by Bobby Harrison, Mississippi Today
May 4, 2025

The Mississippi Legislature’s insistence of not requiring oversight has resulted in a way for private schools to “double dip,” or receive money from two separate state programs to educate the same handful of students.

There is currently no mechanism in state law to allow state officials to determine whether double dipping is occurring. More importantly, there is nothing in state law to prevent double dipping from occurring.

So, maybe the private schools are double dipping and maybe they are not. And this is not an effort to demonize private schools — many of which are doing stellar work — but to point out the lack of state oversight and to question the wisdom of sending public funds to private schools.

There are two primary programs in Mississippi that provide public funds and state tax credit funds to private schools: the Education Scholarship Account and the Children’s Promise Act.

The programs overlap in terms of the children the private schools must educate to receive the state benefits. To receive money through an Education Scholarship Account of up to $7,829 per year to attend a private school, a student must be designated as a special needs student. The special needs designation could be the result of a physical, mental or emotional issue. An attention deficit disorder, for instance, could result in a special needs designation.

On the other hand, students who make private schools eligible to receive the Children’s Promise Act tax credit benefits must have “a chronic illness or physical, intellectual, developmental or emotional disability” or be eligible for the free lunch program or be a foster child.

No more than $3 million per year can be spent through the Education Scholarship Account while the Children’s Promise Act is capped at $9 million annually.

The bottom line is that state officials do not know how many students the private schools are serving through the Children’s Promise Act state tax credits.

The Mississippi Department of Revenue, which has a certain amount of oversight of the Children’s Promise Act funds, has said in the past it knew the number of children being served in the first year a school received the state tax credit funds, but the agency does not know whether the number of students being served in following years changes.

In short, there is nothing in state law that would prevent a private school from receiving the maximum benefit of $405,000 annually while enrolling only one child fitting the definition that would make the school eligible to receive the tax credit funds.

There is a little more oversight of the Education Scholarship Account funds, though that oversight has been slow and has only occurred after a legislative watchdog group pointed out the lax oversight.

If a school has fewer than 10 students receiving the ESA funds, the state Department of Education will not release the exact number, citing privacy concerns. But the Department of Education has released the amount of ESA funds each school received during the 2023-24 school year.

According to that information, multiple schools receiving those ESA funds but educating fewer than 10 ESA students also are receiving significant Children’s Promise Act tax credit funds. According to the Department of Revenue, as of January, six schools had received the maximum tax credit funds of $405,000 for calendar year 2024.

Three of those schools also received Education Scholarship Account funds for fewer than 10 students. For instance, one private school received $16,461 in Education Scholarship Account funds, or most likely money for two students.

If the students receiving the ESA funds were the same ones making the school eligible for the $405,000 in tax credit funds, that would mean the state was paying $210,730 per student whereas the average per pupil spending in the public schools is about $11,500 per pupil in state and local funding.

Of course, state law does not prohibit private schools from educating only one child with special needs and being eligible for the maximum tax credit benefit of $405,000 annually.

Perhaps it seems far-fetched that a private school would be educating only one child to be eligible to receive up to $405,000 in tax credit funds.

But it also seems far-fetched that for years the students receiving the Education Scholarship Account funds were mandated by state law to use the money to go to schools equipped to meet their special education needs. Yet, research by the Legislature’s Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee (PEER) found the students were going to private schools that in some instances did not have any special education teachers and in some cases the students were still getting those services from the public schools.

Perhaps the Legislature’s PEER Committee needs to do some more research to determine whether double dipping is occurring.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post How state law allows private schools to 'double dip' by using two public programs for the same students appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The article presents a critical examination of Mississippi state law and the potential for private schools to receive funds from multiple public programs, with little oversight. The tone is analytical, raising questions about the effectiveness and transparency of the system, without offering a strong ideological stance. The language is factual, with a focus on state law and fiscal policy rather than promoting a political agenda. Although the article critiques the absence of proper oversight, it avoids demonizing private schools, instead advocating for more legislative scrutiny. The piece sticks to the reporting of facts, with a call for further investigation into the issue.

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Today
May 3, 2025

May 3, 1850

Shadrach Minkins, already separated from his family, escaped from the Norfolk, Virginia, home, where he was enslaved. He made his way to Boston, where he did odd jobs until he began working as a waiter at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House. 

Months later, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave authorities the power to go into free states and arrest Black Americans who had escaped slavery. 

A slave catcher named John Caphart arrived in Boston with papers for Minkins. While serving breakfast at the coffee house, federal authorities arrested Minkins. 

