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Behind First Lady Reeves’ "Fred the Turtle" is a little-known religious welfare initiative slowly receiving state funding

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Behind First Lady Reeves’ “Fred the Turtle” is a little-known religious welfare initiative slowly receiving state funding

Last year, Mississippi First Lady Elee Reeves announced the launch of her new initiative aimed at improving child development – an issue leaders have increasingly recognized as a critical economic driver in the most impoverished state in the nation.

Joined by the press in the Governor’s Mansion, Reeves revealed her new strategy: She wrote a children’s activity book about a turtle named Fred.

Throughout February and into March, about nine months before her husband’s reelection bid, Reeves began traveling the state, garnering media attention as she passed out copies of the book.

Reeves hopes that Fred, named after her childhood imaginary friend, and the story of his journey through Mississippi “will help our children to develop the lifelong skills that they need to become successful adults,” she told TV reporters at the March 2022 press conference.

Reeves’ book — 20 pages of stapled white cardstock featuring comic sans font and a green cartoon turtle on the cover — may have taken center stage at last year’s event, but side remarks signal something far more consequential is brewing.

At the announcement, Reeves was flanked by individuals representing Casey Family Programs, a national foster care foundation credited with funding production of the book, and The Hope Science Institute of Mississippi, a little-known nonprofit that quietly evolved from a child welfare initiative called Family First.

The new nonprofit oversees an initiative called Programs of Hope, which consists of an advisory council chaired by Reeves and Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Dawn Beam.

Financial documentation is not yet available for 2022, so it’s difficult to see where The Hope Science Institute, also known as Hope Rising Mississippi, is receiving its funding, how much it’s receiving, or where it’s going. Officials said a grant from Casey paid to print the initial copies of Reeves’ book, called Fred the Turtle. While the two organizations would not disclose the size of the grant, the governor’s office told Mississippi Today that Casey Family Programs awarded Hope Rising $28,500 to print 33,000 books.

But Mississippi Today also uncovered that Hope Rising quietly paid to print thousands of additional copies of Fred the Turtle with $10,000 in federal Head Start funds appropriated to it by the governor’s office.

A spokesperson in the governor’s office justified the expense by describing the coloring books as “materials to promote better linkages between Head Start Agencies.” This goal is not advertised in PR and news alerts about the book. Pressed further, the spokesperson clarified the books Hope Rising paid to print last year will be distributed to Head Start classrooms starting this May.

“Almost since the beginning of our governor’s administration, we were looking for ways to build hope, and the First Lady and Justice Beam have been working together on Mississippi Programs of Hope in the effort to bring together government, the private sector and nonprofits to work together,” Cindy Cheeks, director of program operations for The Hope Science Institute, said at the 2022 book announcement.

The concept bears striking resemblance to the Family First Initiative, for which Cheeks formerly served as a strategic initiatives coordinator. But onlookers wouldn’t know from press releases or promotional materials how one initiative grew from another.

Family First was a short-lived judicial initiative launched by Beam and former Mississippi First Lady Deborah Bryant in 2018. Former Gov. Phil Bryant and others advertised Family First as the catalyst for a significant overhaul of Mississippi’s child welfare system.

The idea was to prevent child neglect by connecting needy families to resources in their community — food, clothing, beds, money for rent or power bills, transportation, job training, etc. — so that the state didn’t have to remove children from their homes.

Instead, the state sold empty promises through the initiative, Mississippi Today found in its 2022 investigation, and while the members say some meaningful work did occur on the local level, the project’s demise was one of many casualties felt by a larger welfare scandal that broke in 2020.

“They were lying,” Beam recently told Mississippi Today, referring to the Bryant administration’s promise to create a database that could connect families to resources and track needs and outcomes.

While two separate and distinct entities, there was a close association between the Family First Initiative and Families First for Mississippi, the now defunct welfare program run in part Nancy New, who pleaded guilty to fraud and bribery.

