Hunger Games
Jeff Mills’ whistleblower suit revealed rotting food, fraud, and millions of dollars lost. Why is DCPS renewing its contract with Chartwells?
How does D.C. ignore a multi-million dollar problem year after year? Pretty easily, it turns out.
On June 5, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine reached a $19.4 million settlement in a whistleblower lawsuit against Chartwells/Thompson Hospitality, the public school system’s food services provider. The plaintiff, former D.C. Public Schools Food Services Director Jeffrey Mills, had detailed poor food quality and outright fraud, from misrepresented costs to concealed overpayments.
The city then proceeded to move forward on a renewal of Chartwells’ contract for the next year. Mayor Muriel Bowser and DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson seem determined to stick with it.
It’s the latest in a dysfunctional relationship between D.C. and Chartwells. Chicken nuggets and crates of spoiling milk is one thing. Price-gouging and fraud is another, given that DCPS exercised a renewal option in 2014, after the D.C. Office of Inspector General cited auditor’s findings that Chartwells brought in $19 million less in revenue and incurred $6 million more in costs than promised from 2008 to 2012. Revelations from the lawsuit and a separate employment lawsuit now hover over an arrangement that raised red flags the minute DCPS outsourced food services in 2008.
And city officials appear all too willing to wave Chartwells in for another year.
With the ink barely dry last month on the settlement, Racine seemed relieved to get the matter off his plate: “Chartwells has quite reasonably acknowledged and addressed mistakes it made in administering the contract to provide food and food services to DCPS,” he said in a press release. “In light of [their] acceptance of responsibility, DCPS looks forward to continuing its contractual relationship with the company.”
Added DCPS in a written statement: “We believe any issues regarding the provision of school meals, which relate primarily to the prior contract term, have been resolved. DCPS believes it can continue its relationship with Chartwells/Thompson through the expiration of the current contract.”
Henderson appeared the least bothered by activity that took place under her nose. Quashing any notion of change, she declared, “Food service is a massive operation, my focus is on improving academic achievement.”
Bowser has Henderson’s back. On June 19, she sent a contract renewal to the D.C. Council and said she will rebid it for the 2016-2017 school year. It will be hard to stop the renewal, too; The most vocal critic on the Council doesn’t even serve on the Committee for Education, which won’t hold a hearing until the fall.
To understand just how bad the city’s attempts at privatizing school meals have been, you need to go to Mills, a former restaurateur who came to D.C. passionate about food and left with last month’s settlement and a separate $450,000 settlement following his wrongful termination from DCPS.
Former colleague Joel Metlen puts it this way: “If it weren’t for Jeff’s lawsuit, none of this would’ve been on the radar.”
Jeff Mills was raised in northern Ohio on grandma’s cooking and the free school lunch program. He tended bar to pay for college in Boston, then after graduating, took his knack for business to New York, where he became a successful restaurateur. The nation’s biggest restaurant scene—full of what he describes as unreliable employees and business partners—was ultimately not for him, though. He still wanted to do something food-related, but with more social value.
Enter the nation’s capital.
D.C. has some of the country’s worst rates of food insecurity, hunger, and child obesity. For years, DCPS failed to provide nutritious meals to more than 45,000 students. In 2008, faced with losses of up to $7 million per year, then-DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee outsourced the school food operation, based on an internal study that said it would improve student health and save taxpayer money.
School districts are fueled by federal reimbursements for every meal they serve. The more meals served, the more reimbursements. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, roughly 87 percent of large school districts nationwide run food services in-house. Mills had his staff do a district-by-district Jeff Mills’ whistleblower suit revealed rotting food, fraud, and millions of dollars lost. Why is DCPS renewing its contract with Chartwells? - Washington City Paper:
