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Students are to return to campus this fall. The challenge is how to keep them safe.

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This May 4, 2017 photograph, shows Nancy New, owner and Director of the Mississippi Community Education Center (MCEC) and New Learning, Inc., at a social function in Jackson, Miss. Special agents from the office of State Auditor, have arrested New and several others in connection with a multi-million dollar embezzlement scheme. The indictments include a range of violations involving fraud and embezzlement. (Sarah Warnock/The Clarion-Ledger via AP)

Nancy New, whose nonprofit received tens of millions of federal welfare dollars intended to help struggling families out of poverty, told Mississippi Today in 2018 she wanted to see the resources “getting right to the people.”

That’s not what happened. Now she awaits trial on embezzlement charges, to which she pleaded not guilty, while an FBI investigation into the alleged welfare scheme continues.

Before she was arrested, New’s organization, Mississippi Community Education Center, and another nonprofit, Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, ran a statewide program called Families First for Mississippi with the new focus of helping low-income families secure employment to support their families instead of public assistance.

They would do this by offering soft skills training, such as resume writing and interviewing, and work supports, such as donated professional clothing, to adults otherwise unprepared for today’s workforce.

In reality, they helped very few low-income families find self sufficiency, according to outcome documents the nonprofits provided to the Mississippi Department of Human Services, the agency funding the program. From 2017 to 2019, the nonprofits reported helping 652 people receive a Career Ready Certificate, 94 write a resume, and 72 complete a job application, though the reporting is likely flawed. They did not track how many of their clients got a job or how much more money they may have earned after the program.

And yet, the nonprofits received about $100 million from the state welfare agency over three years.

Mississippi Community Education Center instead funneled millions to New’s private school company, bought expensive personal vehicles, leased property she owned just for it to sit empty, and paid for the pet projects of retired athletes, such as a $5 million volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, concussion research, the mortgage on a horse ranch and a fitness boot camp, according to a state audit published in early May. 

The audit accuses former Human Services director John Davis, who also pleaded not guilty within the alleged scheme, of enabling, and in some cases directing, the nonprofit to spend the funds this way.

Mississippi Today sat down with Nancy New and other nonprofit employees in October of 2018, while the nonprofit was allegedly perpetrating what the State Auditor called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history, to talk about her nonprofit’s work. She has not made any public statements since her arrest in early February, but the following transcript is how she explained their mission back then.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mississippi Today: How was Families First conceived? I understand now that Mississippi Community Education Center and Family Resource Center of North Mississippi combined in this effort. What was the genesis of that?

Nancy New: I’ve been part of Families First resource centers for 25 years, from its inception. Actually when the federal money first flowed down to the states across the nation, Mississippi was one of them to receive monies to actually set up Family First resource centers to serve families, so I was fortunate then to have a small grant and to get services started in the Delta.

So the whole concept of Families First for Mississippi and the services is to enhance and empower families through getting them stabilized through education, through services and so forth. It is also to reach the whole family. That’s called the Gen+ model.

Where we have concentrated on helping that individual and perhaps the individual’s child or vice versa, what we want to do is learn about the whole family. Let’s reach every individual in the family. Let’s start changing families lives instead of just one person in that family because if we can impact the whole family, that’s going to be much more powerful and beneficial than just one individual.

It hasn’t changed in the last 25 years. What’s happened is that it’s grown and where we were concentrated in just a few areas across the state, according to resources, financial and other resources, we were able to expand that through this greater effort now.

You ask about the two organizations, that’s just a matter of logistics. We divided the state so we could manage it better.

When did that happen?

Nancy New: It really began about five years ago. At that time Mr. Berry was director. They — and when I say ‘they’, I’m speaking of the leaders of Department of Human Services, as well as federal leaders, too — they said, ‘How can we help Mississippi even more so? How can we make these dollars really really have a greater impact?’ Through the family resource centers we had had really good results, in ours and as well as Mrs. (Christy) Webb’s (director of Family Resource Center of North Mississippi) certainly had. Anyway, with the leaders in discussions — and I wasn’t part of any of those discussions at DHS — they said, let’s do this greater. Let’s make a huge impact by really putting our efforts behind this. And get in the communities. (John Davis, former head of the Department of Human Services) will explain this: He really wants to get the services smack dab in as many communities as he possibly can.

(Editor’s note: Human Services awarded New’s nonprofit TANF grants of $1 million in each fiscal year 2016 and 2015, $14.3 million in 2017 and $21.5 million in 2018, according to documents Davis provided to lawmakers. By 2020, it had received over $55 million in TANF funds since the beginning of fiscal year 2017, according to a Mississippi Today review of state expenditures). 

