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Gov. Tate Reeves, with one tweet, digs up his controversial public education record

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Gov. Tate Reeves, with one tweet, digs up his controversial public education record

Note: This editorial anchored Mississippi Today’s weekly legislative newsletter.Subscribe to our free newsletterfor exclusive access to legislative analysis and up-to-date information about what’s happening under the Capitol dome.

Senate Republican leaders shocked the state on Feb. 28 when they announced their intention to fully fund Mississippi’s public school formula for just the third time since 2003.

Just a few minutes before the Senate was set to vote on the proposal on March 7, Gov. Tate Reeves took to Twitter with an eyebrow-raising warning to lawmakers.

“Be very cautious of a last minute change in funding formula that seems to have unanimous support amongst Democrats in Senate and liberal activist groups. Very very cautious,” Reeves tweeted, followed by his office sending his tweet to reporters as an official press statement. “Instead of funneling more money to the district offices — where our kids won’t see it — why not another teacher pay raise? Put it in the classroom!”

A little more than an hour later, the supermajority in the Republican state Senate, apparently unfazed by their Republican leader’s words, voted unanimously to do the exact opposite of what Reeves had warned. Every single Republican and Democrat in the Senate voted with virtually no debate to tweak the education funding formula and fully fund public schools.

The Senate plan, which would help local school districts cover basic costs such as supplies, building costs and, yes, teacher salaries, would require the state send an additional $181 million to the Mississippi Adequate Education Program per year. The proposal comes as Mississippi sits on a record revenue surplus of $3.9 billion, and more than $1 billion of that is recurring.

READ MORE: Bill to fully fund public education heads to House for consideration. Here’s what the changes would mean.

The politics of opposing full funding of public education during an election year are questionable at best. And even more problematic for Reeves is that his unprompted Twitter take dredged up his controversial record on one of the single biggest political issues of any campaign.

Reeves, at least on this issue, appears wildly out of step with Mississippi voters, including his Republican base. A new Siena College/Mississippi Today poll released today shows that a whopping 79% of Mississippians — including 73% of Republicans surveyed — believe lawmakers should fully fund public schools this session.

Democrat Brandon Presley, who is getting all sorts of statewide and national attention for his political upside against Reeves in the governor’s race later this year, pounced immediately. As one longtime political operative put it in a text message later in the day: “I hear they’re having a Field Day in Nettleton today,” referencing Presley’s hometown.

“I commend both Republicans and Democrats in the state Senate for coming together across party lines unanimously to better fund our schools,” Presley tweeted shortly after the Senate vote. “As usual, Tate Reeves is now attacking this bipartisan effort and playing politics once again. Tate Reeves has shown over and over he cares more about HIS political career than OUR students. He won’t lead. As governor, I will.”

Reeves’ tweet leads astute political observers to recall Reeves’ many black eyes from his action (or inaction) on public education related issues. If you’re interested in taking a stroll down memory lane, here are just a few of those moments:

  • In eight years as lieutenant governor, when he had deep influence over the state budget, Reeves raised teacher pay just two times — both during election years. And those pay raises were so marginal that education groups and teachers publicly panned them with descriptors like “a joke”; “insufficient”; “a slap in the face’: “insulting”; and “another election-year-timed symbolic gesture.” His March 7 tweet suggested current lawmakers consider another teacher pay raise. Needless to say, that wasn’t received too well.
  • The governor highlighted in his March 7 tweet that the Senate full funding effort was “last minute.” But no one, seemingly, has forgotten about perhaps the most notorious “last minute” leader in modern political history regarding education-related moves. When Reeves was lieutenant governor, he famously sneaked $2 million for private school vouchers into an unrelated appropriations bill in the 2019 election year, drawing the broad ire of every single public education group.
  • In 2017, Reeves and other legislative leaders tried and failed to rewrite the state’s public education funding formula. A majority of Republican senators shot down Reeves’ plan in broad daylight. Shortly after the Senate vote, Reeves went sour grapes and blamed reporters: “I know you’re all smiling big today. You worked really hard to kill this, and you were very, very successful at doing so.” Reeves has rarely publicly discussed the failed rewrite effort since then, and he has neither tried nor proposed another rewrite effort.
  • In Reeves’ last five years as lieutenant governor, the Legislature underfunded Mississippi Adequate Education Program by $1.06 billion, according to data compiled by The Parents’ Campaign. Since 2008 under the same measures, MAEP has gone underfunded by $3.35 billion, including a worst-ever stretch from 2012-2020 — the eight years Reeves served as leader of the Senate.
  • From 2015-2019, his last four years as lieutenant governor, Mississippi’s public education budgets were cut by $173.5 million ($102 million cut to Institutions of Higher Learning, $40 million cut to K-12 education, $32 million to community colleges).
  • Several teacher loan forgiveness programs in 2016 received budget cuts so extreme from the Reeves-led Legislature that they had to stop forgiving loans for teachers. “It really got me thinking, ‘Well, my state’s not really on my side here,’” a north Mississippi teacher said.
  • And how soon we forget one of the biggest political blunders of modern politics. In 2019, late in his heated governor’s race with Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood, Reeves released a TV ad touting his plan to raise public school teacher pay. There was just one problem: most of the ad was filmed inside a private school and featured several private school teachers. That private school, then a little-known entity, is now one of the most familiar schools in the state for all the wrong reasons. Reeves filmed the ad at New Summit School, owned by welfare and education fraudsters Nancy and Zach New, who were 2019 campaign donors of Reeves.

