Bills to raise teacher salaries, require all political candidates to file campaign finance documents online and allow terminally ill patients to use medical cannabis in hospitals died in the Mississippi Legislature after Tuesday’s deadline.
Tuesday was the last day for committees to pass legislation that originated in the opposite chamber, so House committees had to approve Senate bills to keep them from dying and vice versa. The House and Senate collectively killed almost 300 bills on Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, it’s just part of the process. … They have their ideas, and we have our ideas,” House Education Committee Chairman Rep. Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, told reporters on Wednesday. “You end up with situations where you can’t agree. But I’ve learned a long time ago, that until we leave there’s always possibilities that you can try to do and give another opportunity here or there.”
House and Senate Teacher Pay Raise Bills Are Dead
The House’s and the Senate’s respective teacher pay raise bills died on deadline day. Rep. Rob Roberson said he has not yet lost hope on passing a teacher pay raise this year.
“Until we leave, I’m not going to give up hope,” he told reporters Wednesday. “I think there’s a possibility that we can get there and I’m just going to keep working.”
Senate Education Committee Vice Chairman Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, shared similar hopes.
“I think there’s probably some posturing back and forth at the highest levels,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Wednesday, “but in terms of goals, I know that both the House and Senate want to do that and as long as we’re here, I’m still hopeful that we can get it done.”
The House passed a $5,000 teacher pay raise and an $8,000 raise for licensed special-education educators teaching special-education classes. The Senate killed House Bill 1126 by not bringing it up for a vote before Tuesday’s deadline.
The Senate passed a $2,000 teacher pay raise earlier in the session. Roberson said the House Education Committee killed the bill because the teachers deserved a more robust raise than what the Senate was offering.
“In the long run, I think both chambers agree that we need a pay increase. But you can argue opinions, but you can’t argue facts,” Roberson said. “The fact is, the House position was a $5,000 across-the-board teacher increase, a $3,000 additional increase for special ed teachers. To me, that position is the position we need to be in because those teachers deserve this pay increase.”
Most Education Bills Died on March 3 Deadline
Most bills regarding K-12 education died on Tuesday as the House and Senate continue to battle over policies. On Feb. 3, the Senate killed House Bill 2, which featured a dozen education policies including school vouchers for private schools, and caused a domino effect in the Legislature.
After that, Rep. Rob Roberson held his committee’s last meeting on Feb. 18, where members passed only two Senate bills: Senate Bill 2294 (requiring computer science or technical education classes) and Senate Bill 2103 (exchanging federal ethics requirements for school counselors with state policies).
The only other education bill that survived Tuesday’s deadline is a House provision to give charter schools first priority to purchase closed or unused buildings that public school districts decide to sell or lease. Sen. David Blount said Senate Education Committee Chairman Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, made the decision of which bills the committee would discuss.
“Those decisions are made on the chair level,” Blount told the Mississippi Free Press on Wednesday. “I know that the Senate has passed a lot of good bills this session regarding a teacher pay raise, regarding improved literacy and math efforts and helping teachers come back to work. And so, we passed a lot of good bills and I’m hopeful that we can still get a lot of that done before the session ends.”
The Mississippi Free Press attempted to interview DeBar on Wednesday morning, but he waved this reporter away and said he was not “talking right now.”
Roberson said he did not necessarily know that the Senate was going to kill most of the House’s education bills.
“Now, for argument’s sake, they may have not known that we were going to kill all their bills,” he said. “The logic is, I guess from their standpoint, is that their bills got killed and they didn’t see a reason to bring our bills out.”
A bill making it easier for students to transfer from one public school district to another by removing veto authority from the sending school also died in the House Education Committee. Both the House and Senate Education Committees each killed legislation to bring retirees to teach in classrooms.
Mississippi public schools would have had to set aside time for students to pray and read religious texts under the Mississippi Open to Religion Act, but the Senate Education Committee killed House Bill 1310.
Mandatory Online Campaign Finance Filing
Mississippi could have required all candidates, candidate committees and political committees in the state to file campaign finance reports online, but the House Elections Committee killed the Senate’s bill by laying it on the table subject to call at its final meeting on Feb. 26 after members could not come to an agreement over the legislation.
Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, bluntly said that she has been filing her campaign finance documents on paper for 19 years and she refused to upload them online.
“I have filed on paper for 19 years and I don’t want to do (it) online. I just don’t,” she said at a Feb. 26 House Elections Committee meeting. “And I’m not going to vote for something I’m not going to do.”
Rep. Shanda Yates, I-Jackson, argued that, in 2026, the internet is not new and candidates should know how to use it.
“If you’re a candidate running for office, you need to learn how to use the damn internet!” Yates exclaimed.
A committee member could have revived the bill at the committee’s next meeting, but Chairman Noah Sanford, R-Collins, decided not to have another meeting ahead of the deadline.
Allowing Terminally Ill Patients to Use Medical Cannabis in Hospitals
The bill allowing terminally ill medical cannabis patients to use their nonsmokable plant medicine in hospitals, nursing homes and hospice facilities—provided it is caregiver-supplied and properly stored—died in the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee after a lengthy debate. House Bill 1034 also said health care facilities would not be able to deny a patient’s admission because the person uses medical cannabis.
The bill said terminally ill patients at hospitals, nursing homes and hospice facilities would not be able to smoke or vape cannabis, but they could use edibles, concentrates and topicals. Patients would have medical cannabis use in their medical records and provide a copy of their valid patient medical-cannabis identification card to hospital staff under the legislation.
The bill would have required the caregiver to store the cannabis at their residence or have it locked up in the patient’s room. After the patient is discharged, the caregiver must remove all medical cannabis from the patient’s room. If the caregiver cannot remove it, the hospital must follow legal guidelines to dispose of it.
Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, called the legislation “a recipe for trouble” during a Feb. 25 committee meeting.
“I think it presents a recipe for trouble for the doctor in the hospital that’s trying to treat these patients,” she said. “I think they would be better served by allowing someone that wants to use cannabis to find a facility that is compatible with allowing them to use it, rather than forcing a facility or hospital to say, ‘You have to do it.’”
After the Feb. 25 meeting, Mississippi Medical Marijuana Association Executive Director Henry Crisler told the Mississippi Free Press that he was disappointed with the committee’s vote on the bill, noting that some of the members may have been confused over what H.B. 1034 actually did.
“I think the risk to a hospital would be extremely minimal,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 25. “I was surprised that the vote ended up the way it did, but yeah, I thought it was a pretty uncontroversial bill. I think it passed out of the House almost unanimously.”
The committee laid H.B. 1034 on the table subject to call during its Feb. 25 meeting. Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, attempted to revive the legislation during the committee’s next meeting on March 3, but the effort failed, with six members voting for it and seven voting against it.
Mandating State Agencies Livestream All Meetings
Mississippi’s state agencies and public bodies would have had to livestream “all official meetings” under a bill the Mississippi Senate passed on Feb. 11. House Accountability, Efficiency and Transparency Committee Chairman Rep. Kevin Ford, R-Vicksburg, said he decided not to bring up the bill for a vote in his committee because he did not know of any agency that was not already livestreaming its meetings. He added that he did not know whether a State law would be needed or if state leadership could tell agencies to livestream meetings without an accompanying law.
“They definitely have the budget to do it. I mean, that wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that having been put in front of me,” Ford told the Mississippi Free Press on March 3.
The legislation did not require the Legislature, municipalities, counties or the judiciary and courts system to livestream meetings. Still, Ford said he let the bill die after hearing concerns from leadership in the 50-person village of Satartia, who expressed that it would be challenging and expensive to start livestreaming meetings without any monetary support from the State.