Mississippi Today
‘The stepchildren:’ Community colleges struggle to fund buildings for growing workforce programs

BOONEVILLE — Northeast Mississippi Community College was running out of space, so after years of saving, it bought an empty furniture warehouse five minutes outside this small town.
The plan is to fill the 350,000 square feet with the college’s growing career-technical education programs, setting up everything from classrooms, labs and offices to conference space that could support economic development in the five rural counties that comprise the northeastern-most state lines of Mississippi.
“I can see it in my mind,” said Chris Murphy, the college’s vice president of finance, standing in the mostly empty warehouse on a recent Thursday.

Two years later, the warehouse is still mostly empty. In the cavernous space, there are ant hills next to cardboard boxes belonging to a tenant whose business helped the college pay off the building’s roughly $3 million note (the total cost was about $7 million). Outside, weeds poke through the cracked pavement.
Without help affording at least half of the estimated $15 million in renovations, the warehouse will stay that way, Murphy said.
Until then, the community college and its students will make do with the current career-technical facilities, housed in decades-old brick buildings on the main campus, where conditions are moldy, grimy, cluttered and water-damaged.
Though $15 million may not sound like much, it’s a big ask for the state’s historically neglected community college system. And NEMCC isn’t alone: Many community colleges across the state are struggling with unmet needs, especially on the infrastructure side, even though lawmakers have drawn from the state’s excess revenue to provide what may be more funding than ever before.
Not every college has benefited equally. Though all 15 schools have received routine funds for new buildings, repairs or renovations, some colleges have gotten additional appropriations for line-item projects while others, including NEMCC, have not.
Lawmakers acknowledged this disparity earlier this year and said they are working to fix it.
“I want to make sure that I keep the big boys happy, and they get their fair share, but just, also … we’ve got to do something for the smaller community colleges to keep them afloat,” said Rep. Donnie Scoggin, R-Ellisville, chair of the House Colleges and Universities Committee during an appropriations hearing earlier this year.
But it may not be enough to correct for years of paltry funding. Mississippi has historically used bonds to fund capital projects for state entities. In 2021, the most recent year lawmakers gave out bonds, the entire 15-college system received $35 million, according to the Mississippi Community College Board.
That’s about the highest amount ever received in bonds by the community college system. And yet, the eight universities got more than $86 million in bonds that year, despite educating more students.

For community colleges tasked with shepherding the state’s ambitious workforce development programs, the meager funding means they’re educating students in facilities that are falling behind the conditions of private industry.
“The idea that working in a factory is dark, dangerous, dingy is not true,” said Greg James, NEMCC’s director of workforce systems. Students “need to see the environment they’re gonna be working in.”
“I don’t think I need new equipment anytime soon,” he added. “I need buildings to put it in.”
On the third floor of the William L. Waller Technical Center, in the culinary arts classroom, grease stains the ceiling tiles.
Dead ladybugs line the windows, which aren’t insulated. A wide refrigerator is broken; another fridge can’t get cold enough. A sink in the back galley is out of commission, the pipes rusting and broken. One time in recent years, water leaked through the floor onto computers in the office below.

Other career-tech classes are in brick buildings with flat roofs prone to leaking. In a classroom with dead cockroaches and chalkboards, air-compressor equipment is squished together in rows that don’t resemble a factory. In an industrial lab, a basin sink is covered in grime, and the door to the nearby tool room is metal.
“That looks like a prison to me,” said Nadara Cole, NEMCC’s vice president for workforce training and economic development. But, she joked, at least the leather-and-chrome chairs the college can’t afford to replace are back in style.
Cole is getting ready to retire. She’s worked at NEMCC since the early 1990s, and in that time, the college has been unable to build any new career-tech facilities. The existing buildings, which she said were all constructed during an older push for vocational programs in the 1960s, are almost as old as she is.

