Last year's anti-tobacco posters cost $3,000 to print. Mississippi paid $255,000 to hang them up.

Former Sen. Terry Burton was behind an earmark that has directed $1.8M to SkoolAds.

SkoolAds has paid lobbyist Beth Clay $362,302 since 2011.

With the help of a powerful lawmaker and lobbyists, more than $2.3 million of Mississippi taxpayer money has been funneled to a Memphis company since 2012 to hang posters in schools.

In Mississippi, posters that cost $3 to print are hung by a company that charges more than $250 apiece.

Why?

Apparently Mississippi schools cannot be trusted to properly hang posters that advocate safe driving and not using tobacco.

That's the basic premise behind SkoolAds.

The Mississippi Legislature has ordered agencies to spend money on SkoolAds, allowing the company to sidestep competition and avoid oversight, even though one state agency said the SkoolAds program had no value and was unnecessary.

A ongoing investigation by the Clarion Ledger has revealed that SkoolAds and other companies can short-circuit competition in Mississippi and get direct access to millions of dollars of taxpayer money. It involves hiring a lobbyist, making campaign donations and nabbing an earmark from the right lawmaker.

For the 2018-2019 school year, the state of Mississippi paid about $3,000 to create and print anti-tobacco posters, then paid SkoolAds $255,000 to hang those posters in fewer than a tenth of the state's public schools.

SkoolAds and its lobbyists argue that driving school to school and personally placing posters in black frames above drinking fountains and on cafeteria walls ensures students are seeing posters.

SkoolAds has working relationships with schools across the state, making it the only company currently capable of handling this job, they say, and competitive bidding would only reaffirm that.

"We've been doing an awesome job for years and providing indisputable results," SkoolAds owner Lori Swaney said via text. "Nothing else even comes close to utilizing SkoolAds."

The Clarion Ledger looked into the company as part of an ongoing investigation into how Mississippi lawmakers have quietly funnel millions of dollars to favored projects and vendors.

Here's what our investigation has found so far:

'This was really unnecessary'

Two state agencies — health and transportation — have questioned the effectiveness of SkoolAds.

A spokesman for the Department of Transportation said the agency never wanted to spend money on SkoolAds, but was directed to do so by the Legislature.

As roads and bridges crumbled, MDOT spent $300,000 over three years for SkoolAds to hang posters about driver safety, including the dangers of texting while driving.

“We didn’t think it had any real value whatsoever,” said MDOT spokesman Chris Turner. “…We want to fix roads. This took our money. This was really unnecessary.”

SkoolAds conducts its own surveys, which contend 100 percent of students see the anti-tobacco posters. However, an internal email shows the former director of the state's Office of Tobacco Control doubted the posters' effectiveness as early as 2015.

When asked if the Department of Health ever requested the SkoolAds program, agency spokeswoman Liz Sharlot said no.

Swaney would not speak to the Clarion Ledger on the phone about her company, but she insisted SkoolAds is a worthwhile use of Mississippi's money.

"The fact that you would even ask me why 'we don’t just mail the posters' shows me you have not listened to one thing we have said about our service," Swaney wrote in an email. "We have a legitimate advertising company. We are unique in that our ad space is inside schools. We have worked and continue to work with numerous state agencies."

How did this deal get done?

The SkoolAds anti-tobacco advertising was funded after SkoolAds hired lobbyist Beth Clay and found an influential supporter in powerful Sen. Terry Burton, R-Newton.

Swaney's initial sales pitch to the Department of Health was not successful. She reached out to the agency as early as December 2011, when she emailed a Health Department official thanking him for meeting with her.

The following year, Swaney sent a letter outlining several proposals for hanging anti-tobacco posters in schools, but the department did not pick any of them.

It wasn't until 2013 that a work-around was found.

Lawmakers wrote SkoolAds into the Health Department appropriation bill for $300,000, ordering the program to be funded.

The money came as part of the state's 1997 settlement with tobacco companies.

Clay emailed the Health Department director in September 2013, inquiring about a hold-up with the money for SkoolAds and reminding her that Burton and Rep. John Moore, R-Brandon, wanted SkoolAds funded.

