Connect with us

Mississippi Today

Republicans vowed a robust post-Roe agenda. Here’s how it’s going.

Published

on

Republicans vowed a robust post-Roe agenda. Here’s how it’s going.

After leading the charge to overturn Roe v. Wade and outlaw abortion in Mississippi, Republican leaders promised to address the inevitable fallout and prioritize support to pregnant women and babies.

Yet many bills filed this legislative session to strengthen the social safety net, fund child care for low-income parents and increase access to resources like contraceptives have all died before lawmakers had a chance to vote on them.

While debate rages over the most visible piece of legislation to improve outcomes for expectant moms, postpartum Medicaid coverage, the help pledged by Mississippi’s politicians in the wake of Roe extends far beyond health care. It considers financial and economic stability, improved public assistance policies, family stabilization, streamlined adoption processes and more.

Gov. Tate Reeves has called this an “ambitious new pro-life agenda.” Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who historically defended Mississippi’s abortion ban in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization before the U.S. Supreme Court, described her mission to “support the whole life and the whole woman.” Speaker of the House Philip Gunn called it “an opportunity to lead the nation in protecting, promoting, and supporting life.”

The programs and initiatives, many of them at the discretion of the Legislature, aim to ensure that women who feel unprepared to become mothers are supported and have access to resources to successfully care for their child. They also try to address the reality that these unwanted or unplanned pregnancies and births could result in more children in the state’s plagued foster care system, without homes or families.

For Republicans, these goals are met by funding private pregnancy centers, typically faith-based organizations focused on anti-abortion advocacy as opposed to professional social work; cracking down on child support enforcement; and making it easier for people who do not want to be parents to give up their children for adoption.

More Democratic lawmakers and family advocates believe these objectives would be better accomplished by expanding Medicaid; reforming the state’s welfare agency; increasing workforce development and workplace protections for women; and funding more child care vouchers for low-income parents. Most of this legislation died without a vote, including more than 15 bills introduced to expand Medicaid.

There is one niche but impactful policy change that both Reeves and advocates for low-income families support: to remove the child support enforcement requirement within the child care voucher program. Mississippi’s Child Care Payment Program, which provides child care vouchers to low-income working families, is funded by the annual federal Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and administered by the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Mississippi’s child care block grant was about $94 million in 2023.

The Legislature has not proposed legislation to do this, but legal experts say that because the requirement is not mandated by state or federal statute, Mississippi Department of Human Services could make the rule change on its own.

Reeves has also thrown his support behind new child care tax credits, increased corporate tax credits for crisis pregnancy centers and a special partnership with an adoption agency called Lifeline Children’s Services.

“We must be willing to prove that being pro-life is not simply being anti-abortion,” Reeves said on the Paul Gallo Show on conservative talk radio network SuperTalk on Jan. 11. “Because of that we’ve initiated a very aggressive new pro-life agenda in our state. We’ve proposed establishing child tax credits for child care, increasing the first of its kind across America pregnancy resource center tax credit. We want to partner with Lifeline Children’s Services to ensure that we’re helping the moms and newborn babies.”

Mississippi Today compiled and analyzed more than 60 pieces of legislation that could satisfy politicians’ stated post-Roe agenda. Twenty-six were still alive by early February after the first round of legislative deadlines for general bills.

Access to resources

Republicans are looking to crisis pregnancy centers as the primary support system for women facing an unplanned pregnancy.

House Bill 468, introduced by Gunn, R-Clinton, would increase an existing tax credit for corporations who donate to pregnancy centers from an annual aggregate total of $3.5 million to $10 million. While lawmakers have not taken action on the bill, it remains alive because it is considered a revenue bill, which lawmakers don’t have to take up until a Feb. 22 deadline.

The tax credit, which Gov. Reeves supports, was initially created by legislation last year.

Only centers that align themselves with the statewide organization Choose Life Mississippi, run by ardent anti-abortion activist Terri Herring, are eligible for the tax credit. But the companies that benefit from the program are a mystery – the Mississippi Department of Revenue does not release a list of those that claimed the credit.

Reeves also supports direct taxpayer contributions to these centers.

House Bill 983, which died in committee, would have created the Pregnancy Resources Grant Program under the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services to award competitive grants to crisis pregnancy centers. A separate appropriations bill to fund the CPS grant program, House Bill 1546, is still alive.

Senate Bill 2781 would create the Mississippi Access to Maternal Assistance Program within the Mississippi State Department of Health. The program would serve as a resource hub, coordinating and promoting information about services for expectant mothers, such as adoption assistance, child care, domestic abuse protection, early intervention, food, clothing, job training and placement, paternity, parenting skills, prenatal and postpartum care. That bill is still alive.