The New nonprofit program, also promoted by former Gov. Bryant, served as a vehicle for officials, including former welfare director John Davis, to misspend tens of millions of federal grant funds from the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Beyond sharing a similar name and goal, Family First and Families First were entangled with many of the same characters. They even had the same logo, the result of a bungled branding campaign carried out a PR firm called Cirlot Agency.

After agents from the auditor’s office arrested New and Davis in 2020, Families First for Mississippi immediately shuttered and the court-affiliated Family First Initiative vanished.

“I can tell you that at some point, I was bluer than blue about all this. It broke my heart,” Beam told Mississippi Today in 2022, referring to the welfare scandal.

Beam — daughter of former Mississippi Baptist Convention president and preacher Gene Henderson and sister to Pinelake Baptist Church pastor Chip Henderson — then quoted a Bible verse: “Don’t grow weary in doing good.”

“We can’t quit trying to find resources to help our kids. If anything, we have to fight all the harder,” she said. (Beam spoke to Mississippi Today in an individual capacity, not as a representative of the court.)

Since then, architects of the judicial initiative have tried to rebrand and distance their mission from the corrupt welfare delivery system and its leaders. The new initiative no longer proclaims goals as lofty as reducing the foster care population; it’s more focused on “sharing the power of Hope.”

And while Elee Reeves promotes building resilience in children, her husband squeezes the state of the resources it could use to stabilize households and satisfy that goal.

Gov. Tate Reeves has left millions of federal welfare funds unspent. He sent $130 million in rental assistance back to the federal government. And he continues to adamantly reject billions in Medicaid funds that could provide health insurance to poor parents.

Shortly after arrests in the sprawling welfare scandal, Beam began a new court effort similar to Family First called “Programs of HOPE” under the Mississippi Supreme Court’s Commission on Children’s Justice. HOPE stands for housing and transportation; opportunities for treatment; parent and family support; and economic opportunities — though the program does not itself provide or fund these services.

Former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Jess Dickinson — who headed the state agency that oversees foster care during the Family First era and previously had to recuse himself as the judge in Davis’ criminal case — assisted with HOPE’s creation, narrating and uploading an informational video about the program.

Beam was inspired by the book “Hope Rising” by Casey Gwinn, an attorney and founder of a violence prevention organization, and Chan Hellman, a social work professor at the University of Oklahoma.

The book provides an alternative perspective to the heavily-cited, widely-accepted Adverse Childhood Events or ACE score.

The ACE score is a framework developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control for understanding the correlation between childhood stressors and adult health outcomes — and the corresponding resiliency test, which measures the exception to the rule. In other words, the more traumatic childhood events a person experiences, the higher risk they are for chronic health problems and other challenges in adulthood, unless they have high resiliency.

This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of “trauma-informed care,” which promotes a holistic approach to addressing challenges, recognizing the role that trauma plays in a person’s life.

“Hope science” presents the theory that a person’s level of hope – “the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better,” according to the book – is the greatest indicator of future success.

Beam was struck by the concept.

“Many of us (judges) have been doing this for years. We just didn’t have what to call it,” Beam told Mississippi Today in 2022. “Talking to people in such a way instead of screaming and yelling at them about getting off your butt and finding a house and a job so you can get your kids back, and rather saying, ‘How can I help you? We want your children to be with you because we know that’s going to be the best thing,’” Beam said.

Beam then helped set up a private nonprofit called The Hope Science Institute of Mississippi, and moved the public court function of “Programs of Hope” under the private organization in 2021. The organization changed its operating name to Hope Rising Mississippi in 2022.

“Programs of Hope simply helps them (state and community leaders) to connect and facilitate the exchange of ideas,” Beam recently told Mississippi Today. “It’s exciting to see how light bulbs start going off, where agencies thought, ‘We could never get this done.’ And then all of a sudden, vouchers are there, or transportation is there, those types of things. Parenting – we’ve never had any standard for parenting classes and now that’s coming about. It’s just that opportunity to bring people together.”

