Education

You mean vouchers can be used at Muslim schools?????

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by David Safier h/t to The Range for furnishing me with a follow-up to yesterday's post about Louisiana's school voucher law. Lousiana's Republican Rep. Valarie Hodges is upset about the new private school voucher law. At first, she was all for it because: “I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their … Read more

Imagine School finances: the numbers don’t add up

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by David Safier

NOTE: This is the seventh in a series of recent posts examining Imagine Schools. (Here are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.) If you have ideas or information to add, please leave comments at the end of the post or email me at safier@schooltales.net. I keep all email correspondence confidential.

Most of my posts about Imagine Schools have focused on Imagine Prep at Superstition because that's the school that made the news for losing 11 of its 14 teachers at the end of this school year, either because they were fired or because they quit. Today, though, I'm going to look at Imagine Middle at Surprise as an example of the convoluted and unsustainable financial arrangements that are typical of many Imagine schools. [Both Imagine Prep at Superstition and Imagine Prep at Surprise were for-profit schools until recently, so I don't have access to their tax returns which non profits are required to make public. Imagine Middle at Surprise was always a nonprofit, so I have 5 years worth of 990 tax returns to look at, which makes for a more complete analysis.]

Here's the short story about the financial situation at Imagine Middle at Surprise. Its building costs are higher than the total state allotment that goes to the school, meaning it's in hock before it hires its first teacher or buys its first ream of paper. Imagine Schools loans the school enough to cover the rest of its expenses, then "forgives" part of the debt each year, while piling up more debt for the current year. It's hard to see how the school will ever dig itself out of this cycle of loans and "debt forgiveness."

Let's look at the finances for the 2010-2011 school year. The school had about 165 students and received about $1,150,000 from the state. That's about $7,000 per student, a typical state allotment for Arizona's charter schools. Yet it spent $1,302,000 on "Operation and Maintenance of Plant," meaning it spent 113% of its state funding just paying for building rent and maintenance.

Obviously there had to be some outside funding. It came in the form of $1,340,000 in what the school labels "Supplemental, Contracted Labor." Basically, it's a loan to the school from Imagine Schools, something that happens at their schools around the country when they can't make expenses, which is often the case.