| Monday, June 3, 2024 |
| Summer kicks off camp season in Golden Triangle | |
 | School is out for the summer, and kids are home for the season. Fortunately for parents looking to entertain their kids, the Golden Triangle has plenty to offer when it comes to summer camps. Throughout June, Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District will host several enrichment camps for students. SOCSD Intersession Coordinator Mauriesa Blackwell said the different camps are designed to enrich students' education while exposing them to subject areas they may not encounter in the classroom. The enrichment camps include options for multiple grade levels from kindergarten to eighth grade. Each camp explores a different subject ranging from natural disasters to culinary skills and even to pirates. Each camp includes a literacy focus, Blackwell said. Some camps partner with Mississippi State University to take students on field trips to different facilities, like MSU's Advanced Composites Institute and High Voltage Lab. "The goal is just to really try to find the students' interests and give them enrichment activities that they might not be exposed to otherwise," Blackwell said. "Overall the greatest benefit is exposure." ... MSU offers an array of camp opportunities for athletics, engineering and other educational subjects, performing arts, and more. Camps are designed for multiple age group, and registration fees and requirements vary. A full list of camps is available on MSU's website. |
| Mississippi Society of New York City to revive annual picnic in the park | |
 | The annual Mississippi in the Park picnic is back in New York City this month for the first time since 2015 -- this time with new organizers, a different location and a low-key atmosphere for its first year. The picnic is hosted by the Mississippi Society of New York City, a collaborative comprising a dozen members of Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Miss alumni groups in New York who had long talked of reviving the event. Representatives from universities sponsoring the event -- University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, and University of Southern Mississippi -- will be onsite, and the Mississippi Society of New York City encourages other institutions and organizations to reach out about getting involved next year. There will also be live music. Event merch will be sold and representatives from each of the school alumni groups involved and the Mississippi Society of New York City will be on hand to engage with attendees and collect feedback and ideas for future events. Jimmy Black, a member of the Mississippi Society of New York City, is a Saltillo native who has lived in New York for 16 years and serves as co-president of the NYC/Tri-State Area Bulldogs alumni group. Though this year's event certainly won't be as large as previous years, Black said, the picnic will serve as an opportunity for Mississippians to gather and celebrate where they came from. |
| Where is the water going? Study shows 45% loss in city water systems | |
| About 45% of the city's produced water is lost in "non-revenue" use per day, according to a Neel-Schaffer evaluation, and Starkville Utilities is investigating where it's going. Neel-Schaffer Vice President John Cunningham presented a comprehensive evaluation of the current Starkville Utilities water system and a 20-year plan for that system to the board of aldermen during its Friday work session. During that report, Cunningham said that about 2.1 million gallons of the city's daily 4.7 million gallons of water production is not generating revenue. Only about 2.6 million gallons, or 55% of total production, is being sold to customers. "This is kind of the loss we're seeing in your system in some form, which may be flushing or it could be some other things, like minute errors, meter accuracy or other minute errors that could occur," Cunningham said. Starkville Utilities CEO Edward Kemp explained that these numbers are theoretical and could represent any number of small issues throughout the system. He said he believes the numbers to be accurate, but meter issues could also be affecting those reported losses. After the meeting, Kemp told The Dispatch that the loss could include a variety of explanations, including leakage, flushing, tank overflow, filter backwashes, inaccurate meters, connections that are unaccounted for and more. "We have already started looking at trying to identify where these sources of losses may occur," Kemp told The Dispatch. "And the challenging thing is that it's not just one thing, or two things, or half a dozen things." |
| SOCSD slow to tell authorities of allegations against teacher | |
| Scott Colom said he first learned about recent allegations of a Starkville High School teacher touching students from news reports. Per the language of the state's mandatory reporter statute, Colom, district attorney for the 16th circuit, should have heard it directly from Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District. But Superintendent Tony McGee didn't reach out to Colom's office until Thursday, 15 days after Starkville police began investigating the allegations and a week after the teacher was arrested. "With investigations in regards to allegations against teachers or school officials in the school context, the sooner the district attorney's office can be made aware of those allegations, the better," Colom told The Dispatch on Friday. State law requires school officials to contact the DA, the Mississippi Department of Education and Child Protective Services in a timely manner when they learn of credible allegations of a school employee inappropriately touching a student. But SOCSD also waited at least a few days before notifying MDE and failed to directly read Starkville Police Department into the situation, according to police officials. Moreover, current district protocols don't seem to comply with the letter of the law. |
