NEWS
- D.C. bill looks to strengthen charter school transparency [FOCUS, Dorothy I. Height Academy PCS, Options PCS, Somerset Prep PCS, Basis PCS and Hope Community PCS mentioned]
- Charter schools less likely to have libraries [KIPP DC PCS and DC Prep Benning PCS mentioned]
D.C. bill looks to strengthen charter school transparency [FOCUS, Dorothy I. Height Academy PCS, Options PCS, Somerset Prep PCS, Basis PCS and Hope Community PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
March 10, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A member of the D.C. Council wants to ensure for-profit charter management companies are accountable to taxpayers.
The move, by Council member David Grosso, is in response to two pending lawsuits that allege charter officials diverted millions in public money to private management companies for personal gain.
Grosso’s measure, introduced last week, would require an organization that receives 10 percent or more of a school’s annual revenue or obtains a quarter of its total revenue from a charter to provide its financial records to the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
Co-sponsored by Council member Elissa Silverman, it would also require management companies to disclose conflicts of interest.
In February, the board voted to revoke the charter of Dorothy I. Height Academy Public Charter School, citing fiscal mismanagement. The school’s founder, Kent Amos, created a for-profit management company and funneled more than $13 million for personal gain, a lawsuit contends.
In 2013 the District sued Options Public Charter School over allegations it diverted more than $3 million in taxpayer money. The school reopened under new management this past fall.
Neither school was found to have engaged in fiscal mismanagement until records made public by the lawsuits revealed the companies’ finances. The board asked the D.C. Council to pass a transparency measure last year, saying its oversight was limited.
Grosso said he introduced the bill because the charter school board had asked the Council for more legal authority over for-profit management companies.
“If something goes wrong and there’s somebody taking money or not doing the right thing by that school,there’s no way for the public charter school board to know that and frankly in the end they need to know what’s going on because they’re the authorizor that manages and oversees what’s happening there,” he said.
He said introducing the bill made sense because “charter schools spend D.C. public money as well as education D.C. public kids.”
It’s not uncommon for a for-profit management company to run a charter school, but some companies have come under scrutiny for corruption and misuse of taxpayer money.
Traditional public schools must provide detailed information about their budgets, including employee salaries. Charter schools, on the other hand, are considered independent nonprofits and aren’t required to reveal employee salaries, unless an employee makes more than $100,000.
But some charter’s use private, for-profit companies to manage the school. Under federal law, a private management company for a school getting public money doesn’t have to disclose how it spends that money.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board did not respond to a request for comment.
The bill would affect three charter schools in the District run by for-profits — Somerset Prep, Basis D.C. and Hope Community.
The other 108 charter schools in the city are run by either nonprofit companies or manage the school themselves.
Robert Cane, executive director of pro-charter group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, said he thinks giving the charter school board more authority to learn the financial arrangements between schools and management companies is a good idea.
But, he said, it’s also important to make sure the threshold percentage of required revenue isn’t too low.
“I think it’s important that they get those right so that people aren’t scared of and that we aren’t collecting in the sweep of this bill companies that aren’t really management companies, so relationships that aren’t large enough to make them subjects of interest,” he said.
Charter schools less likely to have libraries [KIPP DC PCS and DC Prep Benning PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
March 10, 2015
Charter schools are far less likely than traditional schools to have libraries or librarians, surveys show.
During the 2011–12 school year, 49 percent of public charter schools reported having a library media center compared to 93 percent of traditional public schools in the United States, according to a survey by the National Center on Education Statistics.
Nationwide, one-third of libraries in public charter schools had full-time, paid, state-certified library media center specialists, compared to two-thirds of traditional public schools.
Publicly funded, independently operated charter schools typically have greater discretion over their spending and often have smaller or temporary facilities.
In 2014, the D.C. Public Charter School Board surveyed charter schools in the District to determine what library services they offer. Of the 100 campuses that reported library data, 43 had libraries outside the classroom, while 44 had classroom libraries. There were 13 campuses that reported having no library.
Here’s a campus-by-campus list of what the schools reported.
KIPP DC reported investing in classroom libraries at each of its campuses rather than in school-wide libraries.
Kate Finley, chief academic officer for KIPP DC, said it’s part of the culture of their classrooms for students to have a wide range of books at their fingertips, organized by reading levels.
Advocates for school libraries say centralized libraries serve a different purpose, as a center where students can learn research and information skills and where they can explore books on any topic at any level.
D.C. Public Libraries is opening a branch at DC Prep Benning Public Charter School this month, with plans to have a collection of 5,000 books and staff who will connect students and teachers to library resources at the school and a nearby D.C. public library on Benning Road.
The plan was outlined Tuesday by Richard Reyes-Gavilan, executive director of the D.C. Public Library at an oversight hearing before the D.C. Council Education Committee.
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