Mississippi Today

Handwritten notes show what IHL trustees thought during JSU listening session

Published

2 years ago

May 31, 2023

Over the last year, students, alumni, faculty and staff at Mississippi’s eight public universities have come to know this routine well: The Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees fires or lets go of a president, often providing little information as to why. Then the board asks the community to participate in hours-long listening sessions to provide feedback on desirable qualities in the next president.

But are the trustees actually listening? If they are, what do they think? That part is often unclear.

At last month’s listening sessions on Jackson State University’s campus, five trustees and the commissioner, Al Rankins, quietly took notes as stakeholders shared their thoughts on the kind of president they’d like to succeed Thomas Hudson, whose two-and-a-half-year tenure ended earlier this year in a mysterious resignation.

Steven Cunningham, the board’s only Jackson State alumnus and the trustee leading the search, occasionally shared his thoughts with the crowd. But the rest of the trustees and the commissioner kept their perspective confined to legal pads or notebooks, which Mississippi Today obtained through a public records request.

The handwritten notes — from all the trustees who attended except Tom Duff, the former IHL board president — provide a glimpse into how trustees are thinking about the key hire at Jackson State, which is not just the largest historically Black university in Mississippi but the largest university in the state’s capital city.

Trustees typically keep thoughts like these hidden behind the closed doors of executive sessions, but Mississippi Today has reprinted the notes, when legible, exactly as they appear in the records.

There were some common themes. Though none of the notes mentioned Hudson outright, nearly all trustees wrote that community members asked for the board to conduct a more thorough background check on Jackson State’s next president — or more generally to follow an unbiased, by-the-book selection process.

“Vetting,” Cunningham wrote. “What are we going to do DIFFERENT?”

It’s still not clear why Hudson left Jackson State, but many in the community believe the university would not be looking for a new president had IHL not cut the search short to hire him. Community members have a similar critique of IHL’s hiring of Hudson’s predecessor, William Bynum Jr., whose tenure ended after he was arrested in a prostitution sting in 2020.

“don’t hire friends,” noted Teresa Hubbard, a trustee and Delta State University alumnus who had just wrapped up the search for the next president there, which resulted in an out-of-state hire.

Hubbard also noted that the community wants a president who will advocate for JSU, writing “don’t run off a strong willed person.”

Many students said they wanted to be more involved in the selection process, Hubbard also noted. IHL has yet to announce a presidential search committee, a panel of stakeholders that confidentially advise the board, for Jackson State.

Other stakeholders want to be more involved in the search too, Cunningham noted.

“Listen to the Alums,” he wrote. “$,$,$.”

“Allow us to sit before you and listen,” wrote Gee Ogletree, a trustee and University of Southern Mississippi alumnus who, like Hubbard, recently finished a presidential search. “Don’t want to be shamed.”

A few trustees took note of the one person who wanted to see Elayne Hayes-Anthony, the temporary acting president, take the top spot permanently. Chip Morgan, a trustee and retired executive vice president of the Delta Council, wrote that trustees would start looking at applications after the job description was posted. It’s not live yet.

Multiple trustees wrote that community members said the university urgently needs more money to fix its ailing infrastructure — and to get its own water system. Hudson’s administration had been lobbying for $17 million in funding for infrastructure repairs, including a new water system, during the legislative session.

“PWI’s have water systems,” Hubbard wrote. Cunningham noted that this was a “priority!!!”

The trustees did not shy away from taking note of the extensive criticism that some community members had for them. Ogletree summarized nearly every point made by Ivory Phillips, a dean emeritus at Jackson State and a former faculty senate president.

Phillips, Ogletree noted, is a “Critic of College Board,” that trustees have “Not Given JSU Best Attention” and many community members believe the “Listening Sessions are a Sham.”

Ogletree also noted another community member who put the blame for the failures of Hudson, Bynum and his predecessor Carolyn Meyers squarely on the board: “3 Presidents Chosen by You Guys.”

Several trustees seemed alarmed by one faculty member who said that she and other professors had experienced bullying from students. “SAFETY e.g. student threats!!!,” Cunningham wrote; “students cheat + admin does nothing,” Hubbard noted.

Cunningham editorialized his notes with emphatic capitalization, underlinings and exclamation points in blue ink. It appears he took great interest in comments made by Dawn McLin, a professor and the current faculty senate president, underlining her name multiple times and writing “CORE VALUES” beside it, a list that included integrity, “accountability” and “stick to policies/ procedures.”

