Last week, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read released results of an Audits Division investigation that found four preschools squandered hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars meant to provide child care to at-need families.
The “wasteful” spending that auditors identified at Preschool Promise, a state-funded program, was the result of those four providers collecting funding for dozens of preschool slots while reporting chronically low enrollment—sometimes as few as one or two children a year.
The state investigation, primarily focused on the years 2021 to 2024, did not identify the four providers by name. But public records obtained by WW show that one of the four providers that auditors flagged matches the financials provided by a preschool owned by the official who now oversees Multnomah County’s universal preschool program, Preschool for All…