Rob O'Dell, and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez

The Republic | azcentral.com

State schools Superintendent Diane Douglas lashed out this week over coverage of her department's inability to provide information on how much taxpayer money private and religious schools receive through Arizona's school-voucher program.

An Arizona Republic story published Saturday found that the Education Department's public accounting of money distributed to private schools through the Empowerment Scholarship Account program is opaque, incomplete and riddled with errors.

The Republic had sought the data for nearly two years in a series of public-records requests and meetings with Education Department staffers.

Despite repeated assurances from Douglas spokesman Stefan Swiat that the information would be provided in a timely matter, the department only released a list of recipient schools on Thursday — as the House of Representatives was voting on legislation to expand the program by as much as tenfold by 2022.

That list provided no full accounting.

To protect student privacy, the department withheld information about any school it said had fewer than 10 students using vouchers. And the list contained many entries that appeared to be duplicates: the same school name but with a different spelling, abbreviation, even a misplaced comma or space mark. Because each different version is listed as a different school, it is impossible for the public — and, apparently, state officials — to know how many students any given school enrolls, or how much tax money it receives.

Douglas' staff had told the newspaper they could not provide a complete list of private schools receiving public funds because the data had been entered by students' parents and state education officials were unable to decipher whether similar school names were, in fact, the same school.

MORE ON VOUCHERS: Did lawmakers get punked on school-voucher deal?

ESAs allow parents to take tax money that would otherwise go directly to their local public schools and put it toward private-school tuition, homeschooling, tutoring and other programs. Passed in 2011 as a program only for disabled children, the state Legislature has continued to expand it, now to all students.

After the newspaper published its story, Douglas sent an email to Republican lawmakers in an effort to defend her agency. "I am writing to you to respond to fake news that was published by a failing news organization," Douglas wrote. She added that The Republic's "so-called reporters" made claims that are "disingenuous at best or completely false."

Douglas' letter

Douglas' statements in her Monday letter to lawmakers don't always reflect the same discussions Republic reporters had with her staff, nor do they match the actual data the department released.

In the letter, which began, "Dear Republican Legislator," Douglas wrote:

"The so-called reporters asked for 'raw data' and said that they would happily clean up the data, so in good faith those entries were provided."

However, the list her department provided did not contain raw data. Instead, entries for most schools contained only an asterisk.

Department officials said those schools enrolled fewer than 10 students with empowerment accounts. But many of the schools on the list were obvious duplicates, making it impossible to know how many of those duplicates, when added up, actually total 10 or more such students.

The Republic offered to take the department’s entire database to try to assess the data, but officials objected, saying that could run afoul of student-privacy laws.

Douglas, in her Monday letter, focused on that privacy issue, writing:

"When we first agreed to provide these reporters with any data on the program, we made it clear that on sound advice from the Attorney General’s office that we would never provide data for entries with less than 10 students. I am committed to not violating student privacy laws."

But her department's database withheld data about numerous schools that appear to enroll more students than the 10-person privacy threshold.

For example, the data contained at least five entries with versions of the name Brophy College Preparatory, and at least six for Lamb's Gate Christian School.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel School was another notable case. The department's data listed separate school entries for:

Mount Carmel

Mount Carmel Catholic School

Our Lady Mount Caramel

Our Lady Mount Caramerl

Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Elementary

Our Lady of Mount Carmel School

Our Lady Of Mt Carmel

Our Lady Of Mt Carmel School

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Elementary

Our Lady of Mt. Carmel School

State officials treated each of those 12 entries as separate schools, and therefore withheld the enrollment and amount of tax money going to each school. The state's data for each "school" contained only an asterisk.

But even if only one student attended each version of the Mount Carmel school, the total enrollment would be more than 10.

In her letter, Douglas told lawmakers her department was willing to combine data for duplicated schools:

"The reporters claimed that we were unwilling to distinguish among similar school names such as "Brophy," "Brophy Prep" or "Brophy College Preparatory." Not only were we willing, but attached is a screen grab of all of those Brophy combinations assembled together in the report we sent them."

