Mississippi Today
The fate of the House school funding plan could come down to one question: Who wrote it?

House leaders say they’ve been working independently of any other group for more than a year to develop their sweeping new public education funding plan, which they say would send additional money to poorer school districts than the current funding formula does.
But three advocacy groups that have often butted heads with powerful pro-public education groups also have been working on a new funding formula. It consists of many of the same characteristics found in the House leadership’s plan.
The origins of the House school funding bill have become central to the combustible debate at the Capitol about whether the plan should be passed into law — and it could ultimately impact the bill’s fate as it faces key deadlines in coming days and weeks.
Rep. Jansen Owen, a Republican from Poplarville, said he and his colleague, House Education Vice Chair Kent McCarty, a Republican from Hattiesburg, worked independently of advocacy groups in their effort to rewrite the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, which currently provides the state’s share of the basics to operate local school districts.
All three of the advocacy groups that worked to develop the 2024 school funding rewrite have been at odds with pro-public education groups in the past. Two of the groups involved in this year’s rewrite effort — Empower Mississippi and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy — have long advocated for allowing public funds to be spent in private schools.
A third group involved in this year’s rewrite effort — Mississippi First — was an outspoken advocate in developing the state’s charter school program. In the 2010s, when the Legislature was enacting a charter school law, many public school advocates vehemently opposed it, arguing charter schools were funded with public dollars but did not have to adhere to the same rules and regulations that normal public schools must follow.
The three groups’ involvement in the 2024 public education funding formula rewrite has created pause for some education groups fearful of what a rewrite might entail. For decades, lawmakers have underfunded MAEP, with many legislative leaders calling for its rewrite at least partially because they argued the state could not afford full funding. For some public education advocates, any effort to rewrite MAEP is viewed as an effort to further cut education funding. MAEP has been fully funded only twice since its full enactment and has been underfunded more than $3 billion since 2008.
But Owen said that he hopes the rewrite he and his House colleagues have put forward will result in more funding for education. He said he is not sure the three advocacy groups involved in the rewrite are even supportive of the House effort because of the extra money it will mean for K-12 schools.
“Rep. McCarty and myself have been working on a plan for a new formula to address some of the inequities in MAEP and bring funding to the classrooms for well over a year now — long before any other groups or organizations became involved,” Owen said. “After Speaker White took office, and Rep. (Rob) Roberson became chairman, it became apparent that House leadership and our (Republican) caucus were on board with changes that provide equitable funding to classrooms.”
It is likely that the MAEP rewrite will be passed out of the House Education Committee on Tuesday, the deadline for the measure to advance out of committee. There have been no public hearings on the 413-page bill designed to rewrite the current school funding formula.
READ MORE: Speaker Jason White says House will work to scrap, rewrite public education funding formula
The Senate Education Committee already has passed a more modest rewrite of MAEP. Senate Education Chair Dennis DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville, has said the Senate bill addresses some of the issues that that those promoting a complete rewrite say make the existing school funding formula unfair.
Rachel Canter, the executive director and founder of Mississippi First, told Mississippi Today in an interview in late February that she and her organization began working with Empower and Mississippi Center for Public Policy after she was contacted by the two groups. She said there are many areas where she does not agree with the two groups, but she saw the combined effort as a chance to write a new funding formula that she believed would be more equitable for poor and at-risk students.
Grant Callen, founder and chief executive officer of Empower Mississippi, offered a “no comment” when asked if his group believed the formula needed to be rewritten and whether Empower’s involvement might taint the proposed formula with some education groups.
Douglas Carswell, CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, wrote in a February op-ed that the existing funding formula needed to be scrapped because it was outdated and complicated. Plus, he said, the new proposal took into account individual children’s circumstances.
“An individualized funding system means weighting the amount that every student gets above a base amount, depending on every child’s circumstances,” Carswell wrote. “For example, the amount ought to be adjusted to reflect the fact that a child might have special needs, or be especially gifted.”
The House bill and the plan developed by the work of the three advocacy groups include a base student cost (amount of money per pupil) being established and providing additional funds to the base student cost based on the unique circumstances of the student, such as more money for a special needs student.
Sen. Hob Bryan, a Democrat from Amory and key architect of the current MAEP funding formula, told Mississippi Today in an interview he feared the House bill’s base student cost would be used a vehicle to develop vouchers to go to private schools equal to the base student costs for each of the students they educate. House Education Chair Roberson has filed a far-reaching school choice or voucher bill.
Several pro-public education organizations — the Mississippi Association of Educators, Mississippi Association of School Superintendents, Mississippi Professional Educators, Mississippi Association of School Administrators and the Parents Campaign – wrote a letter to legislators in February voicing support for some type of weighted system, but said it was essential that any rewrite of MAEP include an objective formula and a growth factor.
The House plan, as currently written, does not include an objective funding formula or a growth factor as the MAEP does. The Adequate Education Program, passed in 1997, has an objective formula, based on specific criteria, to determine how much per pupil is needed to provide an adequate education.
The House plan would leave it to legislators to determine how much to provide per pupil to the local school districts for their basic operation. But the House bill does require the Mississippi Department of Education to make recommendations to legislators every four years on what the base student cost should be. Owen predicted the House bill would be “tweaked” to include local superintendents in the process of recommending the base student cost to legislators. He also said he would not necessarily oppose an objective formula akin to what is in the Adequate Education Program.
Canter at Mississippi First said the House plan may not necessarily have buy-in from all three of the advocacy groups that worked to develop their own school funding rewrite. She said the groups paid Bellwether, a national education consulting group, to work with them on the plan. Bellwether developed a website that is password protected and not open to the public, where different data can be entered to see how much the new plan would generate in funding. House members working on the rewrite have used that website to ascertain how changes to the plan would impact school districts.
While the three advocacy groups did not recommend an objective formula to ascertain the base student cost in their rewrite, Canter said she would not be opposed to one. But she said the lack of the objective formula is not a reason to discard the rewrite effort.
Canter pointed out that there are elements of the MAEP funding formula that penalize low-income students and property-poor school districts. She said, though, there are merits to having a formula that includes a growth factor and an objective funding formula, but she said the House bill without the formula still merited consideration.
DeBar has said he believes any inequities that have developed in the MAEP since it was first passed in 1997 can be fixed without completely rewriting the formula.
READ MORE: Could this be the year political games end and MAEP is funded and fixed?
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
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.
Mississippi Today
Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate
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?”
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.
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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