MS Legislature

Among the worst forms of government are those that use fear and intimidation to control the people and suppress opposition. House Appropriations Chairman Herb Frierson has now admitted to the Associated Press and the Daily Journal that Mississippi’s elected leadership drafted laws to retaliate against citizens – including educators – who advocated for a constitutional amendment that would have required adequate […]

The legislatively-induced state budget chaos continues… Today, Lt. Governor Reeves and Speaker Gunn announced that the state budget they rammed through the Legislature in the waning hours of the session was based on faulty numbers. It turns out that we can anticipate even less state funding than legislators were told when they blindly voted on budget-slashing appropriations bills and

It’s crunch time! In the next four days, six legislators will decide whether or not to change the law that requires adequate funding for our children’s schools. HB 458, the average daily membership (ADM) bill, is reportedly being used as a vehicle to make changes to the MAEP, ostensibly to reduce the amount required by the

The Senate has adjourned the 2016 session; the House must return tomorrow to dispose of a motion to reconsider before it adjourns sine die. You can  see here the results of all the bills that we tracked this session. Governor Bryant announced today that he will make additional cuts to current-year budgets, including public schools, as revenue is

The K-12 budget bill, HB 1643, has been adopted. It provides level funding for the MAEP, under-funding public schools by $172-million. Other portions of the education budget suffered cuts, but Chairman Moore noted that conferees worked hard to minimize the negative effect on students.  The Schools for the Blind and the Deaf were cut more than $300,000, an impact

Last evening, the appropriations chairmen reported that “dummy bills” (with $0 instead of actual budget numbers) were required to meet yesterday’s 8pm deadline because the staff ran out of time while preparing the reports. Twenty-four hours later, we still have no real budget conference reports for K-12 and many of the largest state agency budgets.

Legislators met their 8:00 p.m. deadline tonight by filing “dummy” conference reports on some budget bills, including HB 1643, the K-12 appropriation. Dummy budget bills are placeholders that include $0.00 in the line items. A dummy tax-cut bill with a reverse repealer was also filed. The appropriations chairs reported that the dummy bills were necessary because the staff

This morning, the Senate voted 26-24 to send the charter school bill to Governor Bryant without any changes. Students in districts rated C, D, and F will now be allowed to cross district lines to attend charter schools, taking your local taxes and their MAEP allocation with them. See how your senator voted. The close vote is

The Senate did not take up the charter school bill today (SB 2161), giving us another day to contact our senators.  Please continue to reach out to your senator on this issue. The leadership will continue to apply pressure, and if we let up, we could lose this opportunity to have C districts removed from the