Mississippi has more rural emergency hospitals than any other state – and there could be two more on the way soon.

Some have hailed the federal designation, created in 2023, as a lifeline for struggling rural hospitals at risk of closure. Others say it forces hospitals between a rock and a hard place. 

Rural emergency hospitals provide 24-hour emergency and observation services, and can also opt to provide additional outpatient services. But the program comes with a catch. 

Hospitals must close their inpatient units and transfer patients requiring stays over 24 hours to a nearby facility. In return, hospitals receive $3.3 million from the federal government each year. 

Rural emergency hospitals in Mississippi currently include Jefferson County Hospital in Fayette, Progressive Health of Batesville, Perry County General Hospital in Richton, Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital in Rolling Fork and George County Hospital in Leakesville. 

Progressive Health of Houston and Smith County Rural Emergency Hospital in Raleigh, a new department of Covington County Hospital established in collaboration with South Central Regional Medical Center, also intend to apply for the status. 

Nationwide, 29 hospitals have received the designation, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services enrollment data. Over half of them are located in the Southeast. 

State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney last year likened conversion to a rural emergency hospital to a closure because of the corresponding loss of medical services.

Quentin Whitwell, the founder and CEO of Progressive Health Group, said that in his experience, the designation has provided increased sustainability and financial viability for hospitals that have adopted it. 

Progressive Health Group owns and manages six hospitals in Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas, over half of which are rural emergency hospitals or plan to seek the designation. The organization previously served as a consultant for Jefferson County Hospital. 

“A lot of people saw it as a place where hospitals would go to die. We, on the other hand, saw an opportunity for expanding ancillary and outpatient services and utilizing the federal subsidy to grow those hospitals,” he said.

He said the model has strengthened access in some areas to outpatient services like general surgery, gastrointestinal and primary care and specialty doctors.

Inpatient services are “the drag on small rural hospitals,” he said. 

In Mississippi, 37% of hospitals are facing immediate risk of closure, according to a recent report. 52% face some risk of closure and 64% have experienced losses on services. 

Nearly 200 hospitals have closed nationwide since 2005. Many of these hospitals had low patient volumes and revenues that were insufficient to cover their costs, said George Pink, deputy director of the Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina. 

The rural emergency hospital was designed to offset the financial challenges of running an inpatient unit, which is costly because it requires 24-hour-a-day nursing care, along with administrative and dietary departments, regardless of patient volume, he said. 

“They’re not a model of health care for every rural community, they’re not a panacea for rural communities. They really are targeted at very small communities that are at risk of losing their inpatient hospitals,” he said. 

Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital converted to a rural emergency hospital after a tornado destroyed the hospital in March 2023. Board Attorney Charles Weissinger said the program made sense given the hospital’s circumstances, but noted that “it’s not the salvation for rural medicine.” 

Pink said that among communities that have experienced hospital closures, emergency services are considered one of the most significant losses. 

Progressive Health of Houston intends to apply for rural emergency hospital status to meet that need. The hospital reopened its emergency department in May after a decade without emergency services in Chickasaw County. Whitwell said that last December and January alone, the county saw 10 cardiac deaths out of a population of 17,000.

Without the ability to provide inpatient services, hospitals may have to give up valuable services, like an intensive care unit or obstetric services. 

Though rural hospitals are allowed to provide obstetric services, “it’s not realistic for the reimbursement model,” said Whitwell. 

Irwin County Hospital in Ocilla, Georgia, a Progressive Health Group facility, continued providing obstetric services after becoming a rural emergency hospital, but was forced to close the unit after just four months. 

David Culpepper, spokesperson for Smith County Rural Emergency Hospital, said the new facility will provide emergency care to the area for the first time in two decades. This is possible by eliminating the cost of inpatient care, he said. 

The hospital will offer “strictly emergency services with a full-on suite of imaging … and radiological services along with a fully functioning lab,” said Culpepper. 

It will be located at the former Patient’s Choice Medical Center of Smith County, which closed in 2023. 

Pink, who studies health care finance and rural hospitals at the University of North Carolina, said because the rural emergency hospital program is just over a year old, it’s too soon to say whether the designation helps hospitals surmount their financial challenges. 

Several changes to the law could make the program more appealing to struggling hospitals, he said, like allowing facilities to participate in the 340B Drug Pricing Program, which requires pharmaceutical companies to provide outpatient drugs to certain hospitals at reduced prices. 

Whitwell said he would like to see the program allow hospitals to operate inpatient psychiatric units and to shore up its definition of “rural.”

Republican Rep. John Lancaster of Houston proposed a bill this year to allow rural emergency hospitals to license psychiatric inpatient beds as a separate entity as a workaround to the federal regulations. The legislation did not make it out of committee.

Less than a year after Alliance HealthCare System in Holly Springs received rural emergency hospital status, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rescinded the designation, arguing that the hospital is too close to Memphis to be deemed rural. 

As a result, the hospital closed its emergency room in April and began the process of becoming relicensed as an acute care hospital.  

Harold Miller, the director of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, said the rural emergency hospital program poses a “problematic choice” for hospitals by forcing them to eliminate inpatient services in order to receive subsidies from the federal government. 

“There is this narrow, narrow window in which a hospital actually could benefit, and then an even smaller window of the hospitals that could benefit that are willing to do what is necessary in terms of closing services to be able to qualify,” he said. 

He said his research shows that hospital closures would be better prevented by ensuring that insurers pay hospitals adequately for their services. Because rural hospitals often have limited administrative resources, they are often not able to combat claims that are contested by insurance companies, he said. 

“We need to be fixing that,” he said. “…We are letting the private insurers off the hook.”

The post Mississippi has more rural emergency hospitals than any other state. Can the ‘lifeline’ program save rural health care? appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The University of Mississippi is in the midst of restructuring its Division of Diversity and Community Engagement as other universities across the state have already made changes to their diversity, equity and inclusion offices, potentially in an effort to ward off a legislative ban.

Earlier this year, the head of Mississippi State University’s diversity division gave a presentation to faculty on the restructuring that was announced last fall. As of July 1, the University of Southern Mississippi’s renamed “Office of Community and Belonging” will serve a broader audience, a spokesperson confirmed.

Delta State University did not to refill its DEI coordinator after the position was vacated last year, according to a statement. The job was eliminated during the recent budget cuts.

At all three institutions, the universities told Mississippi Today the changes did not come with a reduction to any programs, scholarships or initiatives that aim to support the enrollment, retention and employment of students and faculty from historically marginalized groups such as racial minorities, veterans, first-generation and low-income students. In higher education, DEI traditionally refers to a range of administrative efforts to comply with civil rights laws and foster a sense of on-campus belonging among those populations.

At Ole Miss, it’s unclear if the university’s restructuring of the division will result in a reduction to any of the efforts the university announced in its ambitious “Pathways to Equity” plan three years ago.

“University leaders are working to determine the best way to align our resources to focus on what matters for educational attainment and student success,” a spokesperson, Jacob Batte, wrote in an email to Mississippi Today. “We anticipate some changes will be forthcoming, but the internal review is not completed.”