Other bills to actually pump resources through the health department, instead of just coordinating them, died. House Bill 1085 and House Bill 506 would have required a nurse practitioner to be present at each of the county health departments weekly to provide contraceptive supplies, either for free or on a sliding fee scale. House Bill 1263 would have required county health departments to provide free menstrual hygiene products. House Bill 1372 would have added a line item to the health department’s budget for funding to the Child Advocacy Centers, community-based resource centers for children and mothers experiencing abuse, which have recently faced large budget cuts. None of these bills received noticeable attention.

Economic health

Opponents to legal abortion have also acknowledged the need to improve the economic position of mothers, as well as people who choose to adopt.

One policy that national advocates have recommended for years – a state Earned Income Tax Credit – would provide an income boost to low-income working Mississippians. State Auditor Shad White, who investigated the welfare scandal, supports the tax credit and said the state could use welfare funds to implement the program at no new cost to the state.

“Economists agree that EITCs are one of the best ways to improve the economy and help working people,” White wrote in a column last year. “The EITC would directly attack a critical problem facing the state. More people working means stronger families, more tax revenue, and a better economy. Policymakers should put money into the hands of working people and get Mississippi moving forward.”

The Mississippi Legislature has routinely ignored any legislation to start offering a state Earned Income Tax Credit, which models an existing tax credit on the federal side.

House Bill 321 and Senate Bill 2897, both authored by Democrats, are the two Earned Income Tax Credit bills before the Legislature this year.

Other bills introduced by Republicans to create tax credits for child care and adoption expenses might have an easier road ahead this session.

House Bill 130, House Bill 322 and Senate Bill 2898 would provide a new income tax credit to parents for child care expenses.

“As long as we have an income tax, we should use it to incentivize the responsible raising of children,” Reeves wrote in his budget recommendation. “These policy changes are tangible ways to reduce the costs of raising a family in America today.”

Similarly, House Bill 1268 and Senate Bill 2696, which passed the Senate, would increase tax credits for adoptive parents to pay for adoption-related expenses.

Fitch supports House Bill 505 and Senate Bill 2335, which incentivize employers to offer additional benefits to parents. House Bill 505 provides tax credits to employers who provide maternity and paternity leave for its employees and Senate Bill 2335 provides tax credits to employers who pay for their employees’ child care.

All of these are considered revenue bills, so they are still alive, awaiting the later deadline.

Two bills to strengthen women’s standing in the workforce – the Mississippi Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the Mississippi Paid Family Leave Act – died without consideration.

House Bill 1361 would have prohibited employers from discriminating against women because they are pregnant, and Senate Bill 2286 would have required employers with more than 50 employees to offer 12 weeks of paid leave for childbirth.

Mississippi has among the lowest wages and median household income of any state in the country. Minimum wage in the state, which follows the federal minimum wage of $7.25, has not increased since 2009.

Seven bills to increase the minimum wage – House Bill 96, House Bill 323, House Bill 583, House Bill 810, Senate Bill 2284, Senate Bill 2288 and Senate Bill 2439 – died without a vote.

Welfare policies

Following revelations about widespread abuse within Mississippi’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, or welfare, Democratic lawmakers filed several reforms to the Mississippi Department of Human Services.

Currently, Mississippi has over $100 million in TANF funds sitting idle. The department has not answered repeated questions from Mississippi Today about how it plans to use the reserve.

  • House Bill 463, House Bill 774, Senate Bill 2794 would have moved tens of millions of the state’s annual TANF block grant to supplement the state’s child care voucher program, potentially providing child care to thousands of working parents who might not have it otherwise. The federal government allows states to use 30% of its block grant this way.
  • House Bill 1431, a perennial bill from Rep. Omeria Scott, D-Laurel, would have required the state to use unspent TANF funds on tuition and expenses for nursing students, simultaneously providing workforce training to low-income Mississippians and addressing the state’s nursing shortage.
  • House Bill 612 would have required the welfare agency to provide transportation and child care to TANF recipients, to assist them with completing the application process and participating in the required work program.
  • House Bill 613 would have limited TANF programs to serve people below 200% of the federal poverty line.
  • House Bill 502 would have increased the monthly TANF cash assistance by more than $200.
  • House Bill 970 would have prevented the state from using TANF funds for college scholarships to families who are not receiving TANF benefits. Historically, the state has reported its annual appropriations to the state’s scholarship programs as TANF spending in order to match the federal grant and pull down the funding. The effect of this is that money that should be going towards anti-poverty programs is actually being used to benefit middle-class families, Mississippi Today first reported in 2019.
  • House Bill 971 would have loosened eligibility for TANF, removing the upfront job search requirement, which presents significant barriers to applicants.
  • Senate Bill 2331 would have removed the requirement that single moms sue their child’s father for child support – the same restriction Reeves supports dismantling in the child care voucher program – in order to qualify for TANF or food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
  • Senate Bill 2806 would have removed the drug testing requirement from the TANF program.

Though all of these bills died without consideration, Democratic lawmakers took the opportunity to discuss these policies when a repealer bill for the Mississippi Department of Human Services – standard legislation that comes up every few years to extend the life of an agency – reached the Senate floor Tuesday.

