SERVING SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI SINCE 1927 • WWW.STUDENTPRINTZ.COM • MARCH 4, 2020 | VOLUME 105 | ISSUE 20
CORONAVIRUS PG 3
HATTIESBURG SPEEDWAY PG 5
STAFF EDITORIAL PG 8
The Southern Miss volleyball team plays a game in the new facility.
Brian Winters and Michael Sandoz | Printz
Embattled welfare group paid $5 million for new USM volleyball center ANNA WOLFE
MISSISSIPPI TODAY ohn Jones doesn’t play volleyball. The elderly construction worker mostly bides his time during the cold, rainy months — the slow season for his employer, which builds swimming pools. Right now, Jones can’t afford to turn on the electricity or water at his downtown Hattiesburg home. Every time he visits the local utility assistance agency, he said, “They keep giving me the run around.” And yet, three miles west of his deteriorating neighborhood, a nonprofit funded by federal welfare dollars paid $5 million in cash to build a state-of-theart volleyball facility on the University of Southern Mississippi campus. The nonprofit said it would serve the poor. “How in the world is the volleyball court going to help struggling families? How does that help them get the job training they need?” said Oleta Fitzgerald, longtime director of the Children Defense Fund’s Southern Regional Office. A college town of 46,500 people, Hattiesburg has a poverty rate almost double the state average, despite having a lower unemployment rate.
“They didn’t even make a good attempt to connect this money to the needs of these families,” Fitzgerald said. The Mississippi Community Education Center, a nonprofit that receives a majority of its budget from taxpayer dollars intended to help people out of poverty, provided most of the funding for the volleyball center through an upfront five-year sublease agreement with the University’s athletic foundation. The nonprofit owner, Nancy New, sat on the athletic foundation’s board. The university modified plans to the facility, called the Wellness Center, so that it would include office space for the organization. One of the university’s celebrated alumni, former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, was credited in local news reports with raising funds to build the $7 million center. Favre’s daughter plays volleyball at Southern, this year on the beach volleyball team. University spokesperson James Coll said in a statement that individual donors, in addition to the $5 million from the nonprofit, contributed to the construction. Under the 2017 lease agreement, obtained by Mississippi Today, the Mississippi Community Education Center rented all university athletic facilities “for various activities that benefit the area’s underserved population,” but one former employee said that never happened and by Thursday, after
over a week of inquiry, the university had still not explained what the nonprofit accomplished on campus. The nonprofit, under ongoing investigation in connection with the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history, has now closed its offices. The organization’s expansion began shortly after John Davis, a longtime Mississippi Department of Human Services official, became the agency’s director in 2016. That year, expenditure reports show, the department began issuing multi-million dollar lump sum payments to the Mississippi Community Education Center, the nonprofit founded by politically connected private education contractor Nancy New. However, Davis did not make New report how her organization spent the money — now more than $65 million since 2016, according to a review of state agency expenditure reports. “They’re taking from the needy and giving it to people that don’t need it. That’s what it is,” Jones said. New’s nonprofit did not give direct assistance to working folks like Jones, but offered parenting and fatherhood classes, motivational speaking events with retired athletes and health and wellness programs such as boot camp-style fitness classes run by Paul Lacoste. The nonprofit contracted with another of
New’s companies, New Learning Resources Online, to provide online diploma programs to its partners, such as Phoenix Project. In early February, agents from the Mississippi auditor’s office arrested Davis, New and four others in connection with a conspiracy to steal more than $4 million in grant funds meant to serve the poor. They’ve pleaded not guilty. The alleged theft would explain what happened to just 7 percent of all funds Human Services gave the nonprofit since 2016. The state has very little accounting to show what happened to the rest. Most of the money came from a federal welfare program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which the federal government provides each state through a block grant for them to use as they wish — with few strings attached. Out of $135 million in 2018, Mississippi spent just five percent, or $7.3 million, on direct cash assistance to poor families. That year, Human Services gave six times that amount, almost $44 million, to Mississippi Community Education Center and another nonprofit, Family Resource Center of Northeast Mississippi, which together called their statewide outreach services “Families First for Mississippi.”
Continued | PG.2