The Mississippi Department of Education and public schools in the state could lose over $137 million in federal funds after the U.S. Department of Education removed access to pandemic-era grant money.
The post Mississippi Education Leaders Reeling After Trump Administration Rescinds $137 Million in COVID-19 Relief Funds for Schools appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.
Mass firings and federal cuts have many public health officials in Mississippi watching Washington with growing concern as they prepare for the avian flu. An upheaval in the federal government instigated by the Trump Administration is paralyzing key agencies and offices meant to coordinate and direct a unified national response.
The post As Mississippi Prepares for Avian Flu, Federal Chaos Looms Large appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced late Tuesday it will release previously authorized grant funds to farmers and small rural business owners to build renewable energy projects—but only if they rewrite applications to comply with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities.
The move has left some farmers perplexed—and doubtful that they’ll ever get the grant money they were promised, given the Trump administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and hostility toward renewable energy.
Some of the roughly 6,000 grant applicants have already completed the solar, wind or other energy projects and are awaiting promised repayment from the government. Others say they can’t afford to take on the projects they’d been planning unless the grant money comes through.
A Floodlight analysis shows the overwhelming majority of the intended recipients of this money reside in Trump country—congressional districts represented by Republicans.
After hearing of the USDA’s latest announcement Wednesday, Minnesota strawberry farmer Andy Petran said he suspects many previously approved projects won’t be funded. He’d been approved for a $39,625 grant to install solar panels on his farm. But like many other farmers nationally, Petran got word from the USDA earlier this year that his grant money had been put on hold.
“It’s not like any small farmer who is looking to put solar panels on their farms will be able to put a natural gas refinery or a coal refinery on the farm,” Petran said. “I don’t know what they expect me to switch to.”
Petran was counting on the benefits that solar power would bring to his farm.
After getting word in September that the USDA had approved his grant application, he expected the solar panels would not only reduce his electricity bill but allow him to sell power back to the grid. He and his wife figured the extra income would help expand their Twin Cities Berry Co. and pay down their debt more quickly.
Petran’s optimism was soon extinguished. A USDA representative told him earlier this year that the grant had been frozen.
His 15-acre farm about 40 miles north of Minneapolis operates on a razor-thin margin, Petran said, so without the grant money, he can’t afford to build the $80,000 solar project.
“Winning these grants was a contract between us and the government,” he said. “There was a level of trust there. That trust has been broken.”
In its announcement, issued Tuesday night, the USDA said grant recipients will have 30 days to review and revise their project plans to align with President Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Executive Order, which prioritizes fossil fuel production and cuts federal support for renewable energy projects.
“This process gives rural electric providers and small businesses the opportunity to refocus their projects on expanding American energy production while eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals,” the USDA news release said. “… This updated guidance reflects a broader shift away from the Green New Deal.”
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the release that the new directive will give rural energy providers and small businesses a chance to “realign their projects” with Trump’s priorities.
It’s unclear what this will mean for grant recipients who’ve already spent money on renewable energy projects—or those whose planned projects have been stalled by the administration’s funding freeze.
The USDA didn’t directly answer those questions. In an email to Floodlight on Wednesday, a department spokesperson said the agency must approve any proposed changes to plans—but offered no specific guidance on what or whether changes should be made.
“Awardees that do not respond via the website will be considered as not wishing to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after 30 days,” the email said. “For awardees who respond via the website to confirm no changes, processing on their projects will resume immediately.”
The grant funding was put on hold after an executive order issued by President Trump on his first day in office. It froze hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy under President Joe Biden’s massive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The law added more than $1 billion to the USDA’s 17-year-old Rural Energy for America (REAP) program.
About 6,000 REAP grants funded with IRA money have been paused and are being reviewed for compliance with Trump’s executive order, according to a March 5 email from the USDA’s rural development office to the office of U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
A lawsuit filed earlier this month challenges the legality of the freeze on IRA funding for REAP projects.