Across the country, conservative legislation has caused universities to shutter such offices, reassign or fire employees, and end scholarships and programs aimed at supporting marginalized students. Fourteen states have passed laws banning or restricting DEI practices of some kind, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Just last week, the University of Alabama System announced its campuses would close offices and reassign staff in response to a law banning DEI offices, programming and training in state agencies, AL.com reported.

The changes at Mississippi’s universities have come without a legislative mandate. Mississippi lawmakers have nominally banned the teaching of critical race theory, but the Republican-controlled Legislature has not put the kibosh on funding for DEI initiatives. Earlier this year, Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, introduced a bill that would have done so, but it died in a House committee. 

Universities in Arkansas and South Carolina also preemptively reorganized their DEI offices, according to Inside Higher Ed. In both states, lawmakers have not passed a ban. The University of Missouri at Columbia announced a similar move earlier this year.

In Mississippi, the state’s loudest advocate for a DEI ban, State Auditor Shad White, focused much of his speech at the Neshoba County Fair this week on DEI. He has used his office to audit DEI programs at the eight public universities, including his alma mater, Ole Miss. In interviews and on social media, White has repeatedly warned about the “dangers of DEI,” saying it teaches college students “that we have to discriminate against some people because of the color of their skin.” 

Last year, White’s office determined the eight universities have spent at least $23 million in state and institutional funds since 2019 on a range of DEI programs, including affinity groups for minority students, programming like International Student Month, and staff members to support students who are veterans.

The bulk of DEI spending occurred at Mississippi’s five predominantly white institutions, with the three historically Black institutions having little programs or initiatives to report. Alcorn State University reported scholarships for non-Black students as DEI spending.

Changes across the system

Mississippi Today asked every university in Mississippi about possible changes to their DEI programs, including if there has been a reduction in any related programs or jobs.

At some schools, it’s unclear what changes, if any, have occurred. Mississippi Valley State University did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Alcorn State, which listed an Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion on the state auditor’s report. The university’s website now lists an Office of Educational Equity and Inclusion, but a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to questions from Mississippi Today, a Jackson State University spokesperson responded “I have no new info to share with you.”

Though USM renamed its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion last month, its mission remains unchanged, according a statement from the university.

“The Southern Miss family is comprised of many first-generation students and graduates, and that is something we are very proud of,” Eddie Holloway, a senior associate provost who helped lead the restructuring, said in a statement. “Ensuring these, and all students at Southern Miss, have opportunities to learn, lead and excel, remains a key priority for our institution.”

Last November, Mississippi State University announced a new organizational structure for its Division for Access, Diversity and Inclusion, as well as a new name. It is now called the Division of Access, Opportunity and Success. This effort got underway in 2020 in an effort to lessen disparate outcomes that a taskforce found among first-generational, low-income and racial minority students at the university.

Alongside the renaming, the university moved programs aimed at low-income, housing insecure and first-generation students under the Office of Access and Success, according to a presentation the division’s vice president, Ra’Sheda Boddie-Forbes, gave to the faculty senate earlier this year.

Boddie-Forbes told the faculty senate it’s not a secret that DEI has come under attack but that it was important for Mississippi State to continue the work of trying to help students from all backgrounds earn a degree. She said she had spoken with President Mark Keenum about how to protect and expand efforts to support the university’s marginalized students.

“When we think about how we deepen that work at the institution, one of the things that we know we can do is think about the nomenclature associated with the work,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting. “So, how does our work become more grounded in the fact that we’re doing work around ‘access,’ we’re doing work around ‘opportunity,’ and we’re doing work around ‘success?’ So that’s what we decided to do.” 

In a statement, Sid Salter, MSU’s vice president for strategic communications, said the restructuring did not result in the loss of any programs, initiatives, scholarships or jobs but that the university’s offerings are “constantly evaluated and are subject to change as the needs of our students evolve.”

“MSU’s Division of Access, Opportunity and Success exists with the express mission of providing programming and assistance to students to help them be successful in obtaining a college degree,” Salter wrote. “Our students come from many diverse backgrounds – some are first-generation college students, some are from the foster system, some are disabled, some are veterans, some have economic challenges – and the list goes on.”

Delta State University, according to a university webpage, started developing diversity initiatives in 2007. DEI programs, which have not been reduced, are now run through student affairs, according to an email from a spokesperson.

A spokesperson for Mississippi University for Women, which does not appear to have a DEI office, said the university had not made any changes.

‘An example for the nation and the world’

At Ole Miss, the division in question was founded in 2017 as a hub for various diversity initiatives the university had developed over the years. 

But its primary responsibility was implementing the university’s ambitious “Pathways to Equity” plan that committed the campus to three, five-year goals: Create more capacity for equity on campus, cultivate a diverse community and foster an inclusive climate. Each administrative school was charged with creating its own DEI goals.

The university hoped the plan could be an inspiration to other institutions. 

“By taking this responsibility seriously and plotting a principled and measurable path forward, we also can play a role in setting an example for the nation and the world,” Provost Noel Wilkin said in a 2021 press release. 

Ole Miss has achieved some of the plan’s specific goals, such as commemorating the 60th anniversary of the university’s integration. The number of Black faculty at the university has increased but still comprises a small portion of the more than 600 faculty, according to IHL and federal data. 

On other goals, progress has been a struggle. Since the plan was announced, the number of Black students on campus has steadily fallen, according to IHL data of on-campus headcount enrollment. In 2023, Ole Miss enrolled 2,156 Black students — several hundred less than it did in 2013.

Many Mississippi higher ed officials support DEI

This trend is not unique to Ole Miss. The IHL system enrolls fewer Black students than it used to while white enrollment remains roughly the same, though the root cause of this trend is likely complex. 

Still, higher education officials in Mississippi continue to say diversity is an important part of their campuses. As of January last year, the governing board of Mississippi’s eight universities evaluates the college presidents, whom the board has the power to hire and fire, based in part on how well they promote “campus diversity.”

The Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees’ policies and bylaws also includes a diversity statement, last issued in 2013, that reads in part, “Institutions of higher learning have a moral and educational responsibility to ensure that talent is developed in all our citizens, and that our universities, individually and collectively, are strengthened by diversity in student bodies, faculties, administration, and in all areas offering employment opportunities, including construction, financing and consulting.”

When IHL held its annual diversity awards earlier this year, the trustee who presented the awards, Steven Cunningham, a radiologist who attended Jackson State University, thanked the presidents for supporting diversity on their campuses. 

“In this current environment of nationwide, orchestrated assaults against DEI programs by organizations such as the Claremont Institute and others like it, you guys continue to foster representative communities on your campuses, and I just want to thank you for your courage and your leadership in that endeavor, so thank you so much guys,” Cunningham said. “Those thoughts are mine and mine alone, and I approve that message.”

The Claremont Institute is a conservative think-tank based in California with ties to former President Donald Trump that has helped to lead the movement against DEI programs, according to the New York Times.

In a sit-down video recorded last fall, Keenum discussed Mississippi State’s diversity programming with Salter.

The president said he was passionate about and defensive of the work Mississippi State does to support marginalized students. Keenum added that the total bans on DEI programs in states like Texas and Florida came from a place of misunderstanding. 

