Important charter school article in the Star. Where are the investigations?

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by David Safier
Reporters Rhonda Bodfield and Enric Volante have written an excellent investigative article on charter schools in the Star: Education at charters is spotty, oversight lax. It talks about César Chávez Middle School and Aztlan Academy not turning in necessary records and possibly padding their student enrollments, allowing them to get more money from the state than is due to them. It talks about the administrators for La Paloma Academy, who are husband and wife, receiving $171,000 and $166,000 in salaries. And it talks about a general lack of oversight of charter schools, which allow abuses to continue for years.

In other words, the article spells out in lengthy detail the types of problems I have been posting about almost since I began writing on BfA.

So where are the state and federal investigations?

Investigations are going on elsewhere. As I've written earlier, some charters in Pennsylvania have been dragged into court. Agora Cyber School was the first, but the scope of the investigations has widened:

What began as a complaint from a couple of moms more than 18 months ago has mushroomed into a widening federal investigation of at least five Philadelphia-area charter schools, calling into question spending controls and management oversight in this burgeoning alternative to traditional public schools.

[snip]

A supervisory prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office confirmed that federal authorities had taken a broad interest in charter-school operations.

"We are taking a close look at charter schools – Philadelphia Academy is a good example – and the manner in which these programs spend tax dollars for the education of our children," said John J. Pease, an assistant U.S. attorney who is chief of the government-fraud and health-care fraud unit.

Are these abuses greater than what is going on in Arizona, or is the only difference that they are being investigated and ours are hiding in plain sight?

The investigations began "as a complaint from a couple of moms more than 18 months ago" and were "triggered in part by [Philadelphia Inquirer] revelations about questionable spending at several schools." Parents' complaints followed by a series of articles in a newspaper led to a widening investigation which should go a long way towards cleaning up problems in Pennsylvania's charter schools. That should be happening here as well.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Journal Gazette is looking into Imagine MASTer Academy, one of many charters Imagine Schools runs across the country, including more than half a dozen in Arizona.

A Fort Wayne charter school is using state tax dollars to pay a for-profit landowner nearly triple in rent what it might have paid to own its campus outright.

[snip]

Similar real estate deals have come under fire in other states where the national charter school company, Imagine Schools, operates. But a local Imagine executive said such deals are necessary for the charter school company to invest in new properties.

The school is housed in an old YMCA building. Here are the financial transactions, which are typical of the way Imagine Schools does business nationwide.

In July 2006, [the building] was sold by the YWCA to North Wells Schoolhouse, a for-profit, limited-liability company created by the non-profit Imagine Schools Inc. – a move outlined in the school’s charter.

Early last year, North Wells Schoolhouse LLC transferred ownership of the 26-acre Wells Street campus to Imagine Schools’ for-profit real-estate arm, Schoolhouse Finance LLC. That company sold it for $5.5 million – $2.6 million more than North Wells Schoolhouse paid – to a for-profit real estate investment trust, tax records show.

Now, that investment trust is owned by EPT Schoolhouse, a subsidiary of Entertainment Properties Trust.

Entertainment Properties Trust is a for-profit, publicly traded real estate investment company that trades mostly in movie theaters and also owns restaurants, wineries, vineyards and ski slopes, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records. It has no connection to Imagine Schools or its affiliated companies.

I've spent a great deal of time trying to follow the money in Arizona's Imagine Schools to find out if similar arrangements are going on here. Frankly, I lack the expertise and the resources to do the job as it should be done, though I've gotten a bit of help, and I'm trying. But this is a task that should be taken on by professional journalists as well as state and federal investigators. We also need people with inside information about abuses at charter schools to step forward.

Arizona is supposed to get $54 million from the Feds to create new charter schools. That money shouldn't be thrown into an unregulated swamp teeming with hungry alligators. We need to put some time and money into cleaning up the problems with Arizona's charters before we dump more money into a broken system.

Please, if you know about problems with Arizona charter schools, either use the comments section or email me at safier@schooltales.net. Let's put citizen journalism to work.

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2 thoughts on “Important charter school article in the Star. Where are the investigations?”

  1. David,

    Excellent investigative work! My wife and I looked into charter schools when our kids were hitting school age. I never walked into one where I felt like they were on the up and up.

    I hope someone with some pull is able to get on this! Have you tried contacting anyone at the New Times? I know they really aren’t my speed, but they have done some fantastic investigative stuff in the past.

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