Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow

STATE QUESTIONS ATTENDANCE RATES AT INTERNET CHARTER SCHOOLS; Sept. 23, 2006; Associated Press, via Akron Beacon Journal (OH) 

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Attendance has been so good at some of Ohio's Internet charter schools that the state is wondering if the numbers are too good to be true.

The Ohio Department of Education plans to give attendance figures a second look after 20 of the schools - state-funded public schools where students do work online from home or other sites - reported perfect attendance for the last school year. Others had rates that were nearly perfect.

At least two schools, including Ohio's biggest, admit that they don't count students expelled for being absent for at least 21 days.

"This sounds like just another way that charter schools are gaming the system," said Lisa Zellner, spokeswoman for the Ohio Federation of Teachers. "What does this do for the student? The point is to be educating these kids, giving them what they need."…

The state's largest Internet charter school, the 6,664-student Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, has reported perfect attendance for the past three school years…

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ONLINE SCHOOLS UNDER SCRUTINY; May 3, 2002; Wired 

More than 30 publicly funded virtual charter schools have launched during the past five years, and parents have largely been pleased with the results.

But the alleged mismanagement of two academies run by for-profit companies is prompting states to request more regulatory authority.

Educators say the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) in Ohio and Einstein Academy in Pennsylvania, both of which are run by private companies, have ignored numerous academic guidelines while operating with questionable accounting practices…

[Ohio Federation of Teachers] president Tom Mooney said ECOT is "really being run by Bozo and Clarabell," claiming that management company Altair Learning Management had no background in education or technology. However, Mooney said they were "shrewd enough to smell a really good opportunity."…

The audit, which was released in April, showed that the company overcharged the state by $1.65 million for teaching hours it could not substantiate, and that $500,000 worth of computer equipment given to students who left the program were not recovered.

The auditor's office said ECOT's net loss of $3.8 million during the school year "causes substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern."

ECOT recently agreed to pay back $1.6 million to Ohio's department of education over the next three years. ECOT superintendent Jeffrey P. Forster, who saw 30 percent of his students leave the program during its first year, said that because of cost cutting, the academy is on solid financial footing…

The federation also cites a recent charter granted directly to Akron "industrialist" David Brennan's White Hat Management company instead of to a nonprofit as required by state law.

Mooney said that when legislators passed the charter school law, they never envisioned cyber schools and "did not set up appropriate guidelines for oversight."…

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Skills for Tomorrow

FINANCIAL TROUBLES FORCE CLOSING OF ST. PAUL CHARTER SCHOOL; November 25, 2009; Minnesota Public Radio 

St. Paul, Minn. — A charter school in St. Paul plans to close next month because of financial problems.

Skills for Tomorrow school has continually lost enrollment in recent years, which has only hurt finances, but officials say the governor's shifts in education funding this summer also contributed.

While Skills is the first school to announce its closure since the shifts, advocates for charter schools worry it won't be the last.

Every time a school's enrollment drops, so too does its state funding. That's been the root problem for the Skills for Tomorrow school in recent years. This year, it's down to just 65 students…

Piehl also confirms the problems had been building. The school had reserves it could dip into for cash flow needs, but this year, enrollment dropped too much for reserves to cover, which created the need for credit. Credit, Piehl said, that they couldn't get…

"It's true that the payment shift hurts the charter school more than the district school because the district school has the ability to tax and is a better loan risk," Walsh said. "We are working with some others that are on the bubble, so this might not be the last school you see closed." …

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Sarasota School of Arts and Sciences

“Sarasota karate teacher charged in sexual battery on student.” Herald-Tribune (FL), 3/9/2012

SARASOTA - Sheriff’s officers have arrested a karate instructor at the Sarasota School of Arts and Sciences on a charge of sexual battery on a child after a female student said the teacher had sex with her in his classroom seven years ago.

John Garcia, 47, of the 2800 block of Poplar Street in Sarasota, was arrested and jailed without bond Friday on the felony charge, according to a sheriff’s release.