“Because of the perception that there’s a ‘woke indoctrination,’ they’re missing the fact that these programs are here to help students succeed that come to us with different backgrounds,” Keenum said. “And that’s what we’re about here at Mississippi State.” 

“What I heard you say and what I’ve heard Ra’Sheda say as she talks about reorganizing her division is access opportunity and student success,” Salter responded. “And those are all goals nobody can argue with.” 

The post ‘Goals nobody can argue with’: Mississippi universities rebrand DEI to focus on access, opportunity and belonging appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Much has been made nationally of Mississippi’s improvement in fourth-grade reading scores. 

Whether being celebrated or scrutinized, attention has been squarely focused on elementary students and their reading instruction. Mississippi students and educators have closed the gap and reached the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This growth can be attributed to several factors, but chief among them is a 2013 state law that created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn’t hit a certain benchmark.

But this national test also measures students again in eighth grade. The gap between the national average and Mississippi’s eighth-grade reading score has gotten smaller over the last decade, but it hasn’t closed at the rate of fourth-grade reading. 

State leaders are paying attention. 

“Some of our challenge points are eighth-grade reading,” Interim State Superintendent Ray Morgigno said when presenting an annual report at the Jan. 18 State Board of Education meeting.

Morgigno then pointed to the pilot programs underway around the state to expand Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading strategies up to the middle school level. One is being operated by the Mississippi Department of Education in conjunction with a regional arm of the U.S. Department of Education. 

Another one of these pilots, the Mississippi Reading Clinic, is a “legacy project of the Barksdale Reading Institute” according to its website. The Barksdale Reading Institute led some early conversations around literacy reform in Mississippi by defining the problem and testing out solutions that eventually became the basis of the 2013 state law.

Kelly Butler, former CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, said a unique approach to middle school literacy is necessary because instruction shifts in fourth grade from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” This means the curriculum no longer focuses on direct instruction in decoding words, instead having students read passages to learn new concepts. For students who may have passed the third-grade test but are still not strong readers, this can be a particularly challenging transition. 

To address this, both pilots are training subject area teachers in upper grades on literacy instruction and methods to incorporate it in their classrooms. Butler said they’re trying to create a paradigm shift that “Everybody is a literacy teacher – this is what it looks like in K-3 and this is what it looks like in 4-8.”

The state partnership with the federal education department is focused on three school districts: Canton, Columbus and Laurel. 

In Laurel, the District ELA Coordinator Kristin Walters said she’s glad to be participating in the pilot program because it “adds purpose and validity” to strategies she was already trying to implement in the district. 

Walters said the approach used in the program employs a research-based practice guide, instructing teachers to first lead students in a discussion on the topic of the text, preview new vocabulary words before encountering them, annotate passages in a manner specific to its subject and structure, and review their annotations with another student. 

“It’s a routine that is just a very structured way to teach the text and have students engage deeply with the text,” Walters said. 

Walters said the district curriculum leads for each subject area have been the point people for making sure teachers are implementing the new strategy. Walters said it’s too early to have definitive results for the program, which is in its second year, but added that the district’s mid-year benchmark testing scores for science and English are both up over last year. 

‘To me, it’s important that we as a state and as a district, that we are focusing on those adolescent readers and they’re not just getting lost in the cracks just because they’re not in elementary school anymore,” she said. 

The partnership also has a second element focusing on training middle school interventionists. Walters said older students who are struggling to read have different needs, in part because students have developed coping mechanisms like skipping words and guessing to get by. For these students, it’s important to help them access the meaning of more complex words without taking it back to the ABCs and talking down to them.

Butler said she believes the Legislature needs to fund middle school interventionists statewide if the state wants to see eighth-grade reading scores improve. 

Leaders at the Mississippi Department of Education are also interested in scaling up their middle school literacy work but don’t have the funding to do so. Kristen Wynn, MDE’s state literacy director, said the department has already developed a model policy for middle-school literacy improvements but legislative funding only applies to K-3 efforts. If additional funding were made available, the model policy would include teacher training and interventionists in upper grades, similar to the 2013 law without a “gate” assessment. 

“We (sic) are well aware that some kids fall through the cracks and have difficulties when we’re moving in that middle school space,” Wynn said. “Kids in middle school still have phonics gaps and so we still have to equip teachers with what they need to fill those holes and to close those gaps.”

READ MORE: Mississippi’s ‘reading miracle’ has been out of reach for some schools

READ MORE: How many students are retained by the ‘third-grade gate’? No one knows

The post Mississippi falls short of an eighth-grade literacy miracle appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Marquitrice Mangham never imagined that she’d open a grocery store in her hometown of Webb, Mississippi. 

She left in the 1990s after high school. But in 2016, she inherited her family’s farm, splitting her time between the majority-Black town of fewer than 500 people in the rural Delta and her current home in Atlanta.

Webb had changed considerably and was regressing, she said. Businesses had closed, and the housing situation got worse — but the food desert still had a Dollar General. Like many counties across the Delta region, Tallahatchie County, where Webb is, is situated in a food desert. Though the town has had the Dollar General since 2009, it only provided frozen and processed foods. Here, the residents never had a grocery store, forcing many to travel more than 20 miles to the nearest one.

Mangham, a military veteran and planning expert, saw a solution. In October 2022, she opened Farmacy Marketplace, a 2,500-square-foot neighborhood grocery store that sells fresh foods and meats sourced mostly from local farmers. Instead of the traditional for-profit store, she used a different model: her nonprofit, In Her Shoes, works at the intersection of farming and food access. 

Mangham is one of many Black entrepreneurs nationwide working to improve health outcomes and food accessibility in rural communities or Black neighborhoods. And as hundreds of dollar stores are closing, more Black entrepreneurs are opening grocery stores anyway — whether it’s Neighborhood Grocery in Detroit, All-In Grocers in Waterloo, Iowa, or Sherman Park Grocery in Milwaukee. 

Research shows that when dollar stores show up in communities — particularly areas that are low-income, rural, and Black — it results in grocery store closure, job loss, and declining sales. From 2000 to 2019, grocery stores experienced a nearly 6% decrease in sales, 4% decline in employment and 2% increase in grocery stores closing. The outcomes are three times larger in rural areas than urban areas, according to new research released by the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. These negative impacts waned after five years in urban areas. In rural areas, however, the effects continued.

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Read More: The Movement to Stop Dollar Stores from Suffocating Black Communities

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Back in Webb, only a few weeks before Farmacy opened its doors, the Dollar General caught fire and closed down, which served as an opportunity for Mangham to offer household items in the store, too. The dollar store has since reopened.

Opening a grocery store isn’t the only, or best, solution to address the root causes of food insecurity, she said. Affordability, transportation, and lack of education create additional barriers to healthy lifestyles. Mangham is looking to do more: drive a mobile produce truck to other towns and provide financial incentives to encourage families to buy more fruits and vegetables, through programs such as Double Up Food Bucks. It allows people who receive SNAP benefits to earn up to $20 a day when they buy fruits and vegetables.

But what does it really take to open a local grocery store? 

Capital B wanted to understand more about the challenges, the benefits beyond Mangham’s community, and her plans for the future. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Capital B: Why a grocery store? How did you get into this work?