Earthjustice lawyer Hana Vizcarra, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, called the latest USDA announcement a “disingenuous stunt.”
“President Trump and Secretary Rollins can’t change the rules of the game well into the second half,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “This is the definition of an arbitrary and capricious catch-22.”
Under the REAP grant program, farmers pay for renewable and lower carbon energy projects, then submit proof of the completed work to the USDA for reimbursement. The grants were intended to fund solar panels, wind turbines, grain dryers, irrigation upgrades and other projects, USDA data shows.
At a press conference in Atlanta on March 12, Rollins said, “If our farmers and ranchers, especially, have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole.”
But some contend the administration is unfairly making farmers jump through more hoops.
“This isn’t cutting red tape; it’s adding more,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, a Midwest-based environmental advocacy group. “The USDA claims to deliver on commitments, but these new rules could result in awarded grants being permanently frozen.”
U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a longtime farmer and Maine Democrat who sits on the House agriculture committee, said she thinks it’s illegal and unconstitutional for the administration to withhold grant money allocated by Congress. Beyond that, she said, it has hurt cash-strapped farmers.
“This is about farmers making ends meet,” she told Floodlight. “It’s not some ideological issue for us.”
Using USDA data, Floodlight identified the top 10 congressional districts that received the most grants. They’re all represented by Republicans who have said little publicly about the funding freezes affecting thousands of their constituents. It’s impossible to tell from the USDA data which REAP grants will get paid out.
The congressional district that received the most REAP grants was Iowa’s 2nd District, in the northeastern part of the state. Farmers and business owners there got more than 300 grants from 2023 through 2025. The district is represented by U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, who has previously voiced support for “alternative energy strategies.”
“More than half of the energy produced in Iowa is from renewable sources, and that is something for Iowans to be very proud of,” she told the House Appropriations Committee in June 2022.
Hinson’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the matter.
The No. 2 spot for REAP grants: Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad. In that district, which spans southern Minnesota, more than 260 farmers and rural businesses were approved for REAP grants.
Finstad’s office did not return multiple emails and calls requesting comment. His constituents have been complaining about his silence on funding freezes. They’ve staged at least two demonstrations at his offices in Minnesota. Finstad said he held a February 26 telephone town hall joined by 3,000 people in his district.
In a February 28 letter to a constituent, Finstad said Rollins has announced that the USDA will honor contracts already signed with farmers and that he looks forward to working with the administration “to support the needs of farm country.”
Finstad is no stranger to the REAP program. Before becoming a congressman, he was the USDA’s state director of rural development for Minnesota. In that role, he was a renewable booster.
“By reducing energy costs, renewable energy helps to create opportunities for improvement elsewhere, like creating jobs,” Finstad said in a 2021 USDA press release. That has since been deleted from the agency’s website.
Rollins, meanwhile, called herself “a massive defender of fossil fuels” at her confirmation hearing, and she has expressed skepticism about the findings of climate scientists. “We know the research of CO2 being a pollutant is just not valid,” Rollins said at the Heartland Institute’s 2018 conference on energy.
She has also said that she welcomes the efforts of Elon Musk and his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency team at the USDA.
Jake Rabe, a solar installer in Blairstown, Iowa, said he has put up more than 100,000 solar modules in the state since getting into the business in 2015. More than 30 of his customers have completed their installation but are awaiting frozen grant funding, he said. At least 10 more have signed the paperwork but are hesitant to begin construction. Millions of dollars worth of his business are frozen, he said.
On top of that, Rabe said, the state’s net metering policies—in which solar users get credits for any excess power they send back to the grid—are set to expire in 2026.
“I kind of feel like it may be the beginning of the end for the solar industry in Iowa with what’s going on,” said Rabe, who owns Rabe Hardware.
Despite it all, he remains a Trump supporter.
“Under the current administration, I think we’re doing things that are necessary for the betterment of the entire United States,” he said.
On March 13, Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group, filed a federal lawsuit against the USDA on behalf of five farmers and three nonprofits. They’re seeking a court order to compel the Trump administration to honor the government’s grant commitments, saying it violated the Constitution by refusing to disburse funds allocated by Congress.
Vizcarra, the Earthjustice lawyer, said she is disturbed by the lack of concern from Congress, whose powers appear to have been usurped by the administration.
She added, “These are real people, real farmers and real organizations whose projects have impacts on communities who are left with this horrible situation with no idea of when it will end.”
One of the plaintiffs, Laura Beth Resnick, grows dahlias, zinnias and other cut flowers on a small farm about 30 miles north of Baltimore.
Florists are her customers, and demand for her flowers blooms during cold-weather holidays like Thanksgiving. Each of her three greenhouses is half the length of a football field and heating them during those months isn’t cheap, Resnick said. The power bill for Butterbee Farm often exceeds $500 a month.
So a year ago, Resnick applied for a USDA renewable energy grant, hoping to put solar panels on her barn roof—a move that she estimated would save about $5,000 a year. In August, the USDA sent word that her farm had been awarded a grant for $36,450.
The cost of installing solar panels was $72,000, she said. So she paid a solar contractor $36,000 upfront, expecting that she’d pay the rest in January when the federal grant money came in. The solar panels were installed in December.
But the federal government’s check never arrived. A February 4 email from a USDA representative said her request for reimbursement was rejected due to the Trump administration’s recent executive orders.
Resnick said she sought help from her elected representatives but got “pretty much nowhere.”
After hearing about the USDA’s announcement Wednesday, Resnick said that based on the response she’s previously gotten from the USDA, she’s not confident she will get her grant money.
“I’ve lost my trust in the USDA at this point,” she said. “Our project is complete, so we can’t change the scope of it.”
Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat, said he supports the legal fight against the funding freeze.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are scamming our farmers,” Van Hollen said in a statement to Floodlight. “By illegally withholding these reimbursements for work done under federal grants, they’re breaking a promise to farmers and small businesses in Maryland and across the country.”
Since 2023, when IRA funding became available, the USDA has given or loaned about $21.3 billion through programs to support renewable energy in rural areas, according to a Floodlight analysis of agency data, including the REAP program.
Those grant payments were processed until January 20, when the Trump administration announced its freeze.
Trump’s decision was in line with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint crafted by the Heritage Foundation aimed at reshaping the U.S. government. That document called for repealing the IRA and rescinding “all funds not already spent by these programs.”
Environmental groups have sharply criticized the administration’s move, and several lawsuits are challenging the legality of the freeze of IRA funding.
At a recent public roundtable, Maggie Bruns, CEO of the Prairie Rivers Network which supports Illinois communities’ transition to clean energy, listed REAP grants that have been held up in Illinois, where her multifaceted environmental nonprofit is based. A $390,000 grant for a solar array at the grocery store in Carlinville; $27,000 for solar panels at an auto body shop in Staunton; $51,000 for a solar array for a golf course in Alton.
Since 2023, farmers and businesses in Illinois have been approved for more than 590 REAP grants, making the state the third highest in number of recipients in the United States, Floodlight’s analysis shows. In an interview with Barn Raiser, Bruns said the decision to freeze such grants has caused unneeded stress for farmers. Before the executive order, USDA’s rural development team had worked hard to bring dollars for renewable energy projects to Illinois farmers, she said.
“That’s the thing we should be celebrating right now,” Bruns said, “and instead we have to fight to make sure that money actually does land into the pockets of the people who have gone ahead, jumped through all these hoops and are attempting to do the right thing for their businesses and their farms.”
In January, Dan Batson’s nursery in Mississippi was approved for a $400,367 REAP grant—money that he planned to use to install four solar arrays. He intended to use that solar energy to power the pumps that irrigate more than 1 million trees, a move that would have saved the company about $25,000 a year in electricity costs.
Seated in a wooded area about 30 miles north of Biloxi, his 42-year-old GreenForest nursery ships potted magnolias, hollies, crepe myrtles and other trees to southern states. Until a couple of months ago, Batson had been excited about what the grant money would mean for the business.
