Tens of thousands of District of Columbia children are not receiving healthy meals because of a bureaucratic mess in the state education office, according to a D.C. inspector general’s review.
A city inspection of the agency that was recently renamed the Office of State Superintendent of Education found a number of organizational and management problems, including a file room that was in such disarray that it created a fire hazard.
Although the agency does not fall under the purview of new D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the office is responsible for the hot-button issues such as the District’s federal child nutrition programs, financial aid for higher education, enrollment counts at public and charter schools, and educational research.
The report blamed many of the problems on short staffing and complicated and inadequate oversight. Agency head Deborah Gist could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
The education office fell woefully short of its goal to provide free summer meals to poor children, a service that was “vital to the fight against childhood undernourishment,” according to the report.
The city served summer lunches and breakfasts to about 28,800 children in 2005, but because it failed to reach 80 percent of the eligible children, the District is in danger of losing federal funding, the report said.
The 103-page report also included photos showing boxes of records haphazardly piled to the ceiling in a storage room. In addition to being a fire hazard, the lack of a systematic filing system slowed production and increase the risk of misplaced information, the report said.
Among the other findings, the state education office did not provide financial oversight of federal grants and could not account for money spent by contractors, an agency employee received financial aid for higher education even though the employee was not eligible for the money, and the nutrition services failed to properly monitor bids for some of the biggest contracts.