| CREATE's Communities of Excellence program driving improvement throughout region | |
| Communities can't be forced to hit their own major issues head on, but helping them do so with as much support as they'd like to have is setting Northeast Mississippi apart. Communities come into existence organically. Families live side by side. Children share the same schools. Adults work in complementary industries and businesses. They go to the same churches and share the same common concerns. To a large extent, each community and municipality deals with the issues that face them on a day-to-day basis, but often that work is largely reactive in nature. Beyond a certain point, growth and development have to be addressed deliberately. Genuine, long-term progress usually demands a considerable amount of proactive labor. That involves planning, relationship-building and a level of trust both deep and broad. Challenges unique to any location have to be tackled by dedicated, concerned citizens and pressed in a long-term way if conditions are going to improve and stay that way. That's where the CREATE Foundation's Communities of Excellence program comes in. Today, there are six Communities of Excellence recognized and encouraged by CREATE throughout the region. Citizen-led, community organizations in Alcorn, Chickasaw, Lowndes, Pontotoc, Tippah and Union Counties have been working on local concerns specific to them while accessing the regional strength of CREATE and its consensus-building potential. In 2022, CREATE recruited four key partners to help support the mission: the Appalachian Regional Commission, Mississippi State University, the University of Mississippi and the Tennessee Valley Authority. |
| Commissioner Gipson helps open new 'farm-to-table' business in Hattiesburg | |
 | Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture Andy Gipson was in Hattiesburg Friday, to help launch a new business. Gipson cut a ribbon at the grand opening of Mississippi Farmers Meats at Old Eleven Plaza. The new enterprise will give farmers a new way to get their products from the farm to the dinner table. "This is part of the farm-to-table movement, really, and we want to grow more of this in Mississippi," Gipson said. The store sells locally-raised and processed meats, along with fresh local produce and dairy products. The Hattiesburg store is the second Mississippi Famers Meats to open. The first is in Summit, at the site of a meat-processing facility that opened in 2000. "The only way Mississippi is going to grow, is if we support every farmer," said Nadeem M. Kased, Mississippi Farmers Meats president/founder. "If we don't support the farmers, they will be going out of business." Kased said he wants to eventually open 10 Mississippi Farmers Meats locations in Mississippi and Louisiana. |
| State health exchange becomes law in shadow of Medicaid expansion fight | |
 | Lawmakers passed legislation this year that authorizes the Commissioner of Insurance to establish and operate a state-based healthcare insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney (R) and the bill's sponsors all say that the legislation could result in savings to the state while potentially increasing participation from health insurance companies that would give Mississippians more options. Governor Tate Reeves (R) did not sign the legislation, allowing it to become law without his signature. When the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010, it created two new initiatives aimed at reducing the number of Americans without health insurance. One allowed states for the first time to put able-bodied adults without dependents on Medicaid and to expand eligibility up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Most of the energy in the room this legislative session was devoted to the question of whether Mississippi should expand Medicaid. The second initiative under the ACA gave states the option of either creating their own state health insurance exchange or allowing citizens to use the ACA's federal health insurance exchange to purchase individual health insurance subsidized by the federal government. Nineteen states operate their own exchanges separate from the federal platform. During the administration of former Governor Phil Bryant (R), the idea of creating a state exchange was seen as conceding the permanency of "Obamacare," and he rejected efforts to do so. The implementation of the state exchange in Mississippi under the new law is unlikely until at least 2025. State officials say the federal government is expected to provide support to help stand up the state-based exchange. |
| Speaker White makes appointments as committees look to tackle tax and healthcare reform | |
| As lawmakers plan to work between now and next year's session on certain issues such as tax and healthcare reform, House Speaker Jason White has announced appointments for a handful of key committees. "With the appointments made to these committees, I feel confident that the Mississippi House of Representatives will thoroughly study current state laws and tax structures to make informed recommendations for the 2025 Legislative Session," White said, per a release. "The House will continue its pursuit of bold initiatives and policies to improve our great state, focusing on the betterment of Mississippi and all her citizens." Of appointments announced on Friday are members of the Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) Committee, the Select Committee on Healthcare Reform: Certificate of Need (CON), Select Committee on Prescription Drugs, Select Committee on Tax Reform, and Joint Legislative Committee on Compilation, Revision, and Publication. |