…I really want the right information out there. It’s critical because we are doing a great job and so many people are involved, but there are negative people. Some of it may be that we need to correct it, but also it’s just because they don’t know.

What kind of things have you heard?

Nancy New: For one thing, I’ve heard that we’re getting an enormous amount of money and it’s getting duplicated … and I understand people saying that because they don’t understand. First of all, we’re not getting an enormous amount of money, just us. And I want Mr. Davis to explain that. It looks like our budget is whatever but then a lot of that money is not operating money. That goes right back out to our partners, which is great.

How much would you say is Families First operations versus funding to partners?

Nancy New: At least half — at least — for partners. Oh absolutely. That’s great because that’s helping us. When we say partners, these are people who are already getting funding directly. But Mr. Davis is wanting to make sure the people getting funded are doing what Families First needs to be done. So he’s pulling us all together.

By the money flowing through us, that allows us to even join forces together to drive the pillars of Families First. He wants to make sure if the partners are out there, and we’re doing it, everybody’s doing the right thing together and that’s addressing what Families First is supposed to be about.

Explain the genesis of the expansion in 2016 then. Was that an RFP (Request for Proposal)?

Nancy New: Yes it was.

They (Mississippi Department of Human Services) expanded or increased some of the pillars we were to address, and primarily toward workforce. Stabilizing the family and workforce. And literacy.

We had done some workforce things to some extent with out partners. More goals and objectives were written for us to address.

(Editor’s note: The State Auditor’s report revealed that former Human Services Director John Davis disregarded procurement regulations in order to award large grants to New’s nonprofit).

What specific workforce development activities does Families First offer, besides resume writing and—?

Nancy New: Right, the soft skills. We try to do so many soft skills because our partners with the community college are huge. We have wonderful partnerships across the state with our community college system and of course they focus so much on workforce, so we’re trying to get our clients, we’re trying to get them ready to go to the second step of workforce training. Ours are mostly soft skills.

(Editor’s note: Most of the community colleges that Families First for Mississippi listed as subcontract partners on their annual report did not respond to or declined to answer questions about their grants. The audit questioned the nonprofit’s TANF payments to three community colleges ranging from $62,905 to $193,701, a small fraction of the nonprofit’s $55 million Families First grant funds.)

I was thinking that there may be some direct assistance to families done through Families First but it sounds like there’s not. So I just want to make sure I understand: People can’t come here to get their lights paid. There’s no direct financial assistance being provided.

Nancy New: No. What is being provided to families — what we are finding through referrals, families are falling onto hard times and they need help immediately. We have benevolent funds, where we get donations to help underwrite some of those. For instance, a family found themselves having to have a lot of medical assistance, and they got behind on their bills, their lights and so forth, so if we have enough money in the benevolent fund to help, once we verify the legitimacy of the need, we do help them out of our fund.

How much would you say is paid out of that? Or has been so far?

Nancy New: For us, we depleted and got more donations, but every one of the requests. The requests are huge. The people need so much in the state. But, a few thousand dollars, maybe? Somewhere along that.

The 2017 federal TANF numbers came out yesterday and we have spent about $35 million more in TANF than we did in 2016, which would match with Families First coming on board. And we actually spent $1 million less in the same year on basic cash assistance to families. I wonder how you reconcile that. Is this the direction we’re heading as a state?

Nancy New: That’s a question I would like to ask Mr. Davis myself. Monetarily, we’re in a lot of meetings. I can’t answer this accurately because this is a question I haven’t thought about. This is a great question. I don’t think it’s the goal to keep money away from people, I think it’s the goal to put enough support to help the people.

Laura Goodson, an attorney and MCEC’s then-advocacy director: The way we talk about it a lot internally, and from a policy standpoint, is to put enough support in the community to help individuals stabilize themselves so they don’t necessarily need government benefits like TANF. It is not to not have them there when they’re needed and when they need to apply for them, but to help someone that didn’t have a job before, maybe was having to apply for SNAP or TANF benefits, because they didn’t have a workforce skill to get the job that would help them get a livable wage and move that wage up over time.

Not in a negative way. There are definitely people, and a lot of them in our state, who need it, and that is not something that anyone wants to deny. The idea is to try to help them also get skills.

We spent about six percent of our TANF budget on basic assistance and about half on work supports and activities. Do you think that that is the right way to divide those funds?