While presenting his amendment to the repealer bill, Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, criticized MDHS for using $30 million in TANF funds each year to supplement the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, which he argued should be funded with state appropriations. This is just one example of how the state fails to use these dollars in the most effective way to fight poverty.

“It’s all legal but it’s wrong,” Blount said. “And we need to fix it.”

Blount’s amendment would have moved $30 million in TANF funds to the child care voucher program. Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, also introduced an amendment to remove the drug testing requirement for TANF applicants. Sen. Rod Hickman, D-Macon, noted the extremely low approval rate of TANF applications – as low as 2% in some years – when he introduced a bill that prohibits MDHS from denying assistance to families under 130% of the federal poverty level.

Republican senators killed all three amendments.

“The question posed by the amendments today is: In response to the biggest public scandal involving a state agency in the history of this state, what did the Legislature do? The answer expressed today is nothing. We do nothing. We make no changes,” Blount said. “That attitude is the reason we got in this problem in the first place, because it is the disregard for the politically powerless.”

Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson has asked the Legislature to make one important reform to the department to ensure it runs smoothly so that it can serve all eligible applicants: Remove the bureaucratic red tape created by the Medicaid and Human Services Transparency and Fraud Prevention Act, dubbed the HOPE Act, passed in 2017.

A bill this session to do this, House Bill 503, died.

Conversely, Republican lawmakers have filed bills to increase restrictions or make it harder still for low-income families to access public assistance.

Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, introduced a bill to require the welfare department to include photo identification on Electronic Benefit Transfer (known as “EBT”) cards — the cards recipients use to spend their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, benefits. The bill, which died, would have prevented more than two people in the family from being able to use the card.

Two other dead bills, filed by Sen. Melanie Sojourner, R-Natchez, would have prohibited TANF funds from going to people convicted of several felonies and require TANF recipients to participate in community services.

Child support & fatherhood

“The Republican Party Platform affirms ‘our moral obligation to assist, rather than penalize, women who face an unplanned pregnancy,” reads a 2022 column in the Hill co-authored by Fitch. “At the urging of then-Treasurer Lynn Fitch, the platform that stands today supports ‘legislation that requires financial responsibility for the child be equally borne by both the mother and father.’”

The strict ban on abortion has brought renewed attention to the state’s long-troubled child support program, which provides legal services to help separated custodial parents secure court orders against the noncustodial parent for monthly child support payments. Many of the single moms in the child support program are forced into the system as a condition for receiving public assistance from the state.

The enforcement side of the program, which is run by a private contractor, then helps enforce the order by locating the noncustodial parent, establishing paternity if necessary, garnishing wages, intercepting tax refunds, and in extreme cases, suspending driver’s licenses or filing criminal charges in the case of unpaid support.

(The child support privatization contract with Young Williams has come under scrutiny in recent years for failing to require that the contractor meet certain performance-based metrics, something MDHS says it solved in its existing contract. House Bill 177 would have eliminated the contract and brought the program back in-house. It died.)

Lawmakers filed several bills to tweak the child support program to, as Fitch said, “require fathers carry their equal share of the financial needs of childbearing and child-caring.”

  • House Bill 6, House Bill 1046, House Bill 1083, and Senate Bill 2385 would set up procedures to allow the child support enforcement program to intercept gambling winnings for unpaid child support.
  • House Bill 1114 would increase the cap of how much a person’s income goes towards child support. Currently, a person with five or more children under support orders must pay 26% of their income in child support payments. The bill would revise the law so that a person with six or more children pays 30% of their income. Reeves publicly supports this policy change.
  • House Bill 320 and House Bill 1117 would revise the law so that monthly child support payments begin when a woman becomes pregnant, instead of after birth. HB 1117 would also include prenatal and post-natal expenses as part of the order.
  • House Bill 1183 would require Mississippi Department of Human Services to publish the names and photos of people in child support arrearage.

All of these bills died.

The only bills to crack down on child support that remain alive are Senate Bill 2634, filed by Sen. Joey Fililngane, R-Sumrall, on behalf of Fitch’s office, and House Bill 1490 by Speaker Gunn.

Fillingane’s bill increases the statute of limitations for criminal charges against a person who refuses to pay child support. Currently, a person can be charged with desertion of a child if they are found to have wilfully neglected or refused to pay child support while the child is under 18. The bill would increase that age to 21 and also allow for charges to be pursued for three years after the child turns 21.

A nearly identical bill in the House, House Bill 1112, died.

Gunn’s bill requires the Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks to suspend the license of any person who has not paid child support.

“For too many families, regular and reliable child support payments can be the difference between steady meals and going hungry,” Fitch wrote in her most recent column for World News Group last week. “As four out of five custodial parents are women, too often this falls heavily on the mother. Fathers simply must be held equally responsible for their children financially. Women have borne this burden alone for too long.

Legislation that takes a more punitive approach to child support collections – which some advocates warn may lead to the criminalization of poverty – appears to reverse the national trend.

In 2016, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement implemented a rule change that required states to enact safe guards so that before a parent is jailed for unpaid child support, there must be evidence that the parent has the funds and is willfully refusing to pay. The federal government gave states until 2022 to comply. The rule in part helps to ensure that states are following the 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Turner v. Rogers, which said states must determine whether a parent is able to pay the ordered child support before incarcerating them for nonpayment.

The 2016 rule also prohibits states from allowing child support debts to accrue while a parent is behind bars, but the practice still continues today. As a result of not complying, human services director Bob Anderson told lawmakers that Mississippi is at risk of losing its federal match for the operation of the child support enforcement program – about 66% of the program’s budget.

To deal with this, Sen. Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, introduced Senate Bill 2082, which suspends child support arrears from accruing when a person is in prison or involuntarily institutionalized for longer than 180 days. House Bill 1215 would do the same thing. Both are still alive.

Another bill that would have offered leniency to people dinged for not paying child support is Senate Bill 2218, introduced by Sen. Hill, which would have provided temporary driver’s licenses for the purpose of employment and worship to people whose licenses were suspended due to unpaid child support. That bill died.

National child support experts have long acknowledged that a punitive approach to child support collections is not necessarily the most beneficial for families. If a father loses his license or goes to jail, for example, he might lose his job, only making it less likely he’ll be able to make the monthly payment.

“It’s a very complex question when you’re trying to force a parent to do what he or she ought to do anyway. And you can’t legislate everything, but we try to do the best we can,” said Filingane. “Let’s take the example of the driver’s license being suspended. Well, then, if you’re gonna follow the law, and you no longer have a driver’s license, how do you expect that person to get to their job to earn the money to then turn around and pay the child support? … There’s all these sometimes unintended consequences that happen.”

“And when you criminalize behavior and you end up throwing them in jail, sometimes it does the trick,” he continued. “It’s fascinating that sometimes the person who swears up and down that he or she doesn’t have a hundred bucks to their name and can’t pay it cause they just don’t have it, they end up in jail and less than eight hours later it’s paid in full.”

The state’s efforts to either force or incentivize fathers to participate in child rearing extend beyond the child support program. But information about the efficacy of those efforts is lacking.

Every year for the last several years, Mississippi has spent anywhere from $9 million to $39 million in TANF funds on grants to “Fatherhood and Two Parent Family Formation” programs, according to federal reports, but the department does not provide much information about what those programs entail, nor does it gather any records to show what outcomes the programs achieved.

House Bill 1146, authored by Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven – the lawmaker who introduced the abortion ban that overturned Roe v. Wade – would have created the “Mississippi Fatherhood Initiative Fund” to distribute grants to local organizations providing parenting resources to fathers. The bill died.

Auditor White has placed a heavy focus on “fatherlessness” in recent months, releasing a report that aimed to demonstrate the cost of one-parent households on Mississippi taxpayers. One example: the report estimates that 50% of the state’s prison population are men who come from “fatherless” homes, and the state spends $180 million annually to incarcerate them. (A bill to provide workforce training to inmates, House Bill 640, died).

The report lays out the purported problem – positioning “fatherlessness” as the root cause of societal ills associated with poverty, as opposed to the other way around – but the proposed solutions are sparse.

White makes one recommendation: expand the JROTC military program in high schools across the state.

“Countless studies prove our communities and families — along with the average taxpayer — would benefit from strong, engaged fathers and father figures in the lives of Mississippi’s children,” the report reads. “One program interrupting the cycle of fatherlessness is the Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (JROTC).”

White points to the 100% graduation rate of students in the program. The cost of expanding the program to all high schools is $185 million, according to White’s separate 2020 report on JROTC. There has been no legislation introduced this session to do this.

But there have been bills – House Bill 1360, House Bill 1413, House Bill 1414 and House Bill 1419 – to implement various high school dropout prevention and academic performance improvement programs in struggling districts. They all died without consideration.

Reeves supports at least one initiative in this arena: Placing career coaches in high schools across the state. His workforce cabinet began the program last year with $8 million in pandemic relief funding. Reeves recommends doubling it.

“These coaches will especially be directed toward low-income areas, helping to inspire young Mississippians with the abundance of pathways available for fulfilling careers,” Reeves said.

House Bill 274, authored by Speaker Gunn, would provide $12 million to the Office of Workforce Development, called Accelerate MS, to fund more coaches. The bill is still alive, awaiting the appropriations deadline.

Baby drop off, foster care, and adoption

After the Dobbs ruling, health professionals in Mississippi estimated that the state should prepare itself to handle an additional 5,000 births each year. There are already about 4,000 kids in the state’s foster care system – which is still under a decades-long federal court settlement because of its failure to properly care for kids in its care.

Reeves proposes several measures he believes will alleviate issues caused by unplanned births, including increasing the amount of time a parent is allowed to “drop off” a baby without facing consequences; increasing subsidies to adoptive parents; and making modest budget increases to the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services to hire more personnel and reduce adoption backlogs.

