Mississippi Today

My coffee-colored tap water went viral. I still don’t know what was in it.

Published

3 years ago

November 21, 2022

My coffee-colored tap water went viral. I still don’t know what was in it.

by Molly Minta, Mississippi Today
November 21, 2022

On Friday, Sept. 9 – the 11th day of the water crisis in Jackson, Miss., and weeks into a citywide boil water notice – I went to brush my teeth.

I was at my apartment in Belhaven, one of the oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods in the majority-Black capital city. With the day off work, I had planned to drive to a suburb of Jackson to wash my clothes, thinking the laundromats in town were still affected by the crisis. Getting ready to leave, I turned on my bathroom sink faucet; for a second, the stream of water ran normally before it sputtered, lost pressure and turned a shockingly dark, coffee-colored brown.

My reaction was to turn off the faucet.

Earlier that week, I had seen a picture on Twitter of a bathtub, supposedly in Jackson, that was full of opaque, black water. Without more context, I had dismissed it as fake, but I wasn’t doubting anymore. I turned on my shower – it also sputtered before the water turned the same dark brown. I tried my sink again. Still brown. Then I flushed my toilet; it lurched away from the wall. I opened the lid to see chocolate-colored water slowly filling the bowl.

I took a video and posted it on Twitter with the caption, “My water just now in Jackson, MS.”

My water just now in Jackson, MS pic.twitter.com/LFfat03dCv

— Molly Minta (@mintamolly) September 9, 2022

Within minutes, I was getting hundreds of retweets. That turned into dozens of direct messages, emails and phone calls from reporters around the world requesting to play the video on TV that night, and literally thousands of replies all asking the same question: What was in my water, and why was it that brown?

I had the same questions. Like all of my coworkers at Mississippi Today, I had been covering the crisis since it began on Aug. 29, but I wasn’t reporting on the condition of the water system or treatment plants.

Still, I thought I’d be well-suited to get the answers as a journalist. But more than two months later, I still don’t know what, exactly, was in my water, or why it turned brown. I've talked with experts in water quality and city officials – they gave different answers. The experts say that discolored water is a natural phenomenon in aging water systems, though the pipes in my building could've contributed. City officials are adamant my brown water was "an isolated incident," but we obtained records showing people across the city had experienced similar brown water during the height of the crisis.

The city also said they were going to test my water, but after weeks of back and forth with me, they admitted they never did.

But the first call I made that day was to my landlord’s front office. I wanted to know if other properties in Belhaven were affected or if my unit, a 1940s quadruplex, was the only one. Though the pipes in Belhaven are decades old, much of the neighborhood is downhill and nearby J.H. Fewell, the city’s secondary water plant – as a result, the homes here are often better able to weather water-related crises than those in other parts of the city.

The office manager answered the phone. Multiple properties were affected, she said. The water in Nejam Properties’ office in Belhaven Heights, a sister neighborhood on the hill across Fortification Street, was the color of “weak coffee.”

“That’s all to do with the city of Jackson and the boil water notice and stuff like that,” she said in a way that seemed intended to be reassuring.

Even before Gov. Tate Reeves declared the water emergency in a late-night press conference on Aug. 29, there was widespread confusion in Jackson about whether the water was safe to drink. Despite months of on-again, off-again boil water notices, many people, including myself, had been using the water normally. The mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, had repeatedly questioned if the most recent boil water notice, which had been imposed by the state in July, was necessary.

This lack of clarity from both the city and the state continued throughout the crisis, making it hard for many Jacksonians to know what to trust. Reeves’ initial press conference did not include Lumumba or anyone from the city – and the very next day, Lumumba disputed several of Reeves’ comments, including an alarming statement that raw flood water had entered the O.B. Curtis treatment plant and was flowing into people’s homes.

