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The Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid is temporarily unable to process student applications and payments after a cyberattack on Monday. It’s unclear when that issue will be resolved. 

The cyberattack struck the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning offices, which include the student financial aid office. The attack affected the student financial office the most, agency spokesman John Sewell confirmed Thursday, but he did not provide details about the broader impact. 

It is still possible to apply for aid online through the Mississippi Aid Application dashboard, or MAAPP,  because that operates separately from IHL’s affected system, Sewell said. There have been no reports of the cyberattack affecting individual colleges or universities.

IHL officials are working with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals to determine what happened and whether confidential or sensitive data were accessed or compromised, according to Sewell and a news release from IHL.

Sewell also declined to provide additional details about what happened, what type of cyberattack occurred and why the agency announced the incident days later on Thursday.

The attack against IHL is the latest example of cybersecurity disruptions at state institutions so far this year. 

In May, the criminal extortion group ShinyHunters attacked Canvas, a learning management system used by Mississippi State University and thousands of other educational institutions globally. The incident disrupted finals week at MSU, blocking access to coursework, classes and grades — and leaving students scrambling. 

A Feb.19 cyberattack forced the University of Mississippi Medical Center to cancel appointments and elective surgeries for nine days. Medical staff had to care for patients without access to Wi-Fi or phone lines. Roughly 650 surgeries were delayed. A month later, the ransomware group Medusa claimed credit for the cyberattack and demanded payment to prevent the publication of stolen data.

When it comes to data centers, Vayujeet Gokhale has but one ask.

“If you are going to have lights on at night, then let’s do it in a responsible way,” he said.

Gokhale is a physics professor at Truman State University and a board member for DarkSky Missouri — the state chapter for an international nonprofit aimed at reducing artificial lighting at night. The broader organization has taken a similar stance.

Gokhale acknowledges his cause might not be the first or second priority for most communities. It might not even be third, he said. Yet, he argues that it may be the easiest of environmental problems to solve.

“You don’t need to light up the place for these computers and memory banks to work. They’ll still work even if it’s completely dark,” Gokhale said. “You need light for certain other things, but you can minimize the pollution without affecting the quality of the data center product. You can’t make that same case with water and energy.”

Rather than allowing data centers and the companies running them to operate their lighting on an individual basis, Gokhale said he wants to see his organization’s principles for responsible outdoor lighting get adopted. This would include installing lighting that is pointed downwards, motion detectors so that light is only in use when needed, and warm-colored lights to reduce unnecessary brightness. 

These kinds of deliberate choices might benefit the data center companies by reducing their spending on lighting while improving safety and security at their facilities, according to Gokhale.

“Many times, in these environmental issues, pollution-related issues, it’s a zero-sum game. You have to give up something in order to gain something. Not so with light pollution. It’s a win-win,” Gokhale said.

Dark skies for humans, birds and insects

The United States has the most data centers in the world. More than 3,000 are already up and running, as demand for infrastructure that can power artificial intelligence and store digital information continues to grow. Three-quarters of the data centers planned are in the South or Midwest, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. In Mississippi, has seven with more proposed.

Missouri has 95 active data centers, according to Data Center Map, the company that supplied data for the Pew report. 

New projects in the state include a $15 billion investment in Montgomery County from Google that was announced back in May. At the time, Gov. Mike Kehoe touted the move as an economic win for the state. “This project represents more than infrastructure — it’s an investment in Missouri families, communities, and long-term opportunity,” said Kehoe in a press release at the time.

With regulations in place, Gokhale believes the U.S will be better equipped to preserve the night skies for human observers and wildlife — such as migrating birds or insect species that work as night time pollinators. While many people might first think of butterflies and hummingbirds as pollinators, nocturnal insects play a key role for both local ecosystems and agriculture. 

“A lot of the pollinators are actually active at night,” Gokhale said. “If you have too much artificial light, they get confused or disoriented.”

The job of a pollinator is an important one, said Nicole Flowers-Kimmerle, a horticulture educator for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Extension. About one out of every three bites of food produced in the U.S. is dependent on insect or animal pollinators, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Artificial light at night not only disrupts a nighttime pollinator’s ability to navigate, it also changes their feeding and mating behaviors, she said. “So if we see that we’re having a declining number of moths, then that’s going to affect pollination, but it also affects the food web,” she said.

