Santorum bilks Pennsylvania taxpayers

It’s probably a little soon before we know who’s going to take on Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum in Pennsylvania’s Senate race in 2006, but this seems like an issue that’s likely to come up.

A suburban Pittsburgh school district is reviewing whether it should be paying for U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum’s children to use its Internet-based school, since the Pennsylvania senator and his family live in Virginia.

The Penn Hills district has spent $100,000 educating the Republican’s children since 2001-02, said Erin Vecchio, a school board member who requested the review. She also is head of the local Democratic committee.

“I’m concerned because [he is] taking away from my kid. That $100,000 … could be going to my kids, a computer or something,” said Vecchio, who has three children enrolled in Penn Hills schools.

The circumstances here are pretty odd and not flattering for the right-wing senator. Santorum and his wife have six kids, all of whom are homeschooled with an online curriculum. But unlike nearly all homeschool families, Santorum asks taxpayers in Pennsylvania, where his kids do not live, to pay $100,000 to finance their online studies.

Under Pennsylvania’s “cyberschool” law, the district in which a student lives must pay the cost of tuition for students enrolled in online schools. Except Santorum’s six kids live in Virginia, not Pennsylvania, and Virginia has no such law.

In fact, the home the Santorums own in the district is a modest, two-bedroom house, which probably couldn’t house all eight of them anyway. With this in mind, one has to wonder, as James Capozzola does, if Santorum is working some scheme to intentionally bilk Pennsylvania taxpayers.

The crux of the matter is that it’s doubtful the Santorums ever — or ever planned — to live in the town whose taxpayers are paying his tuition bills. According to the A.P., “Santorum’s spokeswoman, Christine Shott, said she did not know whether the senator and his wife, who have six children, had ever stayed in the two-bedroom house they own in Penn Hills.” In the same article Shott says she doesn’t know and can’t comment on whether the family ever stayed at the home or rented it out.

More likely, of course, the Santorum family lives in another house entirely: a home in Leesburg, Va., assessed at $757,000 this year…. So Sen. Santorum has himself a pretty good deal here: Pay the property taxes on a modest, forgotten little Pennsylvania house and let others worry about the cost of the “free-market” choice he’s made for his children’s education.

It sure sounds like a “pretty good deal,” but it also sounds like fraud. Hopefully, Pennsylvania Dems can do something with this, because I have a hunch taxpayers in Penn Hills won’t think highly of Santorum’s little scheme.