The program has received virtually no media attention, save for a feature in Mississippi Christian Living magazine. The article described Hope Rising as a “new nonprofit that aims to create lasting, systemic change in Mississippi through the science of hope (which, yes, is a real thing).”

According to a press release, Justice Beam was supposed to represent Programs of Hope at Elee Reeves’ 2022 book announcement, but her former assistant Cheeks spoke instead. Cheeks explained that Fred the Turtle was born out of the efforts of Programs of Hope.

Cheeks, who worked as a coordinator for Family First during her employment at the Mississippi Supreme Court, is also a longtime administrator for an organization called GenerousChurch, which works to “train Biblical generosity.”

While Beam serves as an advisor to the nonprofit and chairs one of the nonprofit’s programs, the judge is quick to clarify that she is not an employee or a board member for the nonprofit.

The director of Hope Rising Mississippi is Amanda Fontaine, who also serves as director of the Mississippi Association of Broadcasters. Fontaine previously worked for New’s program Families First for Mississippi, according to past articles describing Fontaine as the program’s “director of development and sustainability.”

A 2018-2019 ledger of Families First expenses from New’s nonprofit — which the State Auditor found contained errors — does not reflect that Fontaine was on payroll, but it did list $1,500 worth of reimbursements to Fontaine for food and travel.

“I’m in another role helping numerous people,” Fontaine told the Jackson Free Press in a 2018 feature about her work. “(Families First is) about … the family as a whole. They have so many programs that help families and children.”

(A week before the story ran, New’s nonprofit paid Jackson Free Press $400 for a quarter-page ad with the memo “Congrats to Amanda Fontaine,” according to the ledger).

Hope Rising’s publicly listed address is Fontaine’s residence in Brandon.

Its board president is Jeff Rimes, whose law partner Andy Taggart was on the state steering committee of the original Family First Initiative.

For Rimes, the familiar characters between the old and new welfare initiatives doesn’t come as a surprise. “I often say Mississippi is ‘one big small town.’ Some overlap is inevitable in the world of nonprofits and government,” Rimes said in an email.

Another team member and co-founder of Hope Rising is former FBI agent Christopher Freeze, who served a stint as the director of the embattled Mississippi Department of Human Services under Bryant. Bryant appointed Freeze to replace Davis in August of 2019 after Davis was ousted for fraud.

After leaving the agency as Bryant’s term was ending in early 2020, Freeze dove into the field of trauma-informed leadership and began studying for his doctorate in philosophy in organizational and community leadership. He started motivational speaking and formed an LLC for his services called Mr. Freeze Enterprises.

“I know that a lot of you have programs and services,” Freeze said to social workers and service providers in a keynote address at Hope Rising’s inaugural event, MS Hope Summit, just days after Elee Reeves’ 2022 press conference. “I know that you think that you’re involved in programs and services and that that’s the goal. Let me just tell you, that is not the goal. Your programs are pathways to those goals. Your job is to help that person understand what their goal is and how your programs can help them achieve their goal. And then help them maintain, motivate their willpower.”

Mississippi Child Protection Services Director Andrea Sanders, who oversees the state’s child welfare and foster care system, and many state employees attended last year’s summit. Tickets to the event were $25 and the organization also solicited event sponsorships from $500 to $10,000.

A couple months later, the Governor’s Office gave Hope Science Institute $10,000 in funds from Head Start, the federal preschool program for low-income families. All of the money was used to print 7,500 copies of Elee Reeves’ Fred the Turtle book, according to records Mississippi Today obtained.

“It was a one-time expense of the Head Start Collaboration Office for printing services for materials to promote better linkages between Head Start Agencies, other child and family agencies, and to carry out the activities of the State Director of Head Start Collaboration,” Shelby Wilcher, spokesperson for the governor, said in an email last year.

Head Start does not appear as one of the agency partners listed at the end of Fred the Turtle, nor does Hope Rising appear to do work with Head Start centers.

Asked for more clarification, Wilcher said in a statement that after Fred the Turtle was “so well received by students,” Casey Family Programs awarded a second grant to offer books for students in all of Mississippi’s 82 counties. After the second Casey grant, “the decision was made to expand the initiative to kids in Head Start,” though nearly a year after first ordering the books to be printed, they have not yet been delivered.