Marquitrice Mangham: There was only one grocery store in the whole county, and that was 15 to 17 miles away from most residents in the county, and some even farther. In Her Shoes, we work closely with farmers and help them to grow their business or at least sustain their business over time. One of the biggest ways to help them is to access markets. We work with farmers who are growing but not able to reach those populations that need it … because the populations are sparsely populated, everything is stretched out over 600 square miles. They’re throwing their hard-earned food away because it’s rotting, meeting its shelf life prior to them actually being able to sell it or reach people who want to buy it. The grocery store was the answer to a number of things.

Why a nonprofit model?

We decided to do it under the In Her Shoes Inc. umbrella or do it as a part of our nonprofit because over time, we felt that it would be more sustainable. There are a lot of resources out there to help address food access. There’s a lot of resources out there to help farmers, so we felt by doing it as a nonprofit, if the sales were short or [there were] issues with trying to maintain over time, there were other programs or resources that would help us to be able to sustain the store longer. Fortunately for us, we’ve been able to sustain ourselves even though there is a dollar store in the community.

What are some of the challenges or startup costs you’ve experienced since opening?

We bought the brick-and-mortar store a year or so prior. We applied for a grant to buy the equipment to do some renovations and upgrades to the mechanicals. It took us maybe four or five months to make the renovations and upgrades.

Most of these wholesale vendors require you to order a minimum amount each week, and if you’re not selling it you can’t buy it — having to order $10,000 or $20,000 a week just to maintain your vendor. That alone would shut down a lot of smaller community grocery stores. Just the overhead outside of that is fairly steep when you’re talking about refrigeration and coolers, electricity and other things. So the price tag not only starts up, but the ongoing or monthly price can get pretty extensive. You’re looking at your small, independent store, so you’re not getting your products at the price that a chain retailer gets. 

Not only are you having to buy more, but you’re having to sell at a higher price because you don’t get the discounts. You don’t have the amount of sales volume that the Family Dollar or the Dollar Generals have, and they’re buying in bulk for hundreds of stores at a time. There are a lot of challenges that we saw in the beginning. 

As far as variety, we have a national wholesale distributor, and we partner with them. They helped us out a lot with relaxing some of their standards to be able to allow us to partner with them and supply our grocery store. For us, the best outlet was to basically open under the nonprofit and do it as economically as possible. 

What should people take into account before going on this journey? Are there alternatives to a grocery store?

After opening Farmacy Marketplace, I’m getting quite a few requests from other local governments and other entities to help build a grocery store in their community. I’m doing the research to see if it’s doable, and if it’s economically feasible over time. Every community is just not able to support a standalone grocery store over time, not as a business. It may be more sustainable as a nonprofit. 

Most elderly people, most people, are going to go to the local pharmacy. You could partner with a local pharmacist to offer a food display for fresh fruits and vegetables. That’s one of the reasons why we’re called Farmacy Marketplace because it’s good, healthy food options that promote good health. Rather than building a brick-and-mortar building, look at those retailers that people visit that are already in place that you may be able to partner with. 

We looked at gas stations and other stores that are existing that we may be able to partner with and make some upgrades to their electrical and plumbing to offer what I call fresh food kiosks, and in those outlets they already have the consumers that are visiting out of necessity or easy access. Why not put a refrigerated display case with fresh fruits and vegetables and some meat options?

Try and address the issue with what’s there, meet people where they are, and build up to that. The idea isn’t to just have a brick-and-mortar. The idea isn’t to just build a grocery store. The idea or the hope is to provide fresh food access in whatever form that might be.

The post Dollar Stores Force Local Grocery Stores to Close. This Woman Opened One Anyway. appeared first on Capital B News.

An education company that helps bring free college-level science courses to poor, rural public schools, many in the Mississippi Delta, will lose federal funding after the Biden Administration did not renew its grant last year. 

The Global Teaching Project has received more than $3.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education to support its work offering Advanced Placement science courses to nearly 40 high-poverty schools.

Over 1,000 have enrolled in the project’s classes, according to its founder, former tax attorney Matt Dolan, who says he has put more than six figures into the project since starting it in 2017. Districts could offer AP courses that they never had before. 

Global Teaching Project’s “blended” instructional model — online course content taught by in-class teachers who are supported by virtual STEM tutors from universities such as Harvard — was even praised by school choice and school voucher proponent Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration’s education secretary. Experts have heralded this approach as “the future of education, especially for rural schools,” and the Global Teaching Project has drawn the attention of entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban.

It’s also a model that has the interest of powerful Mississippi Republicans. Senate Appropriations Chair Briggs Hopson told the Magnolia Tribune earlier this legislative session that he hopes to expand virtual learning for schools that struggle to find qualified teachers. 

But the Global Teaching Project’s growth could falter without more financial support when its federal Education Innovation and Research grant expires this summer as, Dolan said, a majority of that funding went to the program costs. The minimum needed to operate this coming year is $1.2 million, Dolan said. 

The Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access, a coalition of rural public school districts, was technically the recipient of federal funds, but Dolan said the Global Teaching Project was the driver of the initiative, a relationship that grant reviewers in 2019 said could be clarified. 

“My guess is they’ve never seen such a thing where somebody not only develops and implements the program, but they provide the money,” Dolan said. “That’s what we told the school districts when we first started in 2017. We said we want to do this, and we’re not asking you to give us a penny.” 

Last year, the Biden Administration awarded more than $275 million in funding to projects in 20 states. Projects in three states — California, Massachusetts and Texas — received almost as much funding as the remaining 17.

Without the project, the Quitman County School District would not be able to offer AP Computer Science, said Baxter Swearengen, a special-education teacher who acts as a “facilitator” for the courses. 

Neither would the Holmes County School District, said Iftikhar Azeem, the science department chair at Holmes County Central High School. He teaches AP Physics and AP Computer Science. 

That’s because these districts, which have a small tax base, can’t compete with other counties and even states that pay teachers much better, or with other science-professions.

“The very fundamental thing is funding,” Azeem said. “I’ve taught several hundred physics students, but nobody came back as a teacher because when they do get a masters in science, they get a better job. … Why should they work as a teacher?”

Both districts struggle to retain college-educated graduates amid population losses since 2010. 

“A place like Holmes County, Mississippi, has fewer residents today than it did when the Civil War broke out,” Dolan said. “That teachers are not moving there is symptomatic of broader issues about exodus from these communities.” 

The Global Teaching Project helps fill this gap, Dolan said, by providing schools with “turnkey courses,” as well as textbooks and workbooks that students don’t have to pay for. And teachers like Swearengen and Azeem are offered stipends for professional development courses. 

“We are paying our teachers, not the other way around,” Dolan said. “We are providing services to our students. They never pay us a penny. Their parents never pay us a penny. We’ve never used a dollar of state or local tax dollars.” 

More than 90% of students who take Global Teaching Project’s classes go to college, though Dolan couldn’t provide the exact number, he said, due to limitations collecting data from public schools. But when students get to college, they are prepared, he said. 

“Where we make a difference, and here I am confident, is where they go to college, how well they do in college, how prepared they are in college, their persistence and scholarships,” Dolan said. 

