Parents who want to benefit from West Virginia’s school choice options are having a nightmare trying to obtain educational supplies through the state’s contracted manager.
The culprit has been TheoPay, which is a key part of a platform that state officials selected months ago for a nearly $10 million contract to process families’ purchases of state-approved educational supplies.
Families who opt to use the Hope Scholarship for non-public school expenses receive an amount that changes each year. Most recently, it’s been about $4,900. Families may use the money for supplies like textbooks, flashcards, whiteboards or even computers.
This can be especially challenging for homeschooling families, who have highly individualized needs.
“How in the world do I get TheoPay to work?” at least one exasperated parent asked in recent weeks.
‘I’m not happy with where we are right now’
For months, parents trying to buy supplies through the TheoPay open market have groaned about clunky submissions, denials of products that should actually be allowed and excessively long wait times for orders to process.
Arkansas, which also had a deal for TheoPay, canceled it after concluding the vendor “failed to deliver a fully functioning system by the deadlines established in the contract.”
In West Virginia, frustrations grew so intense that the former state Treasurer, whose office oversees the Hope Scholarship, said during a public October meeting, that “I am not happy with where we are right now with this vendor.”
Riley Moore, then the Treasurer, described blunt discussions at that point with Student First Technologies, the company that runs TheoPay, saying improvements would need to be made soon.
“Certainly this would be one those deadlines and if it’s not met, I’m certainly going to rain a storm that starts with a certain letter down on some people if we don’t get this figured out,” Moore said near the end of the October meeting.
Moore won election to Congress in November, Republican Larry Pack won election as the new Treasurer, and West Virginia is still trying to figure out TheoPay.
‘Complaints from parents are endless’
As parents made purchases within the past few weeks, they continued to express frustration.
Rachael Robinson, mother to three students eligible for Hope Scholarship support, wrote a letter to the Treasurer’s Office within the past few weeks, saying “complaints from parents are endless.”
Robinson’s letter concluded by saying she, other parents and taxpayers like all of them deserve answers.
“My money has gone toward this program, I participate in this program, and I am not seeing results,” she wrote. “I want answers from my elected officials who are to be held to account.”
Robinson, a Milton resident, has three young daughters who learn from home. Initially, she was excited about the new platform and believed it could provide a greater range of products.
Her frustrations, she said, are not only as a mother leading the educational foundation of her children but also as a taxpayer. She doesn’t feel like the state is getting the bang for its buck.
“To me, this is a total failure of technology on their end,” she said in a telephone conversation. “I see parents literally begging to go back to the old system.”
Jill Upson, executive director of the state’s minority affairs office, is a member of the board overseeing Hope Scholarship. Upson said she is aware of families’ frustrations and believes the board will continue to focus on whether any progress is being made.
“Yes, I am very concerned by reports from parents that they are having technical and other difficulties with the TheoPay open marketplace system,” Upson said.
“My concern is that the scope of some of these issues may further expand as the popularity and participation in the Hope Scholarship program increases if not resolved before the start of the next school year.”
Buying educational supplies but reducing fraud or waste
The system through Student First Technologies actually works a couple of ways. The main idea is to allow parents to buy educational supplies while also trying to reduce possibilities of fraud or waste.
One aspect of the platform is considered a closed system. Products are available at specific prices. You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.
Another option – the one parents complain about — is meant to be more flexible for purchases.
Yet the variety of potential purchases lives in tension with efforts to prevent fraud. Add human error and automated computer systems into the mix and you have a recipe for frustration.
Parents use a browser extension and may shop different markets for personalized school supplies. You place items in your online shopping cart, which is scanned by an artificial technology tool to provide or decline preliminary approval.
After that, an employee of Student First technologies reviews the order – and may make a different determination of whether it would be allowed or not. The representative then manually recreates the order.
In practice, this offers a lot of points for the process to go off track. Sometimes there’s operator error on the part of the parent. Sometimes the system can be clunky. Sometimes the rules are not quite flexible enough. Sometimes the employee deviates from what the family intended in filling the order.