“Once the books funded through the Casey Foundation have been distributed, Fred the Turtle will crawl into Head Start classrooms,” Wilcher wrote.

The aim of the Hope Rising, which has already started delivering lectures to government workers about the science of hope, revolves not around providing evidence-based services to low-income families, but promoting the concept that “hope” is a tangible quality that can be taught, measured and utilized to overcome trauma and generational poverty. This year’s annual “Hope Summit” is set for April.

Hope Rising advertises a summer camp called Camp HOPE America, a national program with which the nonprofit is “working to secure its affiliation status,” and a year-long program called Pathways, which is operated by existing local community organizations, according to its website.

Hope Rising also takes some credit for the state offering five new housing vouchers to young adults aging out of foster care — a program called the Foster Youth to Independence (FYI) Voucher program that the long-standing Tennessee Valley Regional Housing Authority applied to the federal government to start receiving.

“A wide variety of organizations within the state worked for months to forge a process for leading FYI vouchers and determine the supports necessary to assist these youth in transitioning to independence,” a Hope Rising press release says.

It also promotes an initiative called “365 days of prayer.”

Hope Rising was initially incorporated as Hope Science Institute of Mississippi by Madison pastor Dan Hall. At that time, the organization’s website described its mission as “changing the trajectory of our most at-risk youths” and outlined its four action areas: “pray, preach, practice and partner.”

“Can you imagine the impact the Body of Christ could make as we all come together to strengthen families and serve on another at one time?” the old website read. “We are looking at April being a month of hope in action across the state through the Body of Christ, organized with purposeful impact in your own community.”

Cheeks told Mississippi Today in 2022 that Hope Science Institute of Mississippi operates mainly on grants from Casey Family Programs and other private funding. She said that money goes towards administrative salaries, planning and meetings. The organization itself does not provide any direct child welfare services.

Rimes said the majority of time put in by nonprofit staff has been unpaid. “I have been deeply impressed and am extremely appreciative of the servants heart they have displayed,” he wrote.

Rimes did not answer questions from Mississippi Today about how much money Hope Rising gets from Casey Family Programs. Casey Family Programs also would not answer questions about its partnership with Hope Rising.

“Hope Rising has a diverse board of professionals from across our State who are focused on ensuring hope is brought to Mississippi in the best possible way. Financial integrity will always be a focus of our board,” Rimes said in an email.

In 2021, the nonprofit had revenue of $8,000 and spent $3,800, all on administrative expenses, according to the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office. Information for 2022 is not yet listed. Hope Rising’s IRS reports, called 990s, are not available online. Rimes provided Mississippi Today a 990 filing from the nonprofit for 2021 that did not contain any financial data. The 2022 filing is not due until May.

Mississippi Today reviewed state expenditures to The Hope Science Institute of Mississippi in the state’s public-facing accounting database. In fiscal year 2022, Hope Science Institute of Mississippi received $2,525 from the Mississippi Department of Education for employee training, $1,300 from the Mississippi Department of Human Services, $3,000 from the Department of Mental Health and $10,000 from the governor’s office.

In publicly available dollar figures, Fred the Turtle is Hope Rising’s largest tangible offering to the state since the nonprofit’s creation. The book is promoted on Hope Rising’s website, which says 1,750 copies have been distributed in eight communities. It also asks for donations to “help Fred tour Mississippi.”

Elee Reeves’ 2022 announcement of Fred the Turtle came with a hodge podge of vaguely stated goals, such as “to build and bring resources that strengthen families and children in our state,” Cheeks said.

Russell Woods, senior director for strategic consulting at Casey Family Programs, said during the press conference that Fred the Turtle aligns with his organization’s mission to reduce the need for foster care. The organization has repeatedly declined to discuss the project with Mississippi Today.

