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| MARKUS WINKLER / UNSPLASH |
‘When school administrators with access to funds go unchecked, embezzling and misusing public money, it’s a loss for the students.’
Fraudsters in the public school system stole more than $225 million in taxpayer dollars over a seven-year period, Open the Books revealed in a report released Saturday.The report details fraud occurring in 24 states and Puerto Rico, from the West Coast of California to the rural mountains of West Virginia, showing how public school fraud is a prevalent issue across the whole nation.
“When school administrators with access to funds go unchecked, embezzling and misusing
public money, it’s a loss for the students. If it’s in a smaller district, the waste, fraud and abuse impacts in such a profound way that it may take years to recover,” the report stated. Open the Books is a nonprofit, nonpartisan government watchdog organization that “operate[s] the largest private database of public spending in human history.”Open the Books and the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a nonprofit focused on promoting responsible fiscal public policy, found that fraudsters only repaid 30 percent ($67 million) of the total $225 million stolen after the OIG “ordered restitution” from some of the criminals.
Open the Books collaborated with SFOF to sift through the Department of Education Office of Inspector General (OIG) reports to calculate the total amount of recorded education fraud since 2019. The groups looked through more than 90 cases of fraud where “schemers were rigging bids, billing for supplies they never purchased, embezzling and more,” Open the Books said.
In one instance of mass fraud by a single individual, California school Executive Director Janis Bucknor confessed to stealing more than $3 million during a five-year period. She spent the cash on “personal travel, restaurants, internet shopping, and private school tuition for her children,” and most notably, over $220,600 on Disney cruises, Disney theme parks, and other Disney-related products.
The state with the most fraud was Indiana, where a single scheme resulted in $44 million in taxpayer dollars never making it to schoolchildren. OIG reported that the administration at Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy inflated their enrollment numbers for three consecutive years. The schools received millions more in funding from the state than they should have and directed those millions “to fraudulent companies controlled by the founder, which were then funneled to his co-conspirators and others,” the report stated. OIG reports also recorded one school employee being fired for trying to blow the whistle on the mass fraud.
Texas fraud followed close behind Indiana, with fraudsters costing the state nearly $40 million in the past seven years. Florida and Illinois recorded the largest number of fraud cases. Florida fraudsters cost citizens $24.7 million, and Illinois fraudsters $14.5 million.
The report includes fraud data from only three of the “20 largest school districts in the country with the most federal funding.” The OIG has yet to investigate the other 17 school districts, leading Open the Books to write that its survey is “just the tip of another very large iceberg.” Open the Books concluded that “most of the highest-funded school districts are unrepresented here, and among smaller districts the per-student losses to fraud are unacceptably high.”
“Stronger oversight of federal education dollars is more than some bureaucratic exercise — it is an economic and moral imperative,” Open the Books noted. “Families deserve assurance that the public institutions meant to serve their children are not being looted by the very officials entrusted to lead them.”
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon responded to Open the Books’ report on Fox Business, saying, “We’re just beginning now to really look into the fraud [in the] K-12 schools. … I can assure you that we will be following through with our departments to see where this money has been going.”
Fraud in our K-12 schools wastes taxpayer dollars and takes resources away from students.
— Open the Books (@open_the_books) July 10, 2026
Open the Books and @SFOF_States found $225 million in alleged fraud across nearly 90 cases.
Thank you, @EDSecMcMahon for following up on these findings. pic.twitter.com/PaxRjvf5z5This level of continual fraud hurts the taxpayer, but especially the American student. Literacy rates continue to decline, and America continues to slip behind foreign competitors in test scores and critical thinking abilities. Evidently, throwing money at the issue does not work; it only lines bad actors’ pockets. A 2025 review of 12,531 school districts by Open the Books found that “districts that spent more on teacher and administrative pay saw their students’ standardized test scores drop.” --->READ MORE HERE
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