FORT WAYNE, Ind. — Millions of your tax dollars were when two virtual charter schools reported to the state they had more students enrolled than they actually did.

When the state dishes out funding for schools, whether they be public, private, or charter, the more students the school has the more funding it receives. $86 million of that funding was divvied out to Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, both of which are now defunct.

An audit discovered $68 million of that funding was fraudulently given to the schools because the schools inflated enrollments by thousands of students over nine years. Andy Downs, a political science professor at Purdue University-Fort Wayne, tells Indy Politics not all of the blame for the error is on the charter schools.

“Whether there was an intentional misleading here or a mistake, some money got misappropriated and that’s a problem,” Downs said. “This is one of the challenges when you create a ‘diversified public education system’, because there are different accounting standards and accountability standards at play here.”

He said it’s naive to start with the assumption that someone intentionally tried to defraud Indiana’s tax payers. This begs the question of why the error went unchecked for so long without the State Department of Education knowing about it?

“It’s a perfectly fine question that becomes one of ‘what was the work load in that department’ and “were their ever procedures put in place to catch something like this,” asked Downs. “Both could come into play here. Certainly they had plenty to deal with in terms of the change in workload because of the testing.”

Downs said moving forward the priority of the DOE should be to simplify both the accounting and accountability standards so it can be easier to catch these kinds of oversights.

 

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