Author

Jon East

Jon East

Jon East is special projects director for Step Up For Students. Previously, he was a member of the editorial board and the Sunday commentary editor at the St. Petersburg Times, Florida’s largest daily newspaper, where he wrote about education issues for most of his 28 years at the paper. He was also a reporter and editor at the Evening Independent and Ocala Star-Banner. He earned a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Auditor General releases annual review of Florida scholarship programs

Jon East
Jon East

In its fifth annual audit of Step Up For Students, the state’s largest nonprofit scholarship funding organization, the Florida Auditor General today issued what amounted to a clean bill of health.

The report included findings on data procedures and scholarship purchase returns, both of which have been fixed by the organization, while more broadly concluding: “Our audit procedures and tests of selected Step Up records and accounts found that Step Up generally complied with the applicable provisions of State law.”

The audit covered Step Up’s administration of four state-authorized scholarships in 2018-19: the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for K-12 students from low-income and working-class households; Gardiner Scholarships for students with special needs; Hope Scholarships for students who have been bullied in public schools; and Reading Scholarship Accounts that provide help for elementary public school students who are struggling in reading. Collectively, the programs served about 116,000 students that year.

The first finding related to Social Security numbers. The auditor said Step Up was not fully notifying Tax Credit Scholarship applicants of the purpose and authorization for collecting student Social Security numbers. It also questioned whether Step Up was sufficiently restricting internal computer access to such numbers. The organization responded by adding a new notice to all families when the 2020-21 scholarship application season opened in January. It also embarked on a review of database permissions for every staffer, limiting access to Social Security numbers to only those whose job required it, and creating a new process for constant review.

The second finding was with the Gardiner Scholarship, which allows students to spend money on a variety of educational needs beyond just tuition and fees. The report said Step Up was sometimes failing its own policy of posting a timely credit to each student’s account when a household returned a purchase made through authorized online vendors. The audit found 22 returned purchases worth a total of $16,327 that were not credited back within Step Up’s 14-day guideline. By way of comparison, that same year, 2018-19, Gardiner students spent a total of $21.9 million on instructional materials. Step Up reported the problem was remedied with automation.

In his formal response, Step Up president Doug Tuthill thanked auditors for their professionalism and wrote that: “We value the insights and recommendations that contribute to process improvements that strengthen our organization.”

Step Up For Students hosts this blog. 

 

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FACT-CHECKED: Tallahassee educator’s attack on ‘monstrous’ system is misleading

Jon East
Jon East

Editor’s note: The goal of fact-checkED is to bring clinical precision to complex issues that are easily misunderstood, aiming to counteract incorrect information before it continues to circulate.  

Sally Butzin has a rich and accomplished history in public education, as a classroom teacher, instructional innovator and published author. But her latest column in the Tallahassee Democrat offers an unfortunate brew of bitterness and hyperbole about modern reforms.

Butzin cast Florida today as something of an educational wasteland, reminiscing about the early 1990s when “innovation was encouraged” and contrasting that with the election of Gov. Jeb Bush in 1998 when “the bottom fell out.” She deplored the “emphasis on testing and accountability” but especially blames charter schools and private school vouchers. They constitute a “monstrous parallel system” that “has bled the life out of public education” and “left millions of children behind.”

We’ll leave to others the political defense of Bush, who ushered in a wave of education reform in his eight years in office, and instead focus on three of her more tangible claims.

Claim No. 1: “These new schemes had no accountability to taxpayers.”

The “schemes,” in this context, refer to charter schools and private school scholarships.

First, charter schools are created through a contract with each public school district that involves oversight into educational goals and tax dollars received. Their students are required to take the same state assessment tests as all other district students and the schools receive the same letter grade ratings as public schools. Further, under state law, a charter school can be shut down, and many have been, for receiving two grades of F.

