Hello,
Can PEP student be enrolled in FL registered private virtual school with live teacher instructions led by certified teachers 5x a week, 3h a day?
My concern is the legality part of PEP student being enrolled in something like this. It is 15h per week.
School says they have PEP students enrolled and reimbursed. They say for reimbursement they file "part time tutoring" option and school offers all the invoices and info necessary to apply for reimbursement.
My main concern is, can PEP student legally be enrolled in this kind of program? Reimbursement is secondary as we will use funds for other things. I don't want to jeopardize our PEP funding\status.
Thank you!
Hi! We found some pending posts that never went live for some reason, and this was one of them! I know we have already answered your question via private message, but for the sake of others who might have the same question, I'll post here a summary of what we'd sent to you. :) Private school 5 days a week is not an eligible expense for PEP, particularly if the school is reporting your student as enrolled as a private school student. Given that they are only meeting 3 hours per day, they are probably claiming it is "part-time," but how they are reporting enrollment still matters. Also... Private virtual school is not an eligible expense at all--virtual private schools are not currently covered by the scholarship. Part -time tutoring that is actually full-time live instruction via a virtual private school is not what the "part-time tutoring" category is meant to cover, and if this school is encouraging parents to submit full-time virtual instruction under that label for reimbursement, that is likely to get exposed eventually. As the parent, it is your right to direct your child however you see fit.
However, based on there being several issues here that could conflict with the scholarship requirements and possibly also attendance requirements, I would suspect that this program will run into issues in the near future and will either need to change its services to be in alignment with Florida statute, or they may get shut down. Or the parents could even possibly lose their scholarships, if they are found to have been submitting reimbursements as one thing when really they are something else. Many things here to be considered.