“This project was important to invest in because it aligns with Casey’s vision to improve child wellbeing outcomes,” he said during the 2022 press conference. “And part of a healthy child development and wellbeing is literacy, education and social functioning. All of these are elements that are being effectively used in this activity book.”

The last page of the book cites several medical journals that Reeves said she used to inform her writing and the activities in the book. It also thanks several partners, including “The Casey Foundation,” “The Hope Institute,” Mississippi Department of Human Services, Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, Mississippi Department of Education and The Cirlot Agency, the same branding agency that received $1.7 million in welfare funds for promotional materials during the Family First era.

Cirlot CEO Liza Cirlot Looser told Mississippi Today that Cirlot designed the cover and laid out the pages in Fred the Turtle for free.

Mississippi isn’t the only place in which Casey Family Programs is partnering with the spouses of governors to build support for child welfare reform.

“The spouses of governors (first spouses) can leverage their influence to advance child and family well-being,” its website states. “Although not elected officials, first spouses are important allies to child welfare leaders as they seek to collaborate with a wide range of partners, build upstream prevention services, and transform the child welfare system.”

Meanwhile, the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, an agency under Gov. Reeves, is still failing to draw down the unlimited federal matching funds newly offered by the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 that could be used to prevent neglect and keep families intact.

In recent weeks, the First Lady’s office issued a media blast about her book tour, during which she read Fred the Turtle to students in Canton, Jackson, Hattiesburg and Meridian. WDAM reported that Elee Reeves’ goal is to distribute 30,000 copies of her book.

Dixie Attendance Center student Brayden Cooke said this about the First Lady’s visit: “It was amazing, but I was also kind of nervous because it’s my first time seeing her and I didn’t want to act a fool.”

In the book, readers follow a character named Jimmy, a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico. On his seafood delivery route in Hattiesburg, Fisherman Jimmy encounters a turtle he names Fred.

Together, they travel to Meridian, Columbus and the U.S. Air Force Base, Natchez, Indianola and the B.B. King Museum, Oxford, where they learn about William Faulkner, and the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson, briefly running into Gov. Reeves. Along the journey, the book asks children to contemplate and write down their dreams, goals, fears and superpowers. Other pages ask the reader to find the turtles hiding in the Capitol building, connect the dots to finish a picture of a guitar or complete a word search.

The State’s Education Superintendent Carey Wright, who also spoke at the 2022 press conference, said the new book “shows all Mississippians how much the First Lady values the children of our state.”

Wright then turned to Reeves. “If I might say,” Wright said, “you might have another vocation waiting for you when you finish this job.”

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

Mississippi Today

Pharmacy benefit manager reform likely dead

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mississippitoday.org – Gwen Dilworth – 2025-04-01 17:26:00

Hotly contested legislation that aimed to increase the transparency and regulation of pharmacy benefit managers appeared dead in the water Tuesday after a lawmaker challenged the bill for a rule violation.

The bill was sent back to conference after Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, raised a point of order challenging the addition of code sections to the bill, which will likely kill it. 

House members in the past have chosen to turn a blind eye to the rule, which would require the added code sections to be removed when the bill is returned to conference. This fatal flaw will make it difficult to revive the legislation. 

“It will almost certainly die,” said House Speaker Jason White, who authored the legislation. “And you can celebrate that with your pharmacist when you see them.”

“…This wasn’t ‘gotcha.’ Everybody in this chamber knew that code sections were added, because the attempt was to make 1123 more suitable to all the parties.”

The bill sought to protect patients and independent pharmacists, who have warned that if legislators do not pass a law this year to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, which serve as middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry, some pharmacies may be forced to close. They say that the companies’ low payments and unfair business practices have left them struggling to break even.

The bill underwent several revisions in the House and Senate before reaching its most recent form, which independent pharmacists say has watered the bill down and will not offer them adequate protection. 

House Bill 1123, authored by White, originally focused on the transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. The Senate then beefed up the bill by adding provisions barring the companies from steering patients to affiliate pharmacies and prohibiting spread pricing – the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits. 