A decline in moths and other nighttime pollinators could impact the bird species that rely on them as a source for food. That’s a problem that is further compounded since many migrating birds are themselves affected by artificial light pollution at night, according to Murry Burgess, an assistant professor at Mississippi State University who specializes in ornithology and urban ecology. In recent decades, scientists have found that some migratory birds use the stars as a compass that helps orient their travel paths.

“So with light pollution, it’s really obscuring the stars and throwing them off course, making them expend more energy kind of circling around trying to find where they’re supposed to go,” said Burgess. “That’s when you start to see a lot of window collisions and increased mortality as well.”

The Mississippi River Basin, in particular, is a key flyway for approximately half of all North American bird species, which need to travel as far as South America and back each year. Those include song birds, waterfowl and even raptor species.

“It’s really important to preserve dark sky areas, the same way that you would have a wildlife refuge, like the sky is part of the environment, part of their habitat,” she said.

Like other environmental advocates, Burgess agrees that the harm from artificial lighting at night should be mitigated in a responsible way. She said that unlike the larger issues surrounding data center developments, such as land usage and environmental pollution, lighting could be less complicated to solve.

“With light pollution, it really can be as simple as just turning off the lights or changing the types of lights that you use,” Burgess said.

Regulations along the river?

Throughout the Mississippi River Basin, local communities are picking sides in the battle over data centers.

In January, elected officials for the city of Warrenton, Missouri, voted unanimously to approve a data center plan that would include two buildings — each of them four times larger than a Costco warehouse or Walmart supercenter — along Interstate 70. Yet, not all Missouri communities are eager to see these high-profile projects in their town and counties. Earlier this summer, the St. Charles County Council passed a six-month moratorium on large-scale data center development. On the other end of the state, voters in the city of Independence have recalled a number of city council members for approving a data center’s construction with tax breaks. 

With both approval and pushback for data centers growing across the state, legislators have tried to address key issues for their constituents. Like Rep. Colin Wellenkamp — a Republican for St. Charles County — who introduced House Bill 3362 in the previous legislative session. The bill sought to regulate data center electricity usage by making them pay for costs, as well as any necessary power grid upgrades. It also would have created a permit requirement for high water usage from the state Department of Natural Resources, which does not regulate data centers or even have a standard definition for such businesses. 

“The AI economy is growing in Missouri which is a good thing as long as Missouri communities are protected and empowered to lead the way,” said Wellenkamp in a late-June Facebook post.

Ultimately, none of the legislation aimed at regulating Missouri’s data center advanced, nor did they address environmental advocates’ concerns for light pollution and how it could affect local wildlife.

Gokhale, the Truman State professor, said he’s not in favor of data centers, but he’s not exactly opposed to them, either. He just has a lot of questions.

“At the most fundamental level, we need to define what these things are, what their purpose is,” Gokhale said.

Gokhale said a first step toward regulations would be to categorize data centers beyond the vagueness of artificial intelligence and cloud storage. To him, the need is urgent. More and more data centers will spring up around the country — and with them, an increased concern for limited land and water resources from local communities.

“This has to be done by the people, by council members, by politicians, and effectively enacted into some sort of policy,” he said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Deonte Shaw remembers the late October day he arrived at the Hinds County Detention Center in Raymond. He remembers working in the kitchen, spending time with his cell mate and the white sheet that separated their cell from the crowded jail pod. 

What Shaw doesn’t remember is the beating. 

On the night of Nov. 12, inmates attacked Shaw in his cell, according to hospital medical records Shaw provided Mississippi Today. Guards discovered Shaw the next morning, barely conscious and with bruises on his face. Hours passed before the infirmary sent Shaw to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and put on a ventilator.

His girlfriend, Ife Myles, didn’t know about the beating, and she wondered why he had stopped calling. She sought answers from the jail, but weeks went by before a friend told her in late December that Shaw had been severely injured.

On New Year’s Eve, after a week of frequent trips to Raymond, Myles got a call. “Bring a wheelchair,” a jailer told her. Shaw could go home. 

This summer, Shaw, 31, became the latest in dozens of people to sue Hinds County since 2015 when U.S. Justice Department officials declared conditions at the jail unconstitutional, including the failure to protect inmates from violence. His attorneys filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Jackson – five days after inmates in Raymond stomped to death an 18-year-old, whose killing and last breaths were caught on video and shared on social media.

