How did we get here?
May 2021: After a bill authorizing $6 million in to support early childhood education
failed in the Legislature, Idaho legislators passed
a new bill to funnel $36 million in federal funds to help school-aged children recover from learning loss to the Department of Health and Welfare.
March 2022: The Legislature again
approves $36 million in funds for helping school-aged children recover from learning loss. Horman told the Capital Sun the bills were specifically written to exclude pre-schoolers after the Legislature rejected $6 million in funds for child care programming.
October 2022: John Foster, a lobbyist with Kestrel West, filed a records request for documents related to the program. He also later alleged that a state health department employee had a conflict of interest with the program. That’s according to a lawsuit filed in March 2023 by state health department director Dave Jeppesen and two other state health department employees against Attorney General Raúl Labrador, seeking to set aside his civil investigative demands. Foster, over the coming months, “generally expressed his concerns that” the state health department “had approved some grant funds to entities that served children aged 1-4.” Foster “raised the first concern about the Community Grant Program during the fall of 2022,” the lawsuit said.
January 2023: The Idaho Attorney General’s Office publishes a second legal opinion, following up on one issued in November 2022, that said the health department’s distribution of the grants were legally sound. But the Attorney General’s Office withdrew those opinions in March, saying that they were legally inaccurate. The author of those opinions, a since-fired deputy attorney general, disagreed that they were inaccurate but withdrew the opinions. That former deputy attorney
sued the Idaho Attorney General’s Office for retaliation in September 2023.
Feb. 2, 2023: Legislative Services Office Legislative Auditor April Renfro sends Rep. Wendy Horman, co-chair of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, a draft of intent language for an audit into the Community Partners Grants Program. The language said the review would “evaluate if the Community Partners Grants applications and expenditures were in compliance with the guidelines and if they were only used for in-person educational and enrichment activities that focus on student needs and for providing behavioral health supports to address student needs.” The audit would also probe whether grants were used to serve “school-aged participants ages 5-13 years, as allowable by federal guidance” and indicate if grant award amounts complies with the limits for providers.
Feb. 10, 2023: Department of Health and Welfare Director Dave Jeppesen meets with Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee co-chairs Rep. Wendy Horman and Sen. C. Scott Grow, identifying that $14 million in funds went to 10 organizations that served children under 5, as previously reported by
Idaho Reports. An agency spokesperson told Idaho Reports that “the department has always maintained that only eligible recipients received the grant money. The budget committee co-chairs, Horman and Grow, alerted Labrador that month to concerns about how the state health department handled the grants, Idaho Reports reported.
Feb. 27, 2023: The Legislature’s Joint Finance-Appropriations committee approves an audit into the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s administration of the child care funds, as first
reported by the Idaho Press. A motion to order the audit passed the committee on a 16-3 vote.
April 5, 2023: Gov. Brad Little signs
Senate Bill 1203, removing $14.4 million from the Department of Health and Welfare. In his
signing letter on the bill, he referenced concerns from legislators about potential ineligible payments by the state health department. “Maintaining the public’s trust in government is imperative. To do so, government must follow the law, act with transparency, and allow our legal processes to run to completion. Upon internal disagreement or allegations of impropriety, we must not prejudge or impose corrective action without a full and final picture,” Little wrote, noting that the Legislature’s audit process had barely started. Little also signed
Senate Bill 1175, a budget bill for the state health department that authorized the audit.
April 27, 2023: Ada County Judge Lynn Norton, in a ruling,
allowed the attorney general’s civil investigative demands against more than a dozen grant’s recipients to move forward. That case was later accepted on appeal by the Idaho Supreme Court. “This court finds that there is reason for the attorney general to believe that grant recipients did, are or are about to engage in acts that violate (state law) if the recipients only serve children four years old or younger or only provide online educational or enrichment activities,” Norton wrote.
Aug. 10, 2023: An audit, ordered by the Legislature,
finds a lack of internal controls in how the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare administered the child care funds led to funds being used for ineligible purposes and going toward ineligible groups. The head auditor later
told the Idaho Capital Sun that the audit does not clearly state that state law was broken, but instead flags the issue for law enforcement to investigate.
Aug. 30, 2023: The Idaho Attorney General’s Office
selects Adams County Prosecuting Attorney Christopher Boyd as special deputy attorney general in the state’s investigation into child care grant funds. That’s after Judge Norton
barred Labrador from pursuing the civil investigative demands the Attorney General’s Office issued to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Her order centered on legal guidance the Attorney General’s Office provided to the state health department that said the department’s use of the funds didn’t violate guidelines.