Mississippi Today
State’s first long-term medical home for kids to open at long last in 2025
Following several delays and scrutiny over funding and location, construction of the state‘s first skilled pediatric facility is underway in Jackson.
The Alyce G. Clarke Center for Medically Fragile Children will care for patients younger than 19 with complex medical conditions, providing long-term care for some children and training for others’ families to care for them at home.
“For long-term residents, this will feel like a home,” said Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Mississippi Center, in a press release. “They won’t feel like they are in a hospital, even though they will be provided with the same level of care.”
Construction of the 20-bed facility began this spring and is planned for completion by fall 2025.
This is the second time the project has broken ground. The center held its first groundbreaking ceremony in 2019, a month before former Gov. Phil Bryant left office, and planned to begin construction in 2021.
Jones said the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the project, attributing the delay to rising costs and supply chain issues.
UMMC awarded the $12.2 million contract to Mid State Construction Co., Inc in February. The total project costs are estimated at $15.9 million.
The project will be funded by $14.5 million in bonds awarded by the Mississippi Legislature in 2019 and 2020, though the project was initially intended to be paid for by private funders.
The state Legislature originally passed a law in 2018 to lease state owned land off Ridgewood Road in Jackson to a nonprofit, which would construct, own and operate the facility. Then-First Lady Deborah Bryant’s chief of staff set up the nonprofit that would spearhead and fundraise for the project, Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children, that year.
Nancy New, the Families First leader who pleaded guilty in 2022 for her role in channeling Mississippi welfare grant funds for illegal projects, served on the nonprofit’s board.
Tax returns from 2018 to 2020 show Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children raised $3.2 million. The Clarion-Ledger reported that UMMC made a $1 million donation to the center. In 2020, after New was arrested, she was removed from the board, the nonprofit dissolved and Children’s of Mississippi, the pediatric division of UMMC, assumed responsibility for the project. The nonprofit transferred its remaining $1.3 million to UMMC.
The Clarion-Ledger reported in 2020 that Families First, the program New ran through her nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center, was “a partner of the project and will offer services to families at the facility,” according to Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children’s now-defunct website. State Auditor Shad White, who investigated the sprawling fraud scheme, said he did not find any evidence of payments between New’s nonprofit and the center.
However, Mississippi Department of Human Services’ ongoing civil suit, which serves as the state’s effort to recoup millions in allegedly misspent welfare funds, describes Families First’s original proposal to use welfare funds to build the pediatric facility as a “model” for alleged misspending that followed – the construction of a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Before New’s nonprofit entertained entering a $5 million sublease with University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation, allegedly as a way to circumvent the federal prohibition on using welfare funds for “brick and mortar” projects, the idea was for her nonprofit to enter a similar lease to build the pediatric facility with welfare funds, emails show. It’s unclear why that lease was never executed, according to MDHS’s lawsuit, but White acknowledged to The Clarion-Ledger that New “could have directed funding to the center by other means.”
Patients at the new center will include newborns who require additional time on ventilators to adolescents that require skilled nursing care. The conditions of patients at the center will range from children who have been injured in accidents to those who have congenital or genetic conditions.
Children’s of Mississippi has for years provided long-term care to patients in an acute-care hospital setting. The new center will provide a more comfortable setting for long-term care.
“This new facility is designed to look and feel like each room is an individual home,” said Dr. Christian Paine, chief of the Division of Pediatric Palliative Medicine at UMMC. “In addition, children whose families are training to learn the skills necessary to eventually move home with medical technology will have a more home-like environment in which to learn.”
The new pediatric facility is named for former Rep. Clarke, the first African American woman to serve in the Mississippi Legislature and an advocate for the project. She became involved when Calvary Baptist Church in west Jackson, the area Clarke represented, planned to renovate its building to house the center. After years of working on the proposal, the church was later left out of the plan. Some lawmakers accused state leadership of hijacking the church’s proposal to change the location to east of the interstate, next to the wealthier neighborhood of Eastover.
“It appears that it’s difficult for people to understand that we want good, nice things in our neighborhood, too,” Clarke said at the time in 2018.
“What I was trying to do was to improve that area over there and the fact that it’s not in the area, it doesn’t make me feel good,” Clarke told Mississippi Today on Thursday. “But at least I’m glad they’re finally getting to work on it and it’s something that we’ve needed for years.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1966
Sept. 8, 1966
Nichelle Nichols became one of the first Black women to play a lead role on television, portraying Communication Officer Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek.”
Ebony magazine featured her as the first Black astronaut, “a triumph of modern-day TV over modern-day NASA.” A talented singer and dancer, Nichols told creator Gene Roddenberry after the first season that she planned to leave — news that devastated him. At a fundraiser after that, an organizer told her that her greatest fan wanted to meet her. When she turned around, she found herself staring at Martin Luther King Jr., who raved about what her role meant to him, his family and others around the world.