Second, the state’s largest scholarship program, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship serving 108,570 economically disadvantaged students in 1,836 private schools, is overseen by the state Department of Education. Students are required to take nationally norm-referenced tests approved by the state and those test results are reported publicly each year. Schools that receive more than $250,000 in scholarship dollars are required to submit financial reports by certified public accountants, and scholarship funding organizations are audited each year by the State Auditor General and private accounting firms. The students, schools and scholarship organizations are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations.

Third, both charter schools and scholarship schools face a form of accountability that can be more intense than state regulations and audits. Because they are schools of choice and students are free to attend or not, they can go out of business if parents are dissatisfied and choose elsewhere.

These points are brief in part because Butzin’s claim is categorical. She wrote that they have “no accountability,” which is flatly false.

Claim No. 2: “This parallel system has bled the life out of public education, as billions of dollars flowing to it have left millions of children behind.”

This claim seems to have a life of its own, despite the fact that it is refuted by extensive independent research. At its core, it assumes that public schools should be paid tax dollars without regard to how many students attend them, even though Florida has always funded education on a per-student basis. And it ignores the fact that students choosing these two alternative options receive fewer dollars than they would if they remained in a traditional public school.

This is the third time in the short history of fact-checkED that we have analyzed this financial cost claim, and for more detail we invite you to read our first effort. Once again, we rate this claim as false.

Claim No. 3: “Now, it would be one thing if this parallel system was improving outcomes for all our children. But this is simply not the case.”

Butzin did not share her data on outcomes, but the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is generally regarded as one of the most reliable indicators of academic achievement in elementary and secondary schools. NAEP, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” paints an entirely different picture.

By every measure, the NAEP reading and math test scores of fourth- and eighth-graders have increased over the past two decades – the period after which Butzin says “the bottom fell out.” The percentage of fourth-graders who meet basic standards in math is up by nearly two-thirds, and the percentage rated proficient or above has tripled. The percentage of fourth-graders who meet basic standards in reading is up by a third, and the proficient and above is up by two-thirds. Similarly, the percentage of eighth-graders who meet basic in math is up by a fifth, and proficient is up by four-fifths. The percentage of eighth-graders at basic in reading is up by a tenth, and the percentage above proficient up by half.

And, according to the Urban Institute’s adjustment of rankings for race, income and English language learner status, Florida ranks first in fourth-grade reading, first in fourth-grade math, third in eighth-grade reading and eighth in eighth-grade math.

A few other measures are worth mentioning. The most recent Education Week Quality Counts report ranked Florida fourth in the nation in terms of K-12 academic achievement. The College Board ranked Florida third in percentage of graduating high school seniors who have passed college-caliber Advanced Placement exams. The high school graduation rate has jumped from 60.1 percent to 86.9 percent in the past two decades.

We don’t know the data Butzin used, but we rate her claim as highly misleading.

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fact-checkED: Sanders’ education choice claims in Florida op-ed misleading

Jon East
Jon East

With the presidential primary election in delegate-rich Florida just two months away, Democratic candidates are beginning to knock on the door.

In a Monday column in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders found little to like about Florida’s public education system. But our focus is on educational choice and three assertions he made while insisting that “Florida is ground zero of a school privatization movement intent on destroying public education.”

“Each year almost $1 billion in state money goes to private schools instead of public schools.”

“These private schools operate with little to no accountability.”

“In many cases, their students’ math and reading skills have declined.”

These claims are misleading, at best.

Claim No. 1: The $1 billion citation draws attention but does not prove Sanders’ point. He implies that private school voucher and scholarship programs harm public schools financially, which is a longstanding and erroneous argument advanced by the Florida Education Association (FEA) that we have dealt with previously in this space. There is simply no evidence to support it.

Eight different independent financial studies all have concluded the scholarships, which cost less per student than the total amount spent in a traditional public school, save tax money that can be used to enhance public schools. Florida TaxWatch weighed in last year, finding existing scholarships cost 60 cents on the public school dollar. And the FEA lost its legal challenge to the 19-year-old Tax Credit Scholarship program in part because the trial and appellate courts summarily rejected its argument that public schools “have been and will continue to be injured by the scholarship program’s diversion of resources from the public schools.”

Claim No. 2: The qualifier in this assertion – that private schools operate with “little to no” accountability – gives Sanders some wiggle room in part because accountability is hard to objectively measure. But Sanders seems to dismiss entirely the accountability that is inherent with any school that survives only if parents choose it for their children.

That market concept may not appeal to a self-professed socialist but does have real-world consequences and, in the case of the state’s two scholarships for underprivileged students, gives genuine educational power to parents who typically have little.

As to the regulatory oversight, Florida’s largest program, the Tax Credit Scholarship serving 108,570 economically disadvantaged students this year, is ranked among the nation’s most aggressive. The students, schools and scholarship organizations are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations.

Among those requirements: scholarship students must take state-approved standardized tests; those test results are reported publicly every year; schools must submit annual financial reports by certified public accountants; and scholarship organizations must be audited each year by the state Auditor General and independent accounting firms.

Sanders is entitled to believe the program is not subject to sufficient regulation, but we rate his claim of “little to no” accountability as misleading.

Claim No. 3:  Once again, Sanders uses an interesting qualifier – “in many cases” – in his assertion that scholarship students’ “math and reading skills have declined.” Eleven years’ worth of standardized test reports refute his claim.

Students who receive the Tax Credit Scholarship must take a nationally norm-referenced test each year approved by the state, and most take the Stanford Achievement. The test scores are sent to Florida State University’s Learning Systems Institute, which is paid to aggregate and report them publicly.

For the most recent year, 2017-18, scholarship students scored on average at the 47.4 percentile in reading and 45.2 percentile in math. That’s basically average, which is encouraging given that these scholarships students are among the poorest in the state and were among the lowest-performing students in the public schools they left behind.

More to the point, their annual gains have been remarkably consistent. The scores reflect that these low-income students have achieved the same annual gains as students of all income levels nationally.

In other words, they have increased, not declined.

Certainly the average doesn’t reflect every student. In the most recent report, about as many students – 0.6 percent – achieved extraordinary gains of more than 40 percentile points as those who dropped an equivalent amount. But Sanders’ qualifier that “many” students declined seems intended to distort the overall test findings. We rate it mostly false.

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redefinED’s 2019 Myth of the Year

Jon East
Jon East

The Gardiner Scholarship for students with specifically named special needs, which served 11,917 students last year at a cost of $124.1 million, is funded by a direct line-item appropriation.

Editor’s note: While education choice misstatements flourished this year, one was especially egregious: the claim that Florida’s new family empowerment voucher was “unprecedented.” Step Up For Students’ special projects director Jon East revisits this claim and explains why it ranked as the redefinED team’s Myth of the Year. 

As Florida lawmakers debated a new private school voucher for students from low-income and working-class families earlier this year, opponents depicted the program in stark, even apocalyptic, terms.

Ron Meyer, attorney for the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said “this could lead to the dismantling of the public school system as we’ve known it.”

Sen. Gary Farmer, a Broward Democrat, called it “the beginning of the final stage of a decades-long plan to privatize public education in Florida.”

Sen. Perry Thurston, a Broward Democrat, wrote that “Florida seems hellbent on sending its public schools into K-12 purgatory.”

At the root of the rhetoric was the claim that the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES), which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, was without precedent in Florida education. The scholarship was intended in large part to serve lower-income students who are being squeezed out of the 18-year-old Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which has enrolled 108,570 schoolchildren this year, because corporate tax-credited contributions aren’t keeping up with student demand. But opponents argued that serving those students with direct-taxpayer-funded vouchers would push the state into entirely new education policy.

During floor debate, Sen. Daryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg Democrat, called FES a fundamental shift: “That fundamental shift is we’re moving away from a Constitutionally approved method of funding tax credit scholarships to using FEFP (the formula used to fund public schools) dollars and general revenue for private institutions.”

Those charges picked up steam as the scholarship bill moved through each legislative chamber, was signed into law and then began serving roughly 18,000 students this fall. Reporters and opinion writers occasionally mistook the assertions as fact, including an esteemed editorialist who wrote in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in October that the scholarship is “the first time” that a school voucher will be paid “straight from the state treasury.”

But this is patently false.

The Family Empowerment Scholarship is neither the first nor the only direct-state-funded education voucher in the PreK-12 arena in Florida. It’s not even the only voucher funded directly through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP), which is the main operational fund for district public schools. As we described in a recent fact-checkED post, here are the others:

  • The McKay Scholarship for students with learning disabilities. It was created two decades ago and last year served 30,695 students at a cost of $219.7 million. The students are tracked inside the FEFP from each school district in which they live, as is exhibited in this FEFP calculation sheet from 2018-19 (note the second column, which subtracts McKay dollars from each district).

The reason this claim is worthy of redefinED’s Myth of the Year is not just that it persists but also that it is intended to disguise the degree to which the state’s public education landscape has shifted in just over a generation.

In 2017-18, 1.6 million – or 47 percent – of all preK-12 students in Florida chose something other than their assigned district public school. That included 292,001 in privately operated and publicly contracted charter schools, 133,870 in privately operated prekindergarten centers, and 149,400 in private schools with state scholarships.

Those programs exist only if parents choose them for their children, and both school districts and state legislators are responding to the explosive enrollment growth with more and varied options. The claim that FES is some type of legislative abnormality is designed to be misleading.

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fact-checkED: This ‘quick fact’ about scholarships hurting public schools is no fact at all

Jon East
Jon East

A story in Sunday’s Lakeland Ledger about a union-sponsored public education summit in Polk County included a chart of “Quick Facts” that bears scrutiny. One of them, about the financial impact of Florida Tax Credit Scholarships, is false.

The statement: “In 2018, tax-credit scholarship programs totaled $1.058 billion, money that went to private and religious schools that could have gone to public schools.”

First, the total dollars are off. According to the state Department of Revenue, which tracks tax credits awarded under the scholarship law, companies received permission in 2018-19 for tax-credited contributions of $689.3 million. Those dollars translated into scholarships for 104,091 lower-income and working-class children to attend 1,825 private schools in that same year, according to the Department of Education.

The $1 billion figure may well include money spent on two voucher programs – McKay and Gardiner Scholarships – for students with special needs that are funded directly from the state treasury, but it is nonetheless misleading.

The more substantive claim, though, is that the money “could have gone to public schools.” This is at the core of a longstanding and erroneous argument – that vouchers harm public schools financially – offered by the Florida Education Association. In fact, FEA lost a 2014 legal challenge to the Tax Credit Scholarship in large part because it could prove no such harm.

In that case, McCall v. Scott, the FEA argued that public schools “have been and will continue to be injured by the scholarship program’s diversion of resources from the public schools.” The Leon Circuit judge who heard the case, George Reynolds, offered union attorneys the chance to amend their complaint to provide facts that bolstered that claim.

They declined, and Reynolds dismissed the case, writing: “Whether any diminution of public school resources resulting from the Tax Credit Program will actually take place is speculative, as is any claim that any such diminution would result in reduced per-pupil spending or in any adverse impact on the quality of education.”

On appeal, the union lawyers went a step further and asserted the scholarship program cost public schools $300 million in 2013-14. But the state education budget that year increased by $1 billion and per-student funding went up by 6.3 percent, leading First District of Appeal Judge Lori Rowe, during oral arguments, to ask: “But exactly what is the special injury you are articulating here? You haven’t alleged that any individual student is suffering. You haven’t alleged that per-student funding has been reduced. You haven’t even alleged that the education budget has been reduced.”

Outside the courtroom, eight different independent financial studies have all concluded the scholarship saves tax money that can be used to enhance public schools. That’s because the state spends less to educate these students on the scholarship than it otherwise would spend in a traditional public school.

