Arizona Parents’ Nightmare Shows It Matters How States Implement School Choice

Accursed Accurso

Following the election of Republican Tom Horne as the state’s superintendent of public instruction in November, families cheered—hoping that a better director of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program would be appointed.

Horne wanted an ESA supporter to manage the program, so he appointed Christine Accurso, an activist who had led the campaign to protect universal expansion of access to Arizona’s version of education savings accounts from a ballot initiative that sought to overturn it.

Unfortunately, Accurso didn’t prove up to the task. In the ensuing months, she frequently made changes to how the ESA program operated, nearly always making it harder for parents to use their accounts. Parents grew increasingly upset with seemingly arbitrary policy changes and the ever-growing backlog of reimbursements for expenses.

From obstructing and preventing parents’ access to the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program to allegedly violating the privacy of hundreds of Arizona families, Accurso guaranteed that few would mourn her eventual resignation.

Unpopular Decisions
As tens of thousands began applying for Arizona’s ESA program in late 2022 and early 2023, Accurso hit the brakes via numerous policy changes that, in the name of “accountability,” reduced accessibility and usability for parents.

One of her more unpopular decisions was to halt the issuing of “ESA debit cards,” which allowed families to spend money directly on education expenses, instead directing families new to the program to use the online ClassWallet portal.

However, not every eligible education vendor was accessible via the ClassWallet portal, especially as some vendors had complained about not being paid for their services for weeks or longer due to the Arizona Department of Education’s backlog of expense reviews. This posed a particular challenge to families of students with special needs, who were more likely to use services that weren’t yet in the portal.

Accurso blamed her refusal to issue new ESA debit cards to new program applicants on several shifting “obstacles.”

In a March email, she argued that allowing parents direct access to their funds would be “tax dollars immediately spent without accountability,” even though ESA parents had to submit all receipts for review before the next quarterly disbursement.

A 2018 report by Arizona’s auditor general, however, found that misspending via ESA debit cards amounted to less than 1%  of total ESA spending, although it recommended several upgrades in system administration to reduce misspending.

A more recent audit concluded that “concerns with debit card administration have largely been addressed.” Indeed, the rate of improper payments to unapproved merchants had been reduced to just 0.001%.

In an April email, Accurso said ESA debit cards were being distributed, albeit on an individual basis rather than as a blanket policy as in previous administrations. But she said her office had lagged due to “the massive backlog of pre-paid card transactions” aided by ClassWallet, a third-party vendor that she had pushed the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts office to use.

Changing Qualifications

That backlog, however, to a great extent actually was due to Accurso’s own decision to manually review every single ESA transaction rather than to adopt a risk-based review process that approved routine transactions, with greater scrutiny applied only where warranted. Arizona’s auditor general recommended such a risk-based review years ago.

In two public meetings early this year, Accurso’s office said ESA debit cards couldn’t be issued based on a fear of “auditing our office.” The auditor general, however, had given previous administrations high marks for oversight of the debit cards.

Accurso also routinely changed the qualifications for what did and didn’t qualify for ESA funds. Several emails obtained by The Daily Signal show that Accurso consistently found excuses for not covering educational expenses that qualified for funding under previous Arizona Department of Education administrations and in other states with education savings accounts.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/05/the-incompetent-who-almost-ruined-arizonas-school-choice-program

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It's Begun: Some Schools Are Reinstating Mask Mandates for Children

COVID is endemic. People are still going to get it, regardless of vaccination status. And many more will contract the virus multiple times. It will be like flu season, folks, which also has a vaccine that can prevent severe illness or death but is not a silver bullet against infection. It’s not being reported anymore, but I wouldn’t be shocked if the COVID and influenza vaccine efficacy is similar, around 40-50 percent. Take the shot, don’t take the shot, but the experts self-immolated when they said if you take the vaccine, you’d be shielded forever.  

And we’re back to the window dressing that is mask-wearing. It’s been documented for months now that store-bought masks don’t work. KN95 masks are useless for kids because they don’t fit properly; their faces are too small. But it gets better: even for adults, this mask, marketed as the Rolls-Royce of face coverings, did nothing to stop the spread. Still, a Silver Spring, Maryland, school decided to wrap these kids’ faces up because some students tested positive.

COVID is over. The Left may not want to admit it because it helped them win the 2020 election, and the panic peddlers yearn for the days of mass infection to further test the limits of government power. Not anymore. The pandemic is done. Every aspect of social life is back, and lockdowns aren’t coming back.  

