A charter school with campuses in Minneapolis and St. Paul lost $1.3 million in state funding after the Minnesota Department of Education investigated allegations that the school deliberately inflated its attendance figures.
The sanction against the Minnesota Internship Center was disclosed in a recent filing by the Minnesota Supreme Court, which upheld the department’s actions after the school appealed.
Education Department officials declined to provide records involving the case, but the Supreme Court filing shows that the investigation found in 2021 that the high school improperly received reimbursement for 137 students who were not actually attending the Minnesota Internship Center.
School officials “acknowledged that its previous administration had fabricated student attendance records in prior years, but claimed to have made all necessary corrections for the 2018-19 school year,” according to court records.
Tracy Eberlein, school principal and board chair, said none of the administrators involved in falsifying records continues to work at the school. The school’s executive director is one of the few holdovers and he was working as assistant director at the time, she said.
“We had a big staff turnover,” Eberlein said. “The people who weren’t doing their jobs were let go or quit on their own.”
Enrollment fraud has been a significant and growing problem among charter schools in the U.S. In the past five years, charter school leaders have been criminally charged with stealing more than $300 million in taxpayer funds by falsifying attendance figures, according to a review of cases in California, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and North Carolina.
In Ohio, concerns over irregular enrollment practices by the state’s 381 charter schools prompted the state auditor to conduct a random review of 30 charter schools in 2015. The auditor found half of those schools significantly overstated enrollment, which helped spark major reforms of Ohio’s charter school system later that year.