• Mississippi House members revived a teacher pay raise bill after previous versions died in the legislature.
• The new proposal includes a $5,000 salary increase for public school teachers and additional raises for other school staff.
• House Speaker Jason White criticized the Senate for inaction on previous education bills.

Days after legislators in the House and Senate killed more than a dozen teacher pay raise bills, members of the House education committee reanimated the conversation.

Committee chair Rep. Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, proposed a bill on March 6 that would bump public school teacher salaries by $5,000 across the board, with an additional $3,000 supplement for special education teachers. The legislation also includes a $6,000 boost for occupational therapists and licensed school counselors, Roberson explained to the House.

The nearly 500-page education package would also reform the role of school attendance officers, said Speaker Jason White in a Friday news conference, focusing their role more on coaching than punishment. Attendance officers would receive a $5,600 pay increase.

Retired teachers would also be allowed to go back to work while still receiving their full benefits from the state Public Employees’ Retirement System. They would negotiate their salary with the district, White said, and would not be eligible to accrue more retirement benefits.

The state would earmark $18 million for the education department to allocate for failing districts, White explained after discussions in the House, based on demonstrated improvements.

“The issue is not always a lack of money, sometimes it’s a lack of pointed emphasis on teacher improvement, stability there and retaining teachers,” he said. “Maybe the answer is a supplement to help schools retain their best and brightest. Maybe it’s a way to recruit teachers to those areas.”

White’s vision for Mississippi schools: Why MS House Speaker says education reform will pass this session

Roberson, alongside his colleagues on the education committee, deleted all of the text in one of the last Senate education bills to come through the House and replaced it with the teacher pay raise and PERS provisions.

The bill also fixes mistakes in the PERS provisions, Roberson said, lowering the state employee retirement age from 62 to 60 and reducing the requirement back to 30 years of service. The service requirement for certified full-time first responders, White said, would be reduced to 25 years.

“If this all sounds familiar to you, it’s because y’all have voted on this at least twice and sent it to the Senate,” Roberson told the House Friday morning. “Unfortunately, this place has a tendency to create issues for us in terms of getting good work done. I’m not putting the blame on the Senate, not putting the blame on the House, but it’s about time we got the good work done.”

Roberson said he didn’t blame the Senate, but White was more than happy to criticize the other chamber. He boasted that the House was in session working Friday morning while the Senate took a long weekend, sending its members home on Thursday afternoon.

As White touted the strength of the House and its latest piece of legislation, he took shots at Senate leaders, including education committee chair Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. He said that Hosemann wasn’t aligned with Mississippi’s Republican Party, telling attendees at his news conference that Hosemann sent “love letters” to people like Nancy Loome, one of the most outspoken advocates against school choice who has also campaigned against Republicans in local elections.

The death of school choice: MS Senate committee kills House school choice package in just 90 seconds

White derided members of the Senate for killing the House’s initial teacher pay raise bill, but the House did also kill a teacher pay raise bill that originated in the Senate and proposed a $2,000 increase for teachers, assistant teachers and college professors. When asked why the House had chosen to kill the bill instead of passing it through or amending it, White said the raise just wasn’t enough.

“This is not a hollow promise, and it’s not a political play,” White said. “The Senate education committee once again killed an education bill without so much as any deliberation. Your House is here. We beg our Senate colleagues to engage.”

Some Democrats in the House, wary of legislation coming out of the education committee after White’s universal school choice bill, questioned Roberson’s intentions with the bill and whether it included any of the contentious language that the chamber has argued over since the start of the session.

“I can’t think of one thing in this bill that you and I would not agree on,” Roberson told Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus. When all of the questions had been answered, Roberson closed his presentation simply. “Vote for this,” he urged his colleagues.

They obliged, voting unanimously in favor of the bill and opening the door one final time for a teacher pay raise this session.

Ole Miss shouldn’t have starting quarterback Trinidad Chambliss on its roster this fall, the NCAA asserts in an appeal filed with the Supreme Court of Mississippi on Thursday. 

In a petition authored by J. Douglas Minor, Jr. and other attorneys from Holland & Knight, the NCAA warns that unless the state Supreme Court intervenes, there could be a “flood of litigation” involving college athletes whose schools are denied medical waivers to let them keep playing. The NCAA also says the appeal needs to be adjudicated prior to April 23 so that Chambliss—if the NCAA can enforce its eligibility rules to render him ineligible—would “have the opportunity to participate in the upcoming NFL draft.”

The appeal faces hurdles. For starters, it is an interlocutory appeal, meaning an appeal before a final judgment in a case and one where the appellate court can decline. Interlocutory appeals are disfavored because appellate courts prefer to review cases only after a final judgment on the merits—i.e., after a trial verdict—because the record is complete by that point. An interlocutory appeal concerns only a preliminary or incomplete matter. Interlocutory appeals are ordinarily denied unless the petitioner can persuasively explain that an injustice would otherwise occur.

