This is a new twist on the voucher scam. In South Carolina, a state audit revealed that about one-third of the vouchers awarded by the state went to students who returned to their local public school or never left it.
Zack Koeske of The State reported:
More than a third of the nearly 3,000 South Carolina students awarded taxpayer-funded school vouchers last year later withdrew or were removed from the program due to eligibility concerns, S.C. Department of Education data shows.
The department suspended the accounts of 1,229 voucher recipients last school year after they were flagged during enrollment checks conducted to verify that participants had left their zoned school districts, an education department spokesman said.
To be eligible for a voucher last year, a student could not be enrolled full-time in their local district.
About 1 in 5 of the suspended accounts were reinstated after further review confirmed their eligibility. The remaining 1,005 suspended participants, all of whom had already received at least one $1,500 scholarship payment, left the program.
All of the recipients who were removed from the program due to enrollment verification had been enrolled at their zoned public schools, S.C. Department of Education spokesman Jason Raven wrote in an emailed statement.
The department recovered all unused funds that remained in the scholarship accounts of former participants, but did not attempt to recover any scholarship money those participants had already spent…
Launched last year, South Carolina’s school voucher program publicly subsidizes low- and middle-income families that send their K-12 children to private schools or public schools outside their residence area.
Families making no more than twice the federal poverty level, or $62,400 for a family of four, were eligible for $6,000 vouchers last school year.
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