AZ Department of Education released personally identifiable information in school voucher data

Officials at the Arizona Department of Education say they inadvertently released personally identifiable information in a database of 1.2 million school voucher purchases.

Spokesman Doug Nick said the department released the information in response to public records requests by Valley media outlets, including 12News, which has published a series of reports on how voucher dollars are being spent on questionable purchases, including lingerie and jewelry.

Many of those purchases were approved under a Department of Education policy that automatically greenlights reimbursements under $2,000. That policy was adopted to clear a months-long backlog. Those purchases could later be “clawed back” if needed, according to the department.

Nick said state officials removed most personally identifiable information from the Empowerment Scholarship Account database before turning those records over to news outlets. But in a “tiny” number of circumstances, the ESA database included individuals' names as part of data meant for parents or guardians to write a memo detailing what they purchased with voucher dollars.

The department is still sorting through the data to figure out exactly how many instances this occurred, though Nick said it amounted to “dozens” of cases out of more than a million reimbursement requests.

12News reported Tuesday it vetted the database before publishing a list of more than 600,000 ESA purchases — and did not publish instances of reimbursements that went directly to parents, “as a small part of those records included some names of children.”

However, Nick confirmed that The Arizona Republic did publish the full database without redactions.

The Republic has since taken it down. In an editor’s note, the paper wrote that the data provided by the Department of Education “contained personally identifiable information.”