After one instructor teared up talking about how she did not plan to send her kids to Jackson State due to security concerns, Cunningham wrote down the word “Safety.” He drew a square around it. “(Crying),” he noted. “SAFETY,” he wrote again, this time circling it multiple times.

In another note, Cunningham wrote that a community member wanted Jackson State to have an “open door policy” and for the university to “focus on RETENTION as well enrollment.”

“IHL’s roll(sic)?” he wrote underneath it.

Al Rankins, the IHL commissioner whose role it is to manage the eight university presidents, took notes in two columns titled “(Institutional Executive Officer) characteristics” and “issues.”

Under issues, Rankins wrote, among other things: “low morale,” “high presidential turnover,” “administration ignoring complaints,” “need more extensive background checks” and “need to place fence around campus.”

Under characteristics, he wrote, “integrity,” “strong moral compass,” “forward-thinking,” “understand traditions,” “participate in code of ethics training,” “progressive thinker,” “strong advocate for JSU,” “visible,” “transparent,” “visionary,” “structured and have backbone,” “welcoming,” “is home-grown talent,” “servant leader, faith in God” and “loves JSU and its students.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

‘Will you trust us?’: JPS plan for stricter cellphone policy makes some parents anxious

Published

1 day ago

July 11, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @mintamolly – 2025-07-11 15:25:00

by Molly Minta, Mississippi Today
July 11, 2025

Superintendent Errick Greene wanted to be very clear with the roughly 50 parents who attended Thursday night’s community listening session: Jackson Public Schools already has a policy banning students from using cellphones at school.

Aaliyah McIntyre, left, and her mother Ashley McIntyre attend a Jackson Public Schools listening session on July 10, 2025, about the district’s new policy on cellphone use. They raised concerns about how parents would be notified in the event of an emergency.

But the leadership of Mississippi’s third-largest school district has decided that a new approach is in order, citing a series of incidents in recent years involving students using their cellphones to bully others, organize fights or text their parents inaccurate information about violence happening at or near their school.

“To be clear, it’s not the majority of our scholars, but I can’t look at a class and know who’s gonna be bullying today, who’s gonna be scheduling a meetup to cut up today,” Greene said toward the end of the hour-long meeting held at the JPS board room. “I can’t look at a group of scholars and say, ‘OK, yeah, you’re the one, let me take your phone, the rest of you can keep it.’”

Under the rewritten policy, students who take their phone out of their backpacks during the instructional day will lose it for five days for the first infraction, 10 days for the second and 45 days for the third. Currently, the longest the school will hold a phone is 10 days.

The Jackson school board is expected to consider the new policy at its meeting next week and the district hopes to implement the change when the new school year starts later this month, said Sherwin Johnson, the district’s communications director.

Students also currently have the option to pay up to a $25 fine to get their phone back, but the district wants to rescind that aspect of the policy.

“We’ve discovered that’s not equitable,” said Larrisa Harris, the JPS general counsel. “Not everybody has the resources to come and pay the fine.”

Support for the new policy among the parents who spoke at the listening session varied, but all had questions. How will students access the internet on their laptops if the WiFi is spotty at their school and they need to use their cellphone hotspot? If students are required to keep their phones in their backpacks during lunch, how will teachers prevent stealing? How will JPS enforce the ban on using cellphones on the bus?

One mother said she watches her daughter’s location while she rides the bus to Jim Hill High School so she knows her daughter made it safely.

“If they can’t have it on the bus, who’s gonna enforce that?” she said. “I’m just gonna be real, the bus driver got to drive.”

A common theme among parents was anxiety at the prospect of losing direct contact with their kids in the event of an emergency. A Pew Research survey found that most adults, regardless of political affiliation, support cellphone bans in middle and high school classes. But those who don’t say it’s because their child can use their phone during emergencies.

“If something happened, will we get an automatic alert to notify us? Because a lot of the time we see things on social media first,” said Ashley McIntyre, a mother of three JPS students. She attended the meeting with her eldest daughter, Aaliyah, who recently graduated from Powell Middle School.

Though JPS does have an alert system for parents, McIntyre said she didn’t know if it existed. She cited a bomb threat at Powell last year that she found out about because Aaliyah texted her, not through a school alert.

“We didn’t know what was going on, and she texted me, ‘Mom, I’m scared,’ so I went up there,” McIntyre said. “So that puts us on edge.”