It remains unclear what Reeves thought he was doing March 7 with his social media warning to lawmakers and his effective trolling of the Senate’s full funding proposal.

The Senate plan now moves to the House, where Republican leaders there have to decide whether to heed Reeves’ warning. But legislative Democrats, like Presley, are already using the moment to apply pressure.

“This appropriation would be less than 5% of our nearly $4 billion surplus and he still doesn’t want to spend it on Mississippi’s public school students,” said Rep. Robert Johnson, the House Democratic leader. “If we’re in the best financial shape in our state’s history, as the governor so often likes to remind us, why should we have to choose? If he isn’t interested in investing in public education now, will he ever be?”

Johnson continued: “If House Republicans and Tate Reeves think blocking $181 million from going into our public schools while they crow about a $4 billion surplus is a winning strategy going into an election year, then good luck to them.”

But before too long, we’ll get some clarity on how Reeves’ questionable take — effectively, “I know we have more money than we’ve ever had, but let’s actually not send additional funding to our consistently struggling public schools during this major election year” — will affect his effort to win one more term in the Governor’s Mansion.

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

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Mississippi Today

A win for press freedom: Judge dismisses Gov. Phil Bryant’s lawsuit against Mississippi Today

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mississippitoday.org – @GanucheauAdam – 2025-04-04 13:35:00

Madison County Circuit Court Judge Bradley Mills dismissed former Gov. Phil Bryant’s defamation lawsuit against Mississippi Today on Friday, ending a nearly two-year case that became a beacon in the fight for American press freedom.

For the past 22 months, we’ve vigorously defended our Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting and our characterizations of Bryant’s role in the Mississippi welfare scandal. We are grateful today that the court, after careful deliberation, dismissed the case.

The reporting speaks for itself. The truth speaks for itself.

This judgment is so much more than vindication for Mississippi Today — it’s a monumental victory for every single Mississippian. Journalism is a public good that all of us deserve and need. Too seldom does our state’s power structure offer taxpayers true government accountability, and Mississippians routinely learn about the actions of their public officials only because of journalism like ours. This reality is precisely why we launched our newsroom nine years ago, and it’s why we devoted so much energy and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending ourselves against this lawsuit. It was an existential threat to our organization that took time and resources away from our primary responsibilities — which is often the goal of these kinds of legal actions. But our fight was never just about us; it was about preserving the public’s sacred, constitutional right to critical information that journalists provide, just as our nation’s Founding Fathers intended.

Mississippi Today remains as committed as ever to deep investigative journalism and working to provide government accountability. We will never be afraid to reveal the actions of powerful leaders, even in the face of intimidation or the threat of litigation. And we will always stand up for Mississippians who deserve to know the truth, and our journalists will continue working to catalyze justice for people in this state who are otherwise cheated, overlooked, or ignored.

We appreciate your support, and we are honored to serve you with the high quality, public service journalism you’ve come to expect from Mississippi Today.

