Mississippi Today
Could this be the year political games end and MAEP is funded and fixed?
The Mississippi Adequate Education Program, which provides the basics for operating local school districts, was nearly gutted in 1997 just as it was beginning its long legislative journey.
Then-Senate Appropriations Chair Jack Gordon, D-Okolona, passed an amendment to the legislation in his committee that essentially said the funding formula had to be fully funded only as money was available. The Gordon amendment was met with harsh criticism by the education community.
Gordon soon backtracked and said he wanted to offer a new amendment on the Senate floor that would take the legislation back to its original intent, mandating that the Legislature “shall” fully fund the formula.
But the Senate leadership wanted to take a different approach. Senate leaders sought out Sen. Jim Bean of Hattiesburg, a Republican and one of the more respected members of the chamber, to offer the amendment. Bean, who like many Republicans at the time supported the landmark bill, offered the amendment that was approved by his colleagues, Republicans and Democrats alike.
Today, another Republican — Senate Education Chair Dennis DeBar of Leakesville — is trying to fix the important legislation and move beyond the political fights that have engulfed MAEP for years.
Several wars have broken out over the funding formula over the years. Despite the word “shall” being reinserted by the Bean amendment, legislators and Republican governors have ignored the full funding mandate, and the Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled that shall did not really mean shall. On top of the continuing fight over full funding, former Speaker Philip Gunn and then-Lt. Gov Tate Reeves have tried unsuccessfully to replace the program.
Amid all the fighting, efforts to fix issues with the Adequate Education Program have been ignored. Some took the position that MAEP could not be fixed. Instead, it needed to be replaced. Others took the position that any effort to change MAEP would be done for the ulterior purpose of hurting public education. After all, many of those clamoring most for a replacement were supporters of vouchers and other programs most often opposed by public school supporters.
As a result of all the fighting, MAEP has remained in limbo.
DeBar, as unassuming a major committee chair as can be found in the halls of the Capitol, wants to provide a fix — not a rewrite — of the program while fully funding it. At least that was his position in the 2023 session and is presumably his position this year. He has filed legislation to accomplish his goal.
The major issue DeBar wants to address is the amount of local money wealthy school districts have to contribute to the formula. The concept behind MAEP is simple: Through an objective formula, based on the cost needed to operate adequately performing and fiscally conservative schools, a base student cost is developed. The state provides school districts with a certain percentage of that base student cost for each student. The state provides more of the base student cost for poorer districts and less for more affluent districts.
When the formula was developed in 1997, there was a desire to ensure no school district would receive less funding under the newly created Adequate Education Program than it was receiving under the old program. That made sense at the time, but through the years that well meaning commitment has turned into what some would call a financial windfall for a handful of wealthy districts and an albatross for lawmakers funding MAEP.
A major part of DeBar’s fix is requiring those wealthier districts to pay a larger percentage of the costs.
DeBar’s proposal passed the Senate last year but died in the House, where then-Speaker Philip Gunn did not want to do anything to make MAEP more palatable to a larger group of people. Instead, Gunn wanted to replace MAEP altogether.
But it is important to remember that Gunn’s proposed replacement would have eliminated an objective funding formula. Instead, Gunn’s proposal would have left it to legislators to pull a base student cost out of the air. That would leave legislators the option to lower the base student cost on a whim to pass a tax cut, to provide more money to another agency or for any other reason they deemed appropriate. Gunn’s proposal also would have no inflation or growth factor.
Some fear how low education funding might go without the objective formula offered by MAEP. After all, even with the formula and the mandate it shall be fully funded, Mississippi is consistently near the national bottom in per pupil expenditures.
It is not clear what position new House Speaker Jason White will take and whether this will be the year a compromise is reached to fix MAEP, or whether it will remain in limbo and continue a fight first started way back in 1997 in Jack Gordon’s Senate Appropriations Committee.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.”
A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today’s NewsMatch Campaign is Here: Support Journalism that Strengthens Mississippi
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In a time when trusted journalists and media sources are disappearing, we believe the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without on-the-ground, trustworthy reporting, civic engagement suffers, accountability falters and corruption often goes unaddressed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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