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The Miss America Organization has gone through a number of changes recently under current board of trustees chairman Gretchen Carlson and president/chief executive officer Regina Hopper.

The highest profile regarding those changes was the announcement in June of the removal of the swimsuit competition.

Those changes, in addition to a lack of communication, led representatives of boards from 21 states and the District of Columbia to sign a vote of no confidence statement and demand for the immediate resignation of Hopper, Carlson and the entire board of trustees for the organization.

Tennessee was one of those 21 states on the list, represented by Jane Alderson.

Jimmy Exum has been involved with the Miss Tennessee Scholarship Pageant for more than 50 years, nearly the entire time it’s been in Jackson. He’s the pageant’s president and producer now.

“You don’t devote 50 years of your life to something that you don’t think highly of or believe in,” Exum said on Friday. “Miss America and all the state organizations have awarded millions of dollars in scholarship money to the girls that compete each year.

“It’s a good thing that helps these girls with their college costs, and it’s been successful for so long. But we’re not happy with the direction it’s going in now.”

The statement lined out a few of the frustrations with the national organization.

“As dedicated members of our state and local communities who lend our reputations, financial support, and voluntary efforts to facilitate MAO’s long and powerful mission of empowering women to stand up and speak out, we find ourselves needing to use our own voices of leadership to express our profound disappointment regarding what, in our view, is the failed leadership of the entire MAO Board of Trustees led by Ms. Gretchen Carlson as its Chair and Ms. Regina Hopper as its President and CEO,” the statement said. “The recent ouster of two duly elected Trustees, followed by the resignations of two elected Miss Americas from the nine-member Board, have underscored our grave concerns regarding the direction in which MAO is headed, its financial viability, and the expected exercise of all duties attendant to each Trustee as required by law.

“We were promised transparency, competence, and adherence to best practices and good governance. The current Trustees and identified staff member have both individually and collectively failed to deliver on those promises and commitments. In our opinion their leadership has demonstrated that ‘Miss America 2.0’ is simply a new title for the same old tactics of obfuscation and fear-based governance.”

Exum said there’s been virtually no communication between the national organization and the state organization. State boards were notified of the coming change with the swimsuit competition two days before Carlson appeared on national television with the announcement.

“It was a directive with no input from us, and it’s like someone in charge where you work telling you they’re making these changes but they don’t know yet what those changes will look like,” Exum said. “It was like, there’s an election and we didn’t get to vote.”

Exum said there’s been no communication about how the Miss America competition in September would look, and the timing of Carlson’s announcement wasn’t good.

“Some state winners had already been crowned, and there were other states that still had to crown theirs,” Exum said. “That’s changing the rules in the middle of the game, and that wasn’t fair, either.”

Exum said the state competitions are held to a high standard of communication with the local pageants, and the national pageant isn’t living up to its standard.

“When we have all the local winners and we know who’s competing in Jackson for Miss Tennessee, we have meetings with all the pageant directors and workshops with the girls so everybody knows what’s going on,” Exum said. “We meet with the directors if we’re thinking about any changes. None of that has happened with Miss America.”

Exum said no one in the organization likes going to the extent they’ve gone to call for change, but it needed to be done.

“It needs to be resolved somehow, and hopefully this is a step toward that,” Exum said