Lawsuit alleges widespread jail violence

The lawsuit alleges that Shaw’s rights were violated by the county’s failure to run a jail free from widespread violence and is demanding the county pay damages, including Shaw’s medical expenses. 

The couple wants accountability. But so far, Hinds County and the sheriff’s department have ignored public records requests from Shaw’s attorney that might explain Shaw’s injuries, including security videos.

In court filings, Jessica Malone, an attorney hired by the county, denies Shaw was beaten, instead alleging that he “suffered a medical emergency, was found unresponsive, administered Narcan and then provided with medical treatment.” Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones won’t comment on litigation, and Wendell France, the Maryland-based court-appointed receiver currently overseeing the detention center, is barred by the federal court from making statements to the media.

Medical records reviewed by Mississippi Today mention that Shaw had ingested drugs – something Shaw denies – but describe his “mechanism of injury” as assault. According to the medical report, the only drug in Shaw’s system was benzodiazepine, which paramedics gave him before he was admitted to the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Myles, 35, cried when she recounted the moment she finally laid eyes on Shaw. Shaw cried, too.

“It’s not me, like how I used to be,” Shaw said. 

The couple met six years ago when Shaw worked as a cook at Waffle House. Shaw took Myles’ order – a cheesesteak melt and a bowl of grits, then asked for her phone number. He came over for her birthday, Myles said, “and he never left.” 

The alleged beating couldn’t break their bond. Myles took Shaw to physical therapy, bathed him and fed him. 

Now she’s helping Shaw prepare for the day he might have to testify in court. 

Traffic stop leads to jail

Shaw had just paid $1,000 for a used car when Capitol Police pulled him over on Oct. 24 on a traffic stop. Shaw knew he was going to jail. Months earlier, a Hinds County Circuit Court judge had issued a bench warrant after he skipped drug court. 

At Raymond, Shaw called Myles as often as he could. Myles tried to cheer him up by showing off her new red hair. That conversation was on the afternoon of Nov. 12, hours before Shaw says he was beaten.

Then Shaw went silent.

By Thanksgiving, Myles was concerned. She called an official with the Hinds County drug court who told her that Shaw might be at the state mental hospital, where a judge had ordered him to undergo rehab. But the hospital told Myles that Shaw wasn’t there. 

“I got depressed,” Myles said. “I was like, did he run away?” 

On Dec. 20, Myles heard from her legal husband, who she had separated from years earlier. He was also in jail. He knew Shaw, and the two men had chosen to be cell mates for safety reasons. Her estranged husband told her he saw Shaw being beaten. 

The next day, a friend whose boyfriend was also in jail gave her similar news. 

Using a friend’s phone, Myles began recording herself calling the jail. On recordings shared with Mississippi Today, voices from both sides of the conversation were audible.

On one phone call, Myles spoke to a man who introduced himself as a jail supervisor. Myles explained that she hadn’t heard from Shaw in over a month and was considering reporting him missing after learning he had been “severely beaten.”

“OK, I don’t know who told you all that,” the supervisor said on the recording. “Shaw is good.” 

But when Myles asked which zone Shaw was in, the supervisor responded that he couldn’t say. “That’s violating the HIPAA,” he said, referring to the federal law meant to protect sensitive health information. 

“Jail is public record!” Myles yelled into the phone. 

After days of driving to Raymond, Myles finally got confirmation of what she’d suspected. On Dec. 29, a jail captain told her Shaw was in the infirmary. But she was not allowed to see him.

On New Year’s Eve, a Hinds County judge signed Shaw’s release. Later that day, Myles received the call that she could get Shaw from jail.

She brought a wheelchair as instructed. She borrowed it from a neighbor. She wasn’t told why she’d need one.

As she was driving, Myles’ phone rang. A man identified himself as the jail administrator and told Myles that a “doctor report” showed Shaw had taken drugs, passed out, hit his head and had a stroke in the hospital, according to another recording reviewed by Mississippi Today. 

Myles said she knew it was a lie. The caller invited her to speak with an investigator.

Inside the waiting room, Myles’ heart raced. Then the door opened. 

“The first thing I saw was his feet,” she said. “He didn’t have his shoes on.” 

Shaw was slumped in a wheelchair, she recalled. He was drooling, his left arm curled on his chest. His hair was overgrown, and he smelled. 

Myles fell to her knees. Shaw opened his eyes. “He started to kiss my forehead,” Myles said. “And I said, ‘He knows it’s me.’” 

Regaining independence

Myles keeps videos and images in a folder she refers to as life after disaster. 

Unsettled by the jail’s assertion that Shaw wasn’t beaten, Myles knew she needed to document everything.

She has pictures of Shaw at rehab as he learned to walk again. She has videos of Shaw bedridden, struggling to eat and thrashing his skinny legs – signs, Myles said, that he was trying to get stronger. She has recordings of him using muffled, angry and urgent sounds while trying to communicate with her and his children.

“Leave me alone,” Shaw says in one video, slurring his words. 

By February, he had regained some independence. One day, Myles said he rolled out of bed, stood up and began to walk on his own. Soon, he was staying up all night listening to music, sounding out the words to his favorite songs from Memphis rappers like BEO Lil Kenny. 

Now the next grueling step: seeking justice.

Through connections she’d made years ago at a legal clinic, Myles found Shaw a pair of attorneys – Jad Khalaf and his law partner, Ammie Nguyen. 

Khalaf said he’s read reports from a federal monitor – dating back 10 years –  detailing conditions at the Hinds County jail and was struck by the sluggish progress in securing the safety of inmates. 

“All the while, more people are dying or being severely beaten,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.” 

Khalaf said he’s seen Shaw make a remarkable recovery since their first meeting earlier this year. 

“He didn’t say much,” Khalaf said. “He barely could walk.”

Because he has trouble speaking, Shaw is still a man of few words. He still has seizures. His kids still ask, “What’s wrong with Daddy?” 

Shaw worries he’ll never fully recover.

“I still can’t run,” he said, but then added he won’t stop trying.

The Trump administration wants to slash federal regulations for Head Start, an anti-poverty program that has long been considered a gold standard in early childhood education. Advocates say it could drastically impact about 18,000 children served by the program in Mississippi, while researchers say that Mississippi’s state-funded, high-quality early education programs protect some Head Start centers from the changes.

Among the biggest proposed changes are removing the regulatory requirements that govern class ratios, which means class sizes could double in Mississippi, and eliminating wraparound health services, such as medical and dental screenings, for children in poverty. Trump administration officials said the changes would cut red tape and serve more students while minimizing bureaucracy for Head Start providers across the country. 

Critics say the changes would undermine the mission of Head Start, which has historically served the nation’s most vulnerable children. They also say it’s not clear that the administration would reinvest into the program the $2.2 billion it estimates saving from the proposed changes. 

The federal proposals aren’t yet final. The public can leave comments about the changes until Oct. 6. Hundreds have already weighed in, and the Trump administration must review the feedback before finalizing the changes. 

It’s hard to say how the overhaul could take shape in Mississippi, one of the nation’s poorest states. Nearly a quarter of 4-year-olds are enrolled in the program, according to an analysis by Mississippi First, an education policy organization that advocates for expanding charter school options and pre-kindergarten programs. 

Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District has one of the nation’s highest numbers of funded Head Start slots, third only to districts covering Chicago and New York City. Democratic U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson, who represents that district, said the program needs strengthening, not weakening. 

“Head Start was created to give children from low-income families a fair shot at success. If we lower standards for things like teacher-to-student ratios, we risk giving children who already face the greatest challenges fewer resources and less support,” Thompson said in an email to Mississippi Today. 

Nita Norphlet-Thompson, executive director of the Mississippi Head Start Association, asks herself one guiding question about regulations: Are they good for children? 

The proposed regulations don’t pass her test, she said, especially when it comes to increasing the number of children teachers must be responsible for. 

“I don’t see how that’s going to improve outcomes and how that’s going to be good for children and families,” Norphlet-Thompson said. 

Bigger classes, less attention

Eloise McClinton, chair of the National Head Start Association board of directors, works in Holly Springs and oversees 21 childcare centers in 14 counties across north Mississippi. It’s already difficult to hire new teachers, she said, but if more students are put into classrooms, “everybody will be quitting.” 

It will be impossible to uphold the same standards under those conditions, she said. 

“If you take all of these things away from Head Start, then Head Start will not be Head Start as it was intended to be,” McClinton said. “It will affect the whole state of Mississippi.”

The proposed regulations default to state childcare standards for teacher-student ratios. In Mississippi, that would mean one Head Start caregiver would be responsible for nine toddlers instead of four. 

The Trump administration says the lower ratios can help Head Starts serve more students. But Micayla Tatum, a Mississippi First researcher who studies early education policy, said it would reduce education quality and safety.

