Lindsay Wagner tells the strange story of crime without punishment in North Carolina, where the coach at a voucher school embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars, got a light sentence but kept his job. As Wagner points out, this would never happen in a public school; he would be fired and never hired by any other public school for a similar crime. What matters most: honesty or basketball?

When a coach at one of Fayetteville’s top private school basketball programs—a school that also happens to be the state’s top recipient of private school vouchers—pleaded guilty last summer in a Wake County courthouse to embezzling hundreds of thousands of tax withholding dollars he collected over eight years from the school’s employees, he received what some might consider an odd sentence.

Among the punishments handed down by the court for Heath Vandevender’s embezzlement activity at Trinity Christian School was 90 days in jail. He’s completing that sentence this fall by spending his weekends at the Cumberland County Detention Center.

But the sentence also allowed Vandevender to keep his job, despite having embezzled significant sums of money while employed by Trinity Christian—a school that has received more than $1.7 million in publicly-funded vouchers since 2014.
In between his weekend stints in jail, county and school officials say Vandevender continues coaching basketball and teaching journalism to high school students at Trinity Christian during the week.

It’s not the kind of thing that would typically happen at a public school.

“As a practical matter, we think it highly unlikely we would continue to employ this person given these facts unless there was something extraordinary going on,” said Ruben Reyes, the Associate Superintendent of Human Resources for Cumberland County Schools.

There are a couple of things that are extraordinary about Trinity Christian.

It’s the state’s number one recipient of private school vouchers—and it’s got one of the most competitive private school basketball programs in the state of North Carolina.

But that’s not all. North Carolina law allows voucher schools to hire convicted felons.

While Trinity Christian has risen to the top of the pack for producing elite basketball players, it’s not the only “top” distinction the school possesses. It’s also the state’s top recipient of private school vouchers (known formally as the Opportunity Scholarship Program), taking in more than $1.7 million in public funds since 2014 to subsidize tuition for low-income students, according to public records.

Despite the fact that the publicly-funded school’s coach and high school journalism teacher is now a convicted felon, that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to work at the school in between stints in jail—or stopped the school from receiving public funds.

That’s because there is nothing in the school voucher law or associated regulations that would prevent a school receiving funds from the Opportunity Scholarship Program from employing someone who has been convicted of a felony. Only the head of the school is required to undergo and submit to the state a criminal background check, explained Kathryn Marker, a representative with the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority (NCSEAA), the agency tasked with overseeing the state’s school voucher program.