Dolan said he has partial data on pass-rates on the AP national exams for Global Teaching Project students and that the pass-rate for AP Computer Science tends to be higher than AP Physics. A majority of students do not earn a qualifying score for college credit on the exams, which is a three or higher, Dolan said. 

“By taking this exam, you are part of an elite group,” Dolan tells his students. 

Both teachers said their classes’ exam scores aren’t as high as they wish due to a myriad of factors. 

In Quitman County, students don’t struggle with the curriculum, Swearengen said, because the Global Teaching Project provides tutors from Ivy League schools. It’s more about attention: Swearengen said his students tend to miss class for major athletic events. Cellphones are another distraction. 

But the biggest struggle, Swearengen said, is technology. His district has limited bandwidth. During end-of-year testing, only so many students can use a computer at one time, he said. Sometimes, all nine of his students have to crowd around one computer.

That’s a huge reason his AP Computer Science pass-rate isn’t where Swearengen wants it to be. 

“We have so many students on computers to where the technology person will just shut the entire network off,” he said. 

Still, Swearengen said the Global Teaching Project has benefited his students in ways that can’t be quantified. Through the project, they have an opportunity to experience college-level curriculum and visit campuses like Jackson State University. 

Their self-regard increases, he said. 

“They get to spend a night in a hotel room when they’ve never been,” he said. “They get to go to conferences and eat different food. And talk about computers. It’s just so much. It’s a bigger picture than I think anybody could have imagined.” 

That was Demeria Moore’s experience when, as a junior and senior at McAdams Attendance Center in Attala County, she took AP Physics and AP Computer Science, the latter course she was able to claim college credit for at Holmes Community College. 

Though it was lonely to be the only student in the AP Computer Science course, Moore said participating in the class helped her understand the “why” behind the world. 

“When I look out the window and I see the leaves, how they’re full of chlorophyll and the sun will allow them to have energy, and how that energy can get transferred to me and that just creates the circle of life,” Moore said. “All those little things have some type of science or math attached to it. It all just blew my mind.” 

Moore said the Global Teaching Project also provided a sense of community at her school where teacher turnover is high. McAdams is a junior-senior high school and, by the time she graduated, all her teachers from seventh grade had left.

“I had some really good teachers and even the students who may have just maybe caused a few issues in class, even they would listen to these teachers. And I just wish they would have stayed so everybody could have a better learning experience,” she said. 

Dolan said one of the successes of the Global Teaching Project also comes with irony. His initiative can help teachers become AP certified, which can lead them away from high-poverty school districts to ones that can pay better. 

“We recognize there are certain issues that we cannot affect,” Dolan said. “We don’t determine who is in the building, but we will serve whoever is there.” 

The post Company deemed ‘future of education’ for rural schools to falter without cash infusion, founder says appeared first on Mississippi Today.

When the North Carolina legislative session ends, Jim Burgin, a conservative Republican state senator who serves as chair of his state’s Senate Health Care Committee, will go back to his daily life as a businessman.

The owner of an insurance company and a partner in a local car dealership group, Burgin fully understands the virtue of hard work. That’s why when Medicaid expansion, the federal program that 10 states including Mississippi have refused to pass, came up for debate in his legislature over the past few years, he wasn’t immediately sold.

“I don’t think we ought to have any kind of government program that people stay on the rest of their lives,” Burgin told Mississippi Today in an interview this week. “Like most of my Republican colleagues, I wanted to put a work requirement in. But we realized the feds would never approve it, so we had to think about what we really wanted to do as it related to work.”

Many Mississippi Republican lawmakers currently face the same dilemma. Though Medicaid expansion is being seriously considered here for the first time, Senate Republicans, led by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, appear convinced that the only way the state should expand Medicaid is if a work requirement is in place. But with the federal government having shot down 13 states’ previous efforts to implement a work requirement, Mississippi Today reached out to leaders in North Carolina, the most recent Republican-led state to expand, to see how they came to an agreement.

READ MORE: Mississippi lawmakers look to other states’ Medicaid expansions. Is North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia worth copying?

Burgin and his colleagues, knowing the feds wouldn’t allow the work requirement, went to the drawing board to determine if they could come up with a Medicaid expansion bill that still promoted work without requiring it. They started with a “trigger law,” of sorts, to mandate that if the federal government ever changed their policy on allowing states to implement a work requirement, North Carolina would move immediately to adopt one. They also added a separate trigger that allowed the state to immediately drop out of the expansion program if Congress ever defunded it or changed its funding structure.

They also developed some creative ideas for spending the additional federal dollars the state would receive from the expansion program that were designed to promote work. Shortly after they expanded Medicaid, the North Carolina lawmakers designated hundreds of millions in expansion “signing bonus” funds on mental health reform. The state’s mental health system was in crisis with major funding concerns, so Republicans appropriated $835 million — all money they got from the feds to expand Medicaid — to rebuild the crumbled system.

“That’s going to help so many hospitals and law enforcement officers who often had nothing to do with mentally ill people but take them to emergency rooms, whether those people had health insurance or not,” Burgin said. “Hospitals will never have to treat or pay for care for people in those situations in ERs ever again.”

Additionally, North Carolina Republicans in the coming weeks will work on getting the federal government to grant a waiver to spend federal Medicaid dollars on providing free community college — and workforce skills training — to North Carolinians enrolled in the Medicaid expansion program. Additionally, some Republicans want to add child care vouchers to that list of offerings.

“This is all to get people jobs and to keep them working and ultimately to get them off Medicaid,” Burgin said. “Even though it can’t be a requirement, we’re promoting work. We want to make it easier and better for people to get work that they won’t want to stay on Medicaid. They’ll want a job and hopefully eventually get on a group health plan through their employer.”

So what ultimately convinced Burgin, who wanted the work requirement all along, to move forward on expansion even without it?

“Billions of dollars,” he said plainly. “Look, I’m a business guy. I don’t spend money, I invest money. I looked at (Medicaid expansion) as a great investment. I had a fiduciary responsibility to my constituents to take that money. So we wrote a bill that said that if the feds changed the work requirement, if they change anything, we can add it here or opt out of our program altogether.

“I just couldn’t turn down billions of dollars that we needed in so many areas,” Burgin said. “And we get to spend that on a wide variety of things, and all of it is designed to get people across this state working.”

READ MORE: Mississippi leaving more than $1 billion per year on table by rejecting Medicaid expansion

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Republican state Rep. Donny Lambeth was the primary author of what became North Carolina’s Medicaid expansion program.

For years before an expansion program actually passed, Lambeth filed numerous expansion bills that included work requirements.

“I was a big advocate for work requirements because, well, I felt like it was just one of those things,” Lambeth said. “We shouldn’t want to just add more people to Medicaid rolls. You have to figure out how to help them and get them off Medicaid and into the workforce. But when we talked to people in Washington, it was obvious there was no way, if we went through all the trouble to get votes and get it passed, we would get a work requirement.”

READ MORE: How Medicaid expansion could have saved Tim’s leg — and changed his life

So Lambeth, like Burgin, went to the drawing board. They wrote into their expansion plan a provision similar to red-state Montana: State government agencies would work with private partners who had experience with job training to create a program that would pay for Medicaid enrollees to get job training. They couldn’t require people to participate, but they could make it worth their while.

