A Senate bill seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion offices on Mississippi college campuses would also create a taskforce to study how the state’s higher education system can become more efficient, a discussion some have feared is the opening salvo in an effort to closeor merge universities. 

In addition to banning DEI initiatives, Senate Bill 2515, also known as the “Requiring Efficiency For Our Colleges And Universities System” (REFOCUS) Act, would seek to answer questions like, why does Mississippi have a lower rate of postsecondary degrees than other states and what can be done about it when fewer high school graduates will go to college in the coming years? 

Last year’s version of this bill, which was introduced at the same time as other legislation to close universities, sparked concerns that lawmakers were dipping their toes into closing some of the state’s eight public universities. An online petition garnered more than 15,000 signatures opposing the bill.

But the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, told Mississippi Today that’s not her goal. The chair of the Senate Colleges and Universities committee said she wants to use the taskforce to dig into a range of questions, from if Mississippi’s higher education funding formula is equitable to why some universities in the state have better graduation rates than others. 

“I think we have to in Mississippi be efficient with the dollars that we have, and this is what this taskforce is looking at,” Boyd said. “The goal of the taskforce is not to close any colleges but is simply to look and see what are the plans that they have to increase their enrollment?”

By “efficiency,” Boyd said she’s referring to whether state dollars invested in Mississippi’s colleges and universities “are producing the best results.” The taskforce would deliver its findings by the end of the year and be led by lawmakers, members of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, and representatives from Mississippi’s research universities, regional colleges and historically Black universities. 

“We need to know what the clear path is ahead and what is the direction we are moving in,” Boyd added. 

Nonetheless, discussions about closing universities are in the ether in Mississippi. Last year, Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, introduced a bill to close three public universities in an effort, he said, to start a conversation. The bill recalled a plan proposed years ago by Gov. Haley Barbour  to merge Mississippi University for Women into Mississippi State University and merge the state’s three HBCUs into one.

“Sometimes you just have to pull the Band-Aid off the wound,” Polk said last year. “Until I introduced this bill, no one was talking about that.”

Boyd did not pass Polk’s bill out of committee. This year, Boyd said she has talked with leaders of the state’s universities, and they are excited to have conversations about how to graduate more Mississippians and keep them working in the state. 

The taskforce will eventually look at the state’s community college system, Boyd said. The meetings will be livestreamed and potentially held in college towns throughout the state, an idea Boyd said came at the suggestion of a university she would not name. 

“This all is about making them more efficient and then creating a stronger workforce for the state,” she said. “How do we do this because we know we’re going to have, if population trends are what they predict, we know we’re going to have fewer students from the state of Mississippi.” 

Boyd tied the taskforce to anti-DEI legislation because, she said, there is a “correlation” between efforts to ban DEI and increase efficiency.

“DEI programs have not proven to be in many situations particularly efficient at really helping people,” she said. “DEI programs in many cases have not been the most productive use of dollars.” 

Instead, the taskforce should be looking at how the universities can more efficiently help people on their own merit, she added, whether that’s understanding how best to serve different student populations or how to attract nontraditional students like single mothers. 

“We have a tremendous number of people that start college that don’t finish it and then we have a lot of people with student debt,” Boyd said. “Why is that? What happened that they could not graduate? That’s where the emphasis is.” 

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

Several health care organizations gathered at the Capitol Thursday to advocate for patients and call on legislative leaders to expand Medicaid. 

“Forty-seven years after I began my practice in Laurel, (it’s) 2025, there are still thousands and thousands of Mississippians who don’t have access to health care,” said Dr. Dan Jones, former chancellor of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Jones was joined by the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Lung Association and Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. 

Advocates said there is “no time like the present” to take advantage of a state-federal program that would bring in billions of federal dollars, as 40 other states have done since the Affordable Care Act made it an option in 2014. 

Expanding Medicaid in Mississippi would provide health insurance to tens of thousands of low-income working Mississippians whose income is too much to qualify for Medicaid under the state’s strict eligibility requirements but too little to afford private insurance from the marketplace. 

As it stands, Mississippi has one of the country’s strictest income requirements for Medicaid. Childless adults don’t qualify, and parents must make less than 28% of the federal poverty level, a mere $7,000 annually for a family of three, to qualify. More times than not, that means that working a full-time job counts against an individual – despite anti-expansion critics arguing that Medicaid should only apply to those who work.

House and Senate Medicaid committees passed expansion “dummy” bills on Wednesday ahead of legislative deadlines, meaning the issue is alive, but no details have been fleshed out as lawmakers say they’re waiting to hear what a Trump administration will bring. 

Meanwhile, Gov. Tate Reeves continues to publicly oppose the policy, which he derisively calls “welfare.”

Expansion will face all the problems it faced last year – too few votes in the Senate, plus disagreements over the income threshold and whether or not to include a work requirement – with the added issue of a federal administration in transition.

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

The state House is again trying to reinstate Mississippi voters’ right to place issues directly on the ballot.

But the latest measure, again, would not allow voters to consider any abortion issues.

A House committee on Wednesday passed House Concurrent Resolution 30, which is still several legislative steps away from being finalized. It would reinstate citizens’ ability to gather signatures to propose new state laws or change existing laws. The measure also would not allow them to amend the state Constitution. 

“I’m trying to give something to the people,” House Constitution Chairman Price Wallace told reporters after the committee vote. 

The House leadership’s previous recent proposals also would have barred voters from considering any initiative related to abortion. However, the Senate has blocked voters regaining any right to ballot initiatives.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated a person’s constitutional right to an abortion, Mississippi’s so-called “trigger law” went into effect that banned abortion in most instances.

But after the nation’s highest court ruled in 2022 that state governments have the authority to set abortion laws, voters in several conservative-run states elected to protect abortion access.

The current House proposal would require petitioners to gather signatures from 12% of the number of people who voted in the last presidential election, which Wallace estimates to be around 145,000 people. 

One change from past proposals is that the current legislation would require petitioners to gather an equal number of signatures from the state’s three Supreme Court districts, instead of from Congressional districts. 

“We looked at the Supreme Court districts, which is a lot easier to get the signatures,” Wallace said. “That’s why we went with that.” 

Mississippi law establishes three distinct Supreme Court districts, commonly referred to as the Northern, Central and Southern districts. But these districts have not been redrawn since 1987, and a federal judge is currently considering a case to redraw those districts.  

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private law firms on behalf of a group of Black Mississippians including state Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, sued state officials in April 2022 arguing the districts as currently drawn do not allow Black citizens to elect a candidate of their own choosing. 

If U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock orders the state to redraw the districts while the state implements a new voter initiative process, it could lead to voter confusion or further delay. 

Wallace said he was not aware of the lawsuit and it was not a factor in his decision to require petitions to gather signatures from the Supreme Court districts instead of congressional districts.  

Population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau and voter data from the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office analyzed by Mississippi Today show that the number of people and active voters in the three areas are not equal. 

There are 659,920 active voters in the Northern District, 621,181 in the Central District and 699,806 in the Southern District. 

This is now the fourth year in a row that lawmakers have attempted to reinstate some version of a ballot initiative after the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2021 ruled the state’s initiative process was unworkable because of a technicality of the number of the state’s congressional districts. 

The Senate killed a similar House bill in 2023,  and it failed to pass its own version of a ballot initiative proposal last year. The Senate has not yet advanced its own ballot initiative proposal out of a committee this session.

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