Florida charter schools (grant tapping-practices)

“Charter schools get a second helping of free money.” Miami Herald, 4/28/2012     

Established charter schools are able to tap into grants meant to help start-ups by nesting schools within schools. Sometimes the two schools share everything, from staffers to teachers to buildings.

From the outside, it looks like a single school, with one main door, one security guard, one principal greeting students.

But on paper, the Charter School of Excellence at Tamarac is actually two schools in one — a bookkeeping strategy allowing the school to collect an extra $250,000 in grant money from the state...

For years, state and local school officials have handed out these competitive grants with few strings attached and little oversight, a Miami Herald review has found. For example:

• State officials have approved grants to schools before they established a fixed location or even a name, records show. Some of these schools later ended up within existing schools — with no requirement to open a new, separate campus.

• Officials have also approved grants of as much as $275,000 to schools based on inflated enrollment projections. One grant-winning charter has only 26 students — though in its application the school claimed it would draw 900 kids, records show.

• Until recently, the Miami-Dade school district never monitored how charter schools spent this grant money, or checked to ensure the grants were spent according to state and federal rules.

The state’s loose definition of a charter school has caused other problems, too. In 2010, administrators overseeing two middle schools in the same Coral Springs building swapped students between the schools — without alerting the school district — helping an F-rated school raise its grade to a B on statewide performance tests...

Under Florida law, a charter school is defined not by its facilities or its students but by its paperwork: State and local school officials recognize a charter school once its founding organization’s application is approved and the school has a contract with its local school board. Once this charter is approved, the school then becomes eligible for a start-up grant — even if the school has no fixed location, or if it operates within an existing school...

Over the past four years, about $23 million in grants have gone to charter schools in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, records show.

Charter schools are eligible for only one start-up grant per school. In recent years, the grants have not exceeded $425,000 per school, with most grants under $300,000, records show.

A Herald review found at least 10 South Florida schools approved for grant money despite sharing a building and administrators with another school...

Once a charter school receives a grant, local school districts are supposed to monitor how the money is spent, to ensure that the school complies with the spending plan approved by Tallahassee. But in Miami-Dade, charter schools spent this grant money with no oversight for years, because Miami-Dade School District officials never reviewed their spending...