But when he saw news about the funding being held up earlier this year, he called a local USDA representative who confirmed the funds had been frozen. Batson had already sent the solar contractor $240,000. Now, his plans are on hold.
“I just can’t do the project if I don’t get the money,” he said.
Tuesday’s announcement from the USDA makes him no more confident he’ll get the money, he said.
Batson said he’s a fiscal conservative, so he understands the effort to cut costs. “But,” he said, “the way they’ve gone about it has disrupted a lot of business owners’ lives.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.
The post Farmers in Trump Country Were Counting on Clean Energy Grants. Then the Government Changed the Rules. appeared first on Barn Raiser.
Americans could soon pay more for gas, groceries and everyday items under President Donald Trump’s international tariffs, which are taxes the federal government imposes on imported goods. The president placed 25% tariffs on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico and 20% tariffs on Chinese goods.
The post Trump Tariffs Could Cause Shortages, Price Hikes and ‘Chaos,’ Experts Say appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.
Hundreds of thousands of poor, disabled or pregnant Mississippians could lose health care coverage if Congress slashes funding for Medicaid.
Although President Donald Trump has vowed Medicaid won’t be “touched,” the U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget resolution Tuesday that instructs the committee that oversees Medicaid and Medicare to cut $880 billion over 10 years. The cuts will help pay for Trump’s agenda on tax cuts and border reform.
The talk of such dramatic changes to the federal-state program has Mississippi lawmakers concerned – and hesitant to push expansion this year.
Proposals for Medicaid budget cuts nationwide include lowering the rate at which states are reimbursed for Medicaid services, capping the amount of money states can get per enrollee, and imposing block grants – meaning states would receive a fixed dollar amount for the program, regardless of need.
Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation, could suffer the most under some of these proposals, according to health policy experts.
Despite the state having some of the strictest eligibility requirements in the nation, pervasive poverty and poor social health determinants mean that more than 650,000 Mississippians – about half of whom are children – rely on the program for basic health care. More than half of births in Mississippi are funded by Medicaid.
“Mississippi has a relatively small population, with the lowest per capita annual income in the country, rates of chronic conditions that are consistently higher than the national average, and with around 60% of Mississippians living with multiple chronic conditions,” explained John Dillon Harris, a health care systems and policy consultant at the Center for Mississippi Health Policy. “… The result is a large Medicaid population that is very expensive to treat.”
Democratic lawmakers are also sounding the alarm about deep cuts to Medicaid. Rep. Omeria Scott, D-Laurel, said it’s something Mississippians “ought to really be afraid of.”
“If they are talking about cutting $880 billion out of the budget, Mississippi is going to be on its knees,” she said at the Democrats’ legislative press conference Tuesday.
However, since Mississippi is one of only 10 states not to expand Medicaid and draw down billions in additional federal funds, some proposed cuts wouldn’t directly affect the state’s current budget – though they would affect future enrollment.
“Mississippi isn’t drawing down as much, so that’s not going to be a direct cut to your current budget, but it’s an opportunity cost,” said Joan Alker, Medicaid expert and executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.
Threats to slash Medicaid spending have already scared away Mississippi lawmakers from attempting expansion this year – though they have passed “dummy bills,” void of details, to keep the issue alive “should something transpire,” House Speaker Jason White said.
After a decade of squelching any debate on the issue, Mississippi House GOP leaders in 2024 pushed for legislation that would expand Medicaid to 200,000 low-income adults, as 40 other states have done. While the bills died after a saga of partisan politics, advocates were hopeful that the historic session created enough momentum to get the policy through the finish line in 2025.
Now, lawmakers fear they may have bigger problems on their hands.
“Unfortunately, we’re hearing more about what may be cuts or block grants to the Medicaid program in general that we will have to deal with as a state because there’s no denying we have a large Medicaid population – so I don’t know the chances,” White said when asked about the likelihood Medicaid expansion would be brought up this year.