House Speaker Jason White brings the House of Representatives to order at the beginning of the new legislative session at the State Capitol, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025 in Jackson.

Independent pharmacists, who have flocked to the Capitol to advocate for reform this session, widely supported the Senate’s version of the bill. 

The Senate incorporated several recommendations from the House into its bill, saying that they believed that the legislation would have the House’s support. 

Instead, the House sent the bill to conference and requested additional changes, including new language that would eliminate self-funded insurance plans, or health plans in which employers assume the financial risk of covering employees’ health care costs themselves, from a section of the bill that prohibits pharmacy benefit managers from steering patients to specific pharmacies.

This language seeks to satisfy employers, who argue that regulating pharmacy benefit managers’ business practices will lead to higher health insurance costs. 

Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, who has spearheaded pharmacy benefit manager reform efforts in the Senate, previously said that adding the language to the bill would “remove any protection out of the law.” But she signed the conference report that included the language Monday after a heated conference meeting between lawmakers. 

Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs and co-author of the bill, said the bill has something for everybody, gesturing to its concessions for employers and independent pharmacists. He said the bill gives independent pharmacists 85% of what they wanted. 

Mississippi Independent Pharmacies Association director Robert Dozier was not available for comment by the time the story published. 

Zuber told House members Tuesday to “blame the Senate” for the slow progress of pharmacy benefit manager reform in Mississippi, citing the body’s failure to take up a drug pricing transparency bill half a decade ago, for three years in a row.

“If the Senate had followed the leadership and the legislation that we drafted those many years ago, we would not be here,” Zuber said. “We would have the information on drug pricing, we would have the information and transparency on (pharmacy benefit managers) and we would have the ultimate reason as to why drug costs continue to rise.”

Members of the House expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation Tuesday, arguing it did not do enough to ensure lower prescription drug costs for consumers. 

“I’m going to try to do something next year that goes even further,” Zuber responded.

For the past several years, lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, but none have made it as far as this session. 

“We’ll go another year,” said White. 

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

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Feuding GOP lawmakers prepare to leave Jackson without a budget, let governor force them back

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-01 19:23:00

After months of bitter Republican political infighting, the Legislature appears likely to end its session Wednesday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown if they don’t come back and adopt one by June 30. 

After the House adjourned Tuesday night, Speaker Jason White said he had presented the Senate with a final offer to extend the session, which would give the two chambers more time to negotiate a budget. As for now, the 100 or so bills that make up the state budget are dead.

The Senate leadership was expected to meet and consider the offer Tuesday evening, White said. But numerous senators both Republican and Democrat said they would oppose such a parliamentary resolution, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has also said it’s unlikely and that the governor will have to force lawmakers back into special session.

White said he believes, if the Senate would agree to extend the session and restart negotiations, lawmakers could pass a budget and end the 2025 session by Sunday, only a few days later than planned.

But if the Senate chooses not to pass a resolution extending the session, White said the House would end the session on Wednesday.

It would take a two-thirds vote of support in both chambers to suspend the rules and extend the session. The Senate opposition appears to be enough to prevent that. 

Still, the speaker said he believes Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Senate leaders are considering the proposal. But he said if he doesn’t hear a positive response by Wednesday, the House will adjourn and wait for Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session at a later date. 

“We are open to (extending the session), but we will not stay here until Sunday waiting around to see if they might do it,” White said.  

White said leaving the Capitol without a budget and punting the issue to a special session might not cool tensions between the chambers, as some lawmakers hope. 

“I think when you leave here and you end up in a special session, some folks say, ‘Well everybody that’s upset will cool down by then.’ They may, or it may get worse. It may shine a different and specific light on some of the things in this budget and the differences in the House and Senate,” White said. “Whereas, I think everybody now is in the legislative mode, and we might get there.”

The Mississippi Constitution does not grant the governor much power, but if Gov. Tate Reeves calls lawmakers into a special session, he gets to set the specific legislative agenda — not lawmakers. 

White said the governor could potentially use his executive authority to direct lawmakers to take up other bills, such as those related to education, before getting to the budget. 