In my apartment, the first clue as to what happened came a few hours after I posted the video. That afternoon, I learned my neighbor directly beneath me on the north side of the building had been getting brown water in his kitchen sink for a week if he used hot water. But on the south side, my neighbors still had clear water, albeit with low-pressure. An expert later told me this could indicate an issue with the pipes inside my section of the building – something my landlord, not the city, would be responsible for.

My water cleared up the day after I posted the video on Twitter, but it continued to gain views. By Monday, it had been watched more than 10 million times. That afternoon, I looked through my Twitter DMs.

One message stood out. It was a request from the City of Jackson’s account. They asked for my address so they could come test the water.

I could send it, I replied, but I wanted to know why they were asking.

“… If the water is that brown… we want to get the address to Public works and the health department to find the reason why,” they responded.

“Gotcha!” I wrote back before sending my address. Since I work from home, I said the city could come by any time.

“Ok…,” they wrote. “I'm going to give that address to our public works person… and hopefully they'll be able to determine what the heck is going on.”

After some back and forth, the city’s Twitter account asked if my water was still brown.

“Can we get a sample of it? (I'm asking per our public works director)”

The next morning, I ran into three city contractors on the sidewalk outside my apartment. They weren’t there to test my water but to install new meters.

I showed them the video. Gesturing down at the water meter, one of the contractors remarked that their work wouldn’t prevent the discolored water from happening again.

Jackson, he said, needs to re-pipe the whole city.

The exchange prompted me to check in with the city’s Twitter account.

“When do you think y’all will send someone over?” I asked at 9:42 a.m.

Six hours later, the city replied, “Hey Hey!!!! I think they went out there this morning…”

That was my last exchange with the city’s Twitter account, but I would learn – when I reached out to the city a month later – that Public Works never tested my water.

Meanwhile, at Mississippi Today, we were trying to do our own test of my water – an effort that proved fruitless.

Our health editor, Kate Royals, had been researching how to test water and found a private lab in Ridgeland, a suburb of Jackson, called Waypoint Analytical. We ultimately submitted three tests to Waypoint over the course of a month, for a total of $137.

The first sample, which I took the same day I posted the video, had puzzling results. That Friday afternoon, I talked to the lab manager who told me I needed to collect 100 milliliters of water and could put it in Tupperware, the only clean container I had at home. We had decided to test my water for E. coli and “total coliform,” a type of bacteria used to indicate the presence of pathogens.

The water was still dark and turbid when I turned it into the lab, but the results they sent us a few days later showed the water was too dark to test.

“The sample could not be read for Total Coliform due to the dark coloration of the sample interfering with the Reading,” the results said.

So six days later, the day the boil water notice was lifted, we tried again.

The second test came back with high levels of total coliform but no E. coli. But I had committed two possible user errors. One, my Tupperware container might’ve introduced bacteria into the sample. Two, I didn’t flush out the line by running the bathroom sink faucet before taking the sample, the water-testing protocol generally recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Nearly another month passed before we could get a third and final test. This time, I got more guidelines from the lab and followed them to a tee, cleaning my faucet with bleach (which yielded more brown sediment) and running the water for one minute before collecting it in a sterile container and placing it in a bag of ice.

It came back with no bacteria detected. But that's not the full story.

One expert I later consulted, Francis de los Reyes – a professor of environmental engineering and microbiology at North Carolina State University – suggested that because the lab’s test required re-growing bacteria, the bleach I had used on the faucet could've lingered in the water, killing any organisms that might’ve been present. He said I should’ve run the tap for longer than one minute to clear the bleach.

So what was in my brown water, and why did it happen? Other experts I talked to could only speculate. De los Reyes’ colleague, Detlef Knappe, who specializes in water quality and treatment, told me that because there was likely no E. coli in my water, the brown color was probably the “natural” result of a drop in pressure in the old pipes.

