Signs of fraud raise major red flags about expanding NC school vouchers | Opinion

Back in April, North Carolina legislators were all too happy to talk about the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program. Rep. Tricia Cotham and Sen. Mike Lee held a press conference, surrounding themselves with legislators and a handful of parents to announce their big goal for the 2023 legislative session: tripling the size of the state’s voucher program from $180 million to $550 million per year.

But for the past two weeks, they’ve gone silent. The reason: new data showing many private schools in North Carolina have been awarded more vouchers than they have students. The data raises some major red flags:

▪ 62 instances where schools received more vouchers than they have students, totaling $2.3 million in potential overpayments

▪ 449 vouchers, totaling $1.7 million, awarded to schools that failed to report enrollment data

▪ 24 private schools receiving voucher payments from the state after they stopped reporting to the state, usually a sign that a private school has closed.

There might be innocent explanations for some of these discrepancies. Private school enrollment data is entirely self-reported. But it also might be a sign of fraud. As WFAE reporter Ann Doss Helms reported this week, one of the schools that seemingly had more vouchers than students, Mitchener University Academy, has already been reported to the SBI.

What’s clear is that the voucher program lacks proper oversight. Previous research from Duke University’s Jane Wettach has shown that the Opportunity Scholarship voucher program is the most unaccountable, unregulated voucher program in the country. North Carolina is the only state that doesn’t require voucher schools to be accredited, use approved curriculum, hire certified teachers, participate in state testing, or meet minimum instructional time requirements.

The new data shows that financial oversight is similarly lacking.

Private voucher schools must certify their tuition policies and that a student is enrolled. But it’s unclear whether anyone is actually checking if these certifications are true.

Parents applying for a voucher for their child must provide a Social Security number and date of birth for their child and report their family income. However state law only requires the state to verify 6% of applications. That percentage drops to 4% if Cotham and Lee’s voucher bill becomes law.

It’s clearly insufficient. The onus is now on Cotham and Lee to explain how they can ensure the program has proper oversight before they vote to triple its size. Yet they remain silent.

Their silence, though disappointing, is hardly surprising. They’ve been avoiding other important questions about their voucher expansion plan, including:

▪ What public benefit is provided by opening the Opportunity Scholarship voucher — currently limited to families with incomes up to 3.7 times the federal poverty threshold — to millionaires and billionaires who already have their children enrolled in private schools, as Cotham and Lee propose?

▪ With 90% of voucher students attending religious schools, why should taxpayers be expected to subsidize private schools that indoctrinate children with outright falsehoods such as the idea that man walked with dinosaurs or that slavery wasn’t that bad? What about the private voucher schools that tell their students that our LGBTQ friends, family, and neighbors are evil “perverts”?

▪ Why do they think the rapid expansion of vouchers won’t create the same disastrous academic results that plagued similar voucher expansions in Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio? In these states, academic losses for voucher students have been on par with the negative impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the COVID pandemic.

▪ How do they expect to shovel half a billion per year to unaccountable voucher schools and fulfill their constitutional obligation to provide the remaining 1.5 million students in our inclusive public schools with a decent education? It was just this past November, after all, when the N.C. Supreme Court ordered legislators to implement the Leandro Plan to ensure we have adequately and equitably funded schools.

As these questions show, shoddy financial oversight and potential fraud aren’t the only reasons why vouchers are a bad idea for North Carolina. The new data is just the latest evidence that voucher expansion is a mistake. The only question that remains is whether voucher proponents will bother trying to justify this reckless agenda.

Kris Nordstrom is a Senior Policy Analyst at the North Carolina Justice Center. He previously spent nine years as a budget analyst with the N.C. General Assembly’s nonpartisan Fiscal Research Division.