The court settlement, referred to as Olivia Y, has required Mississippi to periodically increase the public subsidy foster families receive to care for foster children. But the state failed to make similar increases to the adoption subsidy, meaning families are facing a scenario where it makes more financial sense to foster than to adopt.

“It creates an artificial incentive for courts to keep children in state custody for the sole purpose of making sure that family has adequate funding to take care of the child,” Child Protection Services Commissioner Andrea Sanders said at a Legislative appropriations hearing last month.

She asked for an additional $12 million appropriation to fund increases to the adoption subsidy, as recommended by Reeves.

House Bill 510 would create versions of a “Foster Parents Bill of Rights and Responsibilities,” adding several provisions to existing statute that give foster care parents the opportunity to participate in various areas of the child’s care, including communicating with the child’s school, doctors, guardian ad litem, and others. The Senate version of the bill, Senate Bill 2191, which died, would have also required the court to notify the attorney general’s office when changes to a child’s long-term care plan occur.

House Bill 533, which is alive in the house, and Senate Bill 2611, which died, were introduced to ease requirements for parents seeking adoption in hopes to hasten the process. Instead of a compulsory home study before a child is placed for adoption, the bills would leave it up to a judge to determine if a home study is necessary. Additionally, Gunn’s House Bill 1342 would create the “Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Adoption Licensure Authority” to regulate adoptions in the state and add new adoption procedures to state statute.

Senate Bill 2377 would enact the Mississippi Safe Haven Law, adding exhaustive measures to the existing statute, spelling out step-by-step the process for a parent to relinquish her child to an emergency medical services provider. This law, as well as House Bill 244, would increase the age a baby may be relinquished from seven days to 30 days. House Bill 1318, which passed the full house, takes this a step further, increasing the age to 90 days. If enacted, Mississippi would have one of the most lenient Safe Haven Laws in the nation with the exception of New Mexico (90 days) and North Dakota (one year), according to a 2021 Charlotte Lozier Institute analysis.

House Bill 634, which died, would have removed the age limit altogether and added “baby box” to the list of allowed drop-off destinations.

Children removed from their families often face challenges into adulthood. A bill to waive tuition at state schools for foster or adopted children, House Bill 127, died.

The Legislature still has time to find the additional appropriations requested by CPS. But lawmakers face an even bigger budget question if it ever wants to stop using its federal TANF grant to fund the foster care agency – a financial maneuver that has prevented the state from being able to pull down unlimited dollar-for-dollar federal matching funds offered by the 2018 federal Family First Prevention Services Act.

Study Group on Women & Children

Several bills during the 2023 session came out of the Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families, chaired by Sen. Nicole Boyd, an outspoken proponent of postpartum Medicaid extension.

Senate Bill 2781, Senate Bill 2898, Senate Bill 2696, Senate Bill 219 and Senate Bill 2377, described above, originated from the study group.

The group, which examined a broad range of issues affecting Mississippi families, also resulted in the following legislation, all of which remains alive:

  • Senate Bill 2167: Create the Mississippi Early Intervention Pilot Project at Mississippi State University’s TK Martin Center and create an Early Intervention Task Force to work on issues related to early childhood screenings and therapeutic services for children.
  • Senate Bill 2384: Create the Mississippi Task Force on Foster Care and Adoption to study and make recommendations for improving state laws related to foster care and adoption.
  • Senate Bill 2485: Revise qualifications for personnel under the Early Intervention Act for Infants and Toddlers to address shortages.
  • Senate Bill 2192: Clarify circumstances under which a presumed father cannot further contest paternity.

Finally, a bill to repeal Mississippi’s abortion ban and put the issue to a statewide vote, House Bill 1385, died.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

IHL deletes the word ‘diversity’ from its policies

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – Molly Minta – 2024-11-21 14:32:00

The governing board of Mississippi’s public universities voted Thursday to delete the word “diversity” from several policies, including a requirement that the board evaluate university presidents on campus diversity outcomes.

Though the Legislature has not passed a bill targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved the changes “in order to ensure continued compliance with state and federal law,” according to the board book

The move comes on the heels of the re-election of former President Donald Trump and after several universities in Mississippi have renamed their diversity offices. Earlier this year, the IHL board approved changes to the University of Southern Mississippi’s mission and vision statements that removed the words “diverse” and “inclusiveness.”

In an email, John Sewell, IHL’s communications director, did not respond to several questions about the policy changes but wrote that the board’s goal was to “reinforce our commitment to ensuring students have access to the best education possible, supported by world-class faculty and staff.”

“The end goal is to support all students, and to make sure they graduate fully prepared to enter the workforce, hopefully in Mississippi,” Sewell added.

On Thursday, trustees approved the changes without discussion after a first reading by Harold Pizzetta, the associate commissioner for legal affairs and risk management. But Sewell wrote in an email that the board discussed the policy amendments in open session two months ago during its retreat in Meridian, more than an hour away from the board’s normal meeting location in Jackson.