| Republicans join effort to change confederate statues representing Mississippi in Washington | |
 | Several Republican Mississippi lawmakers are now seeking to replace confederate statues representing the state in Washington, D.C. just weeks after Arkansas installed a statue of a civil rights activist next to Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. During the 2024 session, several bills were filed to either replace or establish a commission to find replacements for Davis, a U.S. Senator and most notably president of the Confederate States of America, and James Z. George, a Confederate politician, military officer and namesake of George County. However, those bills died without ever being brought up in House or Senate Rules Committees. The statues, meanwhile, have been displayed for about 100 years in the U.S. Congress' Statuary Hall. The Davis statue now stands adjacent to that of Arkansas' Daisy Bates, a Black civil rights leader involved in the integration of Little Rock's Central High School among many other efforts. The juxtaposition of thew two is notable. House Rules Committee Chairman Fred Shanks, R-Brandon, who previously declined to comment on a related report in February, told the Clarion Ledger Tuesday he is planning to address changing the statues in the 2025 session. "It's a big deal, and it's going to be an extremely hot topic," Shanks said. "I wanted some time to look at it when we don't have some of the other major things that impact the state going on like we did this past session." |
| Bill moving in Congress would keep Tenn-Tom Waterway flowing | |
 | A bill moving through Congress would help keep the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway flowing. U.S. Senator Roger Wicker said the Water Resources Development Act of 2024 would give money to meet dredging requirements along the waterway's locks and dams. In April 2019, traffic on the waterway was halted after floods created a sandbar at the Aberdeen Lock that required dredging. The Congressional Legislation would address flood risk management infrastructure in Alcorn and Union counties. In all, Wicker said there would be $142 million put towards projects to benefit Mississippi. The bill now moves out of committee and to the full Senate for a vote. |
| Tunica County officials reject proposal to convert abandoned casino complex into housing for migrant youth | |
| Initial plans to house undocumented migrant youth in a vacant north Mississippi casino's hotels failed to move forward. A narrow 3-2 vote by the Tunica County Board of Supervisors on Thursday will prevent a company from converting the former Harrah's Casino Complex into an influx care facility (ICF) through the federal government's Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, praised the majority decision by the supervisors but conveyed doubts that Thursday's vote marked the final time the topic of using the Tunica site as an ICF would be brought up. In a letter penned to the Department of Health and Human Services, Wicker aired out grievances over "chronic mismanagement" by the ORR and asked the federal agency to keep him in the loop on any contracting proposals involving an ICF in Mississippi. "Many of my constituents had raised concerns about this project's impact on the community. It was clear that Tunica County's health care, transportation, and other services were not prepared for this sudden influx," Wicker said. "I am glad this decision was halted for now, but I am still worried about a similar proposal in the future and have shared those with HHS." |
| China Is 'Prepositioning' for Future Cyberattacks -- and the New NSA Chief Is Worried | |
 | As the U.S. military's new cyber chief and the head of the nation's main electronic spy agency, it is Gen. Timothy Haugh's job to be concerned about China's clandestine efforts to steal sensitive American data and weapons know-how. But he is also contending with an unusual Chinese threat, one that is designed not to extract military secrets or data of any kind but to lurk in the infrastructure that undergirds civilian life, as if lying in wait for the right moment to unleash chaos. "We see it as very unique and different -- and also concerning," Haugh said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on the sidelines of a security conference in Singapore. "And the concern is both in what is being targeted and then how it is being targeted." The U.S. believes the Chinese hacking network -- known as Volt Typhoon among cybersecurity experts and U.S. officials -- aims to "preposition" in critical infrastructure networks for future attacks. "We can see no other use," said Haugh, who took charge of the National Security Agency and the military's Cyber Command in February. "We see attempts to be latent in a network that is critical infrastructure, that has no intelligence value, which is why it is so concerning," he said. Unlike other state-backed hackers who typically use tools to target a network and then take data, these Chinese intrusions involve neither. "One of the reasons we believe it is prepositioning is---there are not tools being put down and there's not data being extracted," Haugh said. |
| Hunter Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrive for jury selection in his federal gun case | |