Nancy New: I think what we have to do is be very careful as we assess who needs what. If they’re in real true need and cannot help themselves, then I think it’s our duty as a community to help. But at the same time, I think it’s important that we support efforts in getting people to become as self reliant as possible, through education and other means of support, because that’s going to help them — I don’t want them just to survive, I want them to thrive.

I’m for giving people resources to help become very independent and gain their pride. We get a lot of clients who think they can’t go to community college or vocational training and once they come through Families First and get the soft skills and encouragement and just the confidence that, ‘I can do this.’ That’s what I want to see. Now, how much money goes here and how much money goes there. Mr. Davis is the financial person; he can really address this ’cause he is such a mastermind on all this, but I want to see the resources, whether it’s monetarily or through education, I want to see it getting right to the people.

My heart goes out to the people who may not be able to help themselves. And they’re out there. They’re really out there. And it’s legitimate. We’ve got to help those people.

Being that most of your Families First funding comes from TANF, I assume that most people you’re serving are people who are at that low-income level. The people who left TANF in the last five years made an average of $12,000 a year after leaving TANF. TANF is a work program. We say that a request for TANF is a request for a job. The people who are leaving made $12,000. If they made $12,000, they’re probably going to be coming back to Families First. How do you reconcile that? Are jobs the answer to poverty in this case?

Nancy New: We love those cases because that means they’re coming back for more help and that tells us that they want to improve even more so. That assistance to that person got him or her hopefully on the right path to improving their living environment and we’re going to do what we need to do to help them get to the next step.

Laura Goodson: Jobs is definitely a big part of it. Also, what Nancy mentioned, education. Transportation is a huge issue.

Nancy New: And child care. The two things: child care and transportation.

Does Families First offer child care or transportation?

Nancy New: In some areas we do. We work very closely with Head Start and some other groups across the state. Yes, we try to provide child care in as many areas, or we coordinate with the good existing providers already out there.

(Editor’s note: Laura Goodson clarified that the Families First centers do not provide day care to parents. Additionally, no child care providers were listed on the Families First for Mississippi subcontract partner list).

Have you really been able to track workforce outcomes since the expansion?

Nancy New: We, along with Mimmo (Mimmo Parisi, executive director of the National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center at Mississippi State University) and Community College, we should be able to get you some really good numbers on that. Community College, as our partners, have some really good outcomes on that. And we can find those for you. We’ll be glad to do our best to gather that.

(Editor’s note: The nonprofit did not respond to repeated follow up requests for this information. When this interview took place, Mississippi Today had an interview scheduled the next day with former MDHS director John Davis, but he cancelled shortly after Mississippi Today’s interview with Nancy New, citing a conflict, and never rescheduled).

The post ‘We’ve got to help those people’: A Q&A with Nancy New from 2018, while she was allegedly stealing millions of welfare dollars appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Color your way through Mississippi with me! Click below to download a coloring sheet of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. 

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Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs, left, confers with Burl Cain, the former warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, on May 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

Before Gov. Tate Reeves announced on Wednesday that he had appointed Burl Cain, the 77-year-old former warden of the notorious Angola State Prison in Louisiana, as the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, he’d been handed a list of three finalists.

Reeves appointed a seven-member committee in January to conduct a national search and help him pick the next prisons chief. In total, the committee received about 55 applications for the job, said Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs, the chairman of the search committee.

The committee narrowed the applicant pool down to three finalists, including Cain, and sent the names to Reeves.

“Once we gave him the three finalists, we did not have any influence on the process,” Flaggs, a former chair of the state House Corrections Committee, told Mississippi Today this week. “But I stand behind the work of the committee and the governor’s prerogative to appoint whomever he wanted.”

Reeves’ selection of Cain to oversee the troubled Mississippi Department of Corrections was met with criticism by many this week. Cain, whose controversial corrections career has regularly garnered national headlines, resigned his post in Louisiana in 2015 after allegations that he misused public funds.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections has been plagued for years by scandal. The department received national attention in 2013 after the conviction and sentence of 20 years for then-Commissioner Chris Epps, who received bribes to award contracts to private vendors. 

Earlier this year, the department faced national scrutiny for outbreaks of violence inside state prisons. Since Reeves was inaugurated in January, at least three dozen inmates have died in state custody.

“We cannot rush the critical job of finding a new commissioner for the Department of Corrections,” Reeves said when announcing the search committee in January, as the outbreak of violence inside the state’s prisons had spurred massive protests and lawsuits from national celebrities. “We must get this right for the people of Mississippi. I am turning to my fellow Mississippians to help me in this mission.”

