Rise & Shine response: AG wasted 3 years, taxpayer money

I would like to make a some comments about a recent story on Rise & Shine School to clarify what really occurred, but before I do that, I will say, without hesitation that neither I nor my wife have ever engaged in any unethical behavior. Also, no one was ever defrauded by Rise & Shine. And now as Paul Harvey used to say … for the rest of the story.

My wife (Desiree) and I have five children, three have profound special needs, and two are adopted. We are also currently in the process of adopting another special needs child as well, which will bring our total up to six. My wife has two masters degrees, both related to education. Her degrees and early teaching experience are from Vermont, a state that is consistently regarding as being among the top three states for education.

When she agreed to move to Arizona, she took a teaching position for a short time, but opted not to continue because she felt the schools worried too much about teaching kids to prepare for the AIMS test, rather than give them a well-rounded education. In response to this she stopped teaching at the school and opted to home-school our kids.

A parent of another special needs kid was impressed with the progress Desiree was making with our special needs children. She asked if Desiree would work with her child and mentioned she could pay Desiree using her ESA grant.

For those of you not familiar with the program, the ESA grant allows families of certain qualifying children (such as special needs kids) to use 90% of the funding that would be allotted for them at public school toward other forms of education, such as private schools.

At the time the grant could not be used to pay individuals to teach your children. Desiree wanted to be able to help this parent, so she ultimately opened Rise & Shine. It began in our home, but later grew, so it moved into its own building. As it grew, my wife hired additional teaching staff to help and obviously there were many other expenses related to running a business: rent, utilities, curriculum, equipment, and so on.

One expense that there wasn’t, was a salary for my wife; she never took any type of pay for the work she did related to the school… ever! She did it because she loves helping special needs kids and she thought she would be able to work and be near our kids at the same time.

The problems related to the Attorney General’s Office began almost three years ago now. A parent of one of the students got disgruntled with Desiree over something that was very petty (and actually didn’t have anything to do with the service provided by the school). She became upset, pulled her daughter from the school and called the Department of Education to complain about Rise & Shine. The Department of Ed passed on the complaint to the Attorney General’s Office.

Now comes the part of the story about which I’m most upset.

Having been in law enforcement for more than 20 years, I have a great deal of knowledge on how investigations should be conducted. The Attorney General’s Office apparently doesn’t know how they should be conducted; they have wasted nearly three years, using Arizona taxpayer money, to conduct an investigation that could’ve been successfully concluded with a fifteen minute phone call.

They began by covertly contacting as many of Rise & Shine’s families as they could, telling them they were investigating us and telling them not to tell anyone about the investigation. Well, several of Rise & Shine’s families adored Desiree and what she was doing for their children. They alerted her about being contacted by the Attorney General’s Office. Many families, however, simply assumed that where there was smoke there must be fire and they disenrolled their children. This basically cut the school’s funding in half. It was almost a year before we were even informed what the actual complaint was about.

There were two major complaints.

The first complaint was that the school was being advertised as being ‘tuition-free’ when it wasn’t actually free. My wife explained that she thought the verbiage was okay, as the families were using their ESA grant funds for tuition and not paying for any tuition from their own personal reserves. There were students as well attending the school who didn’t have any ESA grant funding (such as siblings of special needs students, or students who would qualify for the grant in the future, but had missed the application deadline for the current year). For these students, the parents were still never asked to pay anything out of their own pockets; the school did what it could to fundraise so they could attend as well. After the Attorney General’s office told us about this issue, my wife immediately changed the wording about “tuition-free” in any school informational materials. The end result of this change didn’t affect the parents in any way. They all knew exactly that the ESA grant was used to cover student tuition.

The second complaint was that Rise & Shine claimed to be a non-profit when it wasn’t. This is true. My wife was a new business owner and had someone help her with the paperwork that was to be filed with the Corporation Commission. Her intent from the beginning was to be a non-profit, but the person who prepared the paperwork, completed it as a for-profit. The school had also intended to apply for 501c3 status, but we realized the error with the Corporation Commission filing prior to getting to that. The school never represented itself as a 501c3 or solicited any donations with a promise that they would qualify as charitable donations. Both issues outlines in the complaints from the Attorney General’s Office were corrected immediately upon them finally dropping their cloak of secrecy and telling Rise & Shine what the issues were.

I did see a comment under the initial article saying that some private school owners are raking in profits hand-over-fist. That is not the case in terms of Rise and Shine. As I previously stated, Desiree has never taken a salary. Over the years we have also lent the school over $20,000 from our personal savings account to help keep it afloat. The school had operated at a net loss every year. If there had been a net gain in revenue, it would have been reinvested into the school. Rise & Shine was never about making us money and will not ever be about that.

We have been working with the Attorney General’s Office to come to an agreement. The last meeting we had with them, was last year sometime. We came to an agreement with them about all their recommended changes, however, the only thing we asked them to reconsider was the fine amount. They wanted to fine Rise & Shine $5,000 for the violations. We felt the suggested fine amount was not fair for the following reasons: