Grand Jury: State’s handling of GEER programs is troubling, but not criminal

The Oklahoma governor and his political allies in charge of $18 million in pandemic relief funds have the programs intended to help both low-income and privately educated students in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic , mismanaged, said a report released Tuesday by the state’s multicounty grand jury.

Grand jurors released a 31-page report on Oct. 10 after hearing testimony in September and October about two programs funded by the federal governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund. The report, led by Republican Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, said there were no grounds for criminal charges or intentional corruption. However, the handling of federal subsidies was “irresponsible, disappointing and unjustifiable,” it said.

The grand jury recommended several improvements to education spending, including grant administration training, grant administration guidelines, and training for elected officials, agency staff and others on procurement standards, bidding and conflicts of interest.

Gov. Kevin Stitt said through a spokeswoman that Drummond used a grand jury as a weapon in his bid to run for governor in 2026.

“Ultimately, this was an inappropriate and unlawful use of a grand jury, all to pursue a headline in the attorney general’s campaign for governor,” said Abegail Cave, Stitt’s communications director. “Oklahomans can see through this weapon of the law.”

Spending in the first year of the pandemic was often chaotic and marked by few guardrails that would normally be in place during non-emergency times. But the report said Oklahoma education officials ignored the Trump administration’s instructions that the governor’s directed education relief funds go through established channels.

The report said the decision was motivated in part by politics because Stitt did not want to trust that Oklahoma State Department of Education officials would support spending federal pandemic money on private schools. The education department at the time was headed by Joy Hofmeister, and she and Stitt clashed repeatedly over mask requirements and school closures. Hofmeister switched parties in 2022 to run against Stitt as a Democrat for re-election.

Witnesses said at least one person in Stitt’s Cabinet urged him to allocate the funds to the Education Department because it made logistical and political sense. Stitt opposed the idea primarily because of political differences over school choice; he wanted to direct the funding to private school families.

Stitt selected two nonprofit organizations, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma and the American Federation for Children Oklahoma, to administer the programs. The grand jury wrote that it was “deeply disturbed” by the way the state shifted its responsibility for overseeing the funds to private entities without checking them.

The governor’s first round of emergency education funding directed $8 million to the Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet program to help low-income families purchase educational materials. This program was led by Ryan Walters, director of Every Kids Counts Oklahoma, before he was named Stitt’s Secretary of Education in the summer of 2020. Walters was elected state superintendent in November 2022.

Reports from Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier found that pandemic relief funds to support student learning were spent on televisions, grills, furniture, Christmas trees and hundreds of other non-education-related items. A state audit later showed non-educational expenses totaled $1.7 million.

Emails from Walters instructed ClassWallet to ignore protections against spending on non-education-related items and gave blanket approval for purchases from pre-approved vendors.

In an email Tuesday, Walters’ spokesman Dan Isett did not address that 2020 email or the details of the grand jury report. Walters has repeatedly pointed the finger at the provider ClassWallet.

“Superintendent Walters’ deep commitment to fiscal responsibility and taxpayer accountability has been demonstrated during his time as minister and now as state superintendent,” Isett’s statement said. “Under his leadership, OSDE has established the highest standards to ensure the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”

In 2020, an additional $10 million in GEER funding went toward a Stay in School program to provide up to $6,500 in scholarships to help families financially impacted by the pandemic continue to educate their children to send to a private school. That effort was led by Jennifer Carter, who leads the Oklahoma branch of the American Federation for Children, a group founded by former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The organization has long been a proponent of publicly funded private school vouchers.

The grand jury report said neither the Bridge the Gap program nor the Stay In School program met federal pandemic grant funding requirements. Instead, the programs are test runs for a nationwide voucher program for private schools.

The grand jury report noted that ClassWallet failed to protect families’ personal information. The state auditor received a spreadsheet from Carter containing names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and schools of parents and students. Carter had a consulting firm, Libertas Consulting, that was involved in disbursing funds. That a director of a special interest group received this data was troubling, they wrote, and even more troubling was the information added, including political party registration and voting district.

“This suggests that, unbeknownst to the families, their information was collected and processed for purposes other than those for which it was disclosed,” the grand jury wrote.

Applications for the programs were scheduled to go online on August 10, 2020, but on August 8, 2020, early access was granted for approximately six hours to families attending some select private schools, the report said. There is no record of how or why these schools were selected, although some met certain criteria, including that all students attended tuition-free, the school served addiction recovery, or the school subsidized at least 90% of tuition.

According to the grand jury report, more than $2 million in Stay in School scholarships and $167,000 in Bridge the Gap grants were awarded to applicants who were improperly granted early access.

More than half of the Stay in School scholarships were awarded to families who indicated in their applications that they had not experienced or expected to experience a loss in income due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Carter could not be reached for comment.