Louisiana Wastes Tax Money on Creationist School

The Louisiana Department of Education should never have approved New Living Word School in Ruston to take voucher students transferring from public schools. The 122 students attending the church-affiliated school when the state approved it in 2012 for the voucher program were getting most of their instruction via DVD, the principal told the News-Star in Monroe. The school lacked teachers and facilities to handle an influx of new students but was proceeding "on faith," he said at the time.
Even so, the department approved New Living Word for 300 voucher students when Gov. Bobby Jindal persuaded lawmakers last year to offer the program statewide. The actual number at the school ended up being fewer than 100 for 2012-13 -- but that almost doubled the size of the school. And it was still a lot of taxpayer money going to a campus that was so woefully unprepared.
New Living Word didn't last long, though. As of June 28, the school was out of the Louisiana Scholarship Program.
But it wasn't the questionable academic setup that was its demise. State Superintendent John White removed it from the voucher program because of reported financial improprieties.
An audit by Postlethwaite & Netterville found the school violated state rules by charging more in tuition and fees for voucher students than for students paying their own way, according to a Department of Education statement. The non-voucher students were getting the benefit of in-kind services that the school used to reduce their tuition costs, the auditors found. That is not allowed under state law.
The school principal denied the accusations in the audit and told the News-Star that New Living Word has been made a scapegoat by the state.
Mr. White argues otherwise. The state will have "zero tolerance for fiscal mismanagement of taxpayer dollars," he said in the department's statement. That is as it should be.
But it is still puzzling why the department didn't do more due diligence before approving the school to take voucher students.
In fact, the process last year for choosing schools for voucher students was backwards. The Department of Education OK'd a list of private and religious schools statewide to take low-income public school students whose schools were graded C, D or F by the state. After that list was compiled, the state came up with academic and other standards for the voucher program.
In 2011, vouchers were used only in Orleans Parish in a pilot program. Even then, there were signs of academic weaknesses in some of the schools. It was no surprise, then, when the 2012-13 academic results for voucher students statewide were unimpressive.
LEAP scores for third- through eighth-graders released in May showed that only 40 percent of voucher students scored at or above grade level. That compares with a statewide average of 69 percent for all students.
Seven schools in Jefferson and Orleans parishes posted such poor results that they are being barred from accepting new voucher students this fall, although they can keep those they already have.
New Living Word's iLEAP scores for third-, fifth- and sixth-graders were substantially lower than their counterparts in Lincoln Parish public schools and the state as a whole, according to the Department of Education report.
Those poor results wouldn't have triggered the school being removed from the voucher program this year, though. A school has to post three years of poor LEAP results before getting sanctioned.
But the audit results accelerated the process. The roughly 150 voucher students that had been enrolled at New Living Word for the fall semester are being immediately transferred to other schools.
That is an inconvenience for those families, but it is better to move the children. If the state had applied acceptable standards to the school last year, the voucher students never would have been there.
Now the state is left trying to get back more than $375,000 in tax dollars that New Living Word overcharged for students in the voucher program. And the public has to wonder why the state didn't guard its money more carefully from the beginning.