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Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
A
ruling to promote charter school
accountability: editorial
By The Plain Dealer Editorial Board
Sunday, August 21, 2011, 6:34 PM
It
took a Franklin County judge to
make Ohio law perfectly clear to for-profit charter school operators:
Despite
years of lax oversight by Ohio education officials, they must follow
the law.
Although
Ohio’s community schools are
privately operated, their finances -- which come from taxpayers --
cannot be
shielded from public scrutiny or oversight.
That
ruling in early August, from
Franklin County Common Pleas Judge John Bender, in favor of 10
governing boards
that sued Akron-based charter school operator White Hat Management Co.,
holds
that the company must “provide their governing authorities with a
detailed
accounting of how public funds were spent.” The rest of their case
continues.
The
governing boards had charged that
the management company had too much power and would not give them a
financial
accounting, claiming the financial information was confidential.
Bender
ruled that White Hat, owned by
David Brennan, a major donor to Republican causes, must detail all
public money
it spent on school property, teacher salaries, books, equipment and
funds paid
to lobbyists.
That’s
a bundle of money that has been
out of the public view for far too long. White Hat, like all charter
school
operators, is allowed to keep 96 percent of state funds that go to the
schools
it manages and 100 percent of the federal funds. It has more than 30
schools in
Ohio.
White
Hat’s lawyer, Charles Saxbe,
says his client has turned over much of the required expenditure
information.
The charter school boards’ lawyer disagrees. Bender has yet to sort
that
question out.
But
his ruling on the financial
records is critical to holding for-profit charter school managers
accountable
for how they spend public money. Ohioans give community schools a large
chunk
of taxpayer money with the reasonable expectation that they will be as
fiscally
accountable as traditional public schools. Too often, they have not
been, yet
state regulators have failed to act, casting a pall over the many
excellent and
accountable charter schools.
By
insisting that public funds can’t
simply disappear into back rooms, Bender has done a service to
taxpayers and
charter students.
Read
it at the Cleveland Plain Dealer
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