Others are more certain the issue is dead this year.
“In a most practical sense, I’d say we probably won’t be doing anything this year,” Senate Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell told Mississippi Today, though he added that if anything changes, lawmakers could suspend the legislative rules and bring a bill back to life late in the session.
Click the dropdown to learn more about the specific proposals that would reduce Medicaid funding:
The federal government could reduce the federal matching rate, or FMAP, which determines the percentage of Medicaid costs the federal government pays to each state. How much this would affect Mississippi would depend on the language of the proposed cut.
Mississippi currently has the highest FMAP in the country at 76.9% – meaning the federal government pays for nearly 80% of Mississippians’ Medicaid coverage, while the state makes up the rest – because of the state’s high poverty rate.
One of the proposals would take away the FMAP floor. As it stands, all states receive at least a 50% FMAP, even if they “should” be receiving less, according to the per capita income formula. If that floor was removed, richer states would be affected, as their FMAP would drop below 50%. Mississippi would likely not suffer from this proposal.
Another proposal would remove the increased federal match rate of 90% that the federal government offered to newly-expanded states in the last few years. Without the increased match rate, expansion would not hold the financial favor that has made it politically palatable to Republicans in the state.
The feds could also impose what’s called a “per capita cap,” limiting the amount a state could spend on Medicaid per person. If the caps were implemented, Medicaid would only receive a certain amount of money from the federal government to cover the care of a beneficiary – regardless of his or her medical needs. States would be locked into a fixed amount based on what they have historically spent.
The fact that Mississippi has one of the lowest per person Medicaid spending would count against the state – locking it into a lower fixed budget.
Alker, the Medicaid expert from Georgetown University, says pushing expansion legislation through this year could make Mississippi more likely to receive a higher per capita budget – though it’s no guarantee.
“I’ve seen proposals that look at taking away the American Rescue Plan Act incentives, which is extra funding for states that newly come to expansion … I have seen some chatter about how one proposal is to take away those incentives, but to not take them away from states that were counting on them,” explained Alker.
“In other words, sort of grandfathering in North Carolina and South Dakota (states that expanded Medicaid in the past two years). So, if anything, it might be smart for Mississippi to do the expansion this session and lock that in.”
Imposing block grants would be similar to per capita caps, but arguably more punishing for states since funding wouldn’t change based on enrollment growth.
Block grants would limit states’ abilities to respond to emergencies, and would especially hurt rural areas, research says.
Mississippi is currently almost maxed out on the tax it’s allowed to impose on hospitals, which helps the state pay for its share of Medicaid spending. One option being discussed in Congress is to lower the limit of or eliminate the tax, which would mean hospitals would be reimbursed at a lower rate and there would be less state money to fund the Medicaid program.
The proposal is less likely to garner support, explained Harris, the policy consultant at the Center for Mississippi Health Policy.
“It’ll be difficult to move this particular reform through Congress since such a large number of states, both red and blue, rely on this tax to pay for their programs,” he said.
But if it did go into effect, the impact would be profound.
“The state would have to get really creative in figuring out what to tax and how in order to maintain the current level of support hospitals receive through these supplemental payments,” Harris said.
Work requirements have long been discussed as a means of making Medicaid expansion more palatable to conservatives who view the program as “welfare.” Now, Congress may decide to impose work requirements on the regular Medicaid population.
As it stands, Mississippi has one of the country’s strictest income requirements for Medicaid. Childless adults don’t qualify, and parents must make less than 28% of the federal poverty level, a mere $7,000 annually for a family of three, to qualify. More times than not, that means that working a full-time job counts against an individual.
If the state were to keep its strict income requirements while also imposing a work requirement, it would be difficult for Mississippians to qualify for the health care program.
The red tape that a work requirement would create would also likely deter eligible Mississippians from enrolling or staying on the program.
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said Mississippi lawmakers have “a leg up” since the state’s former Medicaid director recently landed a spot in Washington leading the federal Medicaid division under Trump. Hosemann has yet to say what, if anything, Snyder has told lawmakers so far, but said he expects to have “a direct commentary into the area of Medicaid” through Snyder.
