June 3, 2019

CENSUS CHAMPIONS — Jeri Green's Life-Long Crusade to Reverse Historic Undercounts
By Khalil Abdullah

Jeri Green at her desk at the US Census Bureau in 2016. For over three decades, Green has helped make the decennial census a leading civil rights issue, both as a Census Bureau insider, and now as an advocate for the National Urban League.

Green as a college student at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jeri Green at the National Urban League 2018 conference in Columbus, OH

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jeri Green’s passion for the census is still sunrise bright. An outspoken champion of the concerns of African Africans and any people who have been diminished, marginalized or systemically undercounted, she is an enthusiastic and determined advocate for how participation in the census can contribute to healthier communities and a more equitable America.

“Let’s talk about the need for public education,” Green said. “We know African American children continue to be undercounted every census and likely will be so again in 2020. Same for Latino and Native American children. When we say, ‘Count every child in your household,’ it means just that. Grandchildren count, foster kids count, play cousins count. Unless this message is delivered and repeated over and over, families will miss receiving resources that are rightfully theirs.”

“And, quite frankly, why can’t we do a better job of counting formerly incarcerated Black men? We already know they are a disproportionate percentage of the over 650,000 individuals coming back to our communities from jails and prisons every year. They are returning citizens and we should be able to design ways to make sure they show up in the census as well.”

During her 20-year career at the Census Bureau, Green coordinated visits by congresspersons, the General Accounting Office and the Inspector General’s personnel, among others, to census field sites. “Individuals who have oversight responsibility or whose agencies conduct audits to make sure taxpayer dollars are being well spent, have a right to inspect and observe, but those visits have to be scheduled and conducted in a way that doesn’t interfere with the enumeration process or the public’s right to privacy.”
In 2017, she retired as Senior Advisor for Civic Engagement to former U.S. Census Bureau Director, John Thompson.

“He had left the Census Bureau and returned after a decade as a political appointee. He asked me to help him get reacquainted with the issues and concerns of the Civil Rights community, to establish some outreach.”

Green’s experience made her ideally suited for the task.

“When I started full-time, I was working on the advisory committee level,” she recalled. “In addition to serving as the liaison to the technical advisory committee, I was responsible for the five ethnic stand-alone advisory committees: Black; Hispanic; Native American and Alaskan; Asian; Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.

“Back then, each committee had its own chair and vice chair. My job was to understand their needs, engage with them and get to know and understand their issues. I just thought I could automatically do this, that it was just a natural fit for me because — I’m Black! And I know all these issues. Wrong, wrong, and more wrong,” she said laughing.
“You cannot just assume, because you’re a person of color, that you understand another culture. It took time to talk to Native Americans, to understand the road they traveled and their customs. It was the same for each of those committees. It was a very humbling experience that made me a stronger employee and a stronger translator for the Census Bureau. I had to develop a level of trust that the Bureau didn’t have with these communities.”

Regarding her decision to resign, she said when Director Thompson opted to leave in 2017, “I followed him out the door. It was time.”

Her 10 years of prior employment in the District of Columbia government counted toward federal retirement eligibility. Reasons for leaving were personal and professional. For one, the politicization of the Census Bureau, under the Department of Commerce’s then new Secretary Wilbur Ross, carried some weight.

Green opposes Ross’s efforts to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 form. She concurs with other experts that doing so would likely reduce the number of survey respondents and thus undermine the government’s constitutional mandate to count all residents. But, the citizenship dispute, soon to be decided by the Supreme Court, was just one factor in her decision.

Despite the Census Bureau’s growing emphasis and reliance on technology for the 2020 count, “we are still going to need human capital and the funds won’t be there,” Green said. During the Obama administration, the Republican-controlled Congress mandated that 2020 Census costs be held to the life-cycle costs of the 2010 Census. “Who in the world can buy 2020 groceries on a 2010 budget?” she asks. In her opinion, already, and as a direct result of insufficient funding, there have been other consequences that may negatively impact census accuracy.

Between imagining how her daily work might be constrained and what she would do with more time to herself  — continue practicing and performing with D.C.’s own KanKouran West African Dance Troupe or devoting longer hours to genealogical research — the idea of retirement began to fit like a favorite garment. She didn’t see the phone call coming, but she heard the message loud and clear.

“Marc Morial dialed me up on my cell phone right after I retired from the Census Bureau and said, ‘We need you,’” Green recalled. As president of the National Urban League (NUL) for over 15 years, a two-term mayor of New Orleans, and a former Louisiana state legislator, Morial knows and understands how census-derived revenue pours into county and city coffers to fund infrastructure projects and social service programs.

