$20 Million Mis-spent: No surprise

Doc Wood, BSB's resident education expert, has some bad news for us. The Ohio Department of Education misspent $20+ million through problems with charter school's/accountability. For comparison's sake, the whole intern blunder cost us $2.2 mil. Wonder if the Republicans will be debating this one? -Jerid

It should not have been any surprise to read that Republican State Auditor Mary Taylor found that our own Ohio Department of Education mis-spent over $20,000,000 in the Community School program. These schools, also known as charter schools, were the focus of much of the debate around Governor Ted's budget this past spring. While the Governor wanted to put the program on hold (and end payments to 'for profit' charters) while issues like this were straightened out, the General Assembly charged ahead and funded the program without any new controls.

Now we find out that ODE does not have appropriate accounting or control mechanisms in place to manage these schools. I am shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on at ODE.

Not really. If you take the time to read the transition report on ODE that so many of us worked on you will find that the Community School program in particular was pointed out as a 'black hole' when it came to educational dollars. Loosely regulated by ODE (anyone want to explain why Community Schools are located in the ODE organizational charter under "operations" along with payroll, etc. and not under curriculum and instruction--could it be that the head of operations had a hand in writing Ohio's Community School Law while working for the Republican Caucus?), Community Schools, especially those run by for-profit companies, simply do not have to report how they spend money.

During the budget process, when asked by Representative Jennifer Sheets (D-Washington Co.) if he would tell her how much profit his charter company is making one well-heeled executive simply said 'no'. When asked what his salary was, he refused to answer. Bottom line, the for-profit companies running charters simply will not tell how they are spending the tax payers' money.

To add injury to insult, these charter operators don't do such a great job educating kids. Most of the charter schools run by White Hat Management (owned by David Brennen, major Republican donor) are rated as being in 'academic emergency' by ODE. Lot's of taxpayer money for no results--sound familiar?

(One more note on the budget--the Governor also wanted to end the Ed Choice voucher system, citing the lack of results and transparency there as well. Of course, this too went down and now we find out, as reported by the Toledo Blade that several private school operators are hiking their tuition to 'voucher' students by nearly double in order to collect more state money for their private schools. Your tax dollars at work.)

Pardon me for being fairly upset about these new revelations. I just spent most of this week in my school district helping our superintendent cut over $1,000,000 from our district's budget of $11,000,000. After years of hoping that the unconstitutional school funding system would be fixed, we have finally given up and have begun to cut away at our kids' education. This will mean cutting art and music programs for elementary students, foreign language for our middle schoolers, and a number of advanced electives for our high school kids.

How about this--make the charter operators give back the money they are unwilling to account for and give that money to schools like ours. Schools that take every kid that walks in the door, that publicly report both our expenditures and our results, and that are vital to the civic fabric of our state. Come on, either own up or pay up.