FCIR, the Florida Center for Investigate Reporting has published a story about vendor fraud. FCIR is one Florida’s last hopes for continued professional investigative journalism.
According to the article, a vendor for a number of Florida’s on-line public schools, “K12″ has been ripping -off taxpayers by fraudulently submitting bills for services rendered. Allegedly, K12 has been billing taxpayers for “certified” instructors when in fact the instructors actually doing the teaching were lower paid and less qualified.
The FCIR piece claims that K12 leadership attempted to pressure certified instructors into falsifying documents in order to make it look like K12 was delivering services as agreed. K12 is a publicly traded company valued at more than $864 million. The company was founded by William Bennett, the former Secretary of Eduction under Ronald Reagan.
It has long been my contention that MANY state contractors are ripping-off the taxpayers of Florida. In spite of our liberal open government laws and the fact that many contractors are subject to those laws just like the agencies that awarded their contracts, few contractors will tolerate scrutiny. It should come as no surprise that companies like K12 play fast and loose with the terms of their contracts. Whose watching them?
The Florida Center for Investivagitve Reporting story was not about Florida Virtual School. It was about K12 and Florida Virtual Academy. Please correct your post.
Florida Virtual School, the statewide public online school district that has been serving the state of Florida for 15 years, is not affiliated with the for-profit company K12, Inc. which operates in Florida as Florida Virtual Academy.
Florida Virtual School instructors are Florida certified in the subject areas for which they teach, of which more than 100 are national board certified. In addition, Florida Virtual School is performance-based funded, only receiving state funding when a student successfully completes a half-credit course.
For more information on Florida Virtual School, visit http://www.flvs.net.
Thank you for your comment. I believe you are correct and I have made the appropriate corrections. Please let me know if you believe additional changes are necessary in order to accurately relate the intended meaning of the FCIR story.
I was pretty surprised by that but thought maybe things had changed. Our experience with FVS (which we used to refer to the school) was largely fine. The only trouble in fact came where they crossed to Hillsborough Schools. But that’s Mary Ellen Elia and some of her krewe. I was pleased with FVS. Good service good credits. The teachers were OUTSTANDING.
But on this same topic you should tell them to have a REAL HARD look at Pearson Education. Inside track says Pearson products also single students out with dismal online delivery (only selectively they’re very sneaky) and the ones who move through employment with pearson are such as clayton wilcox, darryl rouson’s sister, etc… Sometimes the student has no choice. One program they loaded on one of our computers dials up the screen so bright you can’t look at it. Another entity gives away free Microsoft Word. Don’t line up yet. I am very seriously examining and pin-pointing how they are using it to spy on my laptop. More on that as it progresses. No free lunch.