In March, Florida TaxWatch added to that body of research with a report on what it called the “true cost” of education in 2017-18. TaxWatch went beyond the basic operating formula used to fund public schools and added all the other appropriations as well. It found the state spent $10,856 to educate the average student in public school, and contrasted that amount with $6,447 spent on the average Tax Credit Scholarship student. In other words, the scholarship cost 60 cents on the public school dollar.

One final note: Amid the lawsuit challenging the Tax Credit Scholarship in 2014, Nan Rich, a former state senator, made a similar claim about scholarship programs pulling money out of public schools, and PolitiFact Florida rated it “mostly false.”

We rate this “quick fact” to be false.

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fact-checkED: Family Empowerment Scholarships are not the only state-funded voucher

Jon East
Jon East

Julian Cruz, pictured here with his mother, Emily, was one of the first students to receive a Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs. The direct-state-funded scholarship now serves nearly 12,000 students.

Editor’s note: We add a new feature today, called fact-checkED, that is inspired by the many factchecking efforts across the media landscape these days. Our work will focus solely within the arena of educational choice, and our goal is to bring clinical precision to issues that are often complex and misunderstood. Our intent is not to shame but to inform.

In an editorial Sunday criticizing 19 “bad bills” that became state law this year, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote the following of a new school voucher called Family Empowerment Scholarships:

“Tuition vouchers (SB 7070). For the first time, money goes straight from (the) state treasury – not just by tax credits.”

This is false.

We begin by first acknowledging that the sentence above ends with a phrase describing the money as going “to unregulated private schools, most of which will be religious and can cherry-pick their students.” That’s a handful in itself, particularly given that the participating private schools are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations and that annual state evaluations of a similar program, called the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, have concluded it draws some of the state’s poorest and lowest-performing students from public schools.

But our focus here is on the claim that the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) is the first school voucher to draw funds directly from the state treasury. That’s in part because the claim has current legal and political salience. Ron Meyer, attorney for the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, has told reporters he plans to file a lawsuit asking courts to declare the new program unconstitutional. Even before the bill was passed, Meyer told the GateHouse Capital Bureau: “This could lead to the dismantling of the public school system as we’ve known it.” In June, a month after the bill was signed into law, he told the Florida Phoenix: “There is going to be a challenge.”

The Sun Sentinel editorial draws a proper contrast between the new FES program and an existing 18-year-old program called the Tax Credit Scholarship. Both serve disadvantaged students from low-income and working-class households, but the Tax Credit Scholarship is fueled by contributions from corporations. In turn, those contributions receive 100 percent credits against six different state taxes. Last year, the Tax Credit Scholarship served 104,091 low-income students at a cost of roughly $644.7 million. The funding distinction is important, and led in part to the 2017 dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Tax Credit program.

As the editorial notes, FES is funded directly by the state. In fact, it is funded directly out of the operational funding formula, known as the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP), that pays for district public schools. One distinct difference between FES and district schools is that the scholarships receive money only through state general revenue dollars and do not receive any local property tax money (see subsection (11)(e) in the law).

The claim of being first, though, is wrong. FES is neither the first nor the only state-funded education voucher in the PreK-12 arena. It’s not even the only voucher funded directly through the FEFP. Here are the others:

  1. The McKay Scholarship for students with learning disabilities. It was created two decades ago and last year served 30,695 students at a cost of $219.7 million. The students are tracked inside the FEFP from each school district in which they live, as is exhibited in this FEFP calculation sheet from 2018-19 (note the second column, which subtracts McKay dollars from each district). 1819 FEFP 3rdCalc
  2. The Gardiner Scholarship for students with specifically named special needs. It was created in 2014 and served 11,917 students last year at a cost of $124.1 million. Gardiner is funded by a direct line-item appropriation (see line item 110 on page 28 of this year’s State Appropriations Act).
  3. Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten for 4-year-olds. This program was approved by voters in 2002 and took effect in 2005. In 2017-18, it served 133,870 students in private schools and day care centers at a cost of roughly $326.2 million. The VPK program is funded by a direct line-item appropriation (see line item 89 on page 20 of this year’s State Appropriations Act).