Serving with Flaggs on the search committee were Leake County Sheriff Greg Waggoner, Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, Harrison County District Attorney Joel Smith, former Parole Board member Kathy Henry, Lincoln County Sheriff Steve Rushing and Mississippi Court of Appeals Judge Sean Tindell.

Mississippi law requires that the prisons commissioner have a bachelor’s degree. Flaggs said about 50 of the 55 applicants met that qualification. 

“I was surprised by the number of applicants, good applicants,” Flaggs said.

Each of the seven committee members selected a top five from that large pool of candidates, with the top choice of a committee member receiving five points, the second choice receiving four points and so forth.

Based on the total points received from all committee members, five finalists were selected. One of the original five finalists dropped out during the process, Flaggs said, and the committee agreed to add one more candidate whose resume was lost for a time.

Those final five were interviewed virtually by the committee. Tindell, whom Reeves also announced as commissioner of Public Safety on Wednesday, conducted most of the questioning of the finalists.

The committee then voted again on a top three, and those three names were sent to Reeves. As chair, Flaggs said he did not participate in the final vote for the top three.

Flaggs said he could not reveal the names of the other two finalists, and several others close to the search declined to identify the other two finalists. Flaggs offered no comment on the selection of Cain other than to say he was chosen through a fair process.

“I would not change anything about it,” Flaggs said. He said he did not know the governor’s selection for the post until he attended Wednesday’s news conference where Reeves announced Cain.

“I did not know who it was until I saw Burl Cain getting out of the car right before the announcement,” he said.

In 2017, a Louisiana legislative watchdog audit found that 10 corrections employees performed work on Cain’s private residence — and some apparently while being paid by the state. The audit also claimed that while warden of Angola, Cain received other free benefits such as free appliances and flat screen televisions (totaling $27,000) and lodging at Angola for his relatives.

Cain also was accused of conflicts of interest for some real estate deals. He received national attention because of claims he reduced violence and crime at Angola by, in part, incorporating his Christian philosophy into the prison. Others criticized him for enacting harsh punishments into a prison already notorious throughout the nation.

Flanked by Reeves in a press conference on Wednesday, Cain maintained he did nothing wrong in Louisiana and said that at the time of the audit, he had actually helped grow Angola’s revenue through a prison rodeo that had gained national attention.

“I think what is important is those allegations were unfounded,” Cain said on Wednesday. “There was no crime committed. What we have to do is avoid the hint of impropriety. We will continue to do that. I have done that throughout my career.”

For his part, Reeves downplayed the allegations and doubled down on his support for Cain this week.

“The search committee was aware of the allegations. I was personally aware of the allegations,” Reeves said on Wednesday. “We did extensive research, and it seems like that once the politics were removed the accusations were basically dropped.”

Reeves continued: “I have absolute full confidence in Burl Cain’s ability to change the culture at the Department of Corrections. I have absolute confidence he will do so in a manner to make Mississippians proud. I have zero reservations about appointing him.”

The post How Gov. Tate Reeves picked Burl Cain, the controversial former Angola warden, to oversee Mississippi prisons appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Ole Miss athletics

Ben Williams was elected Colonel Rebel in 1976. Here he is pictured with Barbara Biggs, who was Miss Ole Miss.

Forty-four years later, the photograph seems about as non-controversial as can be.

It was snapped in the spring of 1976. Ben Williams, the history-making football star from Yazoo City, had been elected Colonel Rebel, the since-retired equivalent of Mr. Ole Miss. He was the first black Colonel Rebel in the school’s history. Barbara Biggs, a biology major from Jackson and future doctor, had been elected Miss Ole Miss.

The photo was taken for – and appeared in – the university’s annual, “Ole Miss.”

Williams died Monday. He was 65.

Rick Cleveland

But at the time, Barbara Biggs could never have guessed the controversy the photo would cause. Not long after the yearbook published, the letters began arriving.

“I had multiple threats, even death threats,” Biggs said Tuesday from her home in Kennesaw, Ga., near Atlanta. “I really couldn’t believe it. I had one letter from California with a clipping from a racist underground newspaper with a story about the photo. Then a note that said something like, ‘What would your forefathers have thought?’ Just unbelievable. All that because of a photograph.”

“Ben was such a nice, very nice, man,” said Biggs. “I was so sorry to hear he had passed.”