Aaliyah said she uses her phone to text her mom and watch TikTok, but she feels like her classmates use their phones to be popular or to fit in. When a fight happens, she said many students pull out their phones to record instead of trying to get an adult who can stop it. Then the videos end up on Instagram pages dedicated to posting fights in JPS.

“Once the principal found out about the fight pages, they came around looking inside our videos and camera rolls,” she said. “It happened to me last year. They thought I had a fight on my phone.”

Toward the end of the meeting, Laketia Marshall-Thomas, the assistant superintendent for high schools, took the mic to respond to one parent who said she was concerned that older students would not come to school if they knew their phone could be taken.

“What we have seen is, it’s the older students—” Marshall-Thomas began.

“They are the problem,” someone from the audience chimed in.

“We’re not saying they cannot have them,” she continued. “We know that they have after school activities and they need to communicate with their moms … but we have had major, major issues with cellphones and issues that have even resulted in criminal outcomes for our scholars, but most importantly, our students … have experienced a lot of learning loss.”

While the district leadership did not go into detail about the criminal incidents, several pointed to instances where students have texted their parents inaccurate information, such as an unsubstantiated rumor there was a gun during a fight at Callaway High School or that a shooting outside Whitten Middle School occurred on school property.

“Having phones actually creates far more chaos than they help anyone,” Greene said.

While cellphones have been banned to varying degrees in U.S. schools for decades, youth mental health concerns have renewed interest in more widespread bans across the country. Cellphone and social media usage among school-aged kids is linked to negative mental health outcomes and instances of cyberbullying, research shows.

At least 11 states restrict or ban cellphone use in schools. After Mississippi’s youth mental health task force recommended that all school districts implement policies that limited cellphone and social media usage in classrooms, a bill that would’ve required school boards to create cellphone policies died during the legislative session. Still, several Mississippi school districts have passed their own policies, including Marshall County and Madison County.

Another concern about the ban was a belief among a couple of speakers at the meeting that cellphones can help parents hold the district accountable for misdeeds it may want to hide.

“I just saw a video today. It was not in JPS, but it was a child being yelled at by the teacher and had he not recorded it, his momma would have never known that this sweet lady that they go to church with is degrading her child like that,” one mother said.

Statements like these prompted responses from teachers and other parents who urged the skeptical attendees to be more trusting or to make sure the district has updated contact information for them in case school officials need to reach parents during an emergency.

“I think we have to trust the people watching over our children,” said one of the few fathers who spoke. “When I grew up, what the teacher said was gold.”

One teacher asked the audience, “Will you trust us?”

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

The post ‘Will you trust us?’: JPS plan for stricter cellphone policy makes some parents anxious 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 balanced report on Jackson Public Schools’ proposed stricter cellphone policy without taking a clear ideological stance. It fairly conveys the perspectives of school officials emphasizing discipline and safety, alongside parental concerns about communication and emergency access. The tone remains neutral, focusing on factual details such as policy changes, reasons behind them, and community reactions. While it includes some skepticism from parents and responses from district staff, the language does not endorse or oppose either side. Overall, the coverage adheres to neutral, factual reporting by presenting multiple viewpoints without editorializing.

Mississippi Today

Hospitals see danger in Medicaid spending cuts

Published

2 days ago

July 10, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-07-10 15:30:00

by Sophia Paffenroth, Mississippi Today
July 10, 2025

Mississippi hospitals could lose up to $1 billion over the next decade under the sweeping, multitrillion-dollar tax and policy bill President Donald Trump signed into law last week, according to leaders at the Mississippi Hospital Association.

The leaders say the cuts could force some already-struggling rural hospitals to reduce services or close their doors.

The law includes the largest reduction in federal health and social safety net programs in history. It passed 218-214, with all Democrats voting against the measure and all but five Republicans voting for it.

In the short term, these cuts will make health care less accessible to poor Mississippians by making the eligibility requirements for Medicaid insurance stiffer, likely increasing people’s medical debt.

In the long run, the cuts could lead to worsening chronic health conditions such as diabetes and obesity for which Mississippi already leads the nation, and making private insurance more expensive for many people, experts say.

“We’ve got about a billion dollars that are potentially hanging in the balance over the next 10 years,” Mississippi Hospital Association President Richard Roberson said Wednesday during a panel discussion at his organization’s headquarters.

Richard Roberson, Mississippi Hospital Association president and CEO, discusses the impact of what the White House calls “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Wednesday, July 9, 2025, at the Mississippi Hospital Association Conference Center in Madison.

