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Earlier this month, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne announced a plan to clear the state’s massive backlog of reimbursement requests for Empowerment Scholarship Account expenses. Instead of scrutinizing each request before cutting a check with taxpayer money, the Arizona Department of Education would now auto-approve any expenses under $2,000.
Horne sold the idea as a way to clear most of the roughly 89,000 outstanding reimbursement requests from parents in one fell swoop. However, considering that the ESA program has already been a boondoggle of wasteful spending — with parents successfully netting public money for luxury items — and that ESA fraud has been a persistent issue, the reaction to Horne’s announcement was swift and mostly negative. Beth Lewis, the executive director of Save Our Schools and a frequent Horne critic, called the new reimbursement process a “recipe for disaster.”…