Last month Judge Robert Whitwell of the Lafayette County (Miss.) Chancery Court granted Chambliss—who will enter his sixth year of college this fall—a preliminary injunction to bar the NCAA from rendering Chambliss ineligible in the coming season. The NCAA limits eligibility to four seasons of intercollegiate competition, including junior college and Division II competition, within a five-year period. Chambliss exhausted his NCAA eligibility in 2025–26.

The center of the dispute concerns the 2022 season, when Chambliss, now 23, was on the roster of D-II Ferris State but didn’t accumulate passing or rushing statistics. 

During that season, Chambliss suffered from post-COVID complications including chronic tonsillitis and adenoiditis. The NCAA maintains that a waiver application filed by Ole Miss on Chambliss’ behalf failed to include sufficient medical documentation establishing that Chambliss couldn’t play in 2022. The association insists it consistently applies a standard for waivers that requires contemporaneous medical records from health care professionals unambiguously establishing an athlete can’t play due to health reasons.

The NCAA says Ole Miss came up short on that front. 

As the NCAA tells it, although the Ole Miss application “was voluminous,” it offered only limited contemporaneous medical documents. The NCAA says that the treatment notes of one doctor recommended that Chambliss not have surgery and that medication, including Flonase, “was prescribed to enable [Chambliss] to participate in football.” That narrative suggests that Chambliss was healthy enough to play.

To be clear, Chambliss’ legal team contests this account and argues the medical documentation was sufficient to show he was unable to play in 2022. The appeal, as the NCAA acknowledges, also doesn’t call for a review of the findings of fact, which Whitwell found persuasive enough to grant the injunction.

In its petition to the state Supreme Court, the NCAA argues that Chambliss—who is represented by attorneys Tom Mars, William Liston III and W. Lawrence Deas—tried to “circumvent” case precedent in Mississippi. That precedent, the NCAA maintains, holds that judicial review of athletic association decisions is highly deferential to the association. Chambliss allegedly “circumvented” this precedent by insisting he is a third-party beneficiary of the contractual relationship between the NCAA and Ole Miss as a member institution.

A third-party beneficiary enjoys enforceable legal interest in the contract being performed, and Chambliss asserts the NCAA harmed him by how it reviewed the “total circumstances” of Ole Miss’ application. He used that theory to claim the NCAA breached the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, which collectively require parties to treat other contracting parties’ situations in a fair and honest way.

The NCAA maintains that the applicable standard of review under Mississippi law for review of an athletic association’s eligibility decision is arbitrary and capricious. This standard, which was established in the state Supreme Court case Mississippi High School Activities Association v. Hattiesburg High School (2015), is extremely favorable to the association. Per this precedent, an athletic association’s eligibility decision can be upheld even if it is unreasonable and arguably wrong so long as it is not arbitrary and capricious. As the NCAA tells it, Whitwell—a University of Mississippi School of Law graduate and an elected official—failed to apply the standard as it was intended.

Mindful that interlocutory appeals are disfavored since the record is incomplete, the NCAA insists that the Supreme Court ought to review the matter because of the case’s broader implications and the timing of the situation.

The NCAA explains that, as a membership organization, it has a contractual duty to “ensure a level playing field among” all competing schools. The NCAA suggests it must seek appeals to block courts from “intervening in NCAA eligibility decisions to provide special treatment to favored athletes.” If trial judges meddle with the NCAA’s administration of eligibility rules, the NCAA’s petition argues, that meddling poses an “existential threat to the NCAA’s administration of collegiate sports.”

To corroborate that point, the NCAA warns that unless Chambliss is deemed ineligible, there will be a “flood of litigation” involving athletes whose schools are denied medical waivers. The NCAA points out that UVA quarterback Chandler Morris recently sued the NCAA in Virginia in hopes of obtaining a seventh year of eligibility, and the basis of his case is the denial of a medical waiver.

The NCAA also advises the state Supreme Court that the risk of “spillover effect” has been borne out through the aftermath of former Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia’s eligibility litigation against the NCAA to play a sixth season of college football.

“Since Pavia,” the NCAA writes, “over 60 lawsuits by over 100 student-athletes have raised similar challenges.” This litigation, the NCAA maintains, has caused “uncertainty” as to NCAA eligibility.

The NCAA knows that if Whitwell’s injunction isn’t lifted, the case is effectively over: The injunction will let Chambliss play for Ole Miss in 2026 and then he’ll move on to the NFL or other pursuits. Whether Chambliss would prevail in a trial, which might not be scheduled until 2027 or beyond, could be rendered irrelevant if Chambliss decides to drop the case after the 2026 season.

Chambliss v. NCAA is a reminder of the unique features of the post-House settlement world. It now pays to stay in school, given that athletes can receive full athletic scholarships, NIL deals and direct payments from their schools through revenue shares. According to ESPN, Chambliss could earn about $6 million at Ole Miss if he plays there this fall.