“When we leave here without a budget, it is entirely the governor’s prerogative to when he (sets a special session) and how he does that.”

While the future of the state’s budget hangs in the balance, lawmakers have spent the remaining days of their regular session trying to pass the few remaining bills that remained alive on their calendars. 

House approves DEI ban, Senate could follow suit on Wednesday 

The House on Tuesday passed a proposal to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public schools, and both chambers approved a measure to establish a form of early voting. 

The House approved a conference report compromise to ban DEI programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from K-12 schools, community colleges and universities. If the Senate follows suit, Mississippi would join a number of other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump, who has made rooting DEI out of the federal government one of his top priorities. 

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers follows hours of heated debate in which Democrats, all almost of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. Legislative Republicans argued the legislation will elevate merit in education and remove from school settings “divisive concepts” that exacerbate divisions among different identity groups. 

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the act, but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law, but only after they go through an internal campus review process that would give schools time to make changes. The legislation could also withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. 

Legislature sends ‘early voting lite’ bill to governor 

The Legislature also overwhelmingly passed a proposal to establish a watered down version of early voting, though the legislation is titled “in-person excused voting,” and not early voting.

The proposal establishes 22 days of in-person voting before Election Day that requires voters to go to the circuit clerk’s office or another location county officials have designated as a secure early voting facility, such as a courtroom or a board of supervisors meeting room. 

To cast an early vote, someone must present a valid form of photo ID and list one of about 15 legal excuses to vote before Election Day. The excuses, however, are broad and would, in theory, allow many people to cast early ballots. 

Examples of valid excuses are voters expecting to work on Election Day, being at least 65 years old, being currently enrolled in college or potentially travelling outside of their county on Election Day. 

Since most eligible voters either work, go to college or are older than 65 years of age, these excuses would apply to almost everyone. 

“Even though this isn’t early voting as we saw originally, it makes this more convenient for hard working Mississippians to go by their clerks’ office and vote in person after showing an ID 22 days prior to an election,” Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England said. 

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves opposes early voting, so it’s unclear if he would sign the measure into law or veto it. 

Both chambers are expected to gavel at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to debate the final items on their agenda. 

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

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‘A lot of us are confused’: Lacking info, some Jacksonians go to wrong polling place

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mississippitoday.org – @mintamolly – 2025-04-01 18:43:00

Johnny Byrd knew that when his south Jackson neighborhood Carriage Hills changed wards during redistricting last year, his neighbors would have trouble finding their correct polling place on Election Day.

So he bought a poster board and inscribed it with their new voting location – Christ Tabernacle Church.

“I made a sign and placed it in front of the entrance to our neighborhood that told them exactly where to go so there would be no confusion,” said Byrd, vice president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods.

Still, on April 1, a car full of voters from a senior living facility who should have gone to Christ Tabernacle were driven to their old polling place. 

“I thought it was unfortunate they had to get there and find out rather than knowing in advance that their polling location was different,” said Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson who was on the ground Tuesday helping constituents with voting.

One of those elderly women became frustrated and said she no longer wanted to vote, Norwood said, though her companions tried to convince her otherwise. By midday Tuesday, 300 people had voted at Christ Tabernacle, one of the city’s largest precincts currently in terms of registered voters, but among the lowest in turnout historically.

Voting rights advocates and candidates vying for municipal office in Jackson are keeping an eye on issues facing voters at the polls, though without official results, it remains to be seen if that will dampen turnout this election with the hotly contested Democratic primary.

“I still believed it was gonna be low,” Monica McInnis, a program manager for the nonprofit OneVoice, said of turnout. “I was expecting it would be a little higher because of what is on the ballot and how many people are running in all of the wards as well as the mayor’s race.”

A daughter helps her mother casts her votes as mayoral candidate John Horhn chats with voter at Christ Tabernacle Church in south Jackson, Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

The situation is evolving as the day goes on, but the main issues are twofold. One, thousands of Jackson voters have new precinct locations after redistricting last year put them into a new city council ward. 