READ MORE: Judge Bradley Mills’ order dismissing the case

READ MORE: Mississippi Today’s brief in support of motion to dismiss

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate

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mississippitoday.org – @rick_cleveland – 2025-04-04 11:09:00

In an interview years and years ago, the late Willye B. White told me in her warm, soothing Delta voice, “A dream without a plan is just a wish. As a young girl, I had a plan.”

She most definitely did have a plan. And she executed said plan, as we shall see.

And I know what many readers are thinking: “Who the heck was Willye B. White?” That, or: “Willye B. White, where have I heard that name before?”

Rick Cleveland

Well, you might have driven an eight-mile, flat-as-a-pancake stretch of U.S. 49E, between Sidon and Greenwood, and seen the marker that says: “Willye B. White Memorial Highway.” Or you might have visited the Olympic Room at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and seen where White was a five-time participant and two-time medalist in the Summer Olympics as a jumper and a sprinter.

If you don’t know who Willye B. White was, you should. Every Mississippian should. So pour yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, follow along and prepare to be inspired.

Willye B. White was born on the last day of 1939 in Money, near Greenwood, and was raised by grandparents. As a child, she picked cotton to help feed her family. When she wasn’t picking cotton, she was running, really fast, and jumping, really high and really long distances.

She began competing in high school track and field meets at the age of 10. At age 11, she scored enough points in a high school meet to win the competition all by herself. At age 16, in 1956, she competed in the Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.

Her plan then was simple. The Olympics, on the other side of the world, would take place in November. “I didn’t know much about the Olympics, but I knew that if I made the team and I went to the Olympics, I wouldn’t have to pick cotton that year. I was all for that.”

Just imagine. You are 16 years old, a high school sophomore, a poor Black girl. You are from Money, Mississippi, and you walk into the stadium at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds to compete before a crowd of more than 100,000 strangers nearly 10,000 miles from your home.

She competed in the long jump. She won the silver medal to become the first-ever American to win a medal in that event. And then she came home to segregated Mississippi, to little or no fanfare. This was the year after Emmett Till, a year younger than White, was brutally murdered just a short distance from where she lived.

“I used to sit in those cotton fields and watch the trains go by,” she once told an interviewer. “I knew they were going to some place different, some place into the hills and out of those cotton fields.”

Her grandfather had fought in France in World War I. “He told me about all the places he saw,” White said. “I always wanted to travel and see the places he talked about.”

Travel, she did. In the late 1950s there were two colleges that offered scholarships to young, Black female track and field athletes. One was Tuskegee in Alabama, the other was Tennessee State in Nashville. White chose Tennessee State, she said, “because it was the farthest away from those cotton fields.”

She was getting started on a track and field career that would take her, by her own count, to 150 different countries across the globe. She was the best female long jumper in the U.S. for two decades. She competed in Olympics in Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich. She would compete on more than 30 U.S. teams in international events. In 1999, Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century.

Chicago became White’s home for most of adulthood. This was long before Olympic athletes were rich, making millions in endorsements and appearance fees. She needed a job, so she became a nurse. Later on, she became an public health administrator as well as a coach. She created the Willye B. White Foundation to help needy children with health and after school care. 

In 1982, at age 42, she returned to Mississippi to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and was welcomed back to a reception at the Governor’s Mansion by Gov. William Winter, who introduced her during induction ceremonies. Twenty-six years after she won the silver medal at Melbourne, she called being hosted and celebrated by the governor of her home state “the zenith of her career.”

Willye B. White died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital in 2007. While working on an obituary/column about her, I talked to the late, great Ralph Boston, the three-time Olympic long jump medalist from Laurel. They were Tennessee State and U.S. Olympic teammates. They shared a healthy respect from one another, and Boston clearly enjoyed talking about White.

At one point, Ralph asked me, “Did you know Willye B. had an even more famous high school classmate.”

No, I said, I did not.

“Ever heard of Morgan Freeman?” Ralph said, laughing.

Of course.

“I was with Morgan one time and I asked him if he ever ran track,” Ralph said, already chuckling about what would come next.

“Morgan said he did not run track in high school because he knew if he ran, he’d have to run against Willye B. White, and Morgan said he didn’t want to lose to a girl.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting. 

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID. 

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots. 

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion. 

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor. 

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking. 

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber. 

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said. 

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting. 

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice. 

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures. 

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security. 

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

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