In a functioning water system, Knappe explained, generators push waterfrom the plant to homes, where it stays suspended in the pipes until a faucet is turned on. But in old water systems like Jackson’s, lined with cast iron pipes, a drop in pressure can cause accumulated sediment to collapse into the disrupted water stream and turn it brown. The water isn’t leaving the plant a dark brown color, Knappe said, but becomes discolored somewhere along its journey to the faucet.

Christine Kirschoff, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State University, had another perspective. Though she agreed that the brown water was likely caused by a drop of pressure in the pipes, she said it could’ve been exacerbated by the routing of the pipes in my building. That scenario would explain why my downstairs neighbor also had discolored water but my neighbors to the south never did.

The last week of September, I went on vacation and promptly got food poisoning. I would later learn that as I was laid up on my couch – subsisting on chicken nuggets and Uncrustables and using up the last of the bottled water I’d bought the first week of the crisis – the mayor had commented on my water at a town hall the same week.

A recording of the town hall at the New Jerusalem South Church on Sept. 27 shows Lumumba, microphone in hand, standing in front of poster boards of graphs, pictures of O.B. Curtis and a spreadsheet labeled “IMMEDIATE NEEDS.” He starts talking about my water around the 12-minute mark in a tangent about re-watching an interview he gave on national TV.

By now, my tweet had helped shape the national perception of Jackson’s water crisis.

“I was upset, because I did an interview," Lumumba said. "And y’all know when I do these interviews, I can't see the packages they're running, I can't see the images that they're running in the background – all I see is a blank screen. And they keep showing this black water coming out of a faucet, right?”

My water, Lumumba went on to say, represented an “extremely rare situation” issue at “one isolated building.”

“That is not what is coming out of your water treatment facility, right?” he said. “You're not having black water going to every resident. Y'all – y'all live in Jackson. Y’all – how many times have you seen a black water come out of your faucet? Right? I have residents tell me time and time again that they don’t know where that was, right?”

For me, this raised several new questions. Did the city actually send anyone to test my water? How were they able to determine the brown water was isolated to my building? What other discussions did they have about my water? Why didn’t the city reach out to me with their conclusion?

On Oct. 13, I sent an email asking if the city had tested my water to Melissa Faith Payne, the city’s public information officer.

“I believe the discolored water at your building was an isolated incident … and not indicative of the water that actually comes from the plant,” she responded the next day. “I think it had more to do with the lines/pipes at your building. I'll Loop our public works team in to get more information for you.”

I followed up. What was the mayor’s basis for his comments at the town hall? If it was easier, I suggested, I would be happy to talk with the Public Works employee that tested my water.

“I briefed the Mayor just before the town hall,” Payne replied, adding that she was still waiting on an answer from Public Works.

About a week later, I got a statement from Jordan Hillman, the interim director of Public Works. The department could not make any employees available for an interview, she said, due to the workload of maintaining the water system, but Hillman did explain why the city thought my water was an isolated incident.

“This incident was indicative of a local pipe issue for a variety of reasons including knowledge of water condition leaving plants, water color at nearby fire hydrants, and experience with similar issues,” Hillman said. “There were extremely limited reports of similar water discoloration through our report tool.”

The tool that Hillman is referring to is an online survey the city created for residents to report the color of their water. My coworker Alex Rozier, who has been covering the crisis closely, recommended I fill it out the same day I posted the video.

I asked the experts what they thought of Hillman’s reply.

Knappe, the NC State professor, told me that the water from a fire hydrant isn’t necessarily representative of the color of water inside a home, because the pressure and speed at which water comes out of a hydrant is much greater than a faucet. Kirschoff said that it depends on where the fire hydrant that the city examined was located relative to my apartment.

Unsatisfied, I put in several public records requests. I asked for copies of any communications about my water, which the city has only partially fulfilled.

After a few more days of inquiries, Hillman finally told me that “no samples were taken from your specific home or area at that time.”

