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Lawmaker kills bill to raise truancy officer pay after it passed unanimously in the Senate

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Lawmaker kills bill to raise truancy officer pay after it passed unanimously in the Senate

Terri Hill from Jones County has been working as a school attendance officer for 26 years. After taxes, she takes home about $28,000.

Legislation to increase the base salary for Hill and her colleagues — who were left out of teacher and state worker pay raises in recent years — passed the Senate unanimously but was killed last week by House Education Committee Chair Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach.

“He is a brick wall that we can’t get around,” said April Brewer, the school attendance officer for Lamar County.

Brewer, a mother of seven, has been at the job for 11 years. But with a $30,000 salary, she’s had to consistently work two additional jobs.

Bennett did not return several Mississippi Today efforts to reach him for comment.

With such low pay, the Mississippi Department of Education has a hard time retaining these workers, who, when effective, play a significant role in the wellbeing of children in Mississippi.

READ MORE: State truancy officers face stagnant pay and ‘unmanageable caseloads’

The shortage of attendance officers in the state has resulted in massive, unmanageable caseloads, the officers say. In some counties, one officer is responsible for as many as 10,000 students. When this happens, officers get too many referrals for children missing school that they can’t adequately assess the problem and try to address the students’ needs.

These state workers are direct employees of MDE but work locally in each county. They work in different offices, some stationed inside school district buildings while others work out of local courthouses.

Spread out and tucked away, this is likely one reason the officers feel they’ve been so ignored.

Mississippi Today spoke with several school attendance officers in the fall who said MDE has not consistently supplied them with the materials they need: paper, ink, and stamps for the letters they’re required by law to send to the parents of truant children. They say they’ve also had trouble getting reimbursed for the travel expenses they incur making home visits to find out why kids are not in school. Brewer said these issues persist.

“The Mississippi Department of Education understands the Student Attendance Officers’ concerns and plans to continue working with the Legislature as it relates tooverall agency funding,” MDE said to Mississippi Today in a statement Friday.

MDE has proposed the solution of moving school attendance officers to the local school districts. But bills to accomplish this also died this legislative session.

Brewer said that option, however, presents a possible conflict of interest. Part of a school attendance officer’s job is to ensure that the state’s truancy statutes are being followed — and that includes by schools. An example is the requirement that schools allow homeless students to enroll.

“How do we tell our superintendent, ‘You’re not complying with the law,’ when they can just say, ‘Hey, you work for me,’” Brewer said.

School attendance officers also work with kids outside the public school districts — homeschool and private school students — and Brewer worries that being employees of the school district could prevent officers from working in the best interest of all students.

Brenda Scott, longtime president of the Mississippi Alliance of State Employees workers union, is representing the officers at the legislature this session. She recognizes that it often takes years for lobbying efforts to bear fruit.

Currently, school attendance officers must have at least a bachelor’s degree and their salaries are set in statute. After 17 years, an officer with a bachelor’s degree can earn no more than $31,182. With a master’s degree, they can start out making $26,000 and cap out at $37,000 after 21 years.

“He (Rep. Bennett) thinks that they’re receiving adequate pay and I just don’t see how he could think that,” Scott said.

Their bill, Senate Bill 2777, would have increased the baseline pay for school attendance officers by $5,000, bringing the floor for workers with a bachelor up from $24,500 to $29,500.

With her 11 years, Brewer’s salary would increase to a minimum of $39,050. The starting pay for public school teachers is $41,500.

The bill also included a new $250,000 cap on the salary for the state superintendent, who currently earns $300,000.

Brewer said they had enough support in both the Education Committee and full House of Representatives to get the bill passed. But Bennett would not take up the bill in his committee. It’s still possible for the Senate to amend the existing House education appropriations bill to include the changes, but then the legislation would have to go to conference in the House, potentially meeting the same hurdle.

Brewer said that the school attendance officer in Bennett’s hometown, Long Beach, is “also in a county with over 30,000 students and there’s only two workers.”

“It’s not going to get better,” she said.

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

Mississippi Today

‘A good start’: Senate passes pharmacy benefit manager reform bill

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mississippitoday.org – Gwen Dilworth – 2025-03-12 17:19:00

The Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would increase the regulation and transparency of pharmacy benefit managers, which advocates argue will protect patients and independent pharmacists. 

The legislation, authored by Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, beefs up a House of Representatives bill focusing on the transparency of pharmacy benefit managers by adding language to tighten appeal procedures, bar the companies from steering patients to affiliate pharmacies and prohibit spread pricing – the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits. 