Several local lawyers, including Robert Morris, volunteered to represent him. Three days later, a group of abolitionists, led by African-American abolitionist Lewis Hayden, broke into the Boston courthouse and rescued a surprised Minkins. 

“The rescuers headed north along Court Street, 200 or more following like the tail of a comet,” author Gary Collison wrote. They guided him across the Charles River to the Cambridge home of the Rev. Joseph C. Lovejoy, whose brother, Elijah, had been lynched by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837. 

Another Black leader, John J. Smith, helped Minkins get a wagon with horses, and from Cambridge, Hayden, Smith and Minkins traveled to Concord, where Minkins stayed with the Bigelow family, which guided him to the Underground Railroad, making his way to Montreal, spending the rest of his life in Canada as a free man. 

Abolitionists cheered his escape, and President Millard Fillmore fumed. Morris, Hayden and others were charged, but sympathetic juries acquitted them. Meanwhile in Montreal, Minkins met fellow fugitives, married, had four children and continued to work as a waiter before operating his own restaurants. 

He ended his career running a barbershop before dying in 1875. A play performed in Boston in 2016 told the dramatic story of his escape.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post On this day in 1850, Shadrach Minkins escaped from slavery appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The article presents a historical recount of Shadrach Minkins’ escape from slavery and the role abolitionists played in his rescue. The content is fact-based, focusing on a historical event without promoting a particular ideological stance. While it centers on the abolitionist movement and highlights the moral victory of Minkins’ escape, it does so in a narrative style rather than advocating for any contemporary political agenda. The tone is neutral, and the article adheres to factual recounting of historical events, making it centrist in its approach to the subject matter.

by Shirley Wimbish Gray, Mississippi Today
May 2, 2025

Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.

Given recent policy changes threatening the future of medical research and news of Mississippi’s falling childhood vaccination rates, I fear we are ignoring lessons learned the hard way. 

One of those lessons occurred during a yellow fever outbreak in the summer of 1898 when a community of honest citizens in Orwood, then a hamlet in southwest Lafayette County, helped a team of physicians change the direction of public health for Mississippi and the rest of the country.

I first heard about their story listening to a documentary about yellow fever with my husband, a virologist, who teaches at the University of Mississippi. The video mentioned an unnamed doctor in Mississippi who had advanced a theory linking mosquitoes and yellow fever.

The story I uncovered models the honesty and trust in medical science we need today to keep our families and communities healthy. 

***

Yellow fever was a problem in the South throughout the 1800s. Its initial symptoms — fever, body aches and severe headache — were followed by jaundice and in some cases internal bleeding leading to death. The jaundice left the skin tinged with yellow, thus the name “yellow fever.”  

In early August 1898, a young woman named Sallie Wilson Gray (no relation to the author) developed chills and a fever while visiting at her uncle’s home in Taylor. Her uncle immediately sent her home to be cared for by her family in Orwood, about 10 miles away.  

Days later, Sallie’s uncle in Taylor died from what proved to be yellow fever. Family members wiped black vomit, a sign of internal bleeding, from his body as he lay in his coffin. 

Sallie had now brought the same illness home to Orwood. 

***

I learned about yellow fever in seventh grade when we studied the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, the worst to strike the Mississippi River Valley. That year, Mississippi reported almost 17,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths. I didn’t realize, though, how yellow fever continued to appear year after year. 

Physicians had a basic understanding of bacteria after the Civil War, but they didn’t recognize viruses, which proved to be the cause of yellow fever, until later in the 1900s. One popular theory suggested yellow fever spread on fomites—inanimate surfaces—like bedding, clothing and furniture. Panic often followed news of a yellow fever outbreak. Health officials established quarantines, closed roads, river ports and train stations, hoping to curb the spread of infections. 

The fear of what was not known then about yellow fever reminded me of the early days of the COVID pandemic when fear spread through rumors and unconfirmed anecdotes on social media. 

***

Sallie’s sisters and brothers in Orwood soon developed the same symptoms as Sallie. By September, 30-plus people in Taylor and Orwood showed signs of the disease and new cases were reported outside the local area. In response, three interstate railroads shut down and Memphis halted train traffic coming into the city. In Starkville, the president of Mississippi A&M (now Mississippi State University) posted a column of guards along its roads. In mid-October, officials placed all of Mississippi under quarantine as thousands fled the state. 