I also asked for responses to the report tool. Despite the fact that the mayor said my experience was an “extremely rare situation,” the submissions from other Jacksonian detailing discolored water seem to say otherwise. Out of565 responses, including mine, to the form since Aug. 29, 423 – or 74% – reported discolored water. The submissions came from across the city but about a third were concentrated in northeast Jackson.(We did not filter duplicates from this count.)

Responses from more than 20 people, a little more than 4%, contained descriptions of brown, gritty water that matched what I had seen in my home. Though far more people used the word "brown" to describe their water, I couldn't tell if their report matched my experience because the city was supposed to send me pictures that had been uploaded in response to the form but hasn't.

“Reddish brown water in both toilets strong enough to leave a brown ring,” one person wrote.

“When I boil my water it turn my pot brown inside my bath water have dirt in it,” another person said.

“My water is brown and leaves deposits of dirt..” a third submitted.

I asked Hillman and Payne why the city thought these responses were "extremely limited" on Nov. 4 but I haven't heard back.

More than two months after my water turned brown, I haven't had an issue. I've gone back to using my water to cook, wash my dishes, and brush my teeth, but every morning, I see reminders and warnings – representations of what could happen again. The grainy water left permanent, hair dye-like splotches on my toilet bowl, bathtub, and sink basin. Now, I always run my water for one minute before I use it.

The city and state seem to have returned to the contentious relationship that preceded the crisis, with both sides accusing the other of providing incorrect information, which only further weakens public confidence in the system.

There's no sign this will change. As winter sets in, raising the possibility that another freeze could shut down the system, the state is considering if it will lift the emergency declaration. Multiple lawsuits have been filed. And though it’ll become public soon, just last week, the city inked an agreement with the federal government to fix the water system – in secret.

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

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Mississippi Today

Coast judge upholds secrecy in politically charged case. Media appeals ruling.

Published

5 hours ago

July 14, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-07-14 10:30:00

by Anita Lee, Sun Herald and Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
July 14, 2025

A Jackson County Chancery Court judge is denying the public access to a case that involves several politically connected Mississippians and their failed venture to ticket uninsured motorists using cameras and artificial intelligence.

Media companies Mississippi Today and the Sun Herald have filed for relief with the state Supreme Court, arguing that Chancery Judge Neil Harris improperly closed the court file without notice and a hearing to consider alternatives. The media outlets say the court file should be opened.

Mississippi Today in June filed its motion asking that Harris unseal the case, which he denied six days later.

Gulfport attorney Henry Laird writes in the media companies’ petition for state Supreme Court review, “The Chancery Court sealing the entire court file both before and after Mississippi Today’s motion to unseal the file violates the public and press’ cherished right of openness and access to its public court system and records.”

Mississippi judges have long followed a 1990 state Supreme Court decision that says, “A hearing must be held in which the press is allowed to intervene on behalf of the public and present argument, if any, against closure.”

Instead, Harris said he found no hearing necessary after reviewing the pleadings to open the file. The case, he said, is between two private companies.

“There are no public entities included as parties,” he wrote, “and there are no public funds at issue. Other than curiosity regarding issues between private parties, there is no public interest involved.”

The case involves what is usually a public function: Issuing tickets to the owners of uninsured vehicles. And, according to one party to the case, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety is owed $345,000 from the uninsured motorist program.

Since the entire court file is closed, the public is unable to see why the judge sealed the case. The Mississippians said in the Chancery Court case that they have “substantial” business interests to protect and “a lot of political importance,” an attorney opposing them said in a related federal case that is not sealed.

Jackson County Chancery Judge Neil Harris

Georgia-based Securix LLC signed up its first Mississippi client in 2021, the city of Ocean Springs, an agreement with the city showed. Securix developed a program that uses traffic cameras, artificial intelligence and bulk data on insured motorists to identify the owners of vehicles without insurance.

To sign on other Mississippi cities, Securix enlisted three well-known consultants, Quinton Dickerson, Josh Gregory and Robert Wilkinson. Dickerson and Gregory are Republican political operatives in Jackson who have run numerous state and local campaigns and advise many of the state’s top elected officials. Wilkinson, a Coast attorney, has represented local governments and government agencies, including the city of Ocean Springs.

MS business partnership sours

In 2023, the Mississippians formed QJR LLC. Their company entered a 50-50 partnership with Securix called Securix Mississippi.

Securix Mississippi sold the cities of Biloxi, Pearl and Senatobia on the uninsured driver program.

Fees collected from uninsured drivers were apportioned to the company, the cities and the Department of Public Safety, the operating agreement with Biloxi showed.

The citations offered three options, according to copies included in a federal lawsuit filed by three Mississippi residents who received them:

Call a toll-free number and provide proof of insurance.
Enter a diversion program that charges a $300 fee and includes a short online course and requires agreement that the vehicle will not be driven uninsured on public roadways.
Contest the ticket in court and risk $510 in fines and fees, plus the potential of a one-year driver’s license suspension.

The Securix Mississippi partnership soon soured.

Securix Chairman Jonathan Miller of Georgia said in a sworn court declaration submitted in the federal case that he was subjected around March 2024 to a “freeze out” by members and/or employees of QJR. They stopped giving him information, Miller said.

The Department of Public Safety in August pulled the plug on the controversial ticketing program, shutting off the company’s access to the insured driver database.

In September, QJR filed its Chancery Court lawsuit against Securix LLC.

What is known about the case comes from documents in the federal court file. QJR claims the company and its members have been defamed by Miller and Securix and wants their 50-50 business partnership dissolved.

The Chancery Court case does not even show up when the parties are searched for by name.

With a case number gleaned from the federal court file, a search of chancery records shows only that the case is under seal.

Normally, when a case is under seal, the docket would still be available. A docket lists all records and proceedings in a case. While sealed records are listed and described, they can’t be viewed.

“There is no court file,” attorney Laird said in asking the Supreme Court to review Judge Harris’ decision to leave the file sealed. “There is no docket sheet. There is absolutely no access on the part of the public or press to their public court file in this case.”

Judge closes file without public notice

All Mississippi court files are presumed open unless they are closed with notice and a hearing under guidelines established in the 1990 case Gannett River States Publishing Co. vs. Hand.

“It appears that the judge ignored what has been settled law in Mississippi since 1990,” said retired Jackson attorney Leonard Van Slyke, who represented Gannett in the case and still advises the media.

He added, “Since that time, there have not been many efforts to close a courtroom or a court file because the rules are pretty clear as to when that can be done. It is obvious from the rules that this would be a rare occurrence.”

A court file can be closed only if a party in the case requesting closure can show an “overriding interest” that would be prejudiced by publicity.

The Supreme Court said in 1990 that the public is entitled to at least 24 hours’ notice — on the court docket — before a judge considers closure. As a representative of the public, the media has a right to a hearing before a court file or proceeding is closed.

At the hearing, the judge must consider the least restrictive closure possible and reasonable alternatives. The judge also must make findings that explain why alternatives to closure were rejected.

The court wrote in Gannett vs. Hand:

“A transcript of the closure hearing should be made public and if a petition for extraordinary relief concerning a closure order is filed in this Court, it should be accompanied by the transcript, the court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law, and the evidence adduced at the hearing upon which the judge bases the findings and conclusions.”

Because Judge Harris held no hearing, the high court will have a scant record on which to base its review. Without a court record, Laird pointed out in his filing, the public can have no confidence the judge made a sound decision.

Kevin Goldberg, an attorney who serves as vice president and First Amendment expert at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Freedom Forum, said the First Amendment guarantees the public access to courts.

In the Securix case, he said, a private business was doing work normally performed by a police department or other public agency, and residents could be snared into legal proceedings when they received tickets and public funds were involved.