Parks said the bill, which passed 46-4, has the support of the House, which can now send it to the governor’s desk to sign or go to conference with the Senate to negotiate changes. 

“This is the furthest we’ve been in two years,” said Parks. “We’re bringing fairness to the patient and to independent pharmacists.” 

The bill’s passage came after a strong showing of support for reform from 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 Senate’s original bill died in the House, but the body revived most of its language by inserting it into a similar House bill, House Bill 1123, which was authored by House Speaker Jason White. 

The Senate made several concessions in the most recent version of the legislation, including forgoing a provision that would have required pharmacy benefit managers to reimburse prescription discount card claims within seven days. These claims are currently paid within 60 to 90 days, which pharmacists argue is a burdensome timeframe. 

The bill is a “good start” to real pharmacy benefit manager reform and transparency, said Robert Dozier, the executive director of the Mississippi Independent Pharmacy Association.

“The independent pharmacists are pleased with the current form of House Bill 1123,” he said. “They did not get everything they wanted, but they got what they needed.” 

The bill also gives the Mississippi Board of Pharmacy more tools to conduct audits and requires drug manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers and health insurers to submit data to the Mississippi Board of Pharmacy, which will be available to the public. 

Sen. Jeremy England, R-Ocean Springs, said he is concerned the bill will lead to higher health insurance costs for employers, including the state itself, which provides health insurance to state employees. 

Pharmacy benefit managers negotiate rebates, or cost savings, for employers, and some critics of pharmacy benefit manager reform argue that regulating the companies’ business practices will lead to higher insurance costs for employers. 

England said that Mississippi employers stand to lose tens of millions of dollars and that regulation could deter new businesses from coming to the state. 

“This language that we are trying to put into state law here goes too far, in fact it goes to the point where it could end up costing jobs,” he said.

A vote requested by England to determine if a fiscal note is necessary for the bill failed. 

Parks said she disagreed that the bill would raise state health insurance costs and called England’s concerns a “scare tactic” meant to deter legislators from passing the bill.

England also proposed an amendment to the bill to remove 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 and interfering with their right to choose a particular pharmacy. 

Self-funded health plans often use pharmacy benefit managers to administer prescription drug benefits and process claims. 

Parks argued that excluding self-funded health plans from those guidelines would remove the fundamental protections the bill affords pharmacies and patients. 

England’s amendment failed. 

“Mississippi’s been a beacon in where we have stood with PBM,” Parks said. “We need to continue to be that beacon and not go backwards.”

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

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Crooked Letter Sports Podcast

Podcast: Raymond basketball coach Tony Tadlock joins to talk about high school basketball championships and this week’s SEC Tournament.

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mississippitoday.org – Rick Cleveland and Tyler Cleveland – 2025-03-12 12:00:00

One of the state’s top basketball coaches, Tadlock overcame the loss of all five starters from last year’s championship team and losing his leading scorer this season, to win a second straight state championship and the seventh in school history. Tadlock talks about how he works with a 40-man basketball roster and maintaining a remarkable winning culture at Raymond.

Stream all episodes here.


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 1998

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2025-03-12 07:00:00

March 12, 1998

Millsaps College students protest the death of Jackson State University student and civil rights worker Benjamin Brown, who was killed by police at a protest. Photo shot by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission with numbers used to identify individual students. Credit: Courtesy of Mississippi Department of Archives and History

Thirty-two years after Mississippi created a segregationist spy agency, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, its long secret records were finally opened to the public. 

State lawmakers created the agency in 1956 in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that ordered desegregation in public schools and gave the agency broad powers to fight federal “encroachment.” 

Under the direction of Gov. Ross Barnett, the commission promoted propaganda, sending white and Black speakers up North to talk about how wonderful segregation was. The commission also hired informants, infiltrated civil rights groups, smeared civil rights workers and got them fired from their jobs. 

The commission collected spy files on more than 10,000 people, including Elvis Presley. In addition, the commission sent more than $193,000 of taxpayers’ money to the white Citizens’ Council — a practice that drew criticism from Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers. 

In spring 1964, the commission spied on two young white civil rights workers, Michael and Rita Schwerner, after they began to work in the movement in Meridian, Mississippi. The commission shared its spy report with the local police, which included the brother of Klansman Alton Wayne Roberts, who was involved in killing Michael Schwerner and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. 

In 1973, then Gov. Bill Waller vetoed the Mississippi Legislature’s appropriation to the commission, effectively shutting it down. In 1977, the Legislature abolished the agency and sealed the files for 50 years, but a lawsuit by the ACLU succeeded in opening those files.

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

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