Moore was the House Education chairman, and the earmark initially required a transfer of money from the Department of Education.

However, Burton — not Moore — was the driving force behind the SkoolAds earmark, according to Hope Ladner, who works at Clay's lobbying firm.

“Ironically, Sen. Burton was a smoker, and he was one of our biggest advocates about this," Ladner said, "because he truly believed that targeting youth was the best way to spend tobacco cessation, tobacco prevention money.”

Since 2011, SkoolAds paid Clay $362,302 for lobbying, according to state disclosure forms.

“We don’t take clients we don’t believe in," Clay said. "And that’s the gospel truth.”

Between 2013 and 2014, SkoolAds donated $1,000 to Burton and $2,000 to Moore.

Moore resigned from the House in December 2017 after facing sexual harassment complaints from multiple women. He did not respond to multiple calls and texts and a letter seeking comment.

Burton resigned from his leadership post at the beginning of this year's legislative session after his third DUI arrest. Burton is currently recovering from a stroke and said he would not be able to comment for this story. He is not running for reelection.

Department of Transportation pushes back

In the war against “wasteful” government spending, legislative leaders have rarely questioned their own tendencies of ordering agencies to spend taxpayer money on programs that agency officials view with skepticism.

For the Mississippi Department of Transportation, annual directives to enter into a $100,000 partnership with SkoolAds were at odds with the agency’s priorities — repairing roads and bridges.

"We could have done this better, but we had no say in it," said Turner, the transportation spokesman. "As always, we’re going to follow the law.”

What started as a mission to promote a campaign against texting and driving resulted in mounting frustrations at a forced partnership that in the agency's view: "didn't have any real value."

Turner said MDOT asked SkoolAds to consider expanding its business model to provide note pads, pencils or other school supplies with messages warning about the dangers of distracted driving.

The company turned them down.

“We came up with various ideas," Turner said. "They were nixed. We were told, ‘No. No. No. This is all we do.'”

As with the Health Department, SkoolAds was not responsible for production costs.

In 2016, for example, MDOT spent $1,700 on making the posters, having a communications employee design the displays.

With an annual budget of roughly a billion dollars, lawmakers might have viewed directing MDOT to spend $100,000 with the advertising company as a nibble out of the agency’s total appropriation.

But as Mississippi continues to grapple with dilapidated infrastructure, Turner says the agency believes spending mandates that take away from roads are “detrimental to the people of Mississippi.”

Ladner said the response from the Department of Transportation did not surprise her because the agency "does not have a communications drive behind it," particularly when it comes to messaging aimed at youth.

"Does that mean that the messages weren’t effective or that they didn’t reach their targets, which is what the Legislature wanted? No," Ladner said.

The Transportation Department successfully pushed to remove the SkoolAds earmark for the 2019 budget year, but legislators are still funding the anti-tobacco poster program.

Story continues below photo gallery.

Do the posters work?

Ladner said the decreasing number of Mississippi high school students who smoke cigarettes is proof that SkoolAds is working.

According to Mississippi Tobacco Data, the number of high school students smoking cigarettes went from more than 18 percent in 2012 to under 7 percent last year.

That mirrors federal data, which show teens across the country are increasingly rejecting cigarettes.

Ladner said she believes SkoolAds is partly responsible for the drop in Mississippi.

Surveys conducted by SkoolAds routinely show that 100 percent of students report seeing its anti-tobacco posters.

However, Health Department officials have questioned whether SkoolAds is an evidence-based program.

Amy Winter, the director of the Health Department's Office of Tobacco Control, said those surveys use a "convenience sample," meaning a group of people that are easily reached. Winter called the surveys "not scientific or very meaningful."

During the 2014-2015 school year, the state Health Department commissioned a study of teen focus groups to see whether SkoolAds and the anti-tobacco posters were effective.

According to the focus groups, most students were unable to recall the SkoolAds posters without some prompting.

Still, the study recommended continued use of SkoolAds because some students could recognize the posters and recall their messages. The study did not consider the cost of SkoolAds.

The Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, or PEER, looked into the program in 2015, and an email shows that lawmakers were supposed to be briefed on SkoolAds at a July 2015 meeting.