To its credit, the Sun Sentinel published a partial correction to the editorial above. We rate the original claim as FALSE.

 

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Blaine amendments ‘discriminate against all religion’

Jon East
Jon East

As religious and education interest groups furiously file amicus briefs in the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case on whether states can ban faith-based schools from voucher programs, a respected Catholic university professor is offering a remarkably dispassionate plea:

Don’t reject Blaine amendments because they were born of Catholic bigotry; ban them because they discriminate against all religion.

The argument posed by University of Notre Dame law professor Richard W. Garnett is part of an enticing  new SCOTUSBlog symposium on Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The case may determine whether no-aid-to-religion clauses in 37 states, known as Blaine amendments after a Maine congressman who pushed them in the late 1800s, can be used to exclude religious schools from government-supported scholarship programs that allow students to choose private schools.

Garnett writes, in part:

“To be sure, anti-Catholicism was, is and has been from the beginning real in the United States, and it has long skewed constitutional doctrines and public debates about school funding and education policy. Still, it increasingly seems unhelpful – and, indeed, unhealthy – to construct and apply judicial doctrines that invite mind-reading for malice and that make the legality of legislative, executive or other official acts depend less on the harms they cause than on the motives, or even the character, ascribed to their supporters.

“Our political and legal climate and discourse are not well served by a hyper-driven hermeneutic of suspicion, and perhaps the court could help by, in this and other contexts, moving to judicial tests that do not incentivize accusations of bad faith or reductionist accounts of others’ aims. It is appropriate, of course, to take judicial notice of historical facts. Indeed, some cases are probably better decided with deferential reliance on tradition and longstanding practice than by application of clear-cut rules and tests. Here, though, a straightforward application of what (Justice Neil) Gorsuch called the “general principle” that discrimination against religion, as such, is not permitted by the free exercise clause unless it is required by the establishment clause is the court’s best bet.”

The Montana case is particularly relevant to Florida, given that state teacher union attorney Ron Meyer has told reporters he plans to file a lawsuit challenging the new Family Empowerment Scholarship that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law in May. That K-12 scholarship aims to serve up to 18,000 students this fall with state-funded vouchers to private schools.

Though the Florida Supreme Court in 2006 overturned a direct-funded school voucher on the grounds that it violated a requirement that public schools be “uniform,” Meyer is certain to also argue that vouchers awarded to  participating faith-based schools violate the state no-aid provision.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2002 that a Cleveland voucher program that included religious schools did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s church and state provisions, but it has not previously ruled on whether state Blaine amendments can be used to circumvent that decision. The court is expected to rule in the Espinoza case by summer 2020.

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School Choice

Private school responds after being called anti-gay by Florida newspaper columnist

Jon East
Jon East

Students at Calvary City Christian Academy and Preschool perform in a holiday pageant.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell, a frequent critic of school vouchers, is urging companies to stop donating to Florida Tax Credit Scholarships for low-income students because some participating religious private schools have anti-LGBTQ statements on their web sites. In turn, the Sentinel has published two responses over the past four days.

The most recent one comes from an Orlando school that was singled out by Maxwell as having “a policy against letting gay students walk its halls.” Rev. Dr. Nino Gonzalez, pastor of Calvary City Church, which runs Calvary City Academy, noted that his school not only enrolls LGBTQ students but that it served a high-profile role in assisting victims and families in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre in 2016. He said discriminatory language that appeared in a “lifestyle” statement on the school’s web site was outdated and has been removed.

The other comes from Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, which helps administer the scholarship (and publishes this blog). Tuthill criticizes Maxwell for pressuring companies to stop their donations, arguing that fewer donations only hurts the economically disadvantaged children who are helped by the program. He also reports that only a small fraction of the schools appear to have any discriminatory statements toward LGBTQ students in handbooks or web sites and that he has yet to encounter evidence of any LGBTQ student being denied admission or mistreated by a scholarship school.

 

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