“We looked at what other Republican states that had expanded had done,” Lambeth said. “What we came up with in lieu of the work requirement was an optional jobs training program. The idea was that even though you’ve got the vast majority of people on Medicaid working, they’re working in low-income jobs. They couldn’t afford health insurance even though they worked.  The theory is that if you take advantage of expansion dollars from the federal government with a job training program like this, you can go back and further your education. You can then get a better job, have a higher standard of living, get off Medicaid and be able to afford your health insurance.”

Peg O’Connell, a health care advocate and consultant who for several years led North Carolina’s push to expand Medicaid, explained how the jobs training program worked in Montana before her state included it in its program.

“A man had been a hit-or-miss carpenter and really wanted a commercial drivers license,” O’Connell said. “So the Montana caseworker under their expansion program helped get him his CDL. They paid for him to take the classes as well as lodging when he had to travel to take his exams, and they even bought him a pair of work boots. This man is now doing what he wants to be doing, he’s got full-time employment with health insurance, and he has worked himself off the Medicaid program. That’s the idea behind our program here.”

Lambeth, like Burgin, is a small business owner. He owns a logistics contracting company, and he “can’t afford to offer my employees health insurance,” he said.

“Are there some quote-unquote deadbeats, people who are not working, playing off the system? Sure,” Lambeth said. “But we were able to identify the farmers in the east part of the state, small, mom-and-pop businesses that were growing at significant rates but couldn’t quite afford to offer health insurance, hard-working people who desperately wanted and needed health insurance but couldn’t afford it. We saw that the vast majority of these people are working, and the ones who weren’t working, we felt like if we could get them training or education and child care, that would help get them off Medicaid.

“If we’re really all about getting people working, then let’s figure out ways to work within the system, draw down those billions of dollars, and use them to get them working,” he continued. “It was really that simple.”

READ MORE: Gov. Roy Cooper, the most recent state leader to expand Medicaid, has advice for Mississippi lawmakers

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Burgin and Lambeth both supported work requirements but saw they wouldn’t get approval from the federal government. They listened to their constituents, they considered the heart of their desire to get North Carolinians working and they found creative solutions.

As Mississippi lawmakers consider Medicaid expansion over the next few days, what advice might the North Carolina Republicans offer to their counterparts here in the Magnolia State?

“You tell any of the hardest nos, the most conservative ones, that if they have any doubts, give them my number. My cell is 919-207-7263,” Burgin said. “I’ll be happy to answer any question they may have and talk to them about why this is so beneficial. I’ve been tracking Mississippi. I testified the other day to Kansas lawmakers. We’ve already talked to folks in Georgia, Florida, Kansas and now Mississippi. All of these holdout states are looking at the same thing saying, ‘We’ve put it off. Why did you do it?’ For me and my Republican colleagues, it came down to a business decision. How could we, in good faith, leave billions on the table?”

Lambeth answered the question with an anecdote.

“I heard from just dozens and dozens of North Carolinians while we were debating this,” Lambeth said. “But I got one letter, in particular, from a Christmas tree farmer in Ash County. She couldn’t afford health insurance, and she was worried they were going to lose their farm because of out-of-pocket medical bills they had.

“These are real people. They’re not the traditional Medicaid where they’re poor and not trying to improve their lives. They are hard-working people just not able to afford health insurance. I promise the average Mississippian is not much different than the average North Carolinian in that way. Why would we be in the positions we’re in and not help them? I mean really, why?”

READ MORE: The Christian argument for Medicaid expansion

The post These Republicans wanted a Medicaid work requirement but couldn’t get approval. So they got creative. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

As an internal medicine doctor, Dr. Kenneth Williams knows the importance of continuity of care. That’s one of several reasons why the impending closure of the Holly Springs hospital’s emergency room – and its precarious financial position as a whole – pains him so.

After receiving special designation from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to operate the hospital as an emergency room-only and close its inpatient services, the federal government pulled the status less than a year later. Now, the hospital must close its ER and face the expensive and daunting process of reopening and becoming relicensed as an acute care hospital. 

“At the end of the day, who suffers” from the emergency room’s closure and reduced services at the hospital? “My patients,” said Williams, who is co-owner and chief executive officer of Alliance Healthcare System in Holly Springs, a town of just under 7,000 residents about 50 miles from Memphis. 

The news of the ER’s closure comes less than three months after state lawmakers approved a $350 million deal to bring a battery plant to Marshall County that’s expected to create over 2,000 jobs over the next few years. But the county’s only hospital is struggling mightily to stay open, placing continuity of care out of reach for some people in the community. 

Spokespeople from PACCAR and Daimler Truck, two of the companies involved in the battery plant, declined to comment for the story. Representatives from Cummins did not respond to Mississippi Today’s request for comment. 

Recently, one of Williams’ patients he sees at the clinic had an emergency and was taken to an ER outside Marshall County. Williams knew the woman had a severe UTI and was allergic to an antibiotic called cephalosporin. 

But the other ER didn’t have her history, and she was given the drug, he said.

“She had a severe reaction and had to go to rehab. She almost died,” he said. “Something that simple means something. If she had come to our facility, it’s already in our records that she can’t take cephalosporin.”

Rural hospitals in Mississippi are struggling to stay afloat. One report puts 29% of the state’s rural hospitals at immediate risk of closure, and 62% are losing money on patient services. 

Research has found that Medicaid expansion has a positive impact on hospitals, including via a reduction in uncompensated care. And while expansion is not a silver bullet, median operating margins in rural hospitals were higher in expansion states than non-expansion states, according to KFF. 

Williams said Alliance incurs between $800,000 to $1 million a year in uncompensated care, or care the hospital provides for which no payment was received – often as a result of patients who are uninsured.

Williams said he’s “amazed” lawmakers are finally discussing the possibility, but damage has already been done to his hospital and the state as a whole.

“This state could be in so much better shape health care wise,” he said, noting the decision not to expand has been a “disservice” to communities like his.

Tim Moore, the former longtime head of the Mississippi Hospital Association, said expanding Medicaid would put significantly more money towards hospitals’ bottom line through a reduction in uncompensated care, and there’s “not a legitimate argument” against full expansion.

“Even if your concern is not for that individual that needs health care, you should have some concern for your local hospital that’s trying to take care of folks,” said Moore. 

READ MORE: Negotiations begin: Where do House, Senate, governor stand on Medicaid expansion? Is there room for compromise?

Without the boost from Medicaid expansion, the hospital applied for a new federal designation that aims to keep rural hospitals open – though it requires the discontinuation of inpatient services.

Last year, the financially struggling Alliance received rural emergency hospital status, which allowed it to operate as an emergency room-only facility and receive monthly payments and increased reimbursements from Medicare. But on April 1, after Alliance HealthCare System had already laid off staff and shut down its inpatient services to comply with the requirements of the new designation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rescinded the designation.

Hospitals must either be a critical access hospital or a hospital with 50 or fewer beds in a rural county as of Dec. 27, 2020, to be considered for rural emergency status. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services eventually determined Alliance is too close to Memphis, Williams and State Health Officer Dan Edney said.

The federal agency first inadvertently granted the designation, according to a letter it sent Williams, then claimed the hospital failed to reapply for rural status by the deadline given. 