“These are not private people in a small town, going about their business,” Goldberg said. “These people’s business is the public’s business . . . I think that means they need to accept that they’re going to be scrutinized all the time, including when they voluntarily make a decision to go to court.”

This article was produced in partnership between the Sun Herald and Mississippi Today.

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

The post Coast judge upholds secrecy in politically charged case. Media appeals ruling. appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article maintains a largely factual and investigative tone, focusing on government transparency, judicial procedure, and public access to court records. It critiques the secrecy upheld by a judge in a politically sensitive case involving private companies executing public functions, highlighting concerns about accountability and public interest. The framing leans slightly toward advocating for open government and media rights, values often associated with center-left perspectives. However, it stops short of overt ideological framing or partisan language, striving to report the facts and legal context while underscoring the public’s right to scrutiny.

Mississippi Today

Why Andy Gipson is running for governor

Published

9 hours ago

July 14, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @GeoffPender – 2025-07-14 06:30:00

by Geoff Pender and Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
July 14, 2025

Republican Andy Gipson, the first candidate to publicly announce a run for Mississippi governor in 2027, outlines his five-plank platform. No. 1 is fighting crime, which Gipson says is rising in what were once quiet rural areas, because “If people don’t feel safe, nothing else matters.” He also offers a brief sampling of his baritone crooning from his just-released two studio albums.

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

The post Why Andy Gipson is running for governor appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Mississippi Today

‘Will you trust us?’: JPS plan for stricter cellphone policy makes some parents anxious

Published

3 days ago

July 11, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @mintamolly – 2025-07-11 15:25:00

by Molly Minta, Mississippi Today
July 11, 2025

Superintendent Errick Greene wanted to be very clear with the roughly 50 parents who attended Thursday night’s community listening session: Jackson Public Schools already has a policy banning students from using cellphones at school.

Aaliyah McIntyre, left, and her mother Ashley McIntyre attend a Jackson Public Schools listening session on July 10, 2025, about the district’s new policy on cellphone use. They raised concerns about how parents would be notified in the event of an emergency.

But the leadership of Mississippi’s third-largest school district has decided that a new approach is in order, citing a series of incidents in recent years involving students using their cellphones to bully others, organize fights or text their parents inaccurate information about violence happening at or near their school.

“To be clear, it’s not the majority of our scholars, but I can’t look at a class and know who’s gonna be bullying today, who’s gonna be scheduling a meetup to cut up today,” Greene said toward the end of the hour-long meeting held at the JPS board room. “I can’t look at a group of scholars and say, ‘OK, yeah, you’re the one, let me take your phone, the rest of you can keep it.’”

Under the rewritten policy, students who take their phone out of their backpacks during the instructional day will lose it for five days for the first infraction, 10 days for the second and 45 days for the third. Currently, the longest the school will hold a phone is 10 days.

The Jackson school board is expected to consider the new policy at its meeting next week and the district hopes to implement the change when the new school year starts later this month, said Sherwin Johnson, the district’s communications director.

Students also currently have the option to pay up to a $25 fine to get their phone back, but the district wants to rescind that aspect of the policy.

“We’ve discovered that’s not equitable,” said Larrisa Harris, the JPS general counsel. “Not everybody has the resources to come and pay the fine.”

Support for the new policy among the parents who spoke at the listening session varied, but all had questions. How will students access the internet on their laptops if the WiFi is spotty at their school and they need to use their cellphone hotspot? If students are required to keep their phones in their backpacks during lunch, how will teachers prevent stealing? How will JPS enforce the ban on using cellphones on the bus?

One mother said she watches her daughter’s location while she rides the bus to Jim Hill High School so she knows her daughter made it safely.

“If they can’t have it on the bus, who’s gonna enforce that?” she said. “I’m just gonna be real, the bus driver got to drive.”

