Report: MDE fails to report if afterschool programs are working

JACKSON, Miss (VDN) —  Millions in federal grant funds continue to flow from the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) to nonprofits and school districts to operate afterschool programs for children, even as MDE has failed to publish federally mandated evaluations for years according to a new analysis from the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor.

“As we have seen on the news in Minnesota and here at home during the welfare scandal, making sure that these taxpayer funds are monitored is critical,” said Auditor White. “We will continue to highlight any weaknesses we see in the programs providing money for afterschool or childcare centers.”

In fiscal year 2024, the nonprofits and school districts analyzed in this report spent over $11 million of Nita M. Lowey 21^st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) grant funds to provide afterschool care to students. MDE requires subgrantees to collect and submit performance data. MDE is then required to use those for an annual statewide program evaluation. MDE has failed to publish this required report to the federal government since November 2022.

Analysts at the State Auditor’s Office emphasized other findings, too. For instance:

• Subgrantees may have violated state and federal regulations by engaging external evaluators who were not independent. One grantee hired an individual who worked for the nonprofit arm of the organization being evaluated, causing a potential conflict of interest.
• Moreover, attendance data for the centers grouped participant attendance in multi-day and multi-hour increments. This means that a student who showed up one day or only a handful of hours each month would be included in the same “attendance bucket” as someone with perfect attendance.

This report is the second in a series of reports focusing on taxpayer-funded childcare programs in Mississippi.

The full report can be found here.