Tonight’s homework: Do people’s tax returns for them.
High schools across the country are turning students as young as freshmen into IRS-certified tax preparers and having them do free tax returns for low-income community members in partnership with the IRS’ Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program (VITA).
In a time where education reform is the subject of national conversation, and President Obama says he expects high schools to be able to graduate kids into the workforce, these programs are teaching kids real-life skills using real-life experience. Many eventually become accounting majors and professional tax-preparers.
What’s more, the 16,000 or so returns prepared per year through the program and its companion program, Tax Counseling for the Elderly, endear the 77 schools providing free tax preparation to their surrounding communities. The programs together scored a total of $3.8 billion in tax refunds last year.
“We hear a lot about students who are getting in trouble. They make the front page of the paper, but we have students who are doing a lot of positive things,” says Wanda Brown, director of academies at A.J. Moore Academy in Waco, Texas, which was rated by the IRS as the No. 1 student VITA program in the nation. Over eight years, A.J. Moore students have prepared over 10,000 tax returns, and as a result people received more than $15.4 million in refunds. The students do such a good job that some folks come from over 100 miles away to have their taxes prepared, says Angela Reiher, academies dean who helped start the program at A.J. Moore.
Angelo Ochoa, who teaches income tax accounting at the school, says he usually gets 70-100 students certified as tax preparers a year, and that last year they did more than 1,800 tax returns. The kids, he says, get nothing in return for working after school three days a week, sometimes until 11:30 p.m. But they do get free dinner, work experience and plenty of community service.
“We have some students who have over 100 hours of community service. They’re going to school all day and doing taxes all night,” Ochoa says. “The work ethic is just tremendous.”
David Moore, program chief of the National Academy Foundation, which partners with high schools to help them run career-focused programs, says the kids are “going to finish high school with a leg up,” because they’re working directly with communities and seeing a real-life application of what they’ve learned in school. The National Academy Foundation helps eight of its schools run their free tax-preparation programs. Other schools work with charities, community agencies and local businesses for administrative help and funding.
Sandra Garcia, an 11th-grader at A.J. Moore, says she actually enjoys doing taxes for people. She says it’s not too hard to balance the commitment with all the homework from her Advanced Placement classes, even on that one night everyone had to stay until 11:30. “It was exciting to see how many people came in, to see how many people trusted us to do their taxes.”