But Williams and the hospital’s counsel Quentin Whitwell said there was no formal reapplication process that they could determine despite back-and-forth communications with agency officials over four months.

READ MORE: Under a new program, rural hospitals could get more money – but they have to end inpatient care

Williams said the federal government’s actions, in combination with the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid, has done “irreparable harm” to the hospital. 

Now, after closing two of its floors, the hospital has to start the long process of again becoming licensed as an acute care hospital, which includes major building repairs. 

“We’re spending a ton of money that we don’t have … just to get our old designation back,” Williams said.

And it notified the state Department of Health it will close its emergency department – which Williams says costs around $1 million a year just to staff with one around-the-clock physician – beginning April 15.

Mississippi Today’s Eric Shelton contributed to this story.

The post Marshall County’s only ER to close this month after mix-up with federal government appeared first on Mississippi Today.

“It was devastating,” said the town’s mayor, Jerry Norwood. “We went on life support at that point.”

The mill closing meant the loss of 400 jobs, Norwood said, making it by far the top employer in a town of just 900 people. Despite being the mayor, Norwood knows how hard it is to find work close by. His last gig was at a chemical plant in Geismer, Louisiana, a three-hour round trip from his Gloster home.

“The workforce is probably the biggest obstacle (to attracting new industry),” Norwood told Mississippi Today. “We don’t have enough people to fill those (skilled) positions, electricians and stuff like that. And we don’t have a school here in Gloster. The school closed in 1989. People don’t want to move in here if their kids can’t get a quality education.”

In the last decade, towns like Gloster turned to what they saw as a new hope: the emerging wood pellet industry. While the industry is now grappling with a variety of environmental objections, the state and local governments have invested millions of dollars in wood pellets, through tax exemptions and other incentives, in an attempt to stem rural disinvestment.

In 2022, the world’s largest wood pellet producer came to another Mississippi town, Lucedale, 160 miles east of Gloster. The town was in a similar economic predicament: Census numbers show just 29% of working-age residents there are employed, compared to 60% on the national level, and over a third of the town lives below the poverty line. 

So when George County’s economic development director, Ken Flanagan, learned that the company, called Enviva, was bringing one of the largest new wood pellet operations in the world to Lucedale, he took a moment to let it sink in. 

“I never really had that, you know, winning the national championship moment where you get the trophy and jump around,” Flanagan said. “It was just a big sigh of relief.”

Lucedale beat out a number of other places chomping at the bit to house the new plant, he said, with some offering as much as 95% off the company’s tax bill. 

Enviva brought with it 103 full-time positions and 200 more contracting jobs, something to behold for a place with just under 700 working residents. While Lucedale is a small town, it’s in the heart of one of the top timber-producing regions of the world, known as America’s “wood basket,” which made it an ideal spot for a company like Enviva.

Since opening about two years ago, the impact of Enviva has transpired as Flanagan hoped: Most of the jobs have gone to local residents, he said, and even with a two-thirds tax discount the county gave up, Enviva still paid $1 million in revenue last year. 

“The fact that we were able to bring timber back to George County, we knew early on that this is going to be a big, big, deal,” he said.

Excited by the economic promise of the wood pellet world, and what it could mean to struggling rural areas, Mississippi officials have agreed to give companies like Enviva over $24 million in incentives over the last decade – a figure that’s likely much higher due to unquantified tax exemptions. 

But in the process, the wood pellet industry has turned parts of rural Mississippi into venues for a climate and public health debate that’s traversing the globe, one that people in Gloster are all too familiar with. 

The company was in the middle of an impressive fiscal performance: In 2023, Drax posted $1.5 billion in profits, on top of billions in subsidies from the British government.

In recent years, countries in Europe and Asia have gradually injected wood pellets into their energy portfolios as a way of meeting their carbon reduction goals. The trend is based on the belief, which was laid out in the European Union’s 2009 renewable energy directive, that burning wood instead of coal will help reduce emissions.

With a growing global demand for wood pellets, Drax and Enviva have expanded operations in forest-abundant regions like the Southeast. And in Mississippi, the industry has found one of its most eager suitors.

The Lucedale plant, for instance, was widely touted as the largest wood pellet operation in the world when it opened in 2022. To lure Enviva there, the state and county governments committed an estimated $20 million in grants and tax breaks, public records show. Enviva almost raked in another $46 million in state and local incentives for a new Mississippi plant, the Stone County Enterprise reported. But financial struggles have put the new project on hold as Enviva recently declared Chapter 11 Bankruptcy to reorganize its debts. It’s stock price as of Friday stood at 42 cents per share.

Overall, as of 2023, Mississippi had permitted production of over 2 million tons of pellets per year. In the South, where most American pellets come from, only one other state – North Carolina – had more capacity. 

But last year at Drax’s shareholders meeting in London, Martin had traveled to tell everyone about what’s gone wrong with the wood pellet business. During a Q&A portion of the meeting, she grabbed the microphone and addressed the companies’ leaders.

“We have become a sacrifice zone, and we feel like you don’t care about us as people,” she said, choking up as she spoke. “You are willing to pollute our community and extract our natural resources for your own economic gain. So I came all this way from Gloster, Mississippi, to ask you: What role are you prepared to play in addressing the health issues and air pollution that you continue to inflict in our community?”

It didn’t start out bad. When Drax’s facility opened in 2016, Gloster residents were pleased to see a new job creator come to town. 

“When you’re a small rural community, and they announce a business is coming, most people get excited,” Martin recalled to Mississippi Today. 

State officials were excited about it, too. Then-Gov. Phil Bryant even shouted out the new wood pellet plant in one of his State of the State speeches. To bring Drax to Gloster, Mississippi shelled out $2.8 million in grants, in addition to several tax exemptions, which include: full, 10-year corporate income and corporate franchise tax exemptions, as well as a 10-year sales and use tax exemption estimated at about $1.5 million, according to the Mississippi Development Authority. The company also received a 10-year local property tax exemption.

Due to confidentiality laws protecting taxpayers, Mississippi Today couldn’t accurately quantify the full value of those exemptions. For reference, though, Drax estimates it contributed $5 million in state and local revenue in 2023 alone, even with those incentives.

The local revenue has allowed the city to keep utility rates low, Norwood said, emphasizing the importance of making services affordable in a place with a high poverty rate. 

“Thank God for Drax, we have money in those departments where we can do that,” he said.

Drax’s overall economic impact to Amite County, where Gloster is, was $160 million in 2023, company spokesperson Michelli Martin told Mississippi Today. 

But it’s the facility’s environmental impact that has drawn more attention. 

In 2018, Drax alerted the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality that it had underestimated its release of toxic chemicals called Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs, since the plant opened in 2016, and was over three times the legal limit. It wasn’t until 2021, almost five years after the releases began, that Drax finally came into compliance over its VOC emissions. In 2020, MDEQ fined the facility $2.5 million, one of the largest Clean Air Act penalties in state history.

Shortly after, Drax slipped up again. Testing from 2022 showed that Amite BioEnergy, the name of the Gloster facility, was releasing 50% over its permitted limit of another, more dangerous group of chemicals called Hazardous Air Pollutants, or HAPs. MDEQ cited Drax for a violation in 2023, and is now negotiating a new penalty with the company. 

