization grants. With that kind of funding we can do the things that need to be done for child care.”

Today, low-income parents still face barriers getting the child care certificate, but Ellis said the agency isn’t systematically blocking enrollment anymore.

“There are good and honest people at DECCD (Division of Early Childhood Care and Development) today,” Ellis said. “But one thing the pandemic told us was that the policies are still punitive.”

This is a supplement to Part 4 of Mississippi Today’s series “The Backchannel,” which examines former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the running of his welfare department, which perpetuated what officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.

The post When this Mississippian sensed corruption at the welfare agency, she took matters into her own hands appeared first on Mississippi Today.

You are not alone in your school search.

The Mississippi School Finder is an online tool that empowers families with the information necessary to make school choices. Not only does it provide relevant, up-to-date information about schools and communities to help you compare options, but it allows you to customize your school search and gain a better understanding of different school types.

You may not know, for example, that charter schools are an option in Mississippi or that there is a homeschool co-op and magnet school near where you live. You might want to know more about academic performance than an A-F school accountability rating or you might be interested in how your neighborhood compares to others.

The Mississippi School Finder cannot only answer the questions you have, but it can introduce you to information and opportunities you may not have known existed.

Information That Fits Your Needs

You can search for schools by type, distance from your home, grades served, and (soon) school emphasis so that you can customize and explore a map of options for your kids. Furthermore, you can find out what school types exists in the state, from tax-funded, tuition-free options like traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, and special state schools to independent options like private schools, homeschooling, and virtual programs.

In addition, you can find out about state scholarship programs, such as the Education Scholarship Account and the dyslexia and speech-language scholarships, that can help you pay for the options that work best for your child with special needs.

As you click on particular schools, you can find information on school and district performance, school and county demographics, and information about funding or tuition.

You can also view and participate in a new school rating and review system to help other families make decisions. The website asks you to rate your satisfaction with school leadership, teachers, academics, extracurricular activities, and how the school handles learning differences.

Information That Matters

When data is available, school profiles contain

• Proficiency rates on state tests in English, math, science, and U.S. History
• Average ACT scores and sub-scores in English, math, reading, and science
• School discipline statistics
• Student-teacher ratios
• Tuition rates and discounts

In the “Demographics” section for each school, you can find U.S. Census data for the school’s county, including population growth and median income.

For high schools, graduate outcomes include graduation rates, post-secondary enrollment rates, and the labor force participation rate for the area.

Information To Assess Your Options

Although you have probably heard about different school types, you may not understand the differences between them. The Mississippi School Finder describes each school type and provides information about how to transfer, apply, or opt in to certain options and how to contact schools to find out more.

If you cannot find the school options you want or need, you can select “Expand Options” and fill out a form describing your vision for your community to help Empower connect you to new school founders in your area.

Ultimately, the goal of the Mississippi School Finder is simple: give families looking for education options information worth knowing. By enabling families to customize the school search, focus on information that matters, and assess all of their options, the Mississippi School Finder is helping ensure every student has the opportunity to succeed

Mississippi’s year-old workforce office, Accelerate Mississippi, has given an $1.4 million grant to a pair of community colleges grow their utility lineworker program. 

The grant will fund Meridian Community College and East Central Community College’s efforts to double the number of lineworkers they train and help fill jobs needed by Mississippi Power and the East Mississippi Electric Power Association. The colleges, which are about 30 miles apart, serve six rural counties: Lauderdale, Leake, Neshoba, Newton, Scott and Winston. 

“This is a quality program to train, equip and deploy utility lineworkers throughout their region,” said Accelerate Mississippi executive director Ryan Miller. “They provide an incredible service. In our minds, they’re first responders.”

Accelerate Mississippi oversees tens of millions of dollars, including a $25 million pot collected via an unemployment insurance tax on businesses called workforce enhancement training – or “WET” – funds.

Last year, the office awarded nearly $1 million to Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College to fund a diesel technician program, another field with high demands for workers. 

Mississippi Power and the East Mississippi Electric Power Association had expressed a demand to the colleges already for skilled workers, especially for underground linemen, to install broadband cables as the state works to extend internet access to rural areas. 

The colleges wrote in their application to the workforce office that a number of jobs had been lost in “one of the nation’s most economically distressed regions” because of layoffs and business closures. They identified advanced manufacturing, health care, and energy work as having the most potential employment opportunities for their part of the state. 

But there is a gap between the region’s demand for certain jobs and the skills of their population. 

“This was two community college colleges combining forces to apply for WET funds,” said Miller. “It’s exactly what we hope to see: let’s coordinate on resources to meet and address a need that is out there.” 

The colleges expect to train up to 48 new utility workers over each 16-week session. Trainees can find jobs with wages between $21.75 and $31.56 an hour, according to data from the state employment security office.

Students will leave the program with the skills needed to perform electrical work both high on poles and underground. 

The bulk of the funding is going to pay for the equipment – from a bucket truck to a mini excavator – needed to train more students.

The post Community colleges get $1.4 million grant to train more lineworkers from Accelerate Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.