‘Kids were taken advantage of’: Bloomington schools staffer says she was tricked into vouching for contractor in food-aid fraud

An administrator with a major metro school district who worked during the pandemic with a defendant in the Feeding Our Future trial to deliver food to needy children testified Tuesday that she felt used for a fraud scheme.

“I feel taken advantage of, I feel the kids were taken advantage of,” said Dinna Wade-Ardley, director of educational equity at Bloomington Public Schools.

Wade-Ardley also testified that she inadvertently lied in an email on behalf of one of the defendants to make the alleged fraud appear legitimate.

Wade-Ardley testified Wednesday and Thursday in the joint trial of seven defendants who are accused of falsely reporting the number of meals they served underprivileged children in order to receive federal reimbursement through the federal child nutrition programs. They are charged with allegedly stealing $40 million, and face a total of 41 criminal charges, including money laundering, fraud, and bribery. The trial is currently in its third week of testimony and is expected to last a total of six to eight weeks.

Wade-Ardley testified that during 2021, she worked with defendant Mukhtar Shariff to deliver food on Saturdays at Oak Grove Middle School. There, she testified that she delivered between 500 and 600 meals to families who showed up at the school that day. This amounted to packing dry groceries in a bag, for people to cook into meals at home.

At its peak, she estimated delivering 1,000 meals on some of those Saturdays.

Mukhtar and others coordinated supplying the food, she testified, from a food site at Dar Al Farooq, a Bloomigton mosque. That food site was run by the company Mind Foundry Foundation.

Federal prosecutors showed Wade-Ardley the meal claims that Mind Foundry-Dar Al Farooq made to the state Department of Education during the same time period she helped serve the meals at Oak Grove Middle School. The food site claimed to serve 2,000 meals a day, seven days a week in January 2021, for a total of 14,000 meals a week. Numbers like these repeated for many months of that year. Wade-Ardley sighed when shown these numbers.

“You have a look on your face,” U.S. Assistant Attorney Joe Thompson said in response to Wade-Ardley’s reaction. “Can you explain that?”

“It’s a lot of meals,” Wade-Ardley responded.

“Did you and your employees distribute that many meals on Saturdays?” Thompson asked.

“No,” Wade-Ardley said. “We have less than 10,000 students in the Bloomington Public Schools district.”

Thompson showed Wade-Ardley invoices of a company that Mukhtar ran that billed the federal government more than $192,000, claiming to serve nearly 48,000 meals to needy children in August 2021. Thompson asked Wade-Ardley if she would have liked to know that Mukhtar was billing for this many meals at the time she was working with him. “Yes,” she responded.

“Why is that?” Thompson asked.

“I would have known what kind of people I was dealing with,” she said.

Attorney Frederick Goetz, who is representing Mukhtar, emphasized in questioning Wade-Ardley that she saw “real food” get delivered to “real people — week after week, month after month.”

“Yes, sir,” Wade-Ardley responded.

Goetz also showed a cellphone video of a line of cars snaking around the school to pick up meals during the pandemic. Wade-Ardley testified that the video accurately captured what she saw at the Oak Grove Middle School site she worked at. Goetz also emphasized that the food site wasn’t limited to serving students in the school district, which Wade-Ardley agreed with.

Goetz said the meals his client’s business listed in state documents were served at both Oak Grove Middle School and Dar Al Farooq, which was just a 10-minute drive from the school.

“You never visited Dar Al Farooq?” Goetz asked.

“No, sir,” Wade-Ardley said.

“You don’t know how many meals were served at Dar Al Farooq,” Goetz asked.

“No, sir,” Wade-Ardley said again.

The trial is part of a larger investigation federal prosecutors have described as the nation’s largest coordinated COVID-19 fraud against the government. Seventy people were charged in the case for stealing $250 million. Eighteen defendants have pleaded guilty and await sentencing.

‘I don’t like lying’

During testimony, Thompson walked Wade-Ardley through an email that was drafted for her by Khalid Omar, who worked with the food site. Khalid, who Wade-Ardley said was a former Bloomington Public Schools colleague before working with the food site, is not a defendant in the trial and is not charged in the broader Feeding Our Future case.

The email, sent by Khalid to Wade-Ardley in July 2021, was titled “Partnership Information.” Khalid drafted language for Wade-Ardley to sign that endorsed Mind Foundry, which also did business as ThinkTechAct Foundation.

“Greetings everyone,” the draft language for Wade-Ardley read. “The past six months have been amazing to partner and serve our families in Bloomington Public Schools. ThinkTechAct Foundation Inc. in a partnership with Dar Al Farooq has a formal partnership with Bloomington Public Schools to provide healthy meals to our families. As part of this partnership, meals are distributed weekly at Oak Grove Middle School from 9am to 11am. We routinely serve up to 3,000 children through this partnership. Consider this email acknowledgement and testament to this partnership and its reach and impact in the Bloomington community.”

Wade-Ardley sent a follow-up email to Mukhtar questioning the “3,000 children” language in the draft email.

“I am not sure 3000 is the correct number,” she wrote. “Maybe 1,000 each week!”

Mukhtar wrote back to her: “I’ll explain via phone in a minute.”

In the phone call, Wade-Ardley testified, Mukhtar explained to her that the 3,000 children number is the number of children served between the Dar Al Farooq site and the meals dropped off at Oak Ridge Middle School. Wade-Ardley said she accepted Mukhtar’s explanation and signed off on the language.

Months later, Mind Foundry would be implicated in the Feeding Our Future scandal and Mukhtar would be one of several people charged in the case.

“What was your reaction when this became an issue?” Thompson asked Wade-Ardley.

“Very disturbed,” she said.

“Did you have to have a conversation with the school district about it?” Thompson asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“How did that go?” Thompson asked.

“It was not a good conversation, but they are always supportive of me,” Wade-Ardley said.

Thompson also asked Wade-Ardley how she now felt about signing off on the email endorsing Mind Foundry and sending it to others.

“It disturbs me. I don’t like giving false information,” Wade-Ardley said.

“Why did you do it?” Thompson asked.

“I trusted Omar and [Mukhtar] Shariff,” she said.

Chief among the defense’s arguments is that federal waivers to the Child Nutrition Program during the pandemic allowed for-profit organizations to participate in the program. Waivers allowing meals to be combined and flexibility on the meal patterns paved the way for for-profit ventures to claim lots of meals and make money from the food program during the pandemic, defense attorneys have argued throughout the case.

Goetz homed into this line of thought at times during cross-examination. He noted that Wade-Ardley testified to packing multiple meals into the bags she gave to families at Oak Grove Middle School.

A week’s worth of food for a family of four, who each eat three meals a day, could mean one bag of groceries could technically contain 84 meals, Goetz reasoned in a question to Wade-Ardley.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said.

The post ‘Kids were taken advantage of’: Bloomington schools staffer says she was tricked into vouching for contractor in food-aid fraud appeared first on Sahan Journal .