Two nonprofit news organizations in Oklahoma—The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch—teamed up to discover a misuse of federal funding by special interest groups. One such group was Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. The state received $39 million to aid students during the pandemic.

Millions in federal relief money meant to help Oklahoma students during the pandemic was misspent at the hand of special interest groups who gave preferential treatment to private schoolers while hundreds of needy children missed out on financial aid, a state audit has found.

The Stay in School program provided tuition assistance of up to $6,500 for private school students whose families were financially affected by the pandemic.

An audit released Tuesday also confirmed flaws in how the state handled the Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet pandemic relief program. A joint investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch last year revealed how families spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bridge the Gap money on video game consoles, Christmas trees and grills.

Both programs were funded through the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, a pot of flexible federal money intended to give governors the power to fund educational programs during the pandemic…

Before he was elected State Superintendent last year, Ryan Walters oversaw the implementation of the pandemic programs funded with federal relief money while he was executive director of the pro-school reform nonprofit Every Kid Counts Oklahoma and after Stitt appointed him Secretary of Education in September 2020. State auditors were unable to find any contract authorizing Every Kid Counts Oklahoma to oversee the programs.

E-mail records obtained by Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier show Walters issued a “blanket approval” for purchases of all vendor items available on the ClassWallet platform, after the company gave him a chance to restrict which items could be purchased….

State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd’s audit found $1.8 million in questioned costs for the Bridge the Gap Program and $6.5 million for the Stay in School program. The report found programs were overseen by individuals and private organizations who were unqualified, didn’t have contracts with the state authorizing them to perform the work and were granted access to confidential student records.

The audit found that almost 20% of purchases through the Bridge the Gap program were spent on non-educational items, against grant guidelines.

According to Byrd’s report, administrators of the Stay in School program were involved in a “deliberate operation to give selected private schools and individuals preferential treatment by allowing early access for application submission prior to the date this program was offered to the general public.”

Jennifer Carter, a prominent school choice advocate and president of Libertas Consulting LLC was named as an administrator for the Stay in School program administrator without entering into a contract with the state, the audit found.

Carter is a senior advisor for former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos’s education privatization organization Federation for Children, served as chief of staff and campaign manager for former State Superintendent Janet Barresi and has been involved in multiple school-choice efforts in Oklahoma. ClassWallet also listed Carter as a district administrator.

With Carter’s direction, five, unnamed private schools were given preferential treatment for the Stay in School program, the audit found.

Students from the preferred schools were awarded the maximum $6,500 per-student and received enrollment exceptions for children who had not previously attended, the audit found.

After funds ran dry, 657 students of low-income families who qualified for the Stay in School program did not get the financial assistance. More than $5.3 million went to families who said they did not have a pandemic-related financial hardship. The audit also found private schools received $1.8 million in excess of families’ tuition responsibilities.

In a statement to The Frontier, Carter said the American Federation for Children did not bill the state for its work on the program.

“As the nation’s leading voice for education freedom, AFC was happy to offer advice to the state around the implementation of the Governor’s Stay in School Fund GEER program,” Carter said. “The Stay in School Fund, which was aimed at minimizing students’ education disruption during COVID, served almost 1900 kids with tuition assistance. We gladly provided this service at no expense to taxpayers….”

The state auditor said:

“This was a tangled web of government agencies, non-profit organizations, and non-government individuals representing special interest groups managing millions of tax dollars with no contracts and no written agreements,” Byrd said. “Sadly, millions of tax dollars were misspent because certain individuals who were put in charge of managing these programs seemingly ignored federal grant guidelines.”

Wasn’t it charitable of the American Federation for Children to divert money away from impoverished children to private school students, at no cost to the state?