Months earlier, the governor of Mississippi, recognizing the heavy toll yellow fever often brought to his state, had sent a team of Board of Health physicians to Cuba, the center for yellow fever research. There the group met with Dr. Walter Reed, the Army physician directing the American research interests on the island. Reed pursued a theory that mosquitos transmitted the disease, but his experiments to establish that link repeatedly failed. The Mississippi team, including Dr. Henry Gant, a Water Valley doctor, returned home, still hopeful that science could soon solve the yellow fever mystery.

Gant immediately responded when he learned about the outbreak in Taylor. So did Dr. Henry Rose Carter, a field epidemiologist who served as the quarantine officer at Ship Island and who investigated yellow fever outbreaks throughout the South. 

Committed to the same rigorous scientific process that epidemiologists use today, Carter looked for patterns in how diseases spread within clusters of people. With yellow fever, he needed to identify the first person to develop the disease in a specific area and then trace everybody and everything that the person came into contact with.  

Over and over again, unreliable sources or conflicting pieces of data prevented Carter from finding a pattern. People, suspicious of government intervention and scared of the consequences of yellow fever, often distorted the truth. 

Fortunately for us today, the people of Orwood proved to be different. The people, Carter wrote, were “honest enough to tell the truth” and cooperated with efforts to trace the infection of each case.

Working with Carter, Gant moved from house to house in Orwood, instructing families to quarantine at home, though their natural inclination was to care for their neighbors. He also questioned each person, recording data for Gant’s analysis. 

Unlike diseases that produce low-grade fevers, an abrupt and high fever often characterizes a case of yellow fever. For that reason, many of the people Gant interviewed reported the day their infections started and also the time their fevers ignited: Mr. G. W. McMillan, sickened on Aug. 29 at noon.  Mrs. Rogers, Sept. 4, 10:00 am. 

Collecting this detailed information about time proved essential for Carter’s study and he cheered Gant’s ability to gather such reliable data. “A greater tribute to the good faith of the community, or to its confidence in Dr. Gant, can scarcely be given,” he wrote. 

Studying the Orwood data, Carter recognized a consistent time interval between cases, about two weeks between the first case and the development of secondary cases. This meant that the infection did not immediately spread from person-to-person but required time to incubate. He called this the period of extrinsic incubation.

I’ve read Carter’s scientific report with the results of the Orwood study, the same report that persuaded Walter Reed to alter his experimental process. Waiting 10-14 days before introducing infected mosquitos to healthy volunteers, Reed successfully demonstrated the transmission of yellow fever from mosquito to human. 

With the development of mosquito control procedures, the fever soon vanished in the U.S. and Caribbean. Today a vaccine can protect those travelling or living where the disease remains a threat.

***

Sallie and her siblings were among the lucky, surviving their infections with only lingering weakness and fatigue. When frosts fell in north Mississippi in early November 1898, the number of fever cases quickly fell. In total, officials confirmed 2,478 cases across the state. Those who died totaled 114.

Reed later acknowledged that the “work in Mississippi did more to impress me with the importance of an intermediate host in yellow fever than everything else put together.”  

***

My husband and I drove from our home in Oxford to Taylor and then Orwood on a hot muggy day in August, probably experiencing the same weather conditions as Sallie. Orwood is a ghost town today, but we found the cemetery where Sallie’s uncle is buried, adjacent to the wood-planked Presbyterian Church that still stands. 

Walking those grounds emphasized for me what the neighbors who once lived in Orwood taught us. Honesty and rigorous scientific inquiry — and not political rhetoric or unproven claims — are the tools we must trust to combat disease and dispel fear.

Bio: Shirley Wimbish Gray lives in Oxford. A retired writing instructor and science editor, she writes about what is often overlooked or forgotten, particularly in the American South. Her recent essays have appeared in Earth Island, Brevity Blog and Persimmon Tree. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Ghost town of Orwood residents provide lessons for today by working with scientists in 1800s to combat yellow fever appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This article does not present a clear ideological stance but rather focuses on a historical account of a yellow fever outbreak in 1898 and its connection to scientific advancements. The content emphasizes the importance of honesty, scientific inquiry, and collaboration, contrasting it with political rhetoric and unproven claims. The mention of contemporary issues, like Mississippi’s falling childhood vaccination rates and recent policy changes affecting medical research, introduces a subtle critique of current trends in public health. However, the tone remains balanced, and the piece refrains from offering a partisan viewpoint, focusing instead on lessons learned from history and the value of scientific rigor. The discussion of current events is presented more as a concern for public health rather than a partisan critique.