Attorney General Marc Dann deserves some BSB love

According to this Columbus Dispatch article, the Ohio Department of Education claims that the district may owe the state money, in part, because "it paid for more students than actually attended Harte Crossroads Academy and Harte Crossroads High School."  The district is, at least $1.6 million in debt.  However:

"That’s just the debt that officials say they know about, that they gleaned from documents crammed in desk drawers, stuffed in boxes and buried in piles of unopened mail. Richland officials say the best bookkeeping they’ve found is duplicate checks tossed into a cardboard box."

That's a charter school program that in three years used $5 million in state and federal money.  Money that could have gone to public schools with public auditing and local elected officials to be held accountable for the management of the school district.

"It’s hard to defend a school that lasted less than three years and spent $5 million in state and federal money," said Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio programs and policy for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Dayton. The group oversees several charter schools.

And where did that money go?  According to one former student:

"They didn’t have everything situated. We had no teachers. The computers didn’t work," he said.

And the founder of the school, Anita Nelam, who was fired when new management took over the district?  Why, she's a campaign donor to charter school advocate Speaker Husted.

And the lesson proves that Governor Strickland is correct, for-profit companies should not be permitted to manage charter schools.  What happened as a result of using a for-profit management company as a last ditch effort to save the school year?

From the Columbus Dispatch:

Nelam blamed the schools? demise on Richland and a management company its schools use, saying they took their fees even as Harte Crossroads was failing financially.

The management company, Innovative Learning Solutions, took 20 percent of the schools? revenue in return for fiscal, recordkeeping and other services, and Richland took another 3 percent.

"If they had helped us when we asked them ...," Nelam said yesterday. "It did not have to come to this."

Cooper said problems stemmed from the prior administration?s over-reporting of the number of students. Nelam had said there were about 250 students from kindergarten through 12 th grade before she announced the closure; the schools had 190 students yesterday.

So the for-profit companies was taking 23% of the schools incoming revenues to pay itself while teachers and staff went all month without pay.  All to keep a charter school which had been "over-reporting" (i.e. fraudulent lying in order to obtain state taxpayer money it didn't deserve) the number of students it had by possible as many as sixty non-existing students.

Marc is having a busy day.

Apparently, she was the Vice-Chair of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and ironically quoted as saying:

"We must redouble our efforts to remove barriers designed to distract us from our mission of providing high- quality education," said Anita Nelam, founder of Harte Crossroads Public Schools in Columbus, Ohio, who serves as Vice-Chair of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "Laws that limit our independence, or deprive our students of needed resources, must be changed."

This was in support of a report by a taskforce of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools which advocated:

"The Taskforce urges state legislatures and advocates to revisit charter laws to make sure they provide . . . freedom from regulatory burdens and clarity about oversight responsibilities."

Freedom like the kind of financial accountability public schools are required to have?!?

Yep, she the VP for Communication & Organizational Development for the Ohio Charter School Association, too.

This is not simply someone who got into charter schools to make money.  This is one of the leading advocates for the charter school movement in Ohio, a frequent critic of public schools, and someone who was permitted, due to an utter lack of state oversight leave over 100 students who are currently enrolled in no school with incomplete transcripts before they were to graduate.

In other news, apparently there is some question about the academic performance of the students at this charter school as well.  According to a Columbus Dispatch article in 2005 about the school:

Results of the sixth-grade tests, released last week, appear dismal. Among the boys, no one passed the citizenship, math or reading portions. The girls did better, although writing is the only subject in which more than 26 percent of the students passed. In writing, 65 percent of the girls were judged at least proficient.

Well, she was the VP in the Ohio Charter School Association, until it went broke, too.

According to this cached story, she never graduated college, filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and has been called by the president of the charter-school advocacy group Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in D.C., Chester Finn, Jr. "a major player" on the national charter school scene.

How did a person with no college degree and a prior bankruptcy be permitted to receiving millions of dollars in taxpayers money to open a charter school?