2015/04/29 – Isn’t it wonderful when a dirty switch gets one-upped?  That’s the way it went down in Jackson recently, when Hinds County Circuit Judge Winston Kidd altered the language of a flytrap ballot initiative created by anti-education legislators.

Last year, One Voice and the MSNAACP joined other pro-K-through-12 advocates to create Initiative 42, a ballot measure forcing legislators to finally fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program.  They’ve only done this twice since its creation in the early ’90s.

There is reason to believe that enough Mississippians are alarmed about the state of Mississippi’s woefully underfunded public education system and leaky school roofs to approve the initiative in the November election.  But during the last legislative session, anti-education lawmakers, including Republicans Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Phillip Gunn, supported a second ballot initiative specifically to water down votes looking to fully fund MAEP.  A majority of voters who approve full MAEP funding could end up dividing their votes between the two warring initiative proposals, guaranteeing majority support for neither, and killing both.

The language of the citizen-led Initiative 42 requires lawmakers to fund “an adequate and efficient system of free public schools.”  Gunn and his cohorts’ unnecessary Initiative 42-A says lawmakers must fund “an effective system of free public schools.”

“The title between these two initiatives is so similar that it’s clear that there was no point to passing that second initiative other than to kill the effort of hard-working Mississippians who want a better future for their children,” said MSNAACP President Derrick Johnson.

Initiative 42-A does have a more insidious purpose, however.  Unlike the crowd-supported Initiative 42, the anti-education Initiative 42-A does not provide a mechanism for injunctive relief if stingy legislators again fail to fully fund MAEP.  Public education advocates say the ballot title for 42-A failed to make clear the absence of this mechanism for injunctive relief, so Oxford parent Adrian Shipman filed suit in Hinds County Circuit Court, seeking to make that clear in 42-A’s title.

On April 2, Circuit Judge Winston Kidd agreed and rewrote the title of 42-A to clarify that there would be no mechanism to enforce the right to effective school funding in court.

Now Gunn and Reeves are fearful that their flytrap initiative will be outed as a tool for killing reasonable education funding, which could push more voters into supporting one amendment over the other.  Both immediately attacked Kidd’s decision and are appealing it to the Mississippi Supreme Court, demanding the higher court remove the judge’s accurate description.

“This one Hinds County judge decided his opinion was more important than the majority of the members of the Legislature, including the elected lieutenant governor and speaker of the House, the secretary of state and the Democrat attorney general,” Reeves and Gunn said in a joint news release.

But two people mentioned in their joint news release — Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann and Attorney General Jim Hood — do not stand with Reeves’ and Gunn’s appeal.  Both have agreed with the opinion of Shipman’s lawyer that Reeves and Gunn can’t appeal that decision to the Mississippi Supreme Court.

“Not only has the Legislature not provided a right to appeal the circuit court’s order, it has forbidden such an appeal;  ironically, the Legislature seeks to appeal a ruling that it specifically made unappealable,” wrote Shipman’s attorney James A. Keith.

It’s still to be determined if the conservative state Supreme Court will side with public education opponents or accurately cite state law in favor of public education supporters.  Whichever way the decision goes, voters will likely need to be educated on the right initiative to support later this year if they want to actually see new textbooks and rain-proof schools in upcoming years.

Source: MS NAACP Staff