Three former employees of the Arizona Department of Education were charged with conspiracy and money laundering. Prosecutors say it was a scheme to defraud more than $600,000 from an education voucher program that has drawn criticism for skyrocketing costs and lax state regulation.
Prosecutors said Thursday that the three employees approved applications for 17 students — five of whom were fictitious — admitting them to the voucher program using forged birth certificates and special education evaluations.
Delores Lashay Sweet, Dorrian Lamarr Jones and Jennifer Lopez, who were fired from the Department of Education last year, are accused of using the money for their own benefit, such as on luxury purchases. Two of Sweet’s adult children, Jadakah Celeste Johnson and Raymond Lamont Johnson Jr., were also charged with conspiracy and money laundering.
“They created ghost students with forged birth certificates — children who did not exist — and gave them false disability diagnoses that made them eligible for larger amounts of funding,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, whose office is investigating other suspected abuses of children’s rights. the voucher program.
No attorneys for the former Department of Education employees or Sweet’s two adult children could be found in the lawsuits.
Phone messages left late Thursday afternoon for Sweet and Jones, as well as a number listed for both Jadakah and Raymond Johnson, were not immediately returned. Attempts to obtain Lopez’s phone number were unsuccessful.
The Democratic attorney general said the case shows that the voucher program is an easy target for fraud and that the Republican-majority Legislature should take steps to reduce the potential for fraud in the voucher program.
Sen. John Kavanagh, a Republican who supports the vouchers, said he doesn’t see the problem as fraud within the Empowerment Scholarships Account program, but rather as fraud at the agency that administers it.
“I don’t think it’s any more burdensome to the ESA than if a bank employee steals money from the banking system,” Kavanagh said. “It (the problem) is about the people, not the program.”
Mayes said investigators were not notified of the alleged fraud by the Education Department, which administers the voucher program, but rather by a credit union that noticed unusually large withdrawals.
In a statement, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne disputed that his office did not notify the attorney general’s office of the fraud. He said his office alerted Mayes’ office about concerns about two of the three employees. He also said he has increased scrutiny of the program and reported other cases of suspected abuse of the voucher program to Mayes’ office.
“Our discovery of the activities of the two former staffers is consistent with my determination to root out potential fraud and abuse,” Horne said.
The voucher program allows parents to use public money for private school tuition and other education costs. It started in 2011 as a small program for disabled children. But it was expanded repeatedly over the next decade until it became available to all students in 2022.
Originally estimated at a cost of $64 million for the current fiscal year, budget analysts now say that figure could exceed $900 million.
The changes to Arizona’s voucher program resulted in a sharp increase in participants. Before the expansion, nearly 12,000 students participated in the program – including children with disabilities, those living on Native American reservations and children in low-performing schools. Now that all students can apply for the vouchers, more than 75,000 students are participating.
Critics say the expansion is a drain on public coffers, while advocates say the expansion will allow parents to choose the best school for their children.
About 75% of students who received vouchers immediately after the program expanded had not previously attended an Arizona public school, according to Department of Education data reported in 2022. That suggests the state subsidies largely went to students whose families already paid private school education. ____ Associated Press writer Rio Yamat in Las Vegas contributed to this report.