IHL often uses these retreats, which unlike its regular board meetings aren’t livestreamed and are rarely attended by members of the public outside of the occasional reporter, to discuss potentially controversial policy changes.

Last year, the board had a spirited discussion about a policy change that would have increased its oversight of off-campus programs during its retreat at the White House Hotel in Biloxi. In 2022, during a retreat that also took place in Meridian, trustees discussed changing the board’s tenure policies. At both retreats, a Mississippi Today reporter was the only member of the public to witness the discussions.

The changes to IHL’s diversity policy echo a shift, particularly at colleges and universities in conservative states, from concepts like diversity in favor of “access” and “opportunity.” In higher education, the term “diversity, equity and inclusion” has traditionally referred to a range of efforts to comply with civil rights laws and foster a sense of on-campus belonging among minority populations.

But in recent years, conservative politicians have contended that DEI programs are wasteful spending and racist. A bill to ban state funding for DEI in Mississippi died earlier this year, but at least 10 other states have passed laws seeking to end or restrict such initiatives at state agencies, including publicly funded universities, according to ABC News.

In Mississippi, the word “diversity” first appeared in IHL’s policies in 1998. The diversity statement was adopted in 2005 and amended in 2013. 

The board’s vote on Thursday turned the diversity statement, which was deleted in its entirety, into a “statement on higher education access and success” according to the board book. 

“One of the strengths of Mississippi is the diversity of its people,” the diversity statement read. “This diversity enriches higher education and contributes to the capacity that our students develop for living in a multicultural and interdependent world.”

Significantly, the diversity statement required the IHL board to evaluate the university presidents and the higher learning commissioner on diversity outcomes. 

The statement also included system-wide goals — some of which it is unclear if the board has achieved — to increase the enrollment and graduation rates of minority students, employ more underrepresented faculty, staff and administrators, and increase the use of minority-owned contractors and vendors. 

Sewell did not respond to questions about if IHL has met those goals or if the board will continue to evaluate presidents on diversity outcomes.

In the new policy, those requirements were replaced with two paragraphs about the importance of respectful dialogue on campus and access to higher education for all Mississippians. 

“We encourage all members of the academic community to engage in respectful, meaningful discourse with the aim of promoting critical thinking in the pursuit of knowledge, a deeper understanding of the human condition, and the development of character,” the new policy reads. “All students should be supported in their educational journey through programming and services designed to have a positive effect on their individual academic performance, retention, and graduation.” 

Also excised was a policy that listed common characteristics of universities in Mississippi, including “a commitment to ethnic and gender diversity,” among others. Another policy on institutional scholarships was also edited to remove a clause that required such programs to “promote diversity.” 

“IHL is committed to higher education access and success among all populations to assist the state of Mississippi in meeting its enrollment and degree completion goals, as well as building a highly-skilled workforce,” the institutional scholarship policy now reads. 

The board also approved a change that requires the universities to review their institutional mission statements on an annual basis.

A policy on “planning principles” will continue to include the word “diverse,” and a policy that states the presidential search advisory committees will “be representative in terms of diversity” was left unchanged.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Continue Reading

Mississippi Today

Closed St. Dominic’s mental health beds to reopen in December under new management

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – Gwen Dilworth – 2024-11-21 13:54:00

The shuttered St. Dominic’s mental health unit will reopen under the management of a for-profit, Texas-based company next month. 

Oceans Behavioral Hospital Jackson, a 77-bed facility, will provide inpatient behavioral health services to adults and seniors and add intensive outpatient treatment services next year. 

“Jackson continuously ranks as one of the cities for our company that shows one of the greatest needs in terms of behavioral health,” Oceans Healthcare CEO Stuart Archer told Mississippi Today at a ribbon cutting ceremony at its location on St. Dominic’s campus Thursday. “…There’s been an outcry for high quality care.” 

St. Dominic’s 83-bed mental health unit closed suddenly in June 2023, citing “substantial financial challenges.”

Merit Health Central, which operates a 71-bed psychiatric health hospital unit in Jackson, sued Oceans in March, arguing that the new hospital violated the law by using a workaround to avoid a State Health Department requirement that the hospital spend at least 17% of its gross patient revenue on indigent and charity care.

Without a required threshold for this care, Merit Health Central will shoulder the burden of treating more non-paying patients, the hospital in South Jackson argued. 

The suit, which also names St. Dominic’s Hospital and the Mississippi Department of Health as defendants, awaits a ruling from Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Tametrice Hodges-Linzey next year. 

The complaint does not bar Oceans from moving forward with its plans to reopen, said Archer.

A hallway inside Oceans Behavioral Hospital in Jackson, Miss., is seen on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, during the facility’s grand opening. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

Oceans operates two other mental health facilities in Mississippi and over 30 other locations in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. 

“Oceans is very important to the Coast, to Tupelo, and it’s important right here in this building. It’s part of the state of Mississippi’s response to making sure people receive adequate mental health care in Mississippi,” said Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann at the Nov. 21 ribbon cutting.

Some community leaders have been critical of the facility. 

“Oceans plans to duplicate existing services available to insured patients while ignoring the underserved and indigent population in need,” wrote Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones in an Oct. 1 letter provided to Mississippi Today by Merit Health. 

Massachusetts-based Webster Equity Partners, a private-equity firm with a number of investments in health care, bought Oceans in 2022. St. Dominic’s is owned by Louisiana-based Catholic nonprofit Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.

Oceans first filed a “certificate of need” application to reopen the St. Dominic’s mental health unit in October 2023. 

Mississippi’s certificate of need law requires medical facilities to receive approval from the state before opening a new health care center to demonstrate there is a need for its services. 

The Department of Health approved the application under the condition that the hospital spend at least 17% of its patient revenue on free or low-cost medical care for low-income individuals – far more than the two percent it proposed. 

Stuart Archer, CEO of Oceans Healthcare, speaks during the grand opening of Oceans Behavioral Hospital in Jackson, Miss., on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

Oceans projected in its application that the hospital’s profit would equal $2.6 million in its third year, and it would spend $341,103 on charity care.

Merit Health contested the conditional approval, arguing that because its mental health unit provides 22% charity care, Oceans providing less would have a “significant adverse effect” on Merit by diverting more patients without insurance or unable to pay for care to its beds. 

Oceans and St. Dominic’s also opposed the state’s charity care condition, arguing that 17% was an unreasonable figure. 

But before a public hearing could be held on the matter, Oceans and St. Dominic’s filed for a “change of ownership,” bypassing the certificate of need process entirely. The state approved the application 11 days later

Merit Health Central then sued Oceans, St. Dominic and the State Department of Health, seeking to nullify the change of ownership. 

“The (change of ownership) filing and DOH approval … are nothing more than an ‘end run’ around CON law,” wrote Merit Health in the complaint. 

Oceans, St. Dominic’s and the Mississippi Department of Health have filed motions to dismiss the case. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Continue Reading

Mississippi Today

How Mississippi’s Supreme Court Runoff Election Could Impact Criminal Cases

Published

on

mississippitoday.org – Caleb Bedillion, The Marshall Project and Daja E. Henry, The Marshall Project – 2024-11-21 11:00:00

Mississippi voters have dealt defeat to one conservative state Supreme Court justice and forced a moderate justice into a Nov. 26 runoff, with the final outcome possibly making the court more open to considering the rights of criminal defendants.

The nine-member court is largely conservative but justices have recently split in high-profile decisions that sharply affected state politics, including a ruling that shut down citizen-led ballot initiatives in Mississippi and allowed some state control over local criminal cases in its majority-Black capital. The court has also rendered rulings that have made the state increasingly unfavorable to defendants appealing their cases. 

“The ability of death row inmates in particular, and inmates in general, to access the courts has been recently curtailed significantly,” Matthew Steffey, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law, told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts following the Nov. 5 election.  

Justice Dawn H. Beam joined the majority in those decisions, acquiring a reputation of being hostile to appeals by criminal defendants, and she ran for reelection this fall as the Republican Party’s favored candidate. However, she lost in the state’s 2nd District on Nov. 5 to David P. Sullivan, a defense attorney who has worked as a public defender.

Judicial races in Mississippi are nonpartisan and Sullivan has given few explicit signals about his judicial outlook. He has supported at least some criminal justice reforms and would be the third justice with experience as a defense attorney on this court. Some reformers nationwide have pushed for more professional diversity on the bench.

Even if Sullivan turns out to be more centrist or independent than Beam on criminal law, any overall shift in power on the court depends on the outcome of a runoff election next week. 

Two-term Justice Jim Kitchens and challenger Jenifer B. Branning will face each other in the Nov. 26 runoff election after neither won more than 50% of the vote on Nov. 5. The runoff will take place across the 22 counties that make up the Supreme Court’s central district, including Hinds County, home to Jackson. Throughout the campaign, the state GOP targeted Kitchens with attacks, while Branning, a Republican state senator with a conservative voting record, is endorsed by the party.

Kitchens is one of two reliably moderate-to-liberal high court justices. Justices from among an additional group of four sometimes veer away from the majority, as well, but can be more unpredictable, and this group does not vote as a bloc. 

Quinn Yeargain, a Michigan State University law professor who closely watches state courts, recently analyzed the court’s voting patterns and found Beam was consistently more conservative than Kitchens in recent cases. Yeargain told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts that conservative and liberal voters often have few signals about how to select a candidate in judicial races. “It’s very hard to label the justices,” they said.


Sullivan — whose father was a Mississippi Supreme Court justice from 1984 to 2000 — called himself a “conservative” throughout his campaign. But he has also touted the value of judicial independence and criticized Beam for campaigning on her endorsement by the state Republican Party. 