A former student of Garcia’s told detectives that she had sex with Garcia in his classroom at the school seven years ago, when she was 14, the release said...

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AUDIT RAISES QUESTIONS OVER CHARTER SCHOOL; SARASOTA SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES OVERSPENT BY $560,000 AND MUST COVER A $300,000 DEFICIT; February 13, 2001; Sarasota Herald Tribune

The Sarasota School of Arts and Sciences overspent by about $560,000 during the last fiscal year, and the mistakes could result in the closing of the 4-year-old school.

The school must cut 21 percent from its budget this year or find other ways to cover a $300,000 deficit, said Al Weidner, the Sarasota County School District's budgeting director. "It's going to be hard."

Not only is the charter school faced with the prospect of drastic cuts, but school leaders are also under scrutiny from Sarasota County School District officials, who have hired a consultant to examine the school's spending…

District leaders became alarmed about the charter school's finances recently when a consultant's audit, for which the district paid $2,000, listed pages of questionable spending policies…

Independent Auditor’s report of June 30, 2008

http://www.myflorida.com/audgen/pages/chschools_efile%20rpts/2008%20sarasota%20school%20of%20arts%20and%20sciences.pdf

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Gateway Charter School (Arkansas)

FIRST CHARTER SCHOOL FAILED, BUT OTHERS HAVE HIGH HOPES; September 17, 2001; Arkansas Business 

Gateway Charter School in Ponca knew it was in financial trouble the first day of school in September 2000.

The first open-enrollment charter school in Arkansas needed 40 students to break even, but it only had 13, said Steve Brewer, director of the Ozarks Unlimited Resource Cooperative in Harrison, which oversaw the school.

The school never recovered from its early student shortages and voluntarily surrendered its charter on Aug. 24, leaving in $400,000 in debt…

A recent special report by the Division of Legislative Audit showed Gateway spent $972,376 during its two years in existence, although students didn't start attending until fall 2000. During that period, its revenue was $570,792, leaving a $401,584 deficit…

Brewer said he decided to take the school off life support because it wasn't luring in enough students. And Gateway never recovered from a $180,000 debt it, incurred by renovating the facilities it got from Ponca Bible Camp, Brewer said.

Gateway was supposed take the fourth-,fifth-and sixth-grade students who had fallen behind academically and keep them 24-hours a day, seven days a week for six weeks at a time…

A strong marketing campaign could have helped the school, but it didn't have the money to advertise, Brewer said.

Although Gateway made "good strides" with the students' academic performance, it was too expensive to house them at the school for the six-week session, Greenway said…

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Franklin High & Franklin Arts Academy

EX-SCHOOL WORKER TO REPAY $50K; February 8, 2007; The Arizona Republic

A former employee of Franklin High in Mesa has agreed to repay nearly $50,000 for office supplies that were purchased with school funds but never arrived on campus, according to Gilbert police.

Police began investigating the purchase of the office supplies by Jesse Bowler after the school reported the situation in November…

The board reached an accord with Bowler last month in which he agreed to repay the cost of the office supplies, said Gilbert Detective Chris Wakefield. Bowler apparently is taking out an equity loan to repay the money, Wakefield said.

Franklin High shut down in November after state education officials caught the charter school with an inflated enrollment, prompting the state to pull its funding for November.

An internal audit of Franklin High's finances revealed the alleged misuse of funds by Bowler, who was fired.

Franklin High shut its doors Nov. 22 because it lacked the money to meet payroll obligations, according to a letter sent from Jerry Stansbury, executive direct of Franklin High and Franklin Arts Academy, to Kristen Jordison, then executive director of the state Board for Charter Schools.

The staff of the state Board for Charter Schools is investigating Franklin Arts Academy's enrollment, which was overstated by at least 267 students. It also appears the state Attorney General's Office could be looking into the academy's enrollment problems, or at least was asked to do so…

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School of Excellence

STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION VOTES TO SHUTTER CHARTER SCHOOL AT HUMPHREY; APRIL 13, 2010; The Daily World (AR) 

School of Excellence students will have to finish up the remainder of the year elsewhere after the state Board of Education unanimously voted Monday to shutter the troubled Humphrey charter school.

