Arizona’s ongoing tuition tax credit scam was well documented back in 2009 courtesy of some terrific investigative reporting, and it continues to come up in our media now and again. Nothing has changed—what else is new in Arizona?—but at least it’s out in the open for anyone who wants to read about it. It’s nice to see this Oldie But Goodie getting some national coverage in a New York Times story, DeVos and Tax Credit Vouchers: Arizona Shows What Can Go Wrong. The story’s poster child for tax credit profiteering is our own state Senate President Steve Yarbrough.
The Times story begins, “Steve Yarbrough is one of the most powerful men in Arizona.” Then it talks about our backdoor voucher program, tuition tax credits, where people give money to School Tuition Organizations and get all of it back when they pay their taxes, meaning their “donation” costs them nothing. The taxpayer picks up the tab, since 100 percent of that money otherwise would have gone into the state coffers. The STOs use most of the money to pay for students’ private school tuitions. It can pay for poor kids to go to private schools, but the money can also be used to pay full tuition for millionaires’ sons and daughters to attend the most exclusive, expensive private schools in the state. The more you know about this program, the worse it gets.
The dirty secret hidden inside the voucher plan, the Ka-ching! that puts a twinkle in Sen. Yarbrough’s eye, is that ten percent of the tuition tax credit money goes to pay the STO’s overhead. If your STO pulls in, say, $18 million, like Yarbrough’s Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization did in 2014, the most recent year with an online tax form from the STO, that means $1.8 million can be used to pay for the expense of collecting money from donors and handing it out to schools. That’s good money if you can get it. Yarbrough gets a $125,000 salary out of the deal. But as the Times piece points out, that’s only part of his total take. He owns HY Processing which does the bookkeeping/tech work for the STO, for which it makes $636,000 a year. Yarbrough owns the building that houses the STO, which brings him $52,000 in rent. The STO paid for his car.
I imagine Yarbrough smiles all the way to the bank when he’s on his way to the State Capitol to do “the people’s work”—with Steve Yarbrough being Steve’s favorite “people.”
The reason for the Times article is that Trump and his Ed Sec Betsy DeVos are looking to set up a similar tax credit voucher plan nationwide. Trump’s campaign idea of writing a $20 billion check from the feds to pay for vouchers didn’t go over so well with Republican members of Congress, so Trump’s people are thinking, if the same amount of money is short-stopped before it makes it into the government coffers using a plan like Arizona’s, it would have the same effect without actually showing up in the federal budget.
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2017.
Would you deny that the young black woman at trump’s speech should have been forced to complete the 3rd grade a third time, or just dumped off at the welfare office when she turned 18? Why not join the solution instead of trying to hang on to the failings of the past? It is legal and yet you paint others as criminals???
Federal tax credits would be awesome. Go Trump! Fix American education. Give choice back to parents.
People went to Yarbrough and forced him into the effort. He wasn’t allowed to declare a conflict of interest. This is a war and there are no bystanders.
Face it. Districts are a white supremacist invention designed to oppress minorities and students from poverty and they can only succeed if students aren’t given their freedom. Calling them public schools is an abuse of the language. They are neither schools nor open to the public.
Steve Jobs attended a district “school” that was characterized by a gang rape, knives and assaults. He gave his parents an ultimatum and they had to go deep into debt to move to district. At the new school, he met Wozniak and together they created the first trillion dollar company. He also learned the art of abstraction from his philosophy teacher which he used to revolutionize six different industries.
The school Jobs went to was in no way shape or form open to the public. The facility which Jobs left behind was in no way shape or form a “school.”
Read in this newsletter all about the mess they call Tucson Unified.
Face it. President Trump could find a cure for cancer and this pencil-neck geek would write a column about how President Trump just put thousands of oncologists out of work.
It’s unclear to me how much Yarbrough makes per year through the STO. You say HY processing makes $636K, but I’d assume there are employees of that firm who get paid out of that net.
Whether or not you can provide a clear figure on Yarbrough’s annual yield from managing the STO, could you answer this question: does Yarbrough make as much as HT Sanchez made per annum for managing the poverty stricken school district, TUSD? Half a million, once you added up all the expense accounts and bonuses and $1,000 per day for not taking 40 allocated vacation days per year, etc.? What about the unapproved, undisclosed $10K bonuses to his chums in central admin and the magically inflating salary of his PR wizard Stephanie Boe, which went from the $40-somethingK per annum at which she was recruited at to $90-somethingK per annum in a very short period of time, reputedly with no Board approval of the increase?
The obvious irony here is that you have a lot of outrage, David, for every example of excess on the “privatizing” side of the fence, and NONE whatsoever for the nauseatingly greedy behaviors of your cronies in public district administration.
Sorry, but I just can’t work up any indignation over your latest rehearsal of the sins of the privatizers. My indignation has been worn out in recent days by the sins of the various mis-managers in charge of an obviously corrupt and mismanaged PUBLIC institution much closer to home.