 | President Joe Biden's son Hunter arrived at court on Monday for jury selection in a federal gun case against him after the collapse of a deal with prosecutors that would have avoided the spectacle of a trial so close to the 2024 election. First lady Jill Biden arrived shortly after, entering the courthouse in support of her son. Hunter Biden, who spent the weekend with his parents, has been charged in Delaware with three felonies stemming from a 2018 firearm purchase when he was, according to his memoir, in the throes of a crack addiction. He has been accused of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application used to screen firearms applicants when he said he was not a drug user, and illegally having the gun for 11 days. He has pleaded not guilty and has argued he's being unfairly targeted by the Justice Department, after Republicans decried the now-defunct deal as special treatment for the Democratic president's son. The trial comes just days after Donald Trump, Republicans' presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, was convicted of 34 felonies in New York City. A jury found the former president guilty of a scheme to cover up a hush money payment to a porn actor to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential campaign. The two criminal cases are unrelated, but their proximity underscores how the criminal courtroom has taken center stage during the 2024 campaign. |
| Biden Stakes Re-Election Campaign on Reviving Bad Memories of Trump | |
| President Biden's re-election strategy rests in large part on reminding voters about the darkest days of Donald Trump's presidency: the Capitol riot, a botched response to Covid-19 and violence driven by racial strife in Charlottesville, Va. Now, Trump's conviction on 34 felony counts gives Biden and his allies their best chance yet to jolt voters into recalling Trump as an agent of chaos and to argue that his personal behavior carries risks for the country. It might not work. Biden's campaign has struggled to change the minds of the undecided voters he needs most, many of whom are disengaged from politics, worried foremost about prices and hold an increasingly rosy view of Trump's presidency. Those factors have made it hard for Democrats to make Trump's personality and policies the most salient issue in the campaign -- as they did successfully in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats made big congressional gains, and in the 2020 race that put Biden in the White House. "This is going to be the 'reminder campaign,'" said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster who has worked with many presidential candidates. "Instead of talking about the future, they're going to be talking about the past, because each one wants to define it in his own way." The challenge for Biden: "Voters' attitudes toward President Trump are locked in," Newhouse said. "They either love him or hate him." |
| Mississippi GOP leaders come to Trump's defense after guilty verdict | |
| Most Mississippi Republican politicians quickly took to social media this week to defend Donald Trump and to attack the New York justice system after the former president was convicted of 34 felony charges. The former president was found guilty of charges related to falsifying business records to conceal that just before the 2016 election he paid off porn actress Stormy Daniels to conceal a sexual encounter. Mississippi politicians, claiming the guilty verdict was politically motivated to harm Trump's election chances, echoed some of the same attacks they used in 2020 after they falsely claimed, like Trump, that the presidential election was stolen. In 2020, many Mississippi politicians supported the former president's effort to throw out votes cast by millions of Americans in order to reverse the outcome of the election. State Sen. Brice Wiggins of Pascagoula, who did not attack the jury verdict, was an exception among Mississippi Republicans on social media. "All jurors deserve thanks and respect. They are the foundation of the best judicial system in the world (though not perfect)." He added that the Republicans leadership "has a lot of soul searching to do." He also posted, "Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.'" Some came to Wiggins' defense on social media, but he was attacked by many for his defense of the jury system. Before being elected to the state Senate, Wiggins served as an assistant district attorney prosecuting criminal cases before juries. |
| Trump verdict brings GOP skeptics into the fold | |
 | The guilty verdict rendered against former President Trump is bringing moderate Republicans and longtime Trump skeptics to his side in a way that Trump's campaign has failed to do for months. Longtime Trump critics, including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), among others, are rallying to Trump's defense after the verdict -- and other Trump-leery Republicans such as Nikki Haley are expected to do so as well. Haley, who said last week she would vote for Trump over President Biden, has so far stayed quiet about Trump's conviction, but prominent Republicans, even some of his biggest critics, say the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) was fundamentally unfair. McConnell said after the verdict the "charges never should have been brought in the first place" and predicted the conviction will be overturned on appeal. And Collins said Bragg had blurred "the lines between the judicial system and the electoral system" by running for the district attorney's office on a pledge to prosecute Trump. "This decision has the same dramatic effect across the country like President Clinton's impeachment. They are very different scenarios, but both caused a massive rally effect. With Clinton it was Democrats, and now with Trump it's Republicans who believe there is judicial overreach," said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior Senate and House leadership aide. |
| Biden's Gaza plan 'not a good deal' but Israel accepts it, Netanyahu aide says | |