Vicky Wilson, who was appointed interim director of the school in January, told the board a month ago that the two-year-old school was struggling to pay bills and expected to be nearly $80,000 in debt by the end of the school year…

“They were operating in the red; they didn’t even know how they were going to pay all of their bills for the rest of the year,” said Tim Kimbrell, commissioner for the Arkansas Department of Education…

A state report had revealed the school was out of compliance with nine of 18 state requirements for public schools in Arkansas. Wilson complained to the education board that the school wasn’t given a fair chance, had just hired a new director this week and had hoped to raise its enrollment cap for next year to improve the current situation…

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Espiritu Community Development Corporation's K-12 school

NFL GIVES SCHOOL ANOTHER $1 MIL; January 26, 2008; The Arizona Republic 

The National Football League is showering a small Phoenix charter school with gifts and money, including a check for $1 million…

The school doesn't have such a sunny record with the state. It has never tracked how many of its graduates have earned a college degree.

Last year, only about a quarter of the school's third-, fourth- and fifth-graders passed the AIMS reading test. For four years, the percentage of eighth-graders passing the AIMS reading test has fallen, landing at 38 percent last year…

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CHARTER SCORES SLIDE DESPITE NFL FUNDING-$1 MIL FROM SUPER BOWL GOTNOW-TROUBLED SCHOOL ROLLING; March 24, 2007; The Arizona Republic 

After the Valley hosted its first Super Bowl, in 1996, the NFL left behind a $1 million grant for a fledgling south Phoenix charter school.

Eleven years later, the non-profit Espiritu Community Development Corp.'s K-12 school has more than doubled the size of its campus and its student population. Yet it is struggling to meet state and federal standards in teaching its kids, with test scores dropping and causing the state to intervene.

Its special assistance, on top of state and federal funding, continues to flow. In keeping with NFL policy, Espiritu's school is in line to reap yet another $1 million when the Super Bowl returns to the Valley in February. In August, it also won a low-interest, private $8 million loan, approved by the Phoenix Industrial Development Authority, a committee appointed by City Council members…

Espiritu's owners, Fernando and Armando Ruiz, say they are confident they can turn around student performance along with the campus.

Fernando said the academic problems started a couple of years ago when the school grew by about 200 students in one year…

Today, Espiritu's school has 800 students, and the non-profit Espiritu Corp. receives about $5 million a year in state funds and $350,000 in federal money to operate…

Besides Armando, the staff of Espiritu Community Development Corp. includes his brother Fernando and their extended family members.

Three Ruiz family homes are adjacent to the charter school's campus, along with the headquarters of two additional non-profit agencies the family also operates.

One is called Mary's Ministries Inc., a Catholic organization created to train and support religious missionaries. Mary's Ministries was inspired by visions of the Blessed Mother that the Ruiz brothers' mother began experiencing in the 1980s. Estela Ruiz's visions became more public in the 1990s when she said she began reading messages delivered by the Blessed Mother and temporarily drawing pilgrims to the property…

Until last year, Mary's Ministries owned the land where Espiritu's charter school sits. About $500,000 a year in the charter school's budget went to Mary's Ministries for rent. But last year, the Ruiz brothers, tired of parents and lenders confusing Mary's Ministries with the school, put the land under the ownership of a third non-profit, the Project America Development Co…

Espiritu's AIMS test scores are sliding, and some grades have not reached state and federal standards over the past few years. If the school continues to underperform, the state can change its curriculum and replace its principal, now Fernando Ruiz, and its teachers. It also could shut it down…

The state report, released Wednesday, painted a picture of a school with vague educational goals that offers inadequate teacher training and that suffers from high teacher turnover. Its classes need more thoroughly written curriculum that matches state learning goals and appropriate instructional resources, the report stated…

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