Education officials, though, had earlier told The Republic the opposite. In an interview shortly before the Legislature voted to expand the program, Douglas' staffers said that trying to determine which school children attended and combining entries was "bad data practice," including the multiple entries for Brophy. (There are five Brophy entries in the database.)

The department later offered to combine the five entries for Brophy, and sent back an image of the spreadsheet with the five versions of the name on one line. The entries for number of students and amount of tax money showed only asterisks because Brophy's school population was fewer than 10 ESA students, education officials said.

See for yourself in the state's ESA database that is provided here.

In all, the database contained scores, if not hundreds, of schools that had multiple entries that most likely needed to be combined. Education staffers told The Republic they would be willing to do more combination of entries.

But because the state says it tracks only the school names as parents enter them, any request to combine database entries would presumably be tantamount to a guess: The ESA program as it exists now has no mechanism to track the expenditures to ensure any given school listing is accurate.

Douglas’ chief of staff, Michael Bradley, told The Republic on Tuesday that Douglas sent the letter specifically to Republican lawmakers.

"We felt compelled to let them know that we do have data on ESAs since they just voted to expand them," he said. "We didn’t want them to be feeling that they should be regretting their vote.”

Lawmakers OK expansion, even without data

But full data about how the ESA program distributes tens of millions of dollars in tax money annually wasn't available to the public when lawmakers voted on legislation to make even more students eligible for vouchers — nor was it available to the lawmakers.

The Republican-controlled Legislature narrowly passed the legislation during a marathon session Thursday. Gov. Doug Ducey, who helped negotiate the deal, signed Senate Bill 1431 into law hours later.

The program has grown from about 2,400 kids and $30 million last year to 3,360 kids and $49 million this year — and is now set to grow even faster. The new law will cap the program at almost 10 times that size, 30,000 students.

Asked if seeing the data kept by the Education Department would have changed his support for expanding the legislation, Mesa Republican Sen. Bob Worsley said, "I don't want to get in another fight over this" program.

Worsley, who was crucial to its passage in the Senate, said he would have requested that the program be capped, regardless of the data.

He said, however, that he wants to see "much more transparency" from the program in the future.

VIEW FROM ROBERTS: Show us the (voucher) money

Worsley had not seen Douglas' email and was read it by a reporter. "She got a good line from Donald Trump," he said of her claim that the newspaper is "failing."

Rep. Regina Cobb, R-Kingman, did not respond to The Republic's request for an interview Tuesday. But earlier, the representative who helped ensure passage said she would have wanted to have the information on private schools before she cast her vote.

"How do we make decisions as lawmakers, as far as funding a program, when we don't even know if it's working?" Cobb said. "Boy, if you ever get that information, I would like to see it."

Worsley's amendment required schools that have 50 or more students who receive ESAs and that administer standardized tests to publicly make available the aggregate test scores of their students. Currently, private schools are not required to make test scores public, but few private schools are likely to meet the testing and enrollment criteria.

Ducey said Tuesday that the public "should expect transparency, and you should expect accountability where the dollars are being spent." The Republican governor said SB 1431 should improve the tracking and reporting of those dollars.

However, the bill does not require the state to identify the private schools that receive taxpayer dollars.

Bradley said Tuesday that Douglas' response to the newspaper’s story was influenced in part by an opinion piece by a Republic opinion writer accusing Douglas of incompetence.

The Republic was not the only target of Douglas' criticism in her letter. She wrote of the newspaper's Saturday report:

"A hack media lawyer chimed in and said that “he was shocked that state officials did not have accurate records readily available.” ... Well, I am shocked that he has never heard of FERPA (the Family and Educational Privacy Act) or student privacy."

That attorney was Dan Barr, a longtime expert on state media law and counsel to the First Amendment Coalition of Arizona.

Barr, when asked about the letter, laughed and said, "People need to come up with better insulting adjectives than 'so-called.' It reflects a lack of imagination and a lack of education."

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