A common theme among parents was anxiety at the prospect of losing direct contact with their kids in the event of an emergency. A Pew Research survey found that most adults, regardless of political affiliation, support cellphone bans in middle and high school classes. But those who don’t say it’s because their child can use their phone during emergencies.

“If something happened, will we get an automatic alert to notify us? Because a lot of the time we see things on social media first,” said Ashley McIntyre, a mother of three JPS students. She attended the meeting with her eldest daughter, Aaliyah, who recently graduated from Powell Middle School.

Though JPS does have an alert system for parents, McIntyre said she didn’t know if it existed. She cited a bomb threat at Powell last year that she found out about because Aaliyah texted her, not through a school alert.

“We didn’t know what was going on, and she texted me, ‘Mom, I’m scared,’ so I went up there,” McIntyre said. “So that puts us on edge.”

Aaliyah said she uses her phone to text her mom and watch TikTok, but she feels like her classmates use their phones to be popular or to fit in. When a fight happens, she said many students pull out their phones to record instead of trying to get an adult who can stop it. Then the videos end up on Instagram pages dedicated to posting fights in JPS.

“Once the principal found out about the fight pages, they came around looking inside our videos and camera rolls,” she said. “It happened to me last year. They thought I had a fight on my phone.”

Toward the end of the meeting, Laketia Marshall-Thomas, the assistant superintendent for high schools, took the mic to respond to one parent who said she was concerned that older students would not come to school if they knew their phone could be taken.

“What we have seen is, it’s the older students—” Marshall-Thomas began.

“They are the problem,” someone from the audience chimed in.

“We’re not saying they cannot have them,” she continued. “We know that they have after school activities and they need to communicate with their moms … but we have had major, major issues with cellphones and issues that have even resulted in criminal outcomes for our scholars, but most importantly, our students … have experienced a lot of learning loss.”

While the district leadership did not go into detail about the criminal incidents, several pointed to instances where students have texted their parents inaccurate information, such as an unsubstantiated rumor there was a gun during a fight at Callaway High School or that a shooting outside Whitten Middle School occurred on school property.

“Having phones actually creates far more chaos than they help anyone,” Greene said.

While cellphones have been banned to varying degrees in U.S. schools for decades, youth mental health concerns have renewed interest in more widespread bans across the country. Cellphone and social media usage among school-aged kids is linked to negative mental health outcomes and instances of cyberbullying, research shows.

At least 11 states restrict or ban cellphone use in schools. After Mississippi’s youth mental health task force recommended that all school districts implement policies that limited cellphone and social media usage in classrooms, a bill that would’ve required school boards to create cellphone policies died during the legislative session. Still, several Mississippi school districts have passed their own policies, including Marshall County and Madison County.

Another concern about the ban was a belief among a couple of speakers at the meeting that cellphones can help parents hold the district accountable for misdeeds it may want to hide.

“I just saw a video today. It was not in JPS, but it was a child being yelled at by the teacher and had he not recorded it, his momma would have never known that this sweet lady that they go to church with is degrading her child like that,” one mother said.

Statements like these prompted responses from teachers and other parents who urged the skeptical attendees to be more trusting or to make sure the district has updated contact information for them in case school officials need to reach parents during an emergency.

“I think we have to trust the people watching over our children,” said one of the few fathers who spoke. “When I grew up, what the teacher said was gold.”

One teacher asked the audience, “Will you trust us?”

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

The post ‘Will you trust us?’: JPS plan for stricter cellphone policy makes some parents anxious appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The article presents a balanced report on Jackson Public Schools’ proposed stricter cellphone policy without taking a clear ideological stance. It fairly conveys the perspectives of school officials emphasizing discipline and safety, alongside parental concerns about communication and emergency access. The tone remains neutral, focusing on factual details such as policy changes, reasons behind them, and community reactions. While it includes some skepticism from parents and responses from district staff, the language does not endorse or oppose either side. Overall, the coverage adheres to neutral, factual reporting by presenting multiple viewpoints without editorializing.