“When I could finally catch my breath after hearing so many accolades from a man I considered as my leader, I thanked him and then told him I was leaving the series,” she recalled. His smile vanished, and he told her that she must not leave: “You have opened a door that must not be allowed to close. For the first time, the world sees us as we should be seen, as equals, as intelligent people.”
In fact, he shared that “Star Trek” was the only show that he and his wife let their children stay up late and watch, “You are their hero!”
The next day, Nichols told Roddenberry she would stay, sharing King’s words. When she looked back at Roddenberry, a tear slid down his face. “And Gene,” she recalled, “was not a man to cry.”
After “Star Trek” ended in 1969, she produced educational programs related to space and challenged NASA to “come down from your ivory tower of intelligent pursuit, because the next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”
Afterward, she led an astronaut recruiting program for NASA that changed the faces of those who went into space. Sally Ride became the first woman in space, Guion Bluford Jr., the first African American in space, and Mae C. Jemison, the first Black woman in space who later played a part on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the first real astronaut to do so.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
In U.S. presidential elections, not all votes are equal
A Mississippian’s vote for president carries more weight than the vote of a Californian or than the vote of a resident of most other states.
Mississippi, with just under 3 million people, has six electoral votes for president — or one for every 496,880 of its citizens. California, on the other hand, has 54 electoral votes for about 39.5 million people — or one for about every 732,190 of its citizens.
But both Mississippi and California pale in comparison to sparsely populated Wyoming in terms of the weight of its electoral votes. Wyoming, with 576,851 people, has three electoral votes, or one vote for 192,284 Wyoming residents.
The national average, based on the latest U.S. Census numbers, is 632,518 people for each of the nation’s 538 electoral votes.
Votes for president in America are not equal.
The weight of electoral votes is of relevance as the nation goes through the cycle of electing the next president. The presidential election is viewed as a national race, but in a real sense it is about 10 separate campaigns in what has become known as swing states or purple states.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, will spend significant time and attention campaigning in Georgia, Pennsylvania and a handful of other swing states, while paying little or no attention to Mississippi, California or most other states.
America’s founding fathers opted not to elect the president by popular votes but by what is known as the Electoral College.
In that process, each state has the number of electoral votes equal to its number of U.S. House members plus its two senators. For instance, Mississippi has four U.S. House members and the two senators. California has 52 U.S. House members plus its two senators.
The fact that each state has two senators is one of the primary reasons the electoral votes of less populous states carry more weight than the votes of more populous states like California and Texas.
In all but two states, all of the electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes in that state regardless of the margin of victory. Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes. The two Senate electors go to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide in those two states. But a candidate gets one electoral vote for each congressional district won in Maine and Nebraska.
Nebraska, like Mississippi, is a solid Republican state. But because Nebraska does not have a winner-take-all Electoral College process, it is likely that Harris and Trump will spend more time in Nebraska’s 2nd District, considered a swing district, than in those much larger non-swing states.
The Electoral College was a compromise between the founding fathers who wanted the president to be elected via popular vote and those who wanted Congress to elect the president. And, like so many aspects of American history, the compromise had racial elements. The notorious Three-Fifths Compromise counted Black residents who could not vote as three-fifths of a person to benefit the Southern states, where a significant portion of the population was slaves. The Three-Fifths Compromise gave Southern states more representation in Congress and thus more representation in the Electoral College.
And to this day, it could be argued the Electoral College still discriminates against Black residents since many Southern states, including Mississippi, have higher percentages of Black citizens who are generally more prone to vote Democratic. Because of the Electoral College, those Black voters in the South have little influence since by wide margins Southern whites, who make up the majority, are more likely to vote Republican and swing the Southern’s states electoral votes to the Republican.
The Electoral College process is in the U.S. Constitution. To amend the Constitution and change the electoral process would be time consuming and burdensome.
But there is another process called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Under the compact, the Electoral College process could be circumvented if legislatures in states with a majority of the of the electoral votes (270) pledged to give their electors to the candidate who won the popular vote.
The proposal has been filed in the Mississippi Legislature but has never been given serious consideration. Thus far 17 states with 207 electoral votes have agreed to the compact. It is not likely to pass anytime soon, though, because Republican-dominated states generally oppose the plan — at least in part because the Republican presidential candidate has lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million, but Trump would have won reelection if about 21,000 voters in a handful of swing states had voted for him instead of Biden.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1954
Sept. 7, 1954
In compliance with the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision, schools in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were desegregated. Baltimore was one of the first school systems to desegregate below the Mason-Dixon line.
A month after a dozen Black students began attending what had been an all-white school, demonstrations took place, one of them turning violent when 800 whites attacked four Black students. White parents began pulling their children out of the schools, and by 1960, the district was majority Black.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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