Sometimes it’s just slow. If much time passes, the price could go up on the produce the family needs.
“This structure provides more flexibility for our Hope Scholarship families but will unfortunately also have a higher denial rate since families are able to request consideration for a large spectrum of items,” said Carrie Hodousek, communications director for the Treasurer’s Office.
She said Hope Scholarship Board staff have been working closely with the Student First Technologies team to improve regarding the consistency of approval or denial decisions for TheoPay orders.
She encouraged parents to review the list of qualifying expenses in the Parent Handbook, as well as the board’s nonqualifying expense list of unallowable items, when submitting purchases in TheoPay to ensure they have the most current guidance about the allowability of the items they wish to purchase.
The Treasurer’s Office, which oversees the Hope Scholarship, has acknowledged challenges during the transition to the new technology.
“There were delays in fulfilling orders and families were frustrated with the level of information provided about their orders,” Hodousek said.
“Student First Technologies has made great strides in improving the process for families, rolling out several changes at the beginning of October which provided more timely and transparent information in the system.”
In particular, she said, an initial backlog of orders has been addressed. And, she said, order processing times have typically improved to about one or two business days. Longer lags are likely, she acknowledged, during peak ordering periods in August and January.
‘The TheoPay platform will get smarter’
Since approval of the platform, the Treasurer’s Office has been trying to communicate with families about system development and hiccups, according to monthly newsletters provided in response to a MetroNews Freedom of Information Act request.
In August, the newsletter to families announced the platform had gone online. “The TheoPay platform will get ‘smarter’ with time,” parents were told.
The next month, September, the newsletter acknowledged that the Hope Board had voted to temporarily expand the board’s reimbursement policy to help address delays. At the time, TheoPay had received 9,000 orders and only 6,000 had been processed.
In October, families were told about some upgrades to the system, including fields that would show notes on the reasons some orders are rejected. In November, the Treasurer’s Office tried to give more information about why price fluctuations occur.
It’s been a journey already, and families who benefit from the Hope Scholarship remain concerned that purchasing challenges are here to stay. In fact, as the program grows in popularity, the strain could grow during heavy buying seasons in August and January.
‘I think this is fiscally irresponsible’
Katie Switzer, a parent of five from Glenwood, which straddles Mason and Cabell counties, is frustrated by the way the system has worked.
Kids in West Virginia are starving for education, and Hope should be removing roadblocks, not creating them, Switzer said.
“Parents wait weeks to get curriculum and supplies for their children’s education. Basic academic needs like curriculum, books, and flashcards are regularly denied,” Switzer said.
“Parents can’t order digital curriculum and academic subscriptions through TheoPay aren’t allowed because of fulfillment issues. The Hope Help Desk is not very helpful in solving problems, parents regularly just give up on getting what their child needs to thrive, because they can’t get answers about ordering problems for weeks or months.”
Yet Switzer acknowledged she does not know of any national providers excelling in both preventing fraud and providing easy, reliable access to a broad range of academic options.
Her hope is for state lawmakers to convert the program to use debit cards with audits (similar to expense reporting), a fully refundable tax credit or simply checks mailed to parents of children in the program.
The emphasis on preventing fraud, she said, has resulted in too strict limitations on parents teaching their children and aiming to meet academic standards.
A better position, she suggested, would be to place more trust in parents.
“West Virginia is spending nearly $10 million over the next three years to prevent fraud in the Hope Scholarship program. I think this is fiscally irresponsible,” she said.
“Every child with the Hope Scholarship in West Virginia must meet academic progress requirements at the end of the year; so what does it matter where the money is spent if the student is academically progressing satisfactorily?”
Her conclusion:
“If a child’s teaching parent wants to spend their child’s portion of the state education funding on lunches for them to eat at home, field trips to the coal mining museum, or home internet (all things that are currently not allowed under the program) then that should be their prerogative.”
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