Strange budget numbers at Imagine Prep at Superstition

by David Safier

I've written two posts about the staff turnover at Imagine Prep at Superstition in Apache Junction — 10 or 11 of the 14 teachers either let go or quitting. (Here's the most recent post and the original. You'll find interesting and revealing comments from students and parents on both posts.)

Since then, I've learned more about the four year old school and its history of teacher turnover, the likes of which I have never heard before. But I'm still gathering information. More on that later. Today, it's budget time.

I dug into the school's annual budget — every school submits an itemized budget to the Dept. of Ed, and they're all online — and found some very, very weird numbers. I've looked at lots of the annual budgets from lots of charter schools and never seen anything like this. I'm using the 2011 budget, but the others are similar.

The figure that jumps out is $1,002,844 spent on "Operation and Maintenance of Plant." That comes to $83,570 per month to pay for the school building. In 2011, the school had a total of 138 students, grades 9-12, so that means the school spent $7,267 per student on building costs. That's close to the average per student expenditure in Arizona.

Imagine Prep gets $979,204 from the state, $23,640 less than the "Operation and Maintenance of Plant" budget. So where does the rest of the money come from?

The answer is, the school lists $2,075,105 in revenue coming from "Contracted Revenue, Facilities, Gain." That would mean $172,925 per month in outside money flows into the school's coffers, 12 months a year. I've never seen anything similar at any other school I've looked at. No school generates that kind of money in outside revenue. The school has two buildings, and one of them has a few offices for district-level adminstrators, but that's the only possible source of funds I know of, and it certainly wouldn't total two million dollars a year.

There's some kind of accounting sleight of hand going on here. Based on what I know about the for-profit Imagine Schools corporations' inflated building rents across the country, I'm guessing the corporation pumped money into the schools revenue numbers — a loan, maybe? (they do that kind of thing) — to preserve the ridiculous $1 million per year figure for the building and still end up with a balanced budget.

The budgets I find online don't go into lots of detail, so I can only get a general picture of how the school generates revenue and how the money is spent, but this doesn't pass the smell test. I would love to know more.