| An aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israel had accepted a framework deal for winding down the Gaza war now being advanced by U.S. President Joe Biden, though he described it as flawed and in need of much more work. In an interview with Britain's Sunday Times, Ophir Falk, chief foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu, said Biden's proposal was "a deal we agreed to -- it's not a good deal but we dearly want the hostages released, all of them". "There are a lot of details to be worked out," he said, adding that Israeli conditions, including "the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas as a genocidal terrorist organisation" have not changed. Biden, whose initial lockstep support for Israel's offensive has given way to open censure of the operation's high civilian death toll, on Friday aired what he described as a three-phase plan submitted by the Netanyahu government to end the war. The first phase entails a truce and the return of some hostages held by Hamas, after which the sides would negotiate on an open-ended cessation of hostilities for a second phase in which remaining live captives would go free, Biden said. That sequencing appears to imply that Hamas would continue to play a role in incremental arrangements mediated by Egypt and Qatar -- a potential clash with Israel's determination to resume the campaign to eliminate the Iranian-backed Islamist group. |
| Hollywood actress and entrepreneur Malinda Williams holds coding boot camp at JSU | |
| A Hollywood actress visited Jackson State University on Saturday on a mission to empower young women who wish to pursue a career in computer science. The actress, Malinda Williams, says it's a coding bootcamp that's geared towards HBCUs called E.S.T.E.A.M., which stands for entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering arts, and math. The goal is to get many girls excited and prepared to go into the field of computer science. "Knowing that she took the time to learn how to code herself when society had different offs facing her is empowering and inspiring," Ka'Pri Burden, a student at JSU said. Dozens of girls like Burden were under one roof at the Jackson State Science building on Saturday getting a one-on-one with the actress. Williams says the four-week training is a part of her non-profit Foundation, Arise and Shine. It aims to help young women at HBCUs be successful in their careers in computer technology with hands-on experiences. Burden says it's an industry that's declining with people who look like her. |
| Jones College hosts inaugural Mississippi Red Angus Association field day | |
| Jones College hosted a first-ever agricultural conference Saturday, with a focus on a popular breed of beef cattle. The college held an inaugural field day for the Mississippi Red Angus Association. The event featured a lecture about the breed at Jones' Home and Health Auditorium and a tour of the college's new livestock show barn. "We've had multiple speakers in, speaking about the 'ag' economy and animal nutrition to the importance of animal photography, just a wide swath of things to be discussed (Saturday)," said Jason Mills, Jones College farm/ranch management instructor and a board member of the Mississippi Red Angus Association. The day also included demonstrations featuring members of the Jones College Livestock Show Team. |
| Most US students are recovering from pandemic-era setbacks, but millions are making up little ground | |
| On one side of the classroom, students circled teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowel sounds. In another corner, children read together from a book. Scattered elsewhere, students sat at laptop computers and got reading help from online tutors. For the third graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia, it was an ordinary school day. But educators were racing to get students learning more, faster, and to overcome setbacks that have persisted since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago. America's schools have started to make progress toward getting students back on track. But improvement has been slow and uneven across geography and economic status, with millions of students -- often those from marginalized groups -- making up little or no ground. Nationally, students made up one-third of their pandemic losses in math during the past school year and one-quarter of the losses in reading, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard, an analysis of state and national test scores by researchers at Harvard and Stanford. But in nine states, including Virginia, reading scores continued to fall during the 2022-23 school year after previous decreases during the pandemic. Only a few states have rebounded to pre-pandemic testing levels. Alabama was the only state where math achievement increased past 2019 levels, while Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana accomplished that in reading. |
| Plan advances to tackle $2 billion repair backlog at Louisiana colleges | |
| Louisiana lawmakers are moving forward with a plan to divert state savings to a new fund to fix a lengthy list of crumbling infrastructure on state college and university campuses. The Legislature approved House Bill 940 by Rep. Chris Turner, R-Ruston, which would provide money for maintenance work without going through the annual state construction budget. The bill cleared both chambers Friday unanimously. Presently, each university system gets a few million dollars each year to address these deferred maintenance projects, far from enough to keep up with new projects added to the list each year. In total, there are approximately $2 billion worth of repairs needed at public colleges and universities in the state. Turner said higher education leaders have asked instead for a set amount of money annually, which they could then decide how to spend themselves. This would prevent long-needed maintenance projects from filling up House Bill 2, the state construction budget, he said. Lawmakers are considering using some money that would typically go into a state savings account to set up the College and University Deferred Maintenance and Capital Improvement Fund. About $70 million destined for the Revenue Stabilization Trust Fund will be diverted to the new fund, Senate President Cameron Henry said. The Revenue Stabilization Trust Fund currently has about $2.3 billion in it. |
