Below is a political opinion column by Bobby Harrison:
The Mississippi Legislature’s insistence of not requiring oversight has resulted in a way for private schools to “double dip,” or receive money from two separate state programs to educate the same handful of students.
There is currently no mechanism in state law to allow state officials to determine whether double dipping is occurring. More importantly, there is nothing in state law to prevent double dipping from occurring.
So, maybe the private schools are double dipping and maybe they are not. And this is not an effort to demonize private schools — many of which are doing stellar work — but to point out the lack of state oversight and to question the wisdom of sending public funds to private schools.
There are two primary programs in Mississippi that provide public funds and state tax credit funds to private schools: the Education Scholarship Account and the Children’s Promise Act.
The programs overlap in terms of the children the private schools must educate to receive the state benefits. To receive money through an Education Scholarship Account of up to $7,829 per year to attend a private school, a student must be designated as a special needs student. The special needs designation could be the result of a physical, mental or emotional issue. An attention deficit disorder, for instance, could result in a special needs designation.
On the other hand, students who make private schools eligible to receive the Children’s Promise Act tax credit benefits must have “a chronic illness or physical, intellectual, developmental or emotional disability” or be eligible for the free lunch program or be a foster child.
No more than $3 million per year can be spent through the Education Scholarship Account while the Children’s Promise Act is capped at $9 million annually.
The bottom line is that state officials do not know how many students the private schools are serving through the Children’s Promise Act state tax credits.
The Mississippi Department of Revenue, which has a certain amount of oversight of the Children’s Promise Act funds, has said in the past it knew the number of children being served in the first year a school received the state tax credit funds, but the agency does not know whether the number of students being served in following years changes.
In short, there is nothing in state law that would prevent a private school from receiving the maximum benefit of $405,000 annually while enrolling only one child fitting the definition that would make the school eligible to receive the tax credit funds.
There is a little more oversight of the Education Scholarship Account funds, though that oversight has been slow and has only occurred after a legislative watchdog group pointed out the lax oversight.
If a school has fewer than 10 students receiving the ESA funds, the state Department of Education will not release the exact number, citing privacy concerns. But the Department of Education has released the amount of ESA funds each school received during the 2023-24 school year.
According to that information, multiple schools receiving those ESA funds but educating fewer than 10 ESA students also are receiving significant Children’s Promise Act tax credit funds. According to the Department of Revenue, as of January, six schools had received the maximum tax credit funds of $405,000 for calendar year 2024.
Three of those schools also received Education Scholarship Account funds for fewer than 10 students. For instance, one private school received $16,461 in Education Scholarship Account funds, or most likely money for two students.
If the students receiving the ESA funds were the same ones making the school eligible for the $405,000 in tax credit funds, that would mean the state was paying $210,730 per student whereas the average per pupil spending in the public schools is about $11,500 per pupil in state and local funding.
Of course, state law does not prohibit private schools from educating only one child with special needs and being eligible for the maximum tax credit benefit of $405,000 annually.
Perhaps it seems far-fetched that a private school would be educating only one child to be eligible to receive up to $405,000 in tax credit funds.
But it also seems far-fetched that for years the students receiving the Education Scholarship Account funds were mandated by state law to use the money to go to schools equipped to meet their special education needs. Yet, research by the Legislature’s Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee (PEER) found the students were going to private schools that in some instances did not have any special education teachers and in some cases the students were still getting those services from the public schools.
Perhaps the Legislature’s PEER Committee needs to do some more research to determine whether double dipping is occurring.
-- Article credit to Bobby Harrison of Mississippi Today --
