Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes indicted two out-of-state residents for allegedly defrauding the state’s school voucher program over $100,000.
According to the indictment, Johnny Lee Bowers and Ashley Meredith Hewitt, who also uses the name Ashley Hopkins, submitted applications to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program for more than 50 children, both real and fake, using “false, forged, or fraudulent documentation.” Bowers and Hewitt submitted applications for 50 children, 43 of whom were made up, applying as parents under their own names, as well as the names of fictitious “ghost” parents.
“In total, the defendants received about $110,000 from the ESA Program and used the money for their own personal living expenses in Colorado,” a press release from the indictment alleges.
The indictment states the pair obtained $110,258.28 in taxpayer funding between December 2022 and May 2024. According to Mayes’s office, the pair now reside in Utah.
The Arizona Department of Education, which processes voucher applications and payments, flagged Bowers’s and Hewitt’s actions to Mayes’s office.
“As a former Arizona attorney general, I am determined as superintendent to eliminate any fraud within the ESA program,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said in a statement.
They have both been charged with conspiracy, fraud, and 58 counts of forgery each.
School vouchers, which allow parents to receive taxpayer funds to send their children to private or charter schools, have been a hot-button issue in the state since their inception in 2011. The original law was limited to schoolchildren with disabilities or who met other specific criteria, but in 2022, under then-Gov. Doug Ducey, it became universal after limitations were removed in the Republican-controlled state legislature in favor of school choice.
Proponents of school voucher programs have hailed Arizona’s program as the gold standard as it was the first state to enact universal school choice. Arizona has long had open enrollment, in which parents could send children to any public school with sufficient openings.
Opponents, however, dislike diverting taxpayer funding from public schools to private ones and point to examples of misuse of funds, in such cases as this one. The voucher program has also put a strain on the state’s budget.
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Mayes had previously expressed concern about the program’s susceptibility to fraud.
In an interview with the Phoenix-based KTAR News last year, she said her “concern is that it has expanded so quickly and it has so few controls over it compared to public schools, and charter schools even, that it is open for abuse, and that’s what I’m trying to ward off here.”