Following several delays and scrutiny over funding and location, construction of the state’s first skilled pediatric facility is underway in Jackson.

The Alyce G. Clarke Center for Medically Fragile Children will care for patients younger than 19 with complex medical conditions, providing long-term care for some children and training for others’ families to care for them at home.

“For long-term residents, this will feel like a home,” said Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Mississippi Center, in a press release. “They won’t feel like they are in a hospital, even though they will be provided with the same level of care.” 

Construction of the 20-bed facility began this spring and is planned for completion by fall 2025.

This is the second time the project has broken ground. The center held its first groundbreaking ceremony in 2019, a month before former Gov. Phil Bryant left office, and planned to begin construction in 2021.

Jones said the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the project, attributing the delay to rising costs and supply chain issues.

UMMC awarded the $12.2 million contract to Mid State Construction Co., Inc in February. The total project costs are estimated at $15.9 million.

The project will be funded by $14.5 million in bonds awarded by the Mississippi Legislature in 2019 and 2020, though the project was initially intended to be paid for by private funders.

The state Legislature originally passed a law in 2018 to lease state owned land off Ridgewood Road in Jackson to a nonprofit, which would construct, own and operate the facility. Then-First Lady Deborah Bryant’s chief of staff set up the nonprofit that would spearhead and fundraise for the project, Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children, that year. 

Nancy New, the Families First leader who pleaded guilty in 2022 for her role in channeling Mississippi welfare grant funds for illegal projects, served on the nonprofit’s board.

Tax returns from 2018 to 2020 show Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children raised $3.2 million. The Clarion-Ledger reported that UMMC made a $1 million donation to the center. In 2020, after New was arrested, she was removed from the board, the nonprofit dissolved and Children’s of Mississippi, the pediatric division of UMMC, assumed responsibility for the project. The nonprofit transferred its remaining $1.3 million to UMMC.

The Clarion-Ledger reported in 2020 that Families First, the program New ran through her nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center, was “a partner of the project and will offer services to families at the facility,” according to Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children’s now-defunct website. State Auditor Shad White, who investigated the sprawling fraud scheme, said he did not find any evidence of payments between New’s nonprofit and the center.

However, Mississippi Department of Human Services’ ongoing civil suit, which serves as the state’s effort to recoup millions in allegedly misspent welfare funds, describes Families First’s original proposal to use welfare funds to build the pediatric facility as a “model” for alleged misspending that followed – the construction of a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Before New’s nonprofit entertained entering a $5 million sublease with University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation, allegedly as a way to circumvent the federal prohibition on using welfare funds for “brick and mortar” projects, the idea was for her nonprofit to enter a similar lease to build the pediatric facility with welfare funds, emails show. It’s unclear why that lease was never executed, according to MDHS’s lawsuit, but White acknowledged to The Clarion-Ledger that New “could have directed funding to the center by other means.”

Patients at the new center will include newborns who require additional time on ventilators to adolescents that require skilled nursing care. The conditions of patients at the center will range from children who have been injured in accidents to those who have congenital or genetic conditions.

Children’s of Mississippi has for years provided long-term care to patients in an acute-care hospital setting. The new center will provide a more comfortable setting for long-term care. 

“This new facility is designed to look and feel like each room is an individual home,” said Dr. Christian Paine, chief of the Division of Pediatric Palliative Medicine at UMMC. “In addition, children whose families are training to learn the skills necessary to eventually move home with medical technology will have a more home-like environment in which to learn.” 

The new pediatric facility is named for former Rep. Clarke, the first African American woman to serve in the Mississippi Legislature and an advocate for the project. She became involved when Calvary Baptist Church in west Jackson, the area Clarke represented, planned to renovate its building to house the center. After years of working on the proposal, the church was later left out of the plan. Some lawmakers accused state leadership of hijacking the church’s proposal to change the location to east of the interstate, next to the wealthier neighborhood of Eastover.

“It appears that it’s difficult for people to understand that we want good, nice things in our neighborhood, too,” Clarke said at the time in 2018.

“What I was trying to do was to improve that area over there and the fact that it’s not in the area, it doesn’t make me feel good,” Clarke told Mississippi Today on Thursday. “But at least I’m glad they’re finally getting to work on it and it’s something that we’ve needed for years.”

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