THEY’RE STILL GOING HUNGRY
State promised poor families free lunch payments
MUNFORD – She opened her refrigerator and saw only a gallon of milk and two old lunch bags from a free-food giveaway.
That’s when she knew her family was in big trouble.
“It’s pretty shocking,” said single mom Kim Biers. “What am I going to tell everybody when they come in the kitchen for lunch?”
Last April, Biers, who has two schoolage sons living with her, didn’t know she was eligible for a program to give parents like her pandemic debit cards to buy food for their children.
Without school meals to count on since her children’s classes were online because of COVID-19, Biers was forced to scramble.
She took out a $500 loan using her car as collateral. The terms of that loan included a 300% annual interest rate, plus fees.
Then Biers, who lives in the southwest Tennessee town of Munford and works transcribing law enforcement interviews for courts, took out several payday loans for $200 each. Those came with 391% to 521% annual interest rates depending on the loan company. When she got the loan money, she was able, finally, to buy food.
“They eat you up in interest rates, but my family eats,” she said. “This is how it turns into a cycle for poor people.”
Her two sons qualify for free lunches at school because of her income level. That also qualifies her for Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfers.
It wasn’t until a friend told her the PEBT program existed that she tried to get the federal money which is administered by the Tennessee Department of Human Services.
That’s when she, like so many poor people in Tennessee, ran into difficulties.
“That is how people stay poor. The government in Tennessee is not very sensitive to people who need a lot.” Kim Biers
Of Munford
Tennessee’s P-EBT program plagued with problems
The P-EBT program, funded by money from the federal government, is supposed to help the families of more than 700,000 school children in Tennessee.
But miscommunication and delays have plagued the P-EBT program. An application process was scrapped, a deadline was extended and not all the money has been given to families in need.
The program pays for food for qualified families because students missed 183 days of school lunches.
The state paid a rate of $5.75 per day for the first 44 missed school days (which has become known as “Round 1”), $5.85 per day for the next 31 missed days (Round 2) and up to $6.82 for the remaining 108 missed school days (Round 3, which may be doled out across multiple installments).
Biers should have received about $2,341 for the lunches her sons missed at school during the first year of the pandemic.
But the state only started sending out Round 3 payments, for lunch money from last October, in late March. The department said all Round 3 cards connected with valid addresses had been mailed by early April.
Biers has not yet received her third P-EBT card. She is trying to get the $1,470 she is still owed with the help of the Tennessee Justice Center.
Thousands of Tennessee families could be worse off.
The state said about 60,000 payments from the first round of funding didn’t make it to eligible families last year.
Thousands left hungry
Tennessee received $967.6 million in three waves of federal funding to help needy families, according to state figures. A maze of red tape kept a significant portion of that money from people like Biers.
The Department of Human Services commissioner who oversaw the beginning of the P-EBT program, Danielle W. Barnes, left the department in November.
A new commissioner, Clarence Carter, took the reins earlier this year.
Students who got free and reduced lunches were automatically eligible for the initial wave of P-EBT funds. But when the program launched, Tennessee refused to mail cards directly to eligible families, as many states did.
Instead, Tennessee required families for most of the eligible children to complete a new application for the money.
The move left millions of dollars unused and tens of thousands of children hungry.
Less than half of the eligible children who were required to apply for the P-EBT benefits were enrolled to get the money allocated for them by late August, according to DHS.
After media scrutiny, public outcry and pressure to distribute the money before it was revoked, the state abandoned the application process.
The state switched to another controversial policy that made local schools responsible for distributing unclaimed P-EBT cards.
The Department of Human Services gave families 30 days to collect their cards from local schools. The department mailed 244,000 cards to schools, according to department spokesperson Sky Arnold.
First-round cards for about 60,000 children were returned to the state by schools. Arnold said the state has not tracked how many of those cards remain unclaimed. The state initially planned to throw unclaimed firstround cards away before saying they were still available to eligible families, but only upon request.
“A notice was sent to those families to let them know a benefit existed for their child if they wished to receive it,” Arnold said in a statement.
“We are continuing to work with the Tennessee Department of Education to utilize incoming data and reaching out to see if any other addresses can be determined.
Arnold said the department also rolled out online resources and a dedicated P-EBT hotline at 833-4960661 to help families determine if they’re eligible for unclaimed benefits.
U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper was highly critical of the state’s distribution process for P-EBT funds, particularly during the first round. He slammed the state for failing to connect those funds to the children who need them.
“Unfortunately, our state has a terrible recent track record of getting federal assistance to Tennesseans in need,” Cooper, D-nashville, said in a statement. “I expressed my concern about how Gov. Lee was handling the rollout of P-EBT cards on three different occasions last year and have seen only marginal improvements. Our neighbors did it; why can’t we?”
The Department of Human Services resisted the idea of sending cards directly to families during the first round, saying that method could lead to fraud if the wrong people got cards. But the state ultimately reversed course and partnered with a private vendor to send second and third round cards to eligible families using addresses on file with the Tennessee Department of Education.
The state mailed cards for about 368,000 students during the second round of funding, Arnold said. More than 350,000 children have qualified so far for the third round of funding.
Making life harder
The process of getting plastic cards to people who could use them to buy food has become a nightmare
“Why are we able to get the stimulus checks so quickly, and P-EBT cards take so long for people who need money for food?” said Signe Anderson, the Tennessee Justice Center’s Director of Nutrition Advocacy.
“I hear people talk about the potential for fraud,” Anderson said. “This fear of fraud is intense. There’s a lot more worry about fraud attached to people who are poor. If these were white, middle class families, there wouldn’t be this attention to fraud.”
Biers, who has five older adult children, doesn’t know when the money is going to come, so the predatory loans were her solution.
She had to figure out how to stretch what food she had for meals for her pre-teen sons. She said she has “cheese night” when times get really tough. She simply makes grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.
She considers a meal at Mcdonald’s a luxury she can’t currently afford.
The father of her two youngest sons is not helping the family financially. Court documents show the Shelby County court granted Biers full custody of her sons, and determined the boys’ father owed her $130,290 in retroactive child support.
She said she has received none of that money. “That is how people stay poor,” she said. “The government in Tennessee is not very sensitive to people who need a lot. I know the money is there. Why are the people you elect not working for you?”
She said the P-EBT cards aren’t for luxury items. “They don’t mean filet mignon,” she said. “They mean you can stock up on Sunday roast, flour, sugar and chicken in the freezer.”
Reach Keith Sharon at 615-406-1594 or ksharon @tennessean.com or on Twitter @Keithsharontn.