Open the Books has spent the summer quantifying recent spending spikes across Medicare and Medicaid, along with the cost of fraudulent schemes that sap the programs of resources for those who need care. Those stories have rightly dominated headlines for months.
But fraud doesn’t start or end with our safety net programs.
We collaborated with the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) to take a look at fraud in K-12 education. The Department of Education Office of Inspector General (OIG) documented more than $225 million in alleged fraud since 2019, across more than 90 cases, in state after state. From California to West Virginia and even Puerto Rico, schemers were rigging bids, billing for supplies they never purchased, embezzling and more.
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These are just a few examples from the report:
DISNEY ADULTING: At Community Preparatory Academy in Los Angeles County, school executive director Janis Bucknor admitted to stealing more than $3 million over five years, or more than one-third of the schools federal and state funding. She used the cash for personal travel, restaurants, internet shopping, and private school tuition for her children, prosecutors said. She also pleaded guilty to spending more than $220,600 on Disney cruise line vacations, theme park admissions, and other Disney-related expenses. The cost per student? A whopping $9,090; that’s plenty to put toward an education somewhere else.
MR. CLEAN: The maintenance director of Boone County, West Virginia schools, Michael David Barker, pleaded guilty in 2025 to defrauding the school district out of $3.4 million. He falsified documents to make it look like the district was receiving large amounts of janitorial and custodial products including hand soap, trash can liners, and face masks from Rush Enterprises, when in fact it only received a small amount of those products or paid for products that were never delivered. Barker and his parents all made cash deposits that went toward purchasing vehicles and making home improvements. The cost per student was $1,096.
PHONY VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS: Five former school employees fraudulently enrolled students in virtual public schools. They used student identities from various private schools around the state, offering those schools computers, direct payments, and access to online curriculum — “to persuade the private schools to share their students’ academic records and personally identifiable information with the public-school districts,” the OIG found. They created fake report cards, used false addresses and submitted falsified course completion reports to the Alabama State Department of Education. The state then paid the school districts millions of dollars to educate these private school students, “who at no time attended the virtual public schools.” The scheme cost state and federal taxpayers $10 million.
IMMEDIATE NATIONAL ATTENTION
In response to our report, Education Secretary Linda McMahon told FOX Business, “Fraudsters are seemingly trying to pick the pocket of American taxpayers everywhere we turn.”
Secretary McMahon noted that her department had previously focused on rooting out waste and fraud in higher education, including the FAFSA student financial aid process. As we documented in our Progress Report of efforts to unwind the agency, the Trump-McMahon effort resulted in rooting $1 billion of fraud out of FAFSA.
But she told viewers they would also place more focus on K-12 schools.
”I can assure you that we will be following through with our departments to see where this money has been going...As we’re looking at schools, looking at the programs that are going out, we will be focusing on this fraud as well.”
This is the kind of accountability — and results — that our transparency model can produce!
Our CEO John Hart gave an interview to local network news stations and told viewers, “Every dollar that we waste on fraud is a dollar that never makes it into the classroom where it’s urgently needed.”
Hart told FOX News Digital, which broke the report, “These schemes within public schools arguably hit us where it hurts most: America’s future leaders…Student outcomes will continue to suffer until we clean up both fraud and administrative overhead."
State Financial Officers Foundation CEO OJ Oleka, whose organization is working to expose fraud at the state level, told FOX, “All fraud is harmful, but defrauding education dollars meant to help kids learn and succeed is especially hideous. The findings in this report should alarm every family, teacher, and civic leader, especially since they only scratch the surface of the problem. The state financial officers courageously tracking every school dollar abused historically have had a bloated federal education bureaucracy only make their job harder."
Investigations and results like these are only made possible by your support. Your readership and contributions are making a difference! Every dollar you invest in transparency goes to exposing waste, fraud and abuse. Any amount helps!
CONCLUSION
These multimillion-dollar figures may not seem enormous in an era when federal agencies are requesting hundreds of billions or even over a trillion dollars for a fiscal year budget. But this survey of reports from publicly funded watchdogs demonstrates they are most likely just the tip of another very large iceberg. Most of the highest-funded school districts are unrepresented here, and among smaller districts the per-student losses to fraud are unacceptably high.
Of the 20 largest school districts in the country with the most federal funding, only three (Broward County Schools, Houston Independent School District and Chicago Public Schools) were included in the more than 6 years’ worth of fraud investigations uncovered by Open the Books. Fraud investigations among the other 17 large districts were not found in OIG records. But dozens of smaller districts did turn up reports, along with individual schools, charter schools, online schools and individual programs.
With that in mind, stronger oversight of federal education dollars is more than some bureaucratic exercise—it is an economic and moral imperative. Families deserve assurance that the public institutions meant to serve their children are not being looted by the very officials entrusted to lead them. Robust auditing, transparent procurement processes, and swift prosecution of bad actors are essential tools for protecting both students and the communities already bearing the full weight of America’s affordability crisis.
Finally, every step must be taken to unwind the enormous bureaucracy and spending housed at the Department of Education, returning education to the state and local level. Not only is that in keeping with the founders’ vision for a limited Executive Branch, but state and local officials are much better equipped to understand the needs of their communities, find efficiencies, innovate for better student outcomes and keep foxes out of the proverbial henhouse.
FURTHER READING
Schooled by Schemers: Fraud, Waste and the Money that NEVER Reached Kids, State Financial Officers Foundation and Open the Books, July 2026
Progress Report: Cutting Waste, Ridding Radicalism, and Returning Education to the States, Open the Books, May 2026
Report: $225M in K-12 fraud found across six years, The Center Square
Report: Roughly $225M in alleged fraud found in K-12 education, Baltimore Sun
Roughly $225 million in alleged fraud found in K-12 education: report, The National News Desk
$225,000,000 In ‘Hideous’ Fraud Schemes Found Across US Schools, Report Alleges, The Daily Caller
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