The federal government is threatening to bring a False Claims Act lawsuit against the city to recoup millions of dollars spent on a District of Columbia public schools program aimed at educating migrant children, according to sources.
At the heart of the controversy, which sources said could eventually yield criminal charges, is money the city accepted over nearly three decades to teach the children of migrant farm workers and fishermen.
The problem for city officials attempting to justify the money spent: A 2005 audit found there were no such children in the D.C. schools.
Now, federal auditors want the money back — with penalties and fines.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. is threatening a lawsuit to get back its losses from the D.C. schools’ Migrant Education Program, which claimed to be educating up to 971 children per year at its peak, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because an investigation is pending.
The False Claims Act allows the victim of fraud to recoup up to three times the amount of money taken and provides up to $11,000 in fines, per offense.
That means a separate fine for each student claimed by D.C. schools.
It’s not clear how far back the alleged fraud goes: D.C. schools have been receiving migrant education grants since 1980, according to the Department of Education.
Channing Philips, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office, declined to comment. So did D.C. schools spokesman John White.
Congress set aside money for the children of migrant farm workers and fishermenin 1966. The money is supposed to supplement the children’s education by offering them tutoring, counseling and health checkups as they follow their parents to labor camps in search of seasonal farm and fishing jobs.
Federal education officials did not directly monitor the hundreds of millions of dollars they were sending out under the migrant program until 2003, said Alex Goniprow, the acting director of the U.S. Department of Education’s migrant education program. The Department of Education would investigate local programs only if it had a tip that something was wrong, Goniprow said.
After 2003, grant recipients were told to hire independent consultants to audit their programs and report back to the U.S. Department of Education, Goniprow said.
In 2005, D.C. schools officials checked 333 families who were listed as the intended beneficiaries of the migrant grants, sources familiar with the investigation told The Examiner. Of those, 144 of them couldn’t be found; the other 189 weren’t migrants.
After the audit, D.C. school officials immediately canceled the migrant program. But according to city records, money was still being paid to the program as late as April 2006.
Goniprow said it was “generally understood” that D.C. wasn’t home to seasonal farm or fishing camps, but “it was quite possible that families may have migrated out of D.C. to other states for such work or made qualifying moves in other states and later settled in D.C.”
An earlier version of the migrant education law said that migrant children were eligible for grants for up to six years. The years of eligibility were cut in half in 1995, but “the possibility of such migrant families living in D.C. was … not an unreasonable occurrence,” Goniprow said in an e-mail sent through a spokesman.
Since 1994, the federal government has given more than $3.8 million in migrant education grants to the District schools,records provided by the Department of Education show.
From 2000 until 2005, D.C. schools claimed they educated nearly 3,800 migrant children, with a peak of 971 in the 2002-03 school year, Department of Education records show.
D.C.’s then-migrant education director Beverly Wallace told Department of Education officials in a 2002 grant application that the money would be used to pay for “recruiters” to identify migrant children and line them up with the services they needed.
More than a year after the audit of her program, Wallace retired with a full pension. She now lives in Hyattsville and told The Examiner that the money was honestly used.
“We helped a lot of kids,” she said.
She declined to elaborate or to explain the results of the 2005 audit, saying, “it’s a legal matter.”
Ralph Neal, the associate superintendent who was supposed to supervise Wallace, retired before the audit controversy flared up. He is now a principal at Friendship-Edison charter school in D.C. and did not return a call seeking comment.
Diane Powell, who replaced Neal, has been briefed fully on the controversy, Wallace said. But according to a spokeswoman for Mayor Adrian Fenty, Powell has not told new schools chancellor Michelle Rhee about the federal investigation. Rhee learned of it via a call from The Examiner.
What happened to the money? Law enforcement officials aren’t sure. The schools’ grants management office has been routinely criticized by outside consultants and federal reviews for sloppy accounting and mismanagement. Last week, top city officials relieved grants executive director Victor Vyfhuis of his duties.
But part of the problem is that officials in the schools finance office covered the expenditures by labeling them “journal entries,” an accounting device that serves like a “miscellaneous” marker, one source who was familiar with the investigationsaid.
Finance office spokeswoman Maryann Young declined to comment for this story.
Outside reviews of the finance office have criticized its use of “journal entries,” and it was one of the factors the Department of Education cited when it labeled the D.C. schools “high risk” for federal funds last year.
Got a tip on the D.C. schools? Call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or e-mail [email protected]