“If folks were being honest, the entire system depends on those rural hospitals,” he said.

Mississippi’s uninsured population could increase by 160,000 people as a combined result of the new law and the expiration of Biden-era enhanced subsidies that made marketplace insurance affordable – and which Trump is not expected to renew – according to KFF, a health policy research group.

That could make things even worse for those who are left on the marketplace plans.

“Younger, healthier people are going to leave the risk pool, and that’s going to mean it’s more expensive to insure the patients that remain,” said Lucy Dagneau, senior director of state and local campaigns at the American Cancer Society.

Among the biggest changes facing Medicaid-eligible patients are stiffer eligibility requirements, including proof of work. The new law requires able-bodied adults ages 19 to 64 to work, do community service or attend an educational program at least 80 hours a month to qualify for, or keep, Medicaid coverage and federal food aid.

Opponents say qualified recipients could be stripped of benefits if they lose a job or fail to complete paperwork attesting to their time commitment.

Georgia became the case study for work requirements with a program called Pathways to Coverage, which was touted as a conservative alternative to Medicaid expansion.

Ironically, the 54-year-old mechanic chosen by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to be the face of the program got so fed up with the work requirements he went from praising the program on television to saying “I’m done with it” after his benefits were allegedly cancelled twice due to red tape.

Roberson sent several letters to Mississippi’s congressional members in weeks leading up to the final vote on the sweeping federal legislation, sounding the alarm on what it would mean for hospitals and patients.

Among Roberson’s chief concerns is a change in the mechanism called state directed payments, which allows states to beef up Medicaid reimbursement rates – typically the lowest among insurance payors. The new law will reduce those enhanced rates to nearly as low as the Medicare rate, costing the state at least $500 million and putting rural hospitals in a bind, Roberson told Mississippi Today.

That change will happen over 10 years starting in 2028. That, in conjunction with the new law’s one-time payment program called the Rural Health Care Fund, means if the next few years look normal, it doesn’t mean Mississippi is safe, stakeholders warn.

“We’re going to have a sort of deceiving situation in Mississippi where we look a little flush with cash with the rural fund and the state directed payments in 2027 and 2028, and then all of a sudden our state directed payments start going down and that fund ends and then we’re going to start dipping,” said Leah Rupp Smith, vice president for policy and advocacy at the Mississippi Hospital Association.

Leah Rupp Smith, Mississippi Hospital Association general counsel and vice president for policy and advocacy, breaks down a timeline for what the White House calls “One Big Beautiful Bill,” during an event to discuss the impact of the law on health care in the state, Wednesday, July 9, 2025, at the Mississippi Hospital Association Conference Center in Madison.

Even with that buffer time, immediate changes are on the horizon for health care in Mississippi because of fear and uncertainty around ever-changing rules.

“Hospitals can’t budget when we have these one-off programs that start and stop and the rules change – and there’s a cost to administering a program like this,” Smith said.

Since hospitals are major employers – and they also provide a sense of safety for incoming businesses – their closure, especially in rural areas, affects not just patients but local economies and communities.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson is the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation. He voted against the bill, while the state’s two Republican senators and three Republican House members voted for it. Thompson said in a statement that the new law does not bode well for the Delta, one of the poorest regions in the U.S.

“For my district, this means closed hospitals, nursing homes, families struggling to afford groceries, and educational opportunities deferred,” Thompson said. “Republicans’ priorities are very simple: tax cuts for (the) wealthy and nothing for the people who make this country work.”

While still colloquially referred to as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the name was changed by Democrats invoking a maneuver that has been used by lawmakers in both chambers to oppose a bill on principle.

“Democrats are forcing Republicans to delete their farcical bill name,” Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York said in a statement. “Nothing about this bill is beautiful — it’s a betrayal to American families and it’s undeserving of such a stupid name.”

The law is expected to add at least $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years, according to the most recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

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

The post Hospitals see danger in Medicaid spending cuts appeared first on mississippitoday.org

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article reports on the negative impacts of a major federal tax and policy bill on Medicaid funding and rural hospitals in Mississippi. While it presents factual details and statements from stakeholders, the tone and framing emphasize the harmful consequences for vulnerable populations and health care access, aligning with concerns typically raised by center-left perspectives. The article highlights opposition by Democrats and critiques the bill’s priorities, particularly its effect on poor and rural communities, suggesting sympathy toward social safety net preservation. However, it maintains mostly factual reporting without overt partisan language, resulting in a moderate center-left bias.