Science fiction has become official policy on COVID, which, if you think about it, isn’t all that shocking since progressives think that biological males can become women, have babies, and menstruate. If you can stomach that delusional hayride, believing that masks will curb the spread of the coronavirus isn’t too far off the reservation.

https://townhall.com//tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/09/05/the-covid-mask-karens-are-targeting-children-again-n2627987

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California Mom Wins Settlement Against School District That Socially Transitioned Her Daughter

California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent. The school district still refuses to admit that it’s at fault.

Many are calling this a landmark case, saying it will make other school districts across the country think twice before transitioning kids behind their parents’ backs.

Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand, “This is a great development in the overall move to stop mistreating children based on gender identity declarations at school. When California is debating the issue of whether or not to inform parents if their child makes a declaration or is accommodated as the opposite sex, this is also timely.”

At the beginning of her sixth-grade year, a friend invited Alicia to the school’s Equality Club, headed by two seventh-grade teachers, Lois Caldeira and Kelly Baraki. While there, the teachers told her that she was bisexual and later on identified her as transexual. (Alicia wasn’t sure what either of those terms meant, but trusted the teachers, was given more material to read, and believed them.)

Later, in the spring, Alicia went to the school counselor because she was depressed and stressed. She had weekly meetings with the counselor as well as Caldeira and the principal. Alicia was informed that she was depressed and stressed because she was “not being who she was” and that if she became her “true self,” she would get better.

According to the legal complaint, Caldeira and Baraki identified students for the school’s Equality Club “based on comments students made to them, comments that they overheard students make to others, and their own observations of students in the classroom setting, and otherwise. Once they identified students for the club, Caldeira and Baraki would invite them to participate.”

In a leaked recording from a 2021 California Teachers Association conference, these teachers discussed how they kept meetings private and “stalked” students online for recruits.

“When we were doing our virtual learning—we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work,” Baraki admitted. “One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”

Spreckels Union School District adopted a “Parental Secrecy Policy,” ensuring that staff at Buena Vista would “conceal from parents that their minor children had articulated confusion about their gender identity, evinced a desire to change their gender identity, or assumed or expressed a new gender identity, unless the student expressly authorized the parents to be informed.”

Remarkably, Spreckels Union would “intentionally deceive parents regarding students’ new gender identity and expression by, among other things, not publishing the Parental Secrecy Policy on the Spreckels Union website, using students’ birth names and pronouns in communications with parents despite using students’ new names and pronouns when parents were not there, instructing students they were not to tell their parents about their new gender identity or expression because their parents ‘couldn’t be trusted,’ and otherwise concealing those facts from parents.”

Devastatingly, the school’s actions drove a wedge between Konen and Alicia.

These are tactics promoted and encouraged by teachers unions such as the California Teachers Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association, as well as the union for school counselors, the American School Counselor Association.

They result from common attitudes among the education establishment and others on the political Left who view parents as potential threats to their own children if they don’t accept LGBTQ ideology.

For example, Peter Renn, an attorney for the LGBTQ legal organization Lambda Legal, said, “Outside of school, these students may similarly face potential hostility at home because of who they are. For example, involuntarily outing a student as LGBTQ to their parents can very well lead to them getting kicked out of the home in some circumstances.”

Thankfully, during Alicia’s eighth-grade year, she was learning at home due to COVID-19 school shutdowns. This is when, in Alicia’s words, she “ended up being out of control of the school” and figured out who she really was—a girl.

Now, five years after Alicia started being transitioned by her school, she and her mom have received counseling, and their relationship has been restored.

Konen and Alicia’s lawyer, Mark Trammel, are calling on parents across the country to be pro-active and realize that this is not just something that happens in California. He says that his office has likely received calls from parents in all 50 states who have gone through something similar to Konen’s situation.

Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for biblical worldview and strategic engagement, told The Washington Stand:

This situation is further evidence that many in the education system view parents as a threat to children. Parents need to be very careful about the environments and people they entrust their children to. There are a lot of ‘nice’ people who will do terrible things to you and your children.

Konen advises parents to be fully involved in their children’s lives; do their research on their school’s faculty, curriculum, and clubs; and listen to their intuition.

Backholm said, “I am encouraged by the result of this lawsuit, not only because it is appropriate under the circumstances, but because it will hopefully deter other schools from doing something similar in the future. When significant things are happening in a child’s life, parents need to be the first to know, not the last. Schools that do not believe that should quickly be reformed or cease to exist.”

Kilgannon agreed. “No one can ‘do over’ even one second of childhood, never mind the years that can be consumed by this evil and the irreparable harm that is done. Let’s celebrate this victory and remember it is but one battle in the ongoing war to protect children and parents.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/05/california-mom-wins-settlement-against-school-district-that-socially-transitioned-her-daughter

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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