Morial chaired the 2010 Census Advisory Committee, an entity not reconstituted by the Trump administration for the 2020 Census. The committee focused on Hard-To-Count communities and had become part of Green’s portfolio during Morial’s tenure. Green now serves as senior advisor to the NUL on the 2020 Census and is a key participant in the NUL’s Census 2020 Black Roundtable, but her path to the NUL began long before.

Just as the Morial family can trace part of its lineage to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, Green’s folk, on her mother’s side, are descendants from formerly enslaved laborers on the Worsley Plantation near Rocky Mount in Edgecombe County, North Carolina.

Green was born in Washington, D.C., a descendant of part of the African American Worsley migration that eventually settled here. “My grandfather used to make me and my little sister hoe-cakes. He couldn’t read or write, nor could his mother, who was a formerly enslaved woman.”

After Eastern High School, Green pursued her undergraduate degree in Afro-American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. At the time, there was no rapid public transportation linking her Washington neighborhood to the College Park campus as the D.C. Metrorail system had not been built. Without a car, the bus ride stretched out interminably. Travel time proved less a barrier than the social climate she encountered.

“Yes, it was only 15 miles, but it was like going to the Deep South, culturally and otherwise,” Green explained. “It was a real eye-opener for me. The whole blackface thing with Gov. Northam in Virginia? That was nothing. We saw blackface all the time at College Park in the 70s, a land-grant university built by formerly enslaved people.”

At College Park, she also encountered the Pan Africanism of Kwame Turé, the former Stokely Carmichael. “He made regular visits out there and would encourage us to be active and to fight injustice. We were the ones who fought for tenure for Black professors, for African American studies programs, and for the establishment of the Nyumburu Cultural Center, which provides a physical space for meetings and activities and is still there today.”

“African Americans are struggling to deal with police brutality, voter suppression, gentrification, and access to health care … so getting them to turn their attention to the census takes time and commitment.”

While earning her master’s degree in Urban Planning and Urban Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, Green had her first prolonged encounter with “reams and reams of census data.” Job opportunities brought her back home where she worked for a few organizations before being hired by the D.C. Department of Public Works. It was a sprawling agency that Green recalls “was responsible for almost anything in the city with wheels, from public transportation to trash collection” before its duties were parceled out in a city government reorganization. Most of her time was spent working out of the mayor’s executive office. She served under Mayors Marion Barry and Sharon Pratt Kelly.

A mentor encouraged her to apply for openings at the Department of Commerce during its recruitment drive to staff the 2000 Census. “I left a full-time job at the District government to join the Census Bureau as a temporary employee in 1997,” Green said.

The practice of bringing former temporary workers aboard after a decennial year is not unusual, those workers’ skills and performance having been subject to evaluation by Census Bureau staff who can then make full-time job offers to the best prospects.

Green is a veteran of three censuses. “I worked on the run-up to the 2000 Census; through the 2010 Census; and for the run-up for the 2020 Census when I left the Bureau in 2017, and I’m still working on 2020 issues with the National Urban League.”

“African Americans are struggling to deal with police brutality, voter suppression, gentrification, and access to health care,” she observed, “so getting them to turn their attention to the census takes time and commitment. But when you look at the issue of Black men being counted where they are incarcerated instead of where they reside, and how that affects political representation and the electoral process, what we at the National Urban League call prison-based gerrymandering, and then you also count the per-person census dollars lost to their communities because, again, that money stays within the communities not their own where they are imprisoned, we cannot remain silent.”
Green still bristles as she talks about the first census in 1790 when African Americans were not counted as full human beings – Native Americans not counted at all. And she has found, within an analysis of the 1860 Census data — and, due to the Civil War, the last census that recorded a captive population — names and information on some of her forbears in North Carolina. She knows full well, however, that most Africans Americans won’t be as fortunate in their quest for family, kinship, and identity.
“Instead of being defiant and not participating in the census, be defiant and let America know we’re still here,” Green inveighed.

Looking to the other side of the 2020 Census, Green envisions more time with children, grandchildren, and, she said, quite frankly, “I’m trying to be on somebody’s beach.”

Ed. Note: This story is one in a series of EMS profiles of leading advocates for the 2020 Census.

Khalil Abdullah is a contributor for Ethnic Media Services. He has served in a number of administrative roles with New America Media, The Beat Within, and the Washington Afro-American Newspaper, among others.

May 29, 2019

Epic Fail: At least 280 Richmond, Va. Public Schools Seniors Won’t Graduate in June 
By Jeremy M. Lazarus 

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Hundreds of Richmond, Va. seniors will not be allowed to graduate in nearly three weeks because they have not met the state standards for a diploma.

The Richmond School Board has been told that at least 280 students have been disqualified to receive diplomas based on a report that RPS Chief Academic Officer Tracy Epp provided on the impact of major flaws in students’ transcripts.

While RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras’ office has acknowledged  that the numbers are incomplete, Epp told the School Board that, at best, only 810 students from the nine main city high schools would qualify to participate in graduation ceremonies that will begin Sunday, June 9.

And it could be fewer, she indicated, as only 507 seniors, at the publication of this article, have met all the requirements and are “on track” to graduate. Another 303 students are considered “likely” to graduate, but there is no guarantee they will make it in the short time left.

Even if 810 students receive diplomas, that would be the smallest number in decades for a system that has graduated at least 1,100 students each year and often far more since before World War II.

It also would be a startling 28 percent decline in graduation numbers from a year ago when 1,110 students received diplomas, according to Epp’s report.

The document looked solely at 1,090 students in the 12th grade who attend the five comprehensive high schools, Armstrong, George Wythe, Huguenot, John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson, and four specialty schools, Franklin Military, Open, Richmond Community and Richmond Alternative School.

Those schools actually enroll 1,178 12th-graders, but some attend the Maggie Walker and Appomattox governor’s schools and other programs, but still will receive RPS diplomas and were not included in Epp’s numbers. 

The 280 students not graduating were disqualified after a review of their transcripts found they had not passed enough state Standards of Learning tests, lacked a credential in career and technical education or were improperly scheduled so they never took one or more required courses, the report stated.

Those students now are being told they must take one or more courses in summer school or return to class next school year in order to receive their diploma.

“I would rather have a slightly lower rate, but know we can stand behind every single (diploma), than have a higher rate and have questions about the authenticity of those diplomas,” Kamras told the School Board.

Board member Kenya Gibson, 3rd District, described the situation as “appalling,” particularly with students just learning about the impact of the transcript foul-ups so close to graduation.

“It is incredibly frustrating to see students impacted by the actions of adults who didn’t address these issues,” said board member James “Scott” Barlow, 2nd District.

Students also are frustrated because even those who believe they are on track to graduate said Wednesday they have not been informed of their status.

“We’re just guessing based off of what we have done. They’re not telling us who is going to graduate and who is not,” said Kayla White, a senior at Armstrong High.
The transcript problem has been brewing for years, but came to a head last year when a parent’s claims of transcript problems for her daughter forced RPS officials to start investigating.

In the process, Kamras asked the Virginia Department of Education to conduct an audit, which began at Armstrong and spread to the entire system, turning up at least 20 flaws that led to the creation of student records that were completely inaccurate.

Epp said that she and her staff had gone through senior transcripts at least eight times to try to find all the flaws. While she indicated this year’s upheaval has been unavoidable, she said a new process is being installed to protect students in other grades. Along with a revamped transcript, she said new policies and practices are being put in place to ensure transcript accuracy.

May 31, 2019

Hope Village File Photo/Washington Informer 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In November of 2018, Washington, D.C. residents, community activists and local officials got an unexpected opportunity to address a question that had long bedeviled them: how to provide former inmates the support they need to adjust to life outside of prison walls.

The stakes could not have been higher: Over 2,000 individuals return home to Washington D.C. every year, with more than half winding up back behind bars within five years of release because many returned to the same environment that drove them to crime in the first place. The population, including African Americans, face a cycle of arrest and re-arrest, tearing communities and families apart.

The unexpected opportunity came when the federal Bureau of Prisons announced it had awarded a private social services provider a contract to turn a vacant building in Ward 5 into a residential reentry center for returning citizens in the area. It was a significant decision because the lone current provider, Hope Village, had been in operation for roughly 40 years, despite a controversial record of substandard services and resident escapes, according to various media reports.

No comment as deal mysteriously falls apart

The deal, however, fell apart at the eleventh hour. The owner of the proposed site for the new reentry center abruptly pulled out of the deal to lease the social services provider, Core DC, without explanation. “I can confirm we are not moving forward,” the vice president of the development company told The Washington Post. “No further comment. Thank you.”

Now, amid new revelations of problems plaguing Hope Village, many in the community are scratching their heads, wondering why the deal was scuttled and, more specifically, why the landlord, Douglas Development, walked away from the leasing arrangement.

Adding to the mystery is the relative silence of key players in this sad saga.

Laurene MacTaggart, a media spokesman for Douglas, did not respond to an email requesting comment for why Douglas Development pulled out of the deal.

Likewise, Advisory Neighborhood Commission Chair Jacqueline Manning also did not respond to an email asking whether she encouraged or advised Douglas Development to pull away from the deal.

Ward 5 Councilman Kenyan R. McDuffie also failed to respond to an email asking why he believed CORE failed to reach out to him during the federal contracting process when our reporting indicates that CORE apparently notified McDuffie’s office during the bid process at least twice and made several attempts to meet with him after the award.

CORE vows to push forward as residents search for answers

In the absence of a clear answer, residents have come up with a slew of theories. Was Hope Village behind a campaign in the community to shunt aside the new social service provider, CORE DC? Or, even more troubling, did Hope Village’s allies in government exert pressure on Douglas Development to walk away from the leasing deal?

This is pure speculation at this point. And the answers may never be known. But this much is clear: the neighborhoods in Northeast DC and beyond are right back where they started, with no obvious solution to a vitally important criminal-justice challenge that has beset them for years.

As it now stands, Core DC has vowed to continue to press forward with its efforts to bring a new, proven model of reentry to DC. Core Services, Core DC’s parent organization, has been providing reentry services to former inmates in New York for more than ten years. With a focus on equipping residents with the tools needed to land a stable job, Core has been touting its record of helping former inmates rebuild their lives after prison.

This model of reentry eludes DC as Hope Village and some politicians apparently seek to place obstacles in Core’s path. But any efforts to foil a new local provider could be complicated by the growing national dialogue around the need for fresh solutions to criminal justice issues.

Indeed, some people are asking why what should have been a straightforward hand-off has now dragged on for months without resolution. Two weeks ago, the National Legal and Policy Center, a nonprofit public interest group, sent a letter to BOP expressing “serious concerns” about the matter.

Hope Village’s spotty record continues to raise concerns

“Hope Village’s decades-long contractual arrangement with the federal government is troubling – not to mention puzzling – given the litany of problems widely associated with the halfway home operator,” the letter read. The NLPC called on the BOP to launch a comprehensive review of the procurement process “to eliminate any and all potential political bias that might be at play.”

In a reflection of Hope Village’s attempt to embed itself politically in the community, NLPC found that D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton has received $6,000 in political donations from the owners of Hope Village.

In a statement, Tom Anderson, Director of NLPC’s Government Integrity Project, said the questions about political bias derailing the procurement process were a legitimate response to the secrecy shrouding the actions of key players.

“Taxpayers have a right to know the decisions that impact the expenditure of public money,” he said in the statement. “Until the public gets those answers, a dark cloud of doubt will hang over this matter.”

Such concerns have taken on a new sense of urgency in recent weeks, particularly in the wake of a shocking report about lax security protocol at Hope Village. On May 14, NBC Washington published an investigative report detailing just how dire the situation is. Hope Village, the report found, is responsible for one in 10 of all halfway house escapes nationwide. It also noted that one of the halfway house escapees has been accused of murder.

The report has once again brought to the surface fears among community members that have been brewing for years due to a drip-drip of alarming reports involving Hope Village. In 2016, a nonprofit, nonpartisan civic organization focused on criminal justice reform sounded the alarm about the lack of review processes for residents accused of disciplinary violations. They urged the BOP not to renew Hope Village’s contract. An independent monitoring body called the Corrections Information Council also investigated conditions inside Hope Village and discovered what they deemed to be problematic practices. “Men have turned down the opportunity to be released from prison early to go to Hope Village because of the safety concerns,” CIC found.

It is this laundry list of problems that has community activists speaking up and demanding change. One longtime criminal justice expert in the community, Barrington Salmon, has gone so far as to launch a website itemizing the complaints against Hopeless Village and the years of negative news coverage focused on the halfway house. “It’s time to move on,” the site reads, “Hope Village is beyond repair.” The name of Salmon’s website, "Criminal Justice Watch", with a subheading, “Hopeless Village,” captures the deep-seated frustrations that have taken hold in the community.

The prospect of Hope Village remaining in place — even for another few months — is stoking unease among the growing chorus of voices calling for a new approach to reentry. That a much-needed solution, which seemed imminent months ago, could now be out of reach once again, is causing local advocates to wonder what is going on behind the scenes.

That could mean mounting pressure on local officials, including Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and Del. Norton, both of whom were criticized by the NLPC in the group’s letter to the BOP. And it also likely means additional questions about Douglas Development’s decision and role in this ongoing saga.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The state of Michigan has awarded $1.5 million to Richard Phillips who was locked up in prison for 45 years for a murder he didn’t commit. The $1.5 million seems like a lot of money, and it is, but Phillips couldn’t work a job that would have enabled him to earn a salary, a pension and Social Security Benefits because he was in prison.

Men and women cannot receive Social Security unless they earned at least 40 credits for 10 years of work, a  spokesman for the Social Security Administration said in 2015. “Social Security does not have a program that compensates wrongfully convicted individuals with no work history,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.