“I knew Ben before the photo was taken, but we weren’t close friends or anything,” Biggs said. “I was – and am – a big football fan so I knew about Ben and about what a great player he was. He was also an outstanding fellow, so down to earth.”

Biggs and Williams had entered Ole Miss at the same time, in 1972, but from quite different backgrounds. She was an Ole Miss legacy and the granddaughter of Mississippi governor Martin S. “Mike” Conner, also the first commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.

Williams was the first African American to play football at Ole Miss. The son of sharecroppers and the oldest of six children, he arrived on the Ole Miss campus as a 17-year-old, the first in his family to attend college.

Williams’ election was a point of controversy at the time. The title was given for the school’s mascot: a cartoonish, aged white man in Confederate garb who many said represented a plantation owner and perpetuated racist symbolism of the Old South. The university officially removed the mascot in 2003, and it changed the title of its most popular elected male to “Mr. Ole Miss” in 2013.

“To be sure, (Williams’) election presented challenges to white sensibilities,” historian Frank Lambert wrote in his 2009 book “The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights vs. States’ Rights.” “How can a black man and a white woman be photographed together without confirming the segregationist fears of race-mixing and amalgamation?”

Ole Miss athletics

Ben Williams.

The photograph was taken in a country setting, Williams on one side of a wooden fence, Biggs on the other. The two are not touching. The photograph takes up an entire page of the annual, page 237. Biggs and Williams are pictured individually on preceding pages for being selected for the Ole Miss Hall of Fame and Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities.

Linda Williams, Ben’s widow, said her husband never mentioned anything about a racist backlash to the photo.

“But he wouldn’t,” Linda Williams said. “He would just let it go right over his head. He wouldn’t pay any attention to it. My husband was a loving man. He loved everybody.”

Biggs said little, if any, of the hate mail or other negative reaction about the photo came from anyone on the Oxford campus. “Everyone I knew at Ole Miss loved Ben,” she said.

Michael Sweet, an Ole Miss football teammate of Williams’ and now the director of ministries at Gateway Rescue Mission in Jackson, well remembers when the annual published.

“Oh yeah,” Sweet said. “We used to tease Ben about that. We said, ‘Man, Ben, they got you two on different sides of the fence. Why you reckon they did that?’”

But Sweet, who will deliver the eulogy at Williams’ funeral Saturday afternoon, said that Williams was fiercely proud of being elected Colonel Rebel by his fellow Ole Miss students. “As well he should have been,” Sweet said. “Ben loved Ole Miss.”

Linda Williams was at the Ole Miss reunion of former Colonel Rebels and Miss Ole Miss winners in 2008. “That was such a good time,” she said. “Ben enjoyed reuniting with Barbara and I did, too.”

Biggs, too, fondly recalled the reunion.

“Again, Ben couldn’t have been nicer,” Biggs said. “My kids (now 21-year-old twins) were with me and were so excited about meeting the big football star. He spent a great deal of time with them and was just wonderful with my kids.”

Hate mail – even death threats – over a photograph probably sounds far-fetched to young people today. But this was 1976, only 14 years after James Meredith became the first black student at Ole Miss amid a riot quelled by thousands of federal troops.

Said Biggs, “It’s amazing how far we’ve come from what really wasn’t that long ago.”

•••

A fund to help allay mounting expenses for Linda Williams, Ben Williams’ widow, has been established. The couple lost their home in a fire last autumn, and their rental home, where they had moved, flooded in February. Ben’s failing health in recent years also has resulted in enormous expense.

Donations can be sent to to First Commercial Bank, 1300 Meadowbrook Road, Jackson, MS 39211, Attn.: Sam Lane. Checks can be made payable to Linda Williams.

The post There’s a story behind this 44-year-old photo of ‘Colonel Reb’ and Miss Ole Miss appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Illness onset refers to the date when a patient with a confirmed case actually started getting sick. The metric can offer a better trend gauge than number of new cases due to reporting delay, but has its own shortcomings because most, but not all, known cases are reported.

Up until the last full week in April, the number of COVID illnesses starting on any given day peaked on April 6 with 174 people reported first having symptoms. Since then, the peak has moved toward the tail of the graph, meaning more recent, and jumped higher — in addition to clustering with other high points. As of the last weekend in April, for the first time, this chart shows most cases ever in the past few days, on April 20 at 214, and the two next highest points in the last two weeks as well — a departure from previous trends. Both single day reports and averaging the number of illnesses weekly show variability without a steady downward trend.

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