All the community colleges struggle with funding. With roughly 90,000 students, the community colleges educate more students than Mississippi’s public universities, but they are expected to do so with lower tuition and less state appropriations.
This imbalance, Cole and others say, is directly reflected in the way the community colleges look which, in turn, affects recruitment. Students who tour NEMCC sometimes come from high schools that are in better shape, she said.
“It’s subliminally telling them, ‘you’re the stepchildren,’” Cole said.
“That is the image we sometimes feel we are projecting because we don’t look as nice,” she added.
The 15 community colleges received $396 million in operational support and capital funding last year, compared to the more than $1.1 billion appropriation for the eight universities, a figure that doesn’t include state financial aid.
It’s not a recent phenomenon: From 1989 to 2021, the community colleges have received one-third the bond funds the universities have, according to figures compiled by MCCB. This means capital projects at the colleges move slower, because they must wait years to accumulate enough bonds, all while the cost of construction increases with inflation.
Kell Smith, the MCCB director, said he doesn’t know why lawmakers don’t appropriate an equitable amount of bonds to the colleges, except possibly because state laws require counties within a community college district to provide additional tax revenue for the “enlargement, improvement and repair” of the campuses.
“I hate to say that’s the way it’s always been,” Smith said.

People are growing more skeptical about the value of higher education. More rural residents are graduating from high school, but people in those communities remain less likely than their suburban and urban peers to continue their education. This 10-part series from the Rural News Network, made possible with support from Ascendium, explores how institutions and students are meeting their educational needs and the demands of today’s rural workforce.
For rural colleges like NEMCC that don’t have the tax base of a Tupelo or DeSoto County, this means they don’t have significant funding alternatives when state appropriations are low. NEMCC is located in Prentiss County, where nearly 17% of its population of less than 25,000 lives below the poverty line.
NEMCC gets about $4 million a year from millage from its five counties, Murphy said.
The formula that lawmakers use for routine appropriations for repairs and renovations also poses another funding ceiling for rural colleges. Last year, lawmakers appropriated $50 million such funds based on a formula that is one-half evenly split among the colleges and one-half full-time equivalent enrollment, meaning colleges got more money if they had more students.
With about 2,500 students, NEMCC isn’t the smallest colleges in Mississippi, but it can’t compete with ones that draw enrollment from the state’s metro areas.

Jason Mattox, the associate vice president for career and technical education, said NEMCC receives federal funds for career-tech programs, but the amount is too small to address all the equipment issues in any given year. The money is also shared with the college’s health science programs.
Without newer facilities, the stigma associated with career-tech education will continue to kneecap the programs, Mattox said.
“It’s dirty, it’s greasy, it’s what we call the ol’ vo-techs,” Mattox said. “In reality, we’re not that way at all. We’re training students for highly technical, high-demand jobs, and we need facilities that replicate what students should see when they get out into the working industry.”
The difference is noticeable, said Cole Thacker, a 24-year-old culinary arts triple major who worked in restaurants before enrolling at NEMCC.

The kitchen is so small, he’s burned himself trying to prevent hot pans from touching other students. Because there are not enough stand mixers, he’s had to wait for his turn hours after class to finish assignments. The fridges have ruined his classmates’ projects, making it harder to learn advanced techniques like mirror glazing.
Thacker views this program as an investment in his future; he hopes to work at Disney World after he graduates in 2026. Going directly into the restaurant industry could only take him so far, he said.
“I tried to climb my way up, and I found out you can only climb so high without knowing … fundamental stuff that usually isn’t discussed in the professional environment,” he said.
What’s new stands out even more in NEMCC’s outdated precision manufacturing and machining technology lab.
Toward the back of the shop are gray-and-white automated machines. They’re brand new — not to mention expensive, costing a total of $816,000. They can be used to cut material into a range of shapes to be used in the manufacturing process for anything from car parts to surgical implants. This skill set is so desirable that NEMCC’s programs have helped attract major defense contractors and international companies like Toyota to the area.

“The sky’s the limit,” said Jonathan Shaw, an instructor in the program.
It’s also something Shaw thinks about more than he should have to. When it rains, the ceiling leaks. The location of the five machines, Shaw said, was strategic. Still, the machines are just a few feet from a wall that he said contains a “splashing risk.”
The morning a Mississippi Today reporter visited the lab, Shaw had to vacuum up water that pooled on the floor. It’s what he signed up for when he decided to become a teacher, taking a $40,000 pay cut because he wanted to pass on the skills he’d learned to others.

When it comes to requesting state funds for capital improvements, the community colleges are often on their own, according to interviews with state and local college officials. Unlike the state’s public universities, which are under the umbrella of the Institutions of Higher Learning, the community colleges operate more autonomously, with individual governing boards. MCCB supports the college’s requests but isn’t involved in crafting them.
Mississippi’s workforce development office, called Accelerate MS, is a source of funding for programs and equipment — they helped NEMCC get the new machines. While brick-and-mortar projects aren’t Accelerate’s main focus, the office has acted as a pass-through for construction projects that lawmakers funded with federal pandemic money, said Courtney Taylor, its new director.
Last year, those funds went to community colleges, Taylor said, and the year before that, $20 million went to the private William Carey University for a new primary care institute.
“Building buildings is very different than building people,” she said.
Smith said he doesn’t know the scope of deferred maintenance at the colleges, and that the Department of Finance and Administration Bureau of Buildings would have that information. The colleges do provide a 5-year capital plan to MCCB, Smith added, that shows $131 million in repair-and-renovation needs for the upcoming fiscal year.

What can end up happening is the colleges, like other public entities, receive funds based on how powerful their local delegation is.
“Our legislators, they do what they say, but we’re one little corner of the whole state,” Cole said.
At the same time, Cole said she isn’t blaming lawmakers for NEMCC’s needs.
“There’s just not enough funds to do everything we need to do,” she said. “We’re a poor state. I get it. We can’t depend on just the state, although that is where a lot of it is going to come from.”
That mentality also leads state agencies like MCCB to craft budget requests based on what they believe lawmakers will fund. According to a 2007 law, community colleges are supposed to receive “mid-level funding,” an amount in-between the budgets of K-12 and IHL. But lawmakers have never done that, so MCCB stopped asking for it on behalf of the colleges.
“What the statute required us to request was such a high amount that we knew this is not reasonable, this is something we can expect to get,” Smith said.
There’s also a lack of transparency in how funding decisions are made. Though Smith regularly talks with “budget writers” — lawmakers on the appropriations committees — he couldn’t tell Mississippi Today how they decide what to fund other than the state has finite resources.
And two college presidents whose schools have not received as much state support as others declined to talk with Mississippi Today for this story. The presidents of Copiah-Lincoln Community College and East Central Community College said they did not have time for an interview.
At Mississippi Delta Community College, the law enforcement training academy is struggling with mold and a roof that’s falling in, lawmakers learned during the House appropriations committee earlier this year. Tyrone Jackson, the president, said he wouldn’t talk with Mississippi Today for this article because the colleges advocate with one voice during the session.
But the college’s don’t receive state funding as one.

In NEMCC’s industrial maintenance classroom, instructor Brian Warren demonstrated how to cut dice while trying not to sweat. The air compressor in the decades-old building’s AC blew out that morning.
What really gets to Warren — who, like Shaw, took a roughly $40,000 pay cut for this job — is the lack of space.
One day, he hopes he will finally have a shop large enough to teach students how to work with a manufacturing robot, donated by a nearby Toyota supplier, that has been sitting wrapped in plastic for four years because he doesn’t have enough space to safely use it.

Local business and economic development leaders who make up NEMCC’s workforce council met in a classroom last week, sitting in classroom desks next to mannequins prone on stretchers. An arcade-game-like simulator to teach truck driving sat in the corner.
James, the workforce systems director, asked the council for feedback on what NEMCC could be doing to help local employers find qualified workers. If NEMCC can secure funding, the council would likely meet in the renovated furniture warehouse, in a grander space befitting the group’s ambitions.

“Are we working on something you think is a waste of time?” James asked the group.
One person suggested NEMCC should offer a lineman class. Several people said they wanted to see NEMCC teach common sense skills, from a work ethic to how to read a clock and use a tape measure. Leon Hays, the executive director of the Prentiss County Development Association, added that “getting a diploma doesn’t give you life skills.”
Rusty Berryhill, the president of a furniture company in Union County and a past chairman of the Mississippi Manufacturers Association, said NEMCC should consider creating a distribution list for employers of recent graduates, an idea that generated a lot of interest.
Then Forrest Bryan, an ecosystem coordinator from Accelerate MS, invited members of the council to a roundtable discussion with industry, not lawmakers or nonprofits, about funding opportunities.

“If we’re not listening to industry, we’re not listening to the people who really matter, okay?” Bryan said. “Politicians really don’t matter. I mean, obviously they matter, but they have their place over there. So the industry leaders and the industry needs are what we are wanting to address at this particular discussion.”
“Somebody should shout, ‘Amen!’” Taylor, NEMCC’s finance person, said, tapping Mattox on the shoulder.
The council’s next stop after the meeting was to tour a brand new robotics lab the college did up itself with painted floors and new lighting.
Before checking out the new classroom, Berryhill paid NEMCC a compliment, saying the college was working hard to be beneficial to local industry. He recently hired one NEMCC graduate at his small company, where he employs less than 125 people, and is employing another NEMCC student part-time.
But are lawmakers appropriating enough to help the college sustain its programs?

“I’m not answering that,” Berryhill responded. He later said he felt like it wasn’t his place to comment on funding matters, because he doesn’t want lawmakers to feel criticized for appropriating too little or make them think they are giving too much, adding “it’s a no-win situation on my part to answer that question.”
Murphy said he thinks lawmakers support Mississippi’s community colleges — they just need to know how. By purchasing the furniture warehouse, NEMCC made a commitment to help citizens in its five-county region, an area where the free-trade agreements of the 1990s led the economy to suffer.
“We need the Legislature behind us,” Murphy said. “I think they are, especially on the workforce equipment and program side. But we need help on the capital side as well.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Pharmacy benefit manager reform likely dead
Hotly contested legislation that aimed to increase the transparency and regulation of pharmacy benefit managers appeared dead in the water Tuesday after a lawmaker challenged the bill for a rule violation.
The bill was sent back to conference after Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, raised a point of order challenging the addition of code sections to the bill, which will likely kill it.
House members in the past have chosen to turn a blind eye to the rule, which would require the added code sections to be removed when the bill is returned to conference. This fatal flaw will make it difficult to revive the legislation.
“It will almost certainly die,” said House Speaker Jason White, who authored the legislation. “And you can celebrate that with your pharmacist when you see them.”
“…This wasn’t ‘gotcha.’ Everybody in this chamber knew that code sections were added, because the attempt was to make 1123 more suitable to all the parties.”
The bill sought to protect patients and 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 bill underwent several revisions in the House and Senate before reaching its most recent form, which independent pharmacists say has watered the bill down and will not offer them adequate protection.
House Bill 1123, authored by White, originally focused on the transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. The Senate then beefed up the bill by adding provisions barring the companies from steering patients to affiliate pharmacies and prohibiting spread pricing – the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits.
Independent pharmacists, who have flocked to the Capitol to advocate for reform this session, widely supported the Senate’s version of the bill.
The Senate incorporated several recommendations from the House into its bill, saying that they believed that the legislation would have the House’s support.
Instead, the House sent the bill to conference and requested additional changes, including new language that would eliminate 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.
This language seeks to satisfy employers, who argue that regulating pharmacy benefit managers’ business practices will lead to higher health insurance costs.
Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, who has spearheaded pharmacy benefit manager reform efforts in the Senate, previously said that adding the language to the bill would “remove any protection out of the law.” But she signed the conference report that included the language Monday after a heated conference meeting between lawmakers.
Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs and co-author of the bill, said the bill has something for everybody, gesturing to its concessions for employers and independent pharmacists. He said the bill gives independent pharmacists 85% of what they wanted.
Mississippi Independent Pharmacies Association director Robert Dozier was not available for comment by the time the story published.
Zuber told House members Tuesday to “blame the Senate” for the slow progress of pharmacy benefit manager reform in Mississippi, citing the body’s failure to take up a drug pricing transparency bill half a decade ago, for three years in a row.
“If the Senate had followed the leadership and the legislation that we drafted those many years ago, we would not be here,” Zuber said. “We would have the information on drug pricing, we would have the information and transparency on (pharmacy benefit managers) and we would have the ultimate reason as to why drug costs continue to rise.”
Members of the House expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation Tuesday, arguing it did not do enough to ensure lower prescription drug costs for consumers.
“I’m going to try to do something next year that goes even further,” Zuber responded.
For the past several years, lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, but none have made it as far as this session.
“We’ll go another year,” said White.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Feuding GOP lawmakers prepare to leave Jackson without a budget, let governor force them back
After months of bitter Republican political infighting, the Legislature appears likely to end its session Wednesday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown if they don’t come back and adopt one by June 30.
After the House adjourned Tuesday night, Speaker Jason White said he had presented the Senate with a final offer to extend the session, which would give the two chambers more time to negotiate a budget. As for now, the 100 or so bills that make up the state budget are dead.
The Senate leadership was expected to meet and consider the offer Tuesday evening, White said. But numerous senators both Republican and Democrat said they would oppose such a parliamentary resolution, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has also said it’s unlikely and that the governor will have to force lawmakers back into special session.
White said he believes, if the Senate would agree to extend the session and restart negotiations, lawmakers could pass a budget and end the 2025 session by Sunday, only a few days later than planned.
But if the Senate chooses not to pass a resolution extending the session, White said the House would end the session on Wednesday.
It would take a two-thirds vote of support in both chambers to suspend the rules and extend the session. The Senate opposition appears to be enough to prevent that.
Still, the speaker said he believes Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Senate leaders are considering the proposal. But he said if he doesn’t hear a positive response by Wednesday, the House will adjourn and wait for Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session at a later date.
“We are open to (extending the session), but we will not stay here until Sunday waiting around to see if they might do it,” White said.
White said leaving the Capitol without a budget and punting the issue to a special session might not cool tensions between the chambers, as some lawmakers hope.
“I think when you leave here and you end up in a special session, some folks say, ‘Well everybody that’s upset will cool down by then.’ They may, or it may get worse. It may shine a different and specific light on some of the things in this budget and the differences in the House and Senate,” White said. “Whereas, I think everybody now is in the legislative mode, and we might get there.”
The Mississippi Constitution does not grant the governor much power, but if Gov. Tate Reeves calls lawmakers into a special session, he gets to set the specific legislative agenda — not lawmakers.
White said the governor could potentially use his executive authority to direct lawmakers to take up other bills, such as those related to education, before getting to the budget.
“When we leave here without a budget, it is entirely the governor’s prerogative to when he (sets a special session) and how he does that.”
While the future of the state’s budget hangs in the balance, lawmakers have spent the remaining days of their regular session trying to pass the few remaining bills that remained alive on their calendars.
House approves DEI ban, Senate could follow suit on Wednesday
The House on Tuesday passed a proposal to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public schools, and both chambers approved a measure to establish a form of early voting.
The House approved a conference report compromise to ban DEI programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from K-12 schools, community colleges and universities. If the Senate follows suit, Mississippi would join a number of other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump, who has made rooting DEI out of the federal government one of his top priorities.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers follows hours of heated debate in which Democrats, all almost of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. Legislative Republicans argued the legislation will elevate merit in education and remove from school settings “divisive concepts” that exacerbate divisions among different identity groups.
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 act, but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law, but only after they go through an internal campus review process that would give schools time to make changes. The legislation could also withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply.
Legislature sends ‘early voting lite’ bill to governor
The Legislature also overwhelmingly passed a proposal to establish a watered down version of early voting, though the legislation is titled “in-person excused voting,” and not early voting.
The proposal establishes 22 days of in-person voting before Election Day that requires voters to go to the circuit clerk’s office or another location county officials have designated as a secure early voting facility, such as a courtroom or a board of supervisors meeting room.
To cast an early vote, someone must present a valid form of photo ID and list one of about 15 legal excuses to vote before Election Day. The excuses, however, are broad and would, in theory, allow many people to cast early ballots.
Examples of valid excuses are voters expecting to work on Election Day, being at least 65 years old, being currently enrolled in college or potentially travelling outside of their county on Election Day.
Since most eligible voters either work, go to college or are older than 65 years of age, these excuses would apply to almost everyone.
“Even though this isn’t early voting as we saw originally, it makes this more convenient for hard working Mississippians to go by their clerks’ office and vote in person after showing an ID 22 days prior to an election,” Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England said.
Republican Gov. Tate Reeves opposes early voting, so it’s unclear if he would sign the measure into law or veto it.
Both chambers are expected to gavel at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to debate the final items on their agenda.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
‘A lot of us are confused’: Lacking info, some Jacksonians go to wrong polling place
Johnny Byrd knew that when his south Jackson neighborhood Carriage Hills changed wards during redistricting last year, his neighbors would have trouble finding their correct polling place on Election Day.
So he bought a poster board and inscribed it with their new voting location – Christ Tabernacle Church.
“I made a sign and placed it in front of the entrance to our neighborhood that told them exactly where to go so there would be no confusion,” said Byrd, vice president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods.
Still, on April 1, a car full of voters from a senior living facility who should have gone to Christ Tabernacle were driven to their old polling place.
“I thought it was unfortunate they had to get there and find out rather than knowing in advance that their polling location was different,” said Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson who was on the ground Tuesday helping constituents with voting.
One of those elderly women became frustrated and said she no longer wanted to vote, Norwood said, though her companions tried to convince her otherwise. By midday Tuesday, 300 people had voted at Christ Tabernacle, one of the city’s largest precincts currently in terms of registered voters, but among the lowest in turnout historically.
Voting rights advocates and candidates vying for municipal office in Jackson are keeping an eye on issues facing voters at the polls, though without official results, it remains to be seen if that will dampen turnout this election with the hotly contested Democratic primary.
“I still believed it was gonna be low,” Monica McInnis, a program manager for the nonprofit OneVoice, said of turnout. “I was expecting it would be a little higher because of what is on the ballot and how many people are running in all of the wards as well as the mayor’s race.”
The situation is evolving as the day goes on, but the main issues are twofold. One, thousands of Jackson voters have new precinct locations after redistricting last year put them into a new city council ward.
Two, some voters didn’t realize their polling place for the municipal elections may differ from where they voted in last year’s national elections, which are run by the counties.
In Mississippi, voters are assigned two precincts that are often but not always the same: A municipal location for city elections and a county location for senate, gubernatorial and presidential elections
“People in Mississippi, we go to the same polling location for three years, and that fourth year, it changes,” said Jada Barnes, an organizer with the Jackson-based nonprofit MS Votes. “A lot of us are confused. When people are going to the polling place today, they’re seeing it is closed, so they’re just going back home which is making turnout go even lower.”
Barnes said she’s hearing this primarily from a few Jackson voters who called a hotline that MS Votes is manning. Lack of awareness around polling locations is a big deterrent, she said, because most people are trying to squeeze their vote in between work, school or family responsibilities.
“Maybe you’re on your lunch break, you only got 30 minutes to go vote, you learn that your polling location has changed and now you have to go back to work,” she said.
Norwood said he heard from a group of students assigned to vote at Christ Tabernacle who had attempted to vote at the wrong precinct and were told their names weren’t on the rolls. They didn’t know they had been moved from Ward 4 to Ward 6, Norwood said, meaning they expected to vote in a different council race until reaching the polls Tuesday.
Though voters have a duty to be informed of their polling location, Barnes said city and circuit clerks and local election commissioners are ultimately responsible for making sure voters know where to go on Election Day.
Angela Harris, the Jackson municipal clerk, said her office worked to inform voters by mailing out thousands of letters to Jacksonians whose precincts changed, including the roughly 6,000 whose wards changed during the 2024 redistricting.
“I am over-swamped,” she said yesterday.
Despite her efforts, at least one voter said he never got a letter. Stephen Brown learned through Facebook, not an official notice, that he was moved from Ward 1 to Ward 2.