The company also miscalculated its emissions from two wood pellet plants in Louisiana, for which the state fined Drax $3.2 million in 2022. Throughout the Southeast, regulators have fined wood pellet facilities 14 times for air emission violations since 2012, totaling $6.6 million in penalties. 

Krystal Martin and other residents were quick to connect Drax’s violations to health issues among those living near the plant. Martin’s mom, for instance, had just started going to the hospital in 2020 for an array of respiratory issues when they heard about the $2.5 million fine. 

Another resident, Shelia Dobbins, lived about a half mile from the plant until 2022. Dobbins told Mississippi Today that in 2017, she fainted during a doctor’s visit. After an extended hospital stay, doctors diagnosed her with COPD, and since then Dobbins has had to carry an oxygen tank with her wherever she goes. In the years after, she’s watched as similar symptoms have plagued her family and neighbors.

“I’m on oxygen… my husband was on oxygen, he’s deceased. My brother-in-law was on oxygen, he’s deceased. My sister is on oxygen right now. All these houses are right there together, around that plant,” she said.  “They need to own up to what they did.”

Three other residents who have lived near the plant told Mississippi Today they’ve also experienced respiratory issues since Drax arrived, and Martin said there were many more.

No conclusive evidence exists connecting Drax’s emissions to any of the aforementioned health symptoms. Norwood, the town’s mayor, was dubious aout the plant having anything to do with the health issues. MDEQ Executive Director Chris Wells told Mississippi Today that, just because Drax violated air emissions limits, doesn’t mean the company has harmed the public’s health. 

“God sees all sin the same,” Wells said. “In the environmental regulatory world, there are gradients of sin … I know that some of the folks in the Gloster community have expressed concerns about their health, and I understand why. What we've tried to tell them is, they are equating a violation with a health impact. I'm not saying there hasn't been. What I told them is that we haven't seen any evidence of that.”

Connecting any health symptoms to any one source of pollution is a tall order. But Erica Walker, a Jackson native who teaches epidemiology at Brown University, believes her ongoing research will determine if there is such a connection. 

Last August, Walker set up air monitors at different homes around Gloster to collect air quality levels. The preliminary data, she said, shows daily averages below federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. But those averages, Walker added, mask a worrisome trend: At night, when most people are home and near the air monitors, the pollutant levels are “magnitudes” higher than EPA standards. 

Walker also pointed to high levels of “noise pollution” that come from the plant, which operates through the night. Irritation from loud noises can build stress, she explained, which over time can increase a person’s risk of symptoms like cardiovascular diseases.

“A hundred percent of the people we’ve talked to in Gloster have expressed that (the noise) is something they can’t control,” she said. “They hear it all the time, at random times of night. Even people that live a distance away from (the plant).” 

Walker said it won’t be until August, when she’ll have a year’s worth of data, before she can officially compare her measurements to EPA standards and then start to narrow down the possible causes of residents’ health issues. 

But regardless of whether Drax is at the root of those issues, Walker said it’s a huge concern that officials allowed a wood pellet facility, which are known to release toxic chemicals harmful to residents, to be built so close to residents in an area with already poor health outcomes like Gloster.

“We want to make sure we aren’t additionally burdening already burdened communities,” Walker said. “When I first went to Gloster and saw where the wood pellet plant was, like literally in the middle of the community, like a real blastoma in the middle of this community that expanded, I was like, ‘Who approved this?’

“There are people that live right around (the Drax plant). If we would’ve taken seriously the environmental justice philosophy, I don’t even think that plant would have been approved. I can just say that plant would not be approved to go sit in Fondren, or the nice fancy part of Madison.”

When asked about the company’s emission violations, Drax reiterates it was the one to tell MDEQ it was out of compliance. 

“What the news articles that covered this don’t mention is that the emissions matter discussed is a direct result of how we continually monitor operations to ensure compliance with all regulatory requirements,” Martin, the company’s spokesperson, said in an email. “The potential issue was identified by Drax through our own on-site monitoring, and we shared the data with the (MDEQ) to proactively address it. Moreover, Drax is constantly evaluating new ways to enhance our operations as technology and best industry practices evolve over time.”  

But the immediate impacts from emissions are only part of the environmental debate going on around wood pellets. More and more, scientists are questioning the very premise that the industry was born out of.

When accounting for the loss of trees that sequester carbon naturally, wood pellet production actually increases the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Carr said. 

“Most of those studies show that, for the next three decades to 100 years, you’re going to have more carbon in the atmosphere from burning trees than if you just continue burning fossil fuels,” he said, citing a study the center commissioned looking specifically at Drax’s plants in Mississippi and Louisiana. “The reason is that you’re cutting down trees that are currently storing carbon, and you’re putting that carbon immediately into the atmosphere. You’re not going to recapture that carbon until they grow back to an equal level of carbon storage.”  

A 2018 report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made the same conclusion. 

Part of the discrepancy between skeptics and those in the industry is over what kind of wood gets used for pellets. Companies like Drax and Enviva maintain their pellets come largely from leftover wood that other businesses, like sawmills, can’t use, as well as from thinnings, which is when a forester removes smaller trees to let larger ones grow.

But in a letter to President Biden and other leaders in 2021, over 500 scientists from around the world argued that even using the “low-grade” wood those companies rely on creates a “carbon debt.”

“Regrowing trees and displacement of fossil fuels may eventually pay off this carbon debt, but regrowth takes time the world does not have to solve climate change,” the letter reads. “As numerous studies have shown, this burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. That is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas.”

It’s unclear what the growing public opinion against wood pellets means for its future in Mississippi. It’s especially unclear for Enviva after its recent bankruptcy declaration. Flanagan, the economic development director in George County, said operations at the Lucedale plant have gone on as usual and he hasn’t heard any sign of that changing. 

Enviva declined to provide any comment for this story. 

Activists around the world, like Merry Dickinson in the U.K., are working to steer politicians against approving new subsidies for wood pellets. 

Dickinson lives about 20 miles from Drax’s plant in Yorkshire, which is where the pellets from Gloster get shipped to and used for energy production. She was at the same shareholder meeting last April where Martin gave her testimony about the health issues in Gloster. 

“Learning about the huge amounts of subsidies that are coming from our energy bills to support (Drax) and then learning about what’s happening to the communities like in Gloster, Mississippi, around the Southern U.S., and the devastating impact that Drax, and therefore our money in the U.K., is having on these people, on these forests… it is so outrageous,” she said. 

Despite her grievances with Drax, Martin has said repeatedly that she’s not looking to shut down the company. After all, the town does need the jobs. In 2018, the town got its first grocery store in decades. At the end of the day, she just wants what’s best for her hometown.

“No one’s invested in Gloster. Everything’s dead. The trees are dead, the grass is dead, the streets are a mess,” she said on a phone call in March. “We want to see something greater in Gloster.”

The post Trouble in the wood basket: How a global push for renewable energy took advantage of rural Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, has struggled to rebuild after a devastating tornado struck last year. One family is finding their way home.

The post A Displaced Family Finds Their Way Home After Rolling Fork Tornado appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.