Here is what our tax dollars paid for at one Arkansas private school.

In April 2025, the founder of a school called the Delta Institute for the Developing Brain sat a room full of students down for a 40-minute "circle time." During it, she directed the kids to physically attack a 13-year-old boy. Someone caught it on video. The same school made students scrub floors as punishment. The founder, Mary "Tracy" Morrison, was later charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and related crimes. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 120 days on house arrest, and five years of probation.

And here is the part that should make every Arkansan angry: the state was paying tuition at that school the whole time. Nearly half the students there were using Education Freedom Accounts — Arkansas's school voucher program — to cover their tuition, and the school collected more than $300,000 in public money.

That voucher program is Sarah Sanders' signature achievement — the LEARNS Act was the marquee bill of her first legislative session. Her own spokesperson says the governor "championed" it. She says she wants to be known as the education governor. This is what her signature program bought.

The program with no lock on the door

Sarah Sanders forced vouchers on Arkansas through the 2023 LEARNS Act. The pitch was "school choice" and "freedom." What she left out is that the freedom runs almost entirely one way: schools get the money, and the state barely checks what they do with it.

Public schools in Arkansas have to follow a long list of rules — curriculum standards, testing, reporting, accountability. A private school taking Education Freedom Account money does not. There's no real curriculum review. No requirement to report individual test scores. Parents at the Delta Institute filed complaints. One asked the state point-blank: "Why are there not stronger regulations and accountability measures?" The state's answer, in practice, was to keep sending the checks.

This is not a small pilot. This past school year the voucher program cost about $309 million in taxpayer funds — more than $120 million over its original budget — with most students getting roughly $7,000 each. This coming year, Arkansas expects nearly 55,000 students to use the accounts. That's a third of a billion dollars a year flowing to schools the state hardly regulates — and Sarah Sanders wants to keep it that way.

We tried to add rules. It got blocked.

Here's the hypocrisy. When Arkansans actually tried to add basic accountability, the answer was no.

Several groups recently tried to put an amendment on the November ballot that would require every school taking voucher money to follow the same rules and minimum academic standards as public schools. Common sense: if you take public money, you play by public rules. The effort failed to gather enough signatures to make the ballot.

So the "education governor" runs a $309 million program, a school in that program had children beat a classmate on video, and the modest fix — hold voucher schools to the same standard as public schools — never even got a vote. That's not an accident. That's the design.

Sanders punishes the people who warned her

Remember that Sarah Sanders didn't just sign LEARNS — she went after the Republicans who wouldn't go along. State Sen. Bryan King voted against the LEARNS Act, and in this year's primary Sanders' political action committee cut a maximum-dollar check to his challenger. The message to her own party was clear: get in line behind the vouchers, or else.

That's the governor who "wants to be known as the education governor." Not the one who fixed the oversight holes. The one who spent political muscle ramming the program through and shutting down dissent.

This is what we said would happen

None of this is a surprise. We've been saying it about Sarah Sanders' voucher scheme all along: it takes hundreds of millions of our tax dollars and it doesn't improve a single public school anywhere in Arkansas.

• In every state where voters actually got a direct say, they've rejected school vouchers. Arkansans never got that vote — Sanders forced it on us.
• Voucher money mostly subsidizes families whose kids were already in private school, not new opportunities for struggling kids.
• Arkansas voucher dollars have already been spent on things like a chicken coop, gaming chairs, and clothes — because when there are no rules, the money goes wherever.

A former Little Rock superintendent put it bluntly: under LEARNS, tax dollars are undoing a century of progress. Now add a school where kids were told to hit a classmate and scrub floors — funded, the whole time, by the state.

Who this actually serves

Every dollar of the roughly $309 million spent on vouchers is a dollar that didn't go to the public schools where 465,000 Arkansas kids actually learn — enrollment that's now dropping as voucher money pulls students and dollars away, in a state that already ranks near the bottom of the country for how we live, learn, and get ahead. Sanders had the power to demand accountability before writing the checks. She chose not to.

When the abuse came out, her office declined to answer specific questions about oversight. The lawmakers who sponsored LEARNS didn't respond either. The pattern is the same one we see across her record: big program, big spending, big promises — and when something goes horribly wrong, nobody's responsible and nothing changes.

Kids got hurt. The state kept paying. And the governor who calls herself the education governor still won't fix it.

We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by the Arkansas Times and ProPublica: "This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It." Photo illustration: Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica.