Some Obama allies fear school lunch bill could rob food stamp program, By Robert Pear, September 23, 2010, New York Times: “In her campaign to reduce childhood obesity and improve school nutrition, Michelle Obama has become entangled in a fight with White House allies, including liberal Democrats and advocates for the poor. At issue is how to pay for additional spending on the school lunch program and other child nutrition projects eagerly sought by the White House. A bill that the House is expected to consider within days would come up with some of the money by cutting future food stamp benefits. When the Senate passed the bill in early August, Mrs. Obama said she was thrilled. But anti-hunger groups were not. They deluged House members on Thursday with phone calls and e-mails expressing alarm…”
Day: September 24, 2010
Homeless Students – Oregon
Number of homeless students in Oregon continues to increase, By Anne Williams, September 23, 2010, Register-Guard: “Oregon public schools continued to see swelling numbers of homeless students in 2009-10, a testament to the reach and tenacity of a stubborn recession. More than three in every 100 students – 19,040 – met the federal definition of homelessness last year, an increase of 5.5 percent over 2008-09, according to a state report released Wednesday. The uptick surprised no one on the front lines of providing services to homeless families. ‘We see how the recession has hit,’ said Janet Beckman, the liaison to homeless families in the Springfield School District, which counted 482 homeless students last year, up from 464 the year before. ‘We know that we’re seeing families we’ve never seen before, that have never been in this type of situation before. There’s been a shift in the type of people who are needing assistance.’ But the increase between the two years wasn’t as large as the previous year’s 14 percent…”
Child Care Subsidy Program and Fraud
- States are vulnerable to child care fraud, By Raquel Rutledge, September 23, 2010, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Government workers across the country are rubber-stamping taxpayer funding for phantom child care arrangements, according to a new report by the federal Government Accountability Office. In an undercover sting operation conducted in recent months, GAO agents were able to receive subsidy payments using fake Social Security numbers, bogus jobs and phony addresses in four of the five states that were spot-checked. All five states were vulnerable to fraud, the report found. ‘Some states didn’t even call our fake employers,’ said Greg Kutz, managing director of forensic audits and special investigations with the GAO. The GAO conducted its sting in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Texas and Washington. The states were selected based in part on the amount of the $2 billion federal stimulus money they received last year…”
- Texas denies it lacks safeguards against child care fraud, By Robert T. Garrett, September 24, 2010, Dallas Morning News: “Texas has few safeguards to catch scam artists posing as struggling parents to get government child care money, congressional investigators have found. Millions of dollars are at risk, according to the investigators, who said that Texas needs to do a better job of verifying applicants’ identities and employment. The Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, said undercover federal employees managed to get fictitious parents and children admitted to the subsidized child care program in Harris and Fort Bend counties, using the Social Security numbers of dead people. And it said Texas doesn’t adequately verify parents’ employment, check the backgrounds of relative caregivers and flag suspicious applications for further review…”