Imagine Schools in Arizona, an introduction

by David Safier
This is one of a series of posts, Peeking into Charter Schools. If you have information you wish to contribute, you can post comments or email me: safier@schooltales.net.

This is a first post in my attempts to try and make sense of the Imagine Schools in Arizona. I'm plowing new territory, since I've seen no reporting on the 15 Imagine charter schools in the state. And since the data the state collects from charter schools is overly broad and very sketchy, it's difficult to find solid data to work with.

So I'm doing my best here. Since we have literally hundreds of people in the state who know this subject better than I — current and former employees of the Imagine Charter schools, not to mention the thousands of students and children — I hope people will correct me when I'm wrong and add more information to the discussion.

The earliest Imagine School in Arizona began in 1999. It was actually one of a nationwide chain of Chancellor Academies, which Imagine Schools bought out.

Until 2007, all the Arziona schools were non profits. But the  schools set up after that — 2 new schools and about 4 additions to existing schools — are all for profit schools.

And that's odd. Because the national Imagine Schools, based in Virginia, likes to portray itself as a non profit, even though it isn't. It applied for non profit status about 5 years ago, but it hasn't been granted non profit status. From all accounts, that's an unusually long time for an application to remain in the pipeline.

So I ask, if Imagine considers itself a non profit company in all but formal designation, why would all of its new Arizona schools be for profit? Like so many things about this company, it's a contradiction between what it says publicly and what it actually does.

All together, there are 22 separate companies that run the 15 schools. Of those, 13 have "Inc." at the end of their names. Those are the non profits. The others have "LLC" after their names. Those are the for profits.

All 22 companies have the same mailing address: 18052 N. Black Canyon Highway in Phoenix. Every one of the companies has Nancy Hall's name attached to it. She's the Executive Vice President and Contract Signer for 9 and the Contract Signer for the other 14 which don't have an Executive Vice President. She is also one of 5 Executive Vice Presidents of the national Imagine Schools Company, in charge of Arizona, California, Colorado and Nevada.

Many other names are listed multiple times on the various Arizona companies that run the schools from Phoenix. My conclusion is, these companies are separate entities in name only.

So the 15 Imagine Charter Schools in Arizona are controlled from afar at two levels: at the national level, where Dennis Bakke, the CEO, calls the shots, and at the state level, where control of all the schools emanates from Nancy Hall, who is also a major player in the national company.

To be honest, I'm not sure what all this means. I don't know a lot about the business or corporate world. But when it comes to how much of their money schools spend on rent and how much they spend on students — that's something I know more about. More on that later.

Meanwhile, help me out if you can, folks. The glory of the blog is, while I have the front page, we're all equal partners on the comments page. And I always honor confidences when I receive emails.