Mississippi Today
South Delta Bulldogs give new meaning to ‘rebuilding year’ – with help from Archie Manning

ROLLING FORK – High school football coaches often bemoan “rebuilding years,” but few, if any, have ever faced anything like what South Delta head coach KePatrick Barnes is up against.
His Bulldogs have no place to play, and no uniforms to wear and no dressing room in which to dress – and that doesn’t even begin to describe the obstacles they face. The EF-4 tornado that blew through Rolling Fork on March 24, killing 14 people and injuring many more, left South Delta High School in shambles and unusable. Two of Barnes’ players lost their mothers in the storm. Another lost the grandmother who was raising him. Far more lost their homes. Some of those who have made it to summer workouts have been living with friends or relatives in Greenville, Leland, Yazoo City and Vicksburg.

The decrepit football stadium, which wasn’t much to look at before, is unusable now. Light poles are down, the ticket booth blown over, concession stands ruined, scoreboard inoperable, bleachers warped, press box windows smashed – that’s for starters. Most of the team’s uniforms were either lost in the storm or badly mildewed.
Where spectators would normally park for games, a tented, portable laundry operates to serve the community. The old gymnasium, which once housed the Bulldogs’ weight room, is now a distribution center to provide tornado victims with household necessities. The football team moved its weight equipment into the old band hall, where on a recent blistering hot, humid morning they lifted weights, dripping sweat, while shouting encouragement to one another over the loud clanging of barbells. There was no power, no air conditioning. On occasion, the Bulldogs have paused their summer lifting regimen to go move heavy boxes from an 18-wheeler into what used to be the distribution center that was once their weight room.
“It’s a different kind of lifting,” says Barnes, 45, a stocky former Alcorn State football player. “We try to help out when they need it”
School is back in session this week, but high school students are crammed into the middle school building five miles away in Anguilla where they finished the 2022-23 school year last spring. “It’s crowded but we make do,” says Coach Barnes, who guided the Bulldogs to a 9-3 record and into the second round of the state playoffs last year. “We are rolling up our sleeves and making the best of a really horrible situation.”
Some help is on the way, thanks to Ole Miss and NFL football great Archie Manning, who nearly six decades ago played for the Drew High Eagles in this same football facility in such sad shape now. Drew and Rolling Fork were in the same Delta Valley Conference in those days. “Rolling Fork was the Green Bay Packers of the Delta Valley Conference,” Manning says. “They beat everybody, they tore us up. They were a bunch of big, old farm boys who lifted weights back before it was fashionable.”

Manning says when he first heard about the deadly tornado of March 24, his first thoughts were of those Delta Valley Conference days “and the most fun I ever had in football, except when we had to play Rolling Fork. We at least scored on them my senior year. Most teams didn’t.”
Manning made some calls, including one to the Northwest Mississippi Community Foundation, and learned more about the South Delta situation. He knew of an NFL program where the league will match contributions (up to $5,000) of NFL players and former players to high school football teams. He wrote a check and the NFL has matched it. Hernando businessman Cal Wilkins heard of Manning’s donation and also matched it. Manning also talked to Riddell, the football equipment company that serves as a major sponsor of the Manning family’s Manning Passing Academy. Riddell has made a sizable donation of equipment, including custom fit, state of the art helmets. The company already has sent a representative to measure the players. The equipment is on the way.
“I hope it helps,” Manning says. “Lord knows, they need it.”
The school and the football team need much, much more. Erra Kelly, superintendent of South Delta School District, says she is still working with insurance company, FEMA and state authorities. What she says will be a first payment of insurance money – $750,000 – has been received. She awaits a final settlement before spending what has been received. A new school building, including new athletic facilities, would be the preference.
Kelly, the superintendent, and Barnes, the coach, are much appreciative of Manning’s assistance. Says Barnes, “To have a man of Archie Manning’s fame and stature reaching out and helping us means the world. We’re still a long way from getting back to where we were, but it’s a start.”
The roof on Barnes’ own house was just recently replaced because of extensive tornado damage. Three families – 12 people – currently live in the three-bedroom home. “Making do, the best we can,” is the way he put it, adding, “We’re better off than lots of others.”
Barnes has tried to be there for all his players. “So many of the guys are living somewhere else right now,” he says. “They haven’t been able to be here for the summer workouts, but we’re happy to see them when they do get here, and I text ‘em or try to talk to ‘em every day.”
South Delta and Rolling Fork have a strong football tradition. As with many small Mississippi communities, the high school football team is a rallying point for the town and surrounding area.

Labrodrick Williams, a 17-year-old senior, returns as a starter at quarterback and free safety. “I really think this whole thing has made us stronger,” Williams says. “We have to be strong for our community.”
Roderick Catledge, a 10th grade center nd linebacker, was among the many players displaced by the storm. He has spent the summer commuting from 40 miles away in Leland, riding with his mother who works two jobs in Rolling Fork. He arrived in time for 9 a.m. workouts and sometimes didn’t get back to Leland until after 11 p.m.
The Bulldogs will open the regular season on Aug. 25 at Yazoo County. They will play in Port Gibson as part of a pre-season jamboree at Mississippi Delta Community College Aug. 18. Their first home game is set for Sept. 8 against Leflore County. A decision is not expected until next week on where that game will be played.
Barnes believes the Bulldogs will be formidable again, no matter where they play and what equipment they wear.
“We’re going to make some noise,” Barnes says. “We’re going to try to put Rolling Fork on our backs, give people something to smile about.”
Anyone wishing to donate to South Delta High School’s or the athletic program’s recovery efforts can do so with a tax deductible donation through the Northwest Mississippi Community Foundation. Contact NMCF president Keith Fulcher at 662 719-1732 to learn how.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
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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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
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 measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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