Two, some voters didn’t realize their polling place for the municipal elections may differ from where they voted in last year’s national elections, which are run by the counties. 

In Mississippi, voters are assigned two precincts that are often but not always the same: A municipal location for city elections and a county location for senate, gubernatorial and presidential elections 

“People in Mississippi, we go to the same polling location for three years, and that fourth year, it changes,” said Jada Barnes, an organizer with the Jackson-based nonprofit MS Votes. “A lot of us are confused. When people are going to the polling place today, they’re seeing it is closed, so they’re just going back home which is making turnout go even lower.” 

Barnes said she’s hearing this primarily from a few Jackson voters who called a hotline that MS Votes is manning. Lack of awareness around polling locations is a big deterrent, she said, because most people are trying to squeeze their vote in between work, school or family responsibilities. 

“Maybe you’re on your lunch break, you only got 30 minutes to go vote, you learn that your polling location has changed and now you have to go back to work,” she said. 

Norwood said he heard from a group of students assigned to vote at Christ Tabernacle who had attempted to vote at the wrong precinct and were told their names weren’t on the rolls. They didn’t know they had been moved from Ward 4 to Ward 6, Norwood said, meaning they expected to vote in a different council race until reaching the polls Tuesday.

Though voters have a duty to be informed of their polling location, Barnes said city and circuit clerks and local election commissioners are ultimately responsible for making sure voters know where to go on Election Day. 

Angela Harris, the Jackson municipal clerk, said her office worked to inform voters by mailing out thousands of letters to Jacksonians whose precincts changed, including the roughly 6,000 whose wards changed during the 2024 redistricting. 

“I am over-swamped,” she said yesterday. 

Despite her efforts, at least one voter said he never got a letter. Stephen Brown learned through Facebook, not an official notice, that he was moved from Ward 1 to Ward 2. 

Stephen Brown, a resident of Briarwood Heights in northeast Jackson, ran into difficulty voting April 1.

A resident of the Briarwood Heights neighborhood in northeast Jackson, Brown’s efforts to vote Tuesday have been complicated by mixed messages and a lack of communication. He has yet to vote, even though he showed up at the polls at 7:10 this morning. 

His odyssey took him to two wrong locations, where the poll managers instructed Brown to call his ward’s election commissioner, who did not answer multiple calls, Brown said. Brown finally learned through a Facebook comment that he could look up his new precinct on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website — if he scrolled down the page past his county precinct information.

This afternoon, Brown has a series of meetings planned, so now he’s hoping for a 30-minute window to try voting one more time, even though he’s skeptical it will make a difference. 

“I’m a very disenchanted voter, because I’ve been let down so much,” he said. “I vote because it’s the thing that I’m supposed to do and because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, but not because I truly believe in it, you know?” 

Brown’s not alone in facing turbulence. Back at Christ Tabernacle, one Jackson voter, who declined to give her name, said she’s frustrated from having to drive to three polling locations in one day.

“I’m dissatisfied with the fact that I had to drive from one end of this street and all of the back to come over here when I usually vote over here on Highway 18,” she said. “This was a great inconvenience, gas wise and time wise.”

The same thing happened to Rodney Miller. He called the confusion some voters are facing in this election “unnecessary.” 

“That ain’t the way we should be handling business,” he said. “We should be looking out for one another better than that, you know? It’s already enough getting people out to vote, and when you confuse them when they try? Come on now. That’s discouraging.”

Christ Tabernacle is the second largest precinct in the city in terms of registered voters, with 3,330 assigned to vote there as of 2024, according to documents retrieved from the municipal election committee. But it had one of the lowest voter turnout rates – 10% in the 2021 primary election before redistricting and before it became so large.

Byrd mentioned the much higher turnout in places like Ward 1 in northeast Jackson, compared to where he lives in south Jackson. Why does Byrd think this is?

“Civics,” Byrd said. “They took civics out of school. If you ask the average person what is the role and responsibility of any elected official, they can’t tell you.”

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

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