If a Democrat had used the same kind of deception to steal from the public for private gain they would have been in prison pronto if they weren’t strung up by a bunch of Republican vigilantes before the trial!
Democrats who mismanage public institutions and mis-apply public funds are not “put in prison pronto” and they are not “strung up by Republican vigilantes.” At least not in Tucson, and at least not when they are making choices in their management of PUBLIC institutions that benefit the PRIVATIZERS in Phoenix whom they are trying to brown-nose. Cf. former TUSD Superintendent HT Sanchez, awarded a compensation package by a Democrat-affiliated School Board majority that netted him close to $500K last school year. Not only did he ask for and receive an inexcusable amount of the tax-funded resources for his personal compensation from the previous Board majority of this conspicuously underfunded public school district, it was repeatedly reported that he was in the habit of using dubious procurement and hiring processes and padding the compensation packages of his central administration cronies without getting Board approval for doing so.
But as long as he was doing things the privatizers in Phoenix liked, like outsourcing the management of substitute teacher labor and fighting the deseg order and giving deseg funds back to taxpayers and co-writing editorials with Lisa Graham Keegan about how it would be a good idea to destroy public school teacher credentialing requirements, no one in the local establishment or state-level establishment even slapped him on the wrist, much less took any kind of serious enforcement action. The closest thing to a warning the Board-that-never-held-him-accountable ever got was a weak judgment of Open Meeting Law Violation from the Attorney General’s Office when the Board majority chose to discuss the Superintendent’s goals and fat bonus in closed executive session rather than in a meeting open to the public.
The day after Sanchez resigned, Randy Friese, local Democratic party darling, was seen consoling Sanchez by introducing him as a guest of honor on the floor of the legislature in Phoenix. What a pleasant visit, with a Democrat companion, to all the Republican PRIVATIZING friends Sanchez made there during his tenure as Superintendent of a PUBLIC institution!
http://threesonorans.com/2017/03/02/ht-sanchez-honored-at-az-state-capitol-less-than-24-hours-after-quitting-at-tusd-and-his-lies-were-exposed/
(There is so little push back locally to sick alliances that betray what the ideals of the Democratic party should properly be that members of the in-network do not hesitate to flaunt them publicly.)
Now the Democrat Kristel Foster is trying to persuade us, in an editorial in the Star, that the new majority on the TUSD Board got rid of a Hispanic Superintendent and a Hispanic Board member because of racial prejudice or “white supremacist” ideas. Sanchez and Juarez had, according to Ms. Foster, done no wrong .
http://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/guest/kristel-ann-foster-is-the-new-school-board-supporting-or/article_ff39bcba-eb24-5b88-8fc2-407fa1babad5.html
That’s false, and those of us who’ve paid a reasonable amount of attention to this public school district’s affairs for the past four years know it.
–Juarez was voted out because he was frequently unprepared for Board meetings and his lack of preparation was obvious to anyone who cared to watch. Also because he received a donation from a company to which he and Foster had voted a $21 million contract for the management of outsourced substitute teachers, said he was going to return the donation when his receipt of the donation was discussed in the media, and did not return it. Even some die-hard Democrats abandoned him over that (e.g. Bruce Wheeler).
–The new Board majority appeared to be preparing to fire Sanchez with cause. Anyone who has watched the Board meetings and read the public discussions of the district for the past three and a half years knows many of these causes, but in an unforgivable and exceedingly ill-advised move (for which we probably have Hicks’ city council ambitions to blame) the new TUSD Board majority voted to accept the Superintendent’s resignation with a “non-disparagement” clause that means they cannot tell the public what any element of the case they had assembled against him was.
Brilliant move, Hicks, Stegeman and Sedgwick: by accepting this “non-disparagement” muzzle, not only did you lose an opportunity to educate the public about proper standards for managing public institutions, you created an “empty space” into which Kristel Foster could inject her attribution of bad motives, as she attempts to portray the three of you as persecutors of a Hispanic Superintendent rather than acknowledging that you were finding a way to unburden a beleaguered and underfunded public institution of a shockingly overpaid and conspicuously incompetent administrator.
Tim Steller nailed it in the Star, “You can make the right move and still get it all wrong.”
http://tucson.com/news/local/columnists/steller/steller-amateurish-tusd-board-makes-bold-move-look-risky/article_e581167b-48ab-5595-9e26-9b395b2b6103.html
Yes, Mr. Steller. That’s exactly what they did.
Moral of the story? Some local Democrats have not been held accountable any more than Yarbrough has been held accountable. They have not been held accountable either by their allies or by their political opponents.
Will they ever, as their actions become more conspicuously irresponsible and transparently manipulative, be held accountable by the largely “Democratic” electorate in this region? Do “Democrats” in this region have any understanding of what the party of FDR and LBJ has found it possible to stand for in the past?
It remains to be seen, but as the months and years go by and the same BS and excuses are retailed by irresponsible commentators like Safier and irresponsible elected officials like Foster, it seems less and less likely.
Sad.