Tatum worries that getting less individualized attention from teachers would hurt children’s development. 

“Those interactions are really important at that age,” she said. “The more interactions you have, it helps you develop speech.”

Head Start programs will also no longer be required to conduct certain screenings, such as ensuring a family has ongoing medical care or insurance, that children are vaccinated and that they’ve seen a pediatrician and dentist. These services are essential components of the Head Start program to Biz Harris, executive director of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance, which focuses on strengthening the state’s early childhood ecosystem.

With the proposed changes, centers could keep previous Head Start standards, said Alex Adams, assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “We trust these local programs to make good decisions.”

In theory, that might be true, said Elizabeth Pufall Jones, the director of preparation and work environment programs at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley. But it remains to be seen if centers will receive federal funding to provide more than the bare minimum once the higher standards are written out of the regulations, she said. 

Tatum shares Pufall Jones’ concerns. She said she believes there’s a good chance local grantees will follow the regulation shifts, especially if it leads to less paperwork. 

Head Start has long been an outlier within the climate of what many have called a childcare crisis. Childcare in the U.S. is unaffordable, according to standards from Health and Human Services, and is often subpar and sometimes dangerous. The Head Start program’s rules are stricter than those governing other childcare options, because the program was designed to give disadvantaged children “a head start in life,” Pufall Jones explained. 

More than 60 years after Head Start’s inception, that could all change. 

Expanding state early learning programs

Mississippi can push back against the proposed changes, researchers say. 

Mississippi’s state-funded early learning programs are highly rated by the National Institute for Early Education Research. One example is Mississippi’s early learning collaboratives, which create education partnerships between K-12 public schools, childcare centers and Head Start centers. The collaboratives, or ELCs, enroll 20% of the state’s 4-year-olds. 

Head Start centers that partner with the collaboratives will be insulated from the federal changes because they have to follow the state program’s rigorous standards. 

“Our state is very wedded to the thought of high quality pre-K programs,” Tatum said. “A good way to counter this deregulation happening at the federal level is to get more Head Starts into ELCs.”

Amid potentially wide-ranging changes, now may be the perfect time to expand those programs, said Steven Barnett, who leads NIEER. But that requires political will and resources. 

“I think the state has been moving in that direction, but you can’t just wave a magic wand and invent the teachers and the classrooms you need,” Barnett said. “Mississippi has been moving fast. Whether they can move faster, I don’t know.” 

Barnett said state leaders should consider how to supplement the ELC program and encourage Head Starts to join with the collaboratives.

Mississippi First, Tatum’s organization, found 14 school districts interested in joining the collaboratives this year — but there wasn’t state funding to expand the program. 

House Education Vice Chairman Kent McCarty, a Republican from Hattiesburg, has long advocated for increased funding for ELCs. He plans to once again introduce a bill to boost funding next session.

“This is obviously a huge priority for me,” he said. “I’ve been pushing for the last few years for universal availability to every student. These changes establish an even greater need for that.”

A ripple effect

Childcare centers, schools and Head Start agencies comprise Mississippi’s early learning ecosystem. 

“There is always going to be a ripple effect because our systems are running parallel to each other,” she said. “Whatever happens with Head Start will ripple in some way through ELCs, childcare centers and our early childhood system as a whole.”

For example, she said, if Head Starts are able to serve more families, childcare centers could lose students and money.

Under the proposed regulations, Head Start programs can also have shorter days. That could make it difficult for working parents to find additional childcare, Harris of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance said. 

“If you only have to pay for three hours of childcare instead of five, think about the cost savings there,” Harris said. “It’s potentially the difference between keeping you in the workforce or not.”

Already, more than 6,000 Mississippi families remain on a waitlist for childcare vouchers, or coupons that make childcare more affordable. If families can’t get the childcare they need at Head Start centers, that waitlist might grow.

Harris said Mississippi needs Head Start. The program addresses children’s health and kindergarten readiness. It enables their parents to go to work. 

“I’m not sure we can overstate the ways this program is supporting some of our children most at risk of not thriving,” she said. 

At best, Harris said, the new regulations won’t tank the program, but they will drain an already burdened system.

McClinton in north Mississippi fears the worst-case scenario.

“Just because you have written it on paper that you’re gonna have that billions of dollars in savings and get to serve more children doesn’t mean that it will actually come back into the program.”