Thank you for your response. It turns out the answer to the question lies in the Pub 970 example I cited in my question. The example in that reference is referring to the student's taxes and not the parents. While the parent gets to use the expenses to determine the AOTC they have nothing to do with the ESA Distribution. So you have to enter the expenses on both parent's and student's return. However, the student is the one that has to process the 1099Q exclusively on their tax return. In TurboTax there is an entry for the student to deduct the expenses used by the parent to calculate the AOTC. In my case I was trying to process the 1099Q on the parent's return.
I will look into the meal expense that you recommend. Thank you for that tip.
