Child food program director quits, reports problems to feds

The director of an $80 million food program for impoverished children has reported to federal regulators that kids in Tennessee are being placed at risk for hunger because of a lack of leadership at the Tennessee Department of Human Services.

Carmen Gentry was director of food programs for DHS until she gave notice of her resignation July 14 — two days after a Tennessean investigation revealed fraud, greed and lack of oversight of the programs that are, in some cases, the only source of nutritious food for children during summer months.

Within days of submitting notice, Gentry sent a four-page letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Services that outlines a series of concerns about the food program, including a severe shortage of staff, a lack of technology and the denials of Gentry’s repeated requests for more staff training.

“Although there is a very real risk of retaliatory action from DHS towards me, I felt that it was more important for me to bring these issues to light, as the ones who are ultimately suffering the most are the ones we are tasked to serve: the children who face food insecurity and hunger in Tennessee, but who are at risk of doing without because of the actions of the leadership of this state agency,” wrote Gentry.

In an interview with The Tennessean, Gentry said she had raised those concerns repeatedly in meetings with DHS Commissioner Raquel Hatter and Deputy Commissioner Petrina Jones-Jesz, but her requests were either ignored or denied. Food and Nutrition Services staff also offered training multiple times, but those offers were declined, Gentry said.

DHS spokeswoman Stephanie Jarnagin disputed Gentry's claims, saying there are "several inaccuracies and false information included from an outgoing employee. It is not uncommon for any organization that increases accountability, increases the focus on high performance and expects professional conduct to have employees that are not able to adapt to these requirements."

Jarnagin provided The Tennessean with a list of four training and three strategy sessions Gentry or her staff have attended since 2014. Gentry noted that only one of the four training sessions mentioned by DHS was actual training on the food programs DHS administers. That training she attended a few weeks after starting her job was a "refresher" training for experienced directors of food programs, which did not provide basic necessary training for new staff. The strategy sessions were not trainings, Gentry said; rather they were interdepartmental meetings.

Jarnagin noted that DHS has "enhanced the analytical capabilities of our current applications and created a digital map of summer feeding sites. DHS is exploring other options for modernizing its systems," she said. And Jarnagin said "the statement that the Commissioner dismissed or denied concerns is false." Gentry did not directly report to Hatter, she said.

But Gentry strongly disputes that statement, saying she had multiple one-on-one meetings with Hatter and Jones-Jesz in which she reiterated the need for training and a database to track thousands of documents.

Gentry said she expected DHS would criticize her for coming forward. "I am not surprised at all about their response," she said. "It's disappointing but expected."

Food and Nutrition Services acknowledged they have received Gentry's letter and it is under review.

Chief among Gentry’s concerns is the lack of technology for an $80 million program that subcontracts with hundreds of agencies to feed 180,000 children during the school year and 42,000 children during the summer. The program is almost entirely paper-based, with the exception of a computerized payment system. Gentry said she and staff would work late hours processing paper applications that are stored in filing cabinets that would have to be hand counted to report back to federal authorities.

“It is incomprehensible that in the 21st century that I have to manually count numbers to provide reports of our progress to FNS (Food and Nutrition Services at the Department of Agriculture),” Gentry wrote. “Nearly every aspect of our operation is conducted as if we are in the 1970s and not in 2015.”

“It truly baffles me,” Gentry told The Tennessean. “We’re doing the children of Tennessee a huge disservice. More than one in four are at risk for food insecurity. Our role was to address that. We can’t do that if we’re held up by problems that are easily fixed.”

Four of the program’s senior staff left or retired several months before Gentry came on board as summer food program coordinator in December 2013. She said it became immediately apparent that five staff members working directly on the food programs were inadequate to oversee an $80 million program. Gentry said the first year she and a colleague worked late nights for weeks to process applications for summer food programs in time for the deadline, she said. Gentry was appointed director of all food programs in July 2014.

Applications for summer meals and snacks for children hadn’t been processed by mid-July, Gentry said, even though the program officially begins when school gets out, which in some counties is as early as the last week of May.

“Because we were denied official training opportunities, and we had to train prospective participants on programs that we were woefully lacking in expertise, we put our participants at a distinct disadvantage and I feel certain that the number of serious deficiencies that have been issued in TN were due to the lack of full and complete training that was provided to applicants,” Gentry wrote in her letter to federal authorities.

Other problems highlighted by Gentry include supervisors arbitrarily overruling Gentry’s approval of applications to provide food from several agencies that could have provided meals and snacks to hundreds of children. In one example, she said an assistant commissioner scrolled through the Facebook page of one applicant and made fun of the ethnic-sounding names of friends. Jarnagin, the DHS spokeswoman, said the application from the agency was incomplete and for Gentry to approve the application was "unacceptable performance."

In another example, Gentry said Lane College, a historically African-American college in Jackson, was willing to provide food to school-age children in campus summer program, but a supervisor overruled her efforts to enroll the college in the food program with no explanation. Jarnagin noted there were already 50 feeding sites in Jackson. But federal regulators had encouraged Tennessee officials to work with historically black colleges and universities like Lane, which would have provided food on campus to students participating in an Upward Bound program who were not being served by the existing feeding sites in Jackson. The university had already received a $3,000 grant from Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit, to begin a food program for those youth, Gentry said. And a local experienced food agency who has worked with DHS was willing to provide those meals. A similar program on the campus of Tennessee State University already participates in the food program for their Upward Bound students.

After submitting her resignation, Gentry was placed on administrative leave until July 31, the last day of her employment. Gentry told The Tennessean she resigned after being told she would be removed from the program, demoted or something possibly more severe the day after The Tennessean reported on the troubled food program.

"I took that to be a threat," Gentry said. "I felt forced out. I was called a 'mission-blocker' " — a term, Gentry said, that Hatter and other DHS officials use to describe employees who seemingly fail to support the agency's mission.

The newspaper earlier this month reported on nonprofits that contract with the state to provide food to children during the summer and year round at day care facilities and after-school programs paid themselves tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses, mysteriously lost paperwork when auditors arrived to inspect them, and in some instances may never have gotten food to children in need.

Gentry, who inherited a department with ongoing problems, hopes her complaints to federal regulators will finally bring some results.

“I am hoping that Tennessee is going to be forced to re-evaluate how the program is being operated and for them to be forced to acknowledge that a program this size and scope cannot operate successfully with so few staff members with no training and no technology."

This story has been updated to reflect a late afternoon response from DHS.

Reach Anita Wadhwani at 615-259-8092 and on Twitter @AnitaWadhwani.