Regardless of what action the federal government decides to take, cuts of this magnitude would affect millions of low-income people across the country, not just in Mississippi.
“States will be forced to deeply cut eligibility, benefits and reduce provider rates,” Alker said in a statement published online in response to the House budget resolution outlining Medicaid costs. “These cuts will especially harm rural communities who are more reliant on Medicaid, and where hospitals are already operating on tighter margins.”
Taylor Vance, Geoff Pender and Michael Goldberg contributed to this report.
Mississippi Today receives grant support from The Bower Foundation, as does the Center for Mississippi Health Policy. Donors do not in any way influence our newsroom’s editorial decisions. For more on that policy or to view a list of our donors, click here.
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Mississippians are no strangers to ticks, but residents of the Magnolia State may be surprised to learn that these pesky parasites are capable of spreading a food allergy that makes red meat particularly hazardous. The allergy, known as alpha-gal syndrome, affects hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The post Mississippi Researchers Investigate Growing Tick-Borne Allergy to Red Meat appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.
President Donald Trump has vowed to close the U.S. Department of Education without clear guidelines for what will happen next. Policy experts say that it could create chaos for state education agencies, including in Mississippi, which relies more heavily on federal education dollars than most.
The post What Trump’s Plan to Abolish the Department of Education Would Mean for Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Free Press.
Hundreds of thousands of eligible poor Mississippi children will miss out on grocery assistance this summer after the state missed the deadline to apply for the federal program for the second year in a row.
Families who rely on free breakfasts and lunches during the school year often have trouble making ends meet while paying for additional child care and meals during months when school is not in session.
The program provides each eligible child $40 a month in grocery assistance. It was estimated the program would have brought in $38 million to the state last year.
The nation’s poorest state is also the hungriest state – with nearly one in four children not having reliable access to food in Mississippi.
The Mississippi Department of Human Services, the agency responsible for administering the program, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Mississippi Today about its decision to opt out. Gov. Tate Reeves, who oversees DHS, also did not respond to questions about the decision, though he told news outlets last year he made the decision based on his desire to reject “attempts to expand the welfare state.”
Springboard to Opportunities will offer cash assistance to needy families in Jackson for another summer after it launched its own program last year in response to the governor’s decision not to participate in the Summer EBT program.
“Summer is the hungriest time of the year for millions of families across our country … This initiative was launched in direct response to Mississippi’s decision to opt out of the federal SUN Bucks program, which could have filled this hunger gap for low-income families across the state,” Sarah Stripp, the nonprofit’s director of socioeconomic wellbeing, said at a press conference at the Capitol last week.
Springboard to Opportunities served 672 children in the summer of 2024, but there are about 324,000 children across the state who would qualify for food under SUN Bucks, according to the Food Resource and Action Center, a national nonprofit organization working to end hunger in the U.S.
Stripp urged state leaders to reconsider their decision for 2026.
Summer cash assistance from Springboard to Opportunities is only available for Jackson families living in federally-subsidized housing. But the success of the program – boasting a drastic reduction in hunger, according to a survey – shows what kind of difference a small amount of cash can make in the hands of eligible families.
Michelle Howard, a Jackson mother of two young boys, applied for assistance from the nonprofit last summer after seeing a flyer on her door. Before she started receiving benefits, Howard said summer wasn’t enjoyable – it was filled with stress and anxiety trying to find the extra money to cover meals and child care.
“We already have a set amount that we’re working with throughout the year. Once the summer comes, we’re still working on that same little bit of money,” Howard, who runs a cleaning business, told Mississippi Today at the Capitol. “… Right now, when my children are in school, I maybe spend $500 a month on groceries. But when the summer comes, I might need an additional $200 or $300 a month.”
SUN Bucks was created based on the success of earlier versions of summer food assistance programs and supported by a bipartisan group in Congress. The Biden Administration created the program to help families deal with higher food costs when children are out of school and not receiving free and reduced-price meals.
