BASIS Charter in the Star

by David Safier

You'll find 2 articles about BASIS in the Sunday Star, one about its academic approach and the other about questions concerning salaries and choice of employees. Reporter Tim Steller also has a few blog posts (here and here) with other interesting information.

First, kudos to BASIS. This is what a charter should do: provide a genuine alternative for students, with a clear educational vision and a dedicated staff. It's not for everyone? Doesn't matter, it's not supposed to be. It creams off the best and most motivated students? What a terrific opportunity for the best and most motivated students to be among peers, to be challenged and energized by the staff and by other students.

From what I've read about BASIS, it's probably too test centered for my tastes, but that's just my educational preferences. I have little doubt its students graduate with excellent educations. I would recommend it with few reservations to students wanting the type of academic rigor BASIS offers.

If most Arizona charters had the same dedication to education, no matter what their overall mission, there would be less to criticize about charter schools. Unfortunately, I fear BASIS is more the exception than the rule.

That being said, some details of the schools' finances (there are 2 schools, one in Tucson and one in Scottsdale) point up reasons why charter schools should be as financially transparent as district schools. Both are publicly funded, so the public should be able to see how charter money is being spent, in detail, just as it can for school districts and their individual schools.

Steller points out a few BASIS salaries in one of the articles.

Basis paid CEO Olga Block and Chief Operating Officer Michael Block $175,000 and $140,000, respectively. Together, the married couple who founded the school made $315,000 that year, up from $216,000 two years earlier.

The school hired Olga Block's daughters in 2007, paying Petra Vyborna $23,634 as employee compensation and Michaela Vyborna $2,255 for public-relations material design.

For its accounting, the school turned to Olga Block's sister in the Czech Republic. Katerina Schmidtova was paid $61,461 in 2007 for accounting services via the Internet and $36,893 in 2006.

Michael Block's son, Robert, also was hired by the schools — as an employee for $8,500 in 2006 and as a provider of IT services for $13,769 in 2005.

(To find these figures, Steller had to hunt online for the schools' tax forms. It shouldn't take an investigative reporter to dig up this kind of information. Any parent should be able to find it easily on the school's website.)

Should two schools with a total enrollment of about 1,100 students pay a total of $315,000 a year to their husband-and-wife team who are CEO and COO? It sounds excessive to me. Are their 3 children on the payroll because they are the best possible hires? That seems questionable. And is someone living in the Czech Republic (who happens to be the CEO's sister) better suited to supply accounting services than someone closer to home? And if so, is $61,461 the salary someone would expect to earn for providing accounting services in the Czech Republic? Again, I question that.

Yet BASIS, by all indications, does a hell of a job with its students and doesn't cut financial corners. Maybe that's because it receives a considerable amount of funding from non-state sources. The Scottsdale school lists $930,027 that it receives above its state per student allotment, which comes to about $1,700 per student. BASIS Tucson lists $271,030 from outside sources. (Anyone who argues that public schools get too much money should ask the BASIS CEO if she could run her school as successfully without the extra funds.)

Finally, this is a small point, but one I think deserves to be mentioned from a state funding standpoint. Seniors only spend their first semester at school.

In the second semester, they complete an independent research project consisting of either working as an intern at a public or private sector institution or enrolling in an external-study program.

I know one BASIS student who spent his second senior semester interning for Rep. Giffords in D.C., which, I imagine, was a great experience.

My question is, does BASIS get its full state funding for seniors who are no longer on campus and probably don't take up much staff time? If so, should it get the funds simply because the students are on the schools' class rolls?

I cut BASIS a reasonable amount of slack for what I consider questionable salary levels and nepotism, because it does a fine job educating its students. But many other people with less pure educational motives are abusing the lax charter school regulations and making a lot of money for themselves, their relatives and their friends, at the expense of their students' educations.

Detailed charter school financial reports should be out in the open and easily accessible so legislators and the public have the information they need to decide what is a reasonable use of state funds and what isn't.