| After a Suicide, What Information Does a College Owe Its Campus? | |
 | On an early April morning in 2023, Randy Woodson was wrestling with how to talk about students who had taken their own lives. It had been a heartbreaking year. Fourteen students at North Carolina State University had died since the previous August, including seven by suicide. Earlier that week, the university had lost two undergraduates to suicide. Woodson, the chancellor, alerted the campus community by email soon afterward. His communications team had removed references to the cause of death. That morning, reflecting on the past eight months, Woodson wondered whether administrators had gotten it right. "I can't help but feel that our approach to announcing very broadly each student death is contributing to the media attention as well as potentially to the contagion effect," Woodson wrote in an email to the university's chief of staff, Paula Gentius, and Brad Bohlander, a spokesman then. The chancellor was referring to emails the university had sent to certain faculty and staff members in the immediate aftermath of a suicide, not to the campuswide messages, Bohlander said in a recent interview. The exchange, made available through a public-records request, speaks to the dilemma that emerges when a student dies by suicide. Their peers and professors expect information -- details of the decedent's life on campus, description of the circumstances around their untimely death. When that doesn't arrive, it can feel like an erasure. But colleges have to weigh other factors, including the interests of the family, privacy concerns, and the risk for copycat behavior. Sharing too much can come off as adulation and inspire vulnerable students to act on dark impulses. Sharing too little can breed anxiety and set the social-media rumor mill in motion. |
| Turning Students' College Intentions Into Enrollments | |
 | With many four-year colleges and universities facing stagnant or shrinking enrollment, a new study from Art & Science Group suggests an overlooked group of students could help them meet their quotas: recent high school graduates who seriously considered pursuing a four-year degree but never enrolled. In a survey conducted in February and March, Art & Science asked 2,408 high school seniors if they had ever seriously considered attending a four-year college. Researchers split students who said yes into two groups: those who are planning to attend college this fall and those who are not. Then they drilled down further among the latter group to try to understand why. The findings, released by the higher education consulting firm Monday, show that a large majority of those not enrolled for the fall still intend to pursue a bachelor's degree at some point. More than half (53 percent) said they intended to start at a two-year college, and one-third (33 percent) said they simply planned to take a break before returning to the classroom. Only 3 percent said they no longer planned to attend college at all. "Demographically, most of the country is seeing a decline in the number of students. So they're asking, 'Who do we reach out to next?'" said Craig Goebel, a principal at Art & Science and lead author of the report. "To us, it's the students that started the process. If you're going to be able to convert anyone, we felt like they were the most realistic population to be able to convert." |
| Work requirement doesn't kill Medicaid expansion for one Republican state | |
| Mississippi Today's Bobby Harrison writes: Mississippi was not the only state where a Medicaid expansion work requirement was a hot topic during the 2024 legislative session. South Dakota -- a more conservative and more Republican dominated state than even Mississippi -- debated the work requirement issue during the 2024 legislative session and came to a much different conclusion. In Mississippi, of course, efforts to expand Medicaid to provide health care coverage for the working poor with the federal government paying most of the costs were unsuccessful. While there were several nuanced reasons the Mississippi Legislature did not expand Medicaid, perhaps the primary reason is the insistence of Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and a majority of the Senate where he presides that any expansion plan include a requirement Medicaid enrollees had to be employed. It should be pointed out, though, that it is not clear Medicaid expansion would have passed the Mississippi Senate even with a work requirement provision. But the fact that the Senate demanded a work requirement doomed Medicaid expansion efforts in Mississippi. Since the federal government has rejected approving Medicaid expansion work requirements, many argued there was no reason to pass a Mississippi proposal that would never go into effect because of the stringent work requirement. |
SPORTS
| Mississippi State to send 17 athletes to NCAA track and field championships | |
| Mississippi State has a long tradition of outstanding javelin throwers, but this year, the Bulldogs are shining in the shot put and discus as well. In total, MSU is sending 17 athletes -- 10 men and seven women -- to the NCAA outdoor championships next week at historic Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, including all five throwers who qualified for the regional meet in Lexington, Kentucky. "They're going to be competing with the best of the best and also have been training all year to get to this moment," said associate head coach April Thomas, who oversees the Bulldogs' throwers. "They're ready, they're prepared, that's what they've trained for all year, to get the job done. So once they get on that stage, no one's your friend at that point. Everybody's out there to try to score points and win and become All-Americans." The Bulldogs also have senior Rosealee Cooper and sophomore Jessicka Woods competing in the women's 100-meter hurdles, plus teams for both the 4×100- and 4×400-meter relays. The 17 NCAA qualifiers represent the largest group MSU has sent to the championships in a decade, and the program's most in Chris Woods' four full seasons as head coach. "All of our goals are still out in front of us," Woods said. "Our team goals that we discussed earlier this season were the men finishing somewhere in the top 10, top 15; the women, their goal was to finish in the top 25, so those goals are still out in front of us, and now we actually have the bullets and the puzzle pieces in place to make that a possibility." |
| Diamond Dawgs Season Comes To An End In Charlottesville Regional | |
| The 2024 Mississippi State baseball season came to an end on Sunday evening in the Regional Finals. In the first game of the day, the Diamond Dawgs advanced by defeating St. John's, 13-5, in an elimination game. The Dawgs came up short in the Regional Finals falling to Virginia, 9-2. Four Dawgs had a pair of hits in the game, David Mershon, Dakota Jordan, Aaron Downs and Hunter Hines. Jordan hit a two-run home run in the first to give the Bulldogs the only runs of the game. Jordan and Mershon ended the day 2-for-4 at the plate while Downs and Hines went 2-for-3 on the day. Pico Kohn grabbed the start on the mound and had a career day, punching out eight Cavaliers in seven innings of work. Gavin Black picked up 1 1/3 innings of relief work and sat three Virginia batters. Tyler Davis and Karson Ligon put together 2/3 innings pitched with Ligon striking out one. The Diamond Dawgs end the season with a 40-23 record. The 40 wins this season are the first 40-win season since the 2021 season. |
| What Mississippi State baseball's Chris Lemonis said about late-game decisions vs Virginia | |
 | Mississippi State baseball coach Chris Lemonis elected to make a questionable pitching change in the ninth inning of Sunday's Charlottesville Regional final against Virginia. He removed righthander Gavin Black, who pitched a scoreless eighth before retiring the first batter he faced in the ninth, in favor of lefthander Tyler Davis. The decision backfired. Virginia, the No. 1 seed and host, rallied for six runs credited to Davis who didn't record an out. A one-run deficit turned into a 9-2 hole for No. 2 seeded Mississippi State – which wound up as the final score and the end of the season for the Bulldogs. After the game, Lemonis dove into his decision to take Black out. With one out and the bases empty, Virginia (44-15) had left-handed hitter Harrison Didawick coming up. Hoping to keep the game within one, Lemonis wanted a left-handed pitcher facing him. Didawick entered the game hitting .303 with 23 home runs this season. Against Mississippi State (40-23) on Saturday, he had a pair of hits. "We had the left-handed matchup," Lemonis said. "Didawick killed us the night before. Tyler Davis has been a rock for us all year long. I hate it for the kid that, that's his last outing because he has been so good for us." The decision proved costly with Davis walking Didawick. That was followed by another walk, three hits and an error before Davis -- who threw 27 pitches Friday in a win against No. 3 seed St. John's -- was removed. |
| No. 1 Tennessee heads group of 4 SEC teams locking up NCAA regional titles; ACC also advances 4 | |
| Four teams from the Southeastern Conference and four from the Atlantic Coast Conference won regionals in the NCAA Tournament on Sunday and will take the next step in their bids to reach the College World Series. The Pac-12 will have its final baseball season extended at least another week with Oregon winning three straight games as a No. 3 regional seed. West Virginia, whose coach will retire after the season, made it to the super regionals for the first time and joined Kansas State as Big 12 teams to win regionals. The best-of-three supers begin Friday and Saturday and will determine the eight teams that advance to the CWS, which begins June 14 in Omaha, Nebraska. The NCAA will announce super regional sites on Tuesday, but it's rare for the higher-seeded team to not host. No. 1 national seed Tennessee hit five homers in a 12-3 win over Southern Mississippi and will head to the super regionals for a fourth consecutive year. The Volunteers will play East Carolina or Evansville with a third trip to the CWS in four years, and second straight, at stake. No. 2 Kentucky beat Indiana State 5-0 to make the supers a second straight year. The Wildcats will play Oregon State or UC Irvine. No. 3 Texas A&M beat Louisiana-Lafayette 9-4 and returned to supers for the second time in three years under Jim Schlossnagle. The Aggies will be matched against Oregon, which beat UC Santa Barbara 3-0. No. 7 Georgia, down three runs early, beat Georgia Tech 8-6 in 10 innings to reach the super regionals for the first time since 2008 after Kolby Branch hit a tying homer in the ninth. The Bulldogs will play No. 10 North Carolina State. |
| Big 12 will distribute record $470 million, though 10 full-share members getting little less | |
| Big 12 schools will share in a record $470 million of revenue distribution, the conference announced Friday when wrapping up its first spring meetings as a 14-team league and before growing by two more teams. While the 10 full-share members will get smaller amounts than they got last year because of the addition of the four schools that joined the league for the 2023-24 academic year, Commissioner Brett Yormark said the conference is more relevant than it has ever been. "We went with stability as a conference and we felt it was investing in all the right ways and for all the right reasons," Yormark said. "Clearly that was the right one for this conference as we think about where we're going." First-year members BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF each will get partial shares of about $18 million each. That leaves about $398 million to be split among the league's other 10 schools, including Oklahoma and Texas before they move this summer to the Southeastern Conference. Yormark said the increases came as a result of bigger College Football Playoff and bowl revenues, growth in ticket revenue across all of the conference championships and sponsorship after streamlining that to be handled directly by the conference instead of using outside parties. "Since I took this job, you know, I said from day one, I was open for business. And I guess you could say we're open for business now more so than ever before," Yormark said. |
| U-Va., state to pay $9 million after deadly 2022 shooting on campus | |
 | The University of Virginia and the state will pay $9 million in settlements after a deadly 2022 shooting on campus, as the families of victims continue to call on the university to release findings of an investigation into the incident. On Friday, Albemarle County Circuit Judge Claude V. Worrell II approved $2 million settlements for each of the families of slain students D'Sean Perry, Lavel Davis Jr. and Devin Chandler -- the amounts are the maximum allowed under the state's risk management plan. During the brief hearing, relatives of the slain athletes sat with their lawyers. Simone Davis, the mother of Davis, sobbed several times and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. The settlements approved by the judge join two others totaling $3 million to Michael Hollins Jr. and Marlee Morgan, two other U-Va. students who were injured in the shooting, according to an attorney. Those agreements did not need court approval. The agreements were negotiated under mediation in November. No lawsuit was filed, the university said. "This settlement today is only one small step for these families. There is much to be done," said Kimberly Wald, an attorney representing the estate of Perry, as well as Hollins and Morgan. "U-Va. needs to be the leader in changing reforms, so that history does not repeat itself." U-Va. President James E. Ryan and the university's rector Robert Hardie said in a statement after the wrongful death settlements were approved that the families of Chandler, Davis and Perry -- "whose lives were tragically cut short -- have been ever present in our minds." |
| After House settlement, schools confront financial reckoning | |
| With the landmark House settlement reached the spotlight has shifted squarely to schools now confronting a financial reckoning as they prepare for the coming revenue-sharing model. They have a rough sense of what the financial road ahead looks like. But each institution must navigate it differently based on its own interests, resources and priorities. There is no blueprint. There's no widely dispersed binder full of best practices. "We all have to be open to realizing it's a new day," Alabama Athletic Director Greg Byrne told reporters during SEC spring meetings. Byrne began more than a year ago talking with Alabama coaches about the state of play with the House case. Last fall, that evolved to a "heart-to-heart" discussion about a potential outcome and wide-ranging implications. Now, on the heels of the settlement agreement, we know the contours of the new financial model: Schools, at their discretion, can share as much as $22 million annually with athletes. That marks a sea change for college sports administrative class. "As much as people think there's unlimited money, there's not," Byrne said. "I think we all have to be thoughtful in how we spend, and where we spend. We can't be top of the market in everything. And I'm at Alabama. Think about that, right?" |
| Despite a tentative House agreement, SEC coaches and ADs have many questions, few answers and no specific path forward | |
| If there was a consistent thought among SEC administrators and coaches in Miramar Beach, Fla., last week, the refrain was fairly simple: "I don't know." "Our answers are few," said Florida Athletic Director Scott Stricklin. "Our questions are many." The past two weeks have included some of the most meaningful developments toward possible stability in college sports during one of the most chaotic periods in its history. A framework settlement in the House, Carter and Hubbard cases has been agreed on, and there are still months of deliberation on tap and an ultimate decision on the agreement from Judge Claudia Wilken. But progress is being made. The settlement framework did little, though, to create stability in discussions on the Florida Panhandle. Auburn coach Hugh Freeze said he's never heard more questions at coaches meetings. Kentucky coach Mark Stoops added he's hoping power brokers avoid unintended consequences and "knee-jerk" reactions. Administrators, too, are privately unclear on where to begin with modeling future scenarios. In the SEC, supremacy reigns by way of top football programs and television contracts. But as the House settlement moves toward its next steps, there is still much that is unsettled. "The House settlement [affects] the NCAA and what they do and we're looking at, 'what are the ramifications moving forward?'" Texas Athletic Director Chris Del Conte said. "Because, to me, House is taken care of through [the NCAA]. What does it look like? We don't know. There's so many unknowns. It's one of those things, it's hard to speculate until the details have been ironed out." |
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