A resident of the Briarwood Heights neighborhood in northeast Jackson, Brown’s efforts to vote Tuesday have been complicated by mixed messages and a lack of communication. He has yet to vote, even though he showed up at the polls at 7:10 this morning.
His odyssey took him to two wrong locations, where the poll managers instructed Brown to call his ward’s election commissioner, who did not answer multiple calls, Brown said. Brown finally learned through a Facebook comment that he could look up his new precinct on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website — if he scrolled down the page past his county precinct information.
This afternoon, Brown has a series of meetings planned, so now he’s hoping for a 30-minute window to try voting one more time, even though he’s skeptical it will make a difference.
“I’m a very disenchanted voter, because I’ve been let down so much,” he said. “I vote because it’s the thing that I’m supposed to do and because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, but not because I truly believe in it, you know?”
Brown’s not alone in facing turbulence. Back at Christ Tabernacle, one Jackson voter, who declined to give her name, said she’s frustrated from having to drive to three polling locations in one day.
“I’m dissatisfied with the fact that I had to drive from one end of this street and all of the back to come over here when I usually vote over here on Highway 18,” she said. “This was a great inconvenience, gas wise and time wise.”
The same thing happened to Rodney Miller. He called the confusion some voters are facing in this election “unnecessary.”
“That ain’t the way we should be handling business,” he said. “We should be looking out for one another better than that, you know? It’s already enough getting people out to vote, and when you confuse them when they try? Come on now. That’s discouraging.”
Christ Tabernacle is the second largest precinct in the city in terms of registered voters, with 3,330 assigned to vote there as of 2024, according to documents retrieved from the municipal election committee. But it had one of the lowest voter turnout rates – 10% in the 2021 primary election before redistricting and before it became so large.
Byrd mentioned the much higher turnout in places like Ward 1 in northeast Jackson, compared to where he lives in south Jackson. Why does Byrd think this is?
“Civics,” Byrd said. “They took civics out of school. If you ask the average person what is the role and responsibility of any elected official, they can’t tell you.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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