While the Mississippi Department of Education participates in other federal food programs during the summer, children – especially in rural areas – often don’t have transportation to get to the sites that serve the meals.
Sade McGee, director of food services in Yazoo County School District, said programs that require students to have transportation to get meals during summer months have low participation in her district.
Thirty-eight states – including Mississippi’s neighboring states of Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama – have enrolled in the program.
The implementation of the program in Louisiana required pressure and funding from state legislators last year. Gov. Jeff Landry originally said in early 2024 that the state would not participate, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers saw differently and put up the money needed to implement the program.
The program cost $7 million to run – half of which was paid by the federal government, the Illuminator reported at the time.
The state got an extension and implemented the program in a short amount of time, according to David Matlock, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Children and Family Services.
Matlock told Mississippi Today the rollout of the program was hard work and took a lot of coordination among state agencies, including the education department.
He said the state plans to continue its participation.
“Our retailers were interested in continuing this program, our families are interested in continuing this program,” he said.
The post Mississippi again turns down millions of dollars to feed low-income kids during summer months appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Note: This story was co-published with Open Campus, The Hechinger Report, and The Washington Post.
CLEVELAND — With no car and a toddler, Shamya Jones enrolled this fall at the four-year university in her small town in Mississippi — Delta State University.
She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, the college eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs including history, English, chemistry and music.
“They’re cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving,” Jones said. The cuts “take away from us, our education.”
Across the country, rural students like Jones are feeling short-changed and frustrated.
Many of the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and resulting financial crises. Nationwide, college enrollment has declined by 2 million students, or 10 percent, in the 10 years ending in 2022, hitting rural schools particularly hard. An increasing number of rural private, nonprofit colleges are not only cutting majors, but closing altogether.
“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, ‘Well, this is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”
For many rural students, there are already few places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges that are in rural areas or serve large proportions of rural students have closed since 2020, data show.
“It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else, because there aren’t enough of you here,’” Koricich said of the cuts. “In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction,” he said.
Rural-serving institutions are defined by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, or ARRC, which Koricich directs, as those located in counties classified as rural and not near a metropolitan area.
Even some flagship universities that serve rural communities are making big cuts. West Virginia University this fall began the process of eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A course review is also underway at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University due to declining enrollment.
But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships, the ARRC calculates. Regional institutions educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools, according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. These campuses are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college, the Baltimore-based Art & Science Group consulting firm found.
St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System has scaled back more than 40 programs since 2020, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Also during that period, Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25 and. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.
The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.
Related: In this shrinking Mississippi Delta county, getting a college degree means leaving home behind
“Some institutions have no other options” than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System, both of which have cut programs.
At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.
A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.
“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to rightsize the budget,” Ennis said.
But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a 2021 report that problems such as enrollment drops made worse by the pandemic are being exploited by administrators to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”
Welch said schools are often simply trying to reduce program duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities.
“The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can’t rely on big endowments,” Welch said. The pandemic, he said, “threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing.”
Many of the majors affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to people who live in urban and suburban areas.
These subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that has also eliminated majors. “We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”
Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more this year. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.
The university, in a message to the campus, pointed out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.
“It is easy to just write us off as, ‘Oh, well, do they really need that school?’ when there are so many other majors,” said Owen Bertram, a senior theater major whose program has so far escaped the cuts. “But I don’t think it’s that simple.”
Bertram, who is also student government representative for the university’s College of Creative Arts, said it’s hard to watch his classmates who wanted to study humanities struggle with the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”
At many of the schools, it’s too early to tell if the program cuts will lead to even lower enrollment. In some cases, however, enrollment has continued to decline. At Emporia State, enrollment is down by 14 percent in the two years since about 40 majors were eliminated there.
These cuts come at a time when the proportion of rural high school graduates going to college is falling. Fifty-five percent enroll right after high school, down from 61 percent in 2016, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s a lower rate than the national average.