However, PEER's executive director James Barber said a formal report was never completed and that he could not comment further on the inquiry. It's unclear if the briefing ever took place.

Does the deal make sense?

SkoolAds currently hangs anti-tobacco posters in 62 Mississippi schools. Almost all the schools get four posters. A few get five.

The Department of Health paid about $3,000 to create and print the posters for the most recent fiscal year, said Sharlot, the agency spokeswoman, though some years the federal government has provided posters for free.

SkoolAds changes those posters four times a year, meaning it put up 1,012 posters in the most recent school year.

While Lori Swaney did not speak to the Clarion Ledger via phone despite numerous voicemails, texts and emails, she did direct a reporter to speak with her husband, Randall Swaney.

“There’s hundreds and hundreds of miles to go between the schools," Randall Swaney said. “...There’s a lot to it. It’s not just hanging up a poster.”

Randall Swaney acknowledged that Mississippi Department of Health could mail the posters to schools — "I'm sure they could. I mean, I bet they could," — but he compared that approach to nailing a sign to a tree stump and calling it a billboard.

A review of the U.S. Postal Service website shows that mailing freely provided cardboard tubes four times a year to 62 schools would cost less than $2,000.

Ladner, with the Clay Firm, said that approach would not be nearly as effective as what SkoolAds does.

“I don’t think (SkoolAds has) ever had a survey where 100 percent of the target did not respond that they had seen the advertisement. You cannot get that from mailing a poster to a school," Ladner said. "You can’t. I mean, they’re not gonna put it up. If it goes up, it’s gonna get torn down. You have no reliability that message is going to be seen.”

The Clarion Ledger reviewed the locations of the schools in the SkoolAds program. According to the route map optimization tool RouteXL, it should take just over 32 hours to drive the nearly 1,500 miles if the driver started and ended in Memphis.

If someone were to drive a car that averages 19 miles per gallon, spend $25 on breakfast, lunch, and dinner, sleep four nights in a hotel at $100 a night, while being paid double the minimum wage for a 40-hour week, they could complete trip at a total cost of about $1,615.

Completing that trip four times a year would cost about $6,460 in gas, wages, food and hotel costs, which is about 40 times cheaper than what Mississippi paid SkoolAds for the last school year: $255,000.

Randall Swaney acknowledged that another company could do what SkoolAds does.

"I would think that's certainly a possibility," he said. "That's the nice thing about free enterprise. People can do whatever they want to do."

Lawmakers earmarked another $255,000 for SkoolAds to hang anti-tobacco posters this upcoming school year.

Senator wants to end SkoolAds earmark

Sen. Angela Burks Hill, R-Picayune, was one of the conferees on the 2013 bill that originally gave SkoolAds its anti-tobacco earmark, but did not sign the report.

Hill said she had never been approached about SkoolAds before being contacted by the Clarion Ledger.

According to Hill, she never heard any complaint from the Health Department and assumed it was a useful program in line with other anti-tobacco programs.

After the Clarion Ledger detailed some of its findings about the earmark, Hill said there needs to be more scrutiny of SkoolAds — as well as of vendors and agencies in general.

“Yeah, it’s frustrating to me. It is. it absolutely is," Hill said. "There’s similar things going on in probably every budget.”

If she's reelected this fall, Hill said she wants to make SkoolAds compete for the anti-tobacco advertising money.

“Nobody has ever brought it to my attention before,” Hill said. "... Don’t look for me to sign the appropriation with that earmark in it now that we’ve discovered what the scope of their work is."

Hill added: “At least it’s coming to light now.”

State Auditor Shad White said the Legislature has the authority to appropriate money to SkoolAds, but the Clarion Ledger's reporting raises questions.

"Is this a good way of doing business with these special appropriations," White said, "and, more specifically, is SkoolAds an appropriate recipient of taxpayer money?"

White said that with few exceptions vendors should have to engage in competitive bids to get money from the state.

"If we can raise questions and make better decisions about where the money is going, then I'm all for it," White said.

Concerned about how lawmakers are spending your tax dollars? Contact Giacomo "Jack" Bologna at 601-961-7282 or gbologna@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @gbolognaCL.