“I think that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way,” Sullivan told the Sun Herald newspaper, speaking of Beam’s use of the endorsement. “Judicial races are nonpartisan for a reason. A judge’s impartiality could be called into question.”

Sullivan has broad legal experience, but much of his career has focused on private criminal defense while also doing some public defense work. He told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Mississippi Today that he supported a new administrative rule handed down in 2023 by the state Supreme Court to require continuous legal representation for poor criminal defendants from the beginning of their cases. An investigation by The Marshall Project, ProPublica and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal last year found, however, that many courts were unready at the time to implement the new representation rules.

During the campaign, Sullivan told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Mississippi Today that more work is needed to improve public defense.

Kitchens has also advocated for public defense reforms during his two terms on the court. He told a committee of legislators last year that the “playing field is far from level” between prosecutors and poor defendants.

On other criminal justice issues, he has sometimes dissented from opinions upholding death sentences. His decisions have scrutinized prosecutorial conduct and inadequate legal representation. 

Branning, the Republican senator, has a voting record on criminal justice issues that suggests a harsher approach toward criminal defendants. She has supported higher mandatory minimum sentences and reclassifying misdemeanors as felonies, has opposed expansion of parole and was among only a few lawmakers who voted against legalizing medical marijuana. 

She also supported increasing the jurisdiction of a controversial, state-run police force inside the majority-Black city of Jackson as well as increasing state control over many felony cases in Jackson. The Supreme Court unanimously curtailed much state power over these felony cases, but a majority left some control intact, with Kitchens and another judge dissenting.

Branning did not respond to questions from The Marshall Project – Jackson and Mississippi Today during the Nov. 5 campaign about her possible judicial outlook.

Kitchens was a prosecutor and then in private practice before joining the bench. Branning is a practicing attorney who typically handles civil cases. 

The winner of the Nov. 26 runoff will join Sullivan on a court that in recent years has been restricting the ability of people who say the legal system has wronged them to seek relief, legal experts told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts this month. 

Krissy Nobile, director of the state’s Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, said it’s become “increasingly more difficult to correct a wrongful conviction.” Her office provides legal counsel for indigent people on death row. 

She said a number of recent cases showed the barriers the high court has erected for criminal defendants appealing their convictions, and demonstrated indifference to civil rights violations. Kitchens disagreed with the majority, in full or in part, in all but one of the appeals, which the court unanimously denied.

In a case earlier this year, the Court ruled to monetarily fine an incarcerated person for filing any future post-conviction relief petitions that lacked merit. Kitchens joined a dissenting opinion condemning the fine. In another, the court denied a man who argued that his lawyers were ineffective and that they did not challenge prosecutorial misconduct or false forensic evidence presented by a medical examiner with a checkered past. The court’s majority denied the motion, and in the process, overturned a precedent that allowed ineffective counsel as an adequate reason to give a case another look in some types of appeals. Kitchens dissented, along with two other justices. 

“For decades in Mississippi, the Court held that it would correct errors if there was a violation (of) a person’s fundamental rights,” Nobile said. But she added this has changed considerably. Now, if you land a terrible lawyer who rushes your case, “You are out of luck,” she said, “even if your core constitutional rights have been clearly violated.” 

For the court’s majority, Nobile added, “The legal technicalities now trump a person’s constitutional rights.” 

Branning, left, and Kitchens at the Neshoba County Fair in August 2024. Credit: Eric Shelton, Mississippi Today

The runoff is the nation’s final supreme court race of the year. Thirty-two states held elections for their high courts earlier this year, resulting in a muddled picture, with liberals and conservatives each gaining ground in different places, Bolts reports

Mississippi’s runoff outcome will heavily depend on turnout and the composition of the electorate. In the Supreme Court’s central district, voters split narrowly between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump in the presidential election on Nov. 5, but the runoff is just two days before Thanksgiving and will likely see a large dropoff in turnout. Branning received 42% of the vote in the first round, and Kitchens received 36%, with three other candidates making up the rest. 

There will also be a runoff the same day in the Gulf Coast area between Amy Lassiter St. Pé and Jennifer Schloegel for an open seat on the state Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals hears both criminal and civil cases that have been appealed from lower courts. The Mississippi Supreme Court can hear cases directly on appeal or can assign cases to the Court of Appeals.

Observers agreed that against the national legal backdrop, neither a Kitchens victory nor a Branning victory would lead to a seismic change since neither outcome would flip the court’s conservative lean. Still, a modest shift could impact some of the most controversial cases, such as a rare 5-4 decision that upheld the death sentence in Willie Manning’s case

A Kitchens win, coupled with Sullivan’s upset earlier this month, would deal the Republican Party rare setbacks in a state where it has been dominant and could put moderate forces in a position to grow their numbers further in future elections. 

“You might end up with a normal conservative court,” law professor Yeargain said, “instead of one of the most conservative courts in the country.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Continue Reading

Trending