Low-income and Black students are disproportionately impacted by program cuts. The University of North Carolina Greensboro, for example, is in the process of phasing out 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics. More than half the students are low income and 28 percent are Black, according to the state university system.
“UNCG should be a place where anyone should be able to come and get an affordable education in whatever they want,” said Holly Buroughs, a physics major who started a petition protesting the cuts.
“Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?” asked Azariah Journey, a second-year graduate student in history who comes from a rural town in Kentucky.
Related: A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’
Dominick Bellipanni is one of the last remaining music students at Delta State as the department is being phased out. He received a scholarship to study piano, which he isn’t sure he would have gotten at the state’s larger, more competitive universities.
Bellipanni is from Indianola, a once-busy crossroad 30 minutes from the university, where he grew up hearing stories about businesses that once operated there but closed.
“Used to be, used to be, used to be,” he remembered people telling him.
Now he’s hearing that again.
His professors talk about how there used to be more music recitals, more scholarships, more money, said Bellipanni, who said he plans to leave the Mississippi Delta when he graduates.
“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’ ”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.
This story about rural college majors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on strengthening local coverage of higher education. Reporters in the Open Campus Local Network contributed: Mississippi Today’s Molly Minta, WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson and Signal Ohio’s Amy Morona
The post ‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ options shrink as colleges slash majors appeared first on Mississippi Today.
Ridgeland — In Mississippi, where an estimated 35,800 residents face language barriers in health care, a recent event trained professionals to communicate more effectively with limited-English-speaking patients in an effort to bridge gaps in care.
The program, which began on Oct. 2, was organized by the Mississippi Department of Health’s Office of Health Disparity Elimination and the Bureau of Language Access. It served as a step toward improving access to essential services for Limited English Proficient (LEP) individuals.
“Interpreters are fundamental in ensuring that every individual can fully understand and access the services they need,” said Selma Alford, director of the Bureau of Language Access. “The training is rigorous and essential; it focuses on ethics, cultural competency, and the ongoing development of interpreters’ skills to meet diverse community needs.”
The training program covered a variety of topics essential for effective interpreting, including medical terminology, ethics, and cultural competency, equipping interpreters with the skills necessary for their roles. Each day of training featured interactive sessions, role-playing exercises, and discussions of real-world scenarios. Participants also engaged in exercises focused on building trust with clients and addressing the nuances of communication in health care settings.
Attendees included medical interpreters, court interpreters, teachers and community health workers, among others.
Gabrielle Miller, a housing case manager with the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence, attended to enhance her capacity to serve the Spanish-speaking population.
“I studied social work and Spanish in undergrad, and I’ve lived in Spanish-speaking countries. Now I’m back here working in the Gulf Coast … There aren’t that many people working in social services who can speak Spanish and interpret for those in the community. So I think it’s really important to come get my certification so that I can better serve the community that I live in,” Miller said. “… Some of my clients are solely Spanish-speaking, so advocating for them within my role is crucial.”
According to data from the Migration Policy Institute, approximately 1.2% of Mississippians are considered Limited English Proficient (LEP), meaning they speak English less than “very well.” The top five languages spoken by these individuals in Mississippi are Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, and Gujarati. While about 96% of people in the state speak only English, 3.8% speak a language other than English.” This data underscores the critical need for trained interpreters to facilitate access to essential services.
The training also emphasized the risks of using children or family members as interpreters, which can lead to miscommunication.
“Misunderstandings can have life-threatening consequences, especially in medical settings,” Alford said.
Alford and Miller reiterated the need for credentialing and ongoing education to ensure interpreters can effectively support their communities and provide equitable access to critical services.
Alford urged community members to recognize the importance of professional interpreters as the need for effective communication in health care and social services continues to grow.
“Every voice matters. We encourage anyone interested in making a difference to pursue certification and help us build a more inclusive Mississippi,” she said.
Participants in the training received certificates of completion, signifying their readiness to serve as professional interpreters.
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