Forum… Or Against ’em

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
The California Legislature needs to act with alacrity in eliminating the lax regulation of charter school operations. In recent years there has been a disturbing tendency of the individuals who found or otherwise create or start charter schools to structure them so that they dominate their operation and management, and from that perch of power direct to themselves or secondary companies they have created contracts for the provision of all order of things schools use – pencils and pencil sharpeners, erasers and pens, chalk and chalkboards, desks, tables and chairs, books and instructional materials, computers and monitors, keyboards and printers, and the like. This has created scandal after scandal, resulting in the closures of a succession of charter schools…
It should not come as too much of shock that charter schools have, in practice, had at best checkered success, as the impetus behind them is of somewhat dubious pedigree. In theory, charter schools are intended to fill a few crucial gaps that exist in the conventional public school system. Some charter schools are intended to cater to students who stand outside the mainstream: either as underachievers or as overachievers. Some charter schools are designed to offer a curriculum that is better suited to the academically challenged than what is available in public schools, utilizing more basic and less challenging material buttressed by instructional assistance, tutoring or resources intended to assist the slow learner in coming up to speed. Other charter schools are designed to offer a curriculum that is better suited to those who are academically advanced, utilizing more challenging material and applying more exacting and accelerated standards than exist in the typical public school setting. Other charter schools offer concentrations in subjects that traditionally lie outside the focus of normal public schools such as in the performing arts or, more mundanely, that are intended to offer intensified vocational training, such as in the area of woodworking and carpentry, fabricating and welding, construction, or firefighting, or law enforcement. Others still are intended as relatively typical academic training grounds that are simply devoid of the cultural and social elements normally present in public schools which some parents find objectionable. A question exists, of course, as to why these elements, or most of them, cannot be provided by the public school system. But, the legislature, in its wisdom has determined that the charter school experiment or option or whatever it is, as it were, should be explored. So, if enough parents in a given area petition for a charter school to be formed, such a school can be “chartered” under the authority of a school district. At that point public money which would otherwise be directed to public schools is diverted to the charter school. It is how that money is ultimately used that has become the issue…
The Oxford Preparatory Academy offers a perfect illustration of how the charter school concept, which in its purest form represents an idealistic approach to improving upon the educational process, can be exploited …
At one point Oxford Academy was, or at least appeared to be, the model of what a charter school was supposed to be. Under the aegis of the Chino Valley Unified School District, it was founded by Sue Roche, the principal at Rhodes Elementary School, the highest-scoring school on academic tests in the Chino school district. The school board approved the two-year charter application unanimously in 2010, with what was obviously widespread community support that had moved into the realm of enthusiasm, as the number of student applicants to attend numbered over 600, well above the 350 student threshold needed to bring a charter school into existence. The school board gambled over $3 million on chartering Oxford for the first year. Roche and the staff she assembled did not disappoint them: In its first year of operation, Roche was able to apply her educational formula absolutely unfettered, and the academic performance of students at Oxford outpaced that of the students at every other school in San Bernardino County. Indeed, over the first three years of the school’s existence, 2011, 2012 and 2013, it was the top performing school academically in San Bernardino County. Students at Oxford Academy in Chino averaged Academic Performance Index scores of 958 out of 1,000 in 2011 and improved to 972 in 2012. In 2011, the school board unanimously extended Oxford’s charter for five years, from 2012-13 through 2016-17. So impressive was the school and its operation, that the Capistrano Unified School District invited Roche to extend the Oxford model into its jurisdiction in Orange County, where she set up a second campus in Mission Viejo. In Mission Viejo, the students there racked up scores on the state’s uniform academic tests that were even more impressive than what had been occurring in Chino – an almost unbelievable average 993 out of 1,000-point maximum on the state’s academic performance index during the first year the Orange County school was open. In Chino, fierce competition broke out among parents vying to get their children admitted to Oxford, with typically 1,500 applicants seeking admission to the school with 728 available slots for students…
With its robust academic scores, Oxford pulled the district’s average scholastic performance up, way up. The Chino Valley Unified School District consistently outperformed the state average. Only once in the years that Oxford was in existence did the Chino Valley Unified School District not outperform every other school district in the county on the standardized tests. Why then, did the Chino School Board this year vote against renewing Oxford’s charter?
Because Sue Roche, who seemed so dedicated to educating students, allowed that imperative to be overridden by her desire to make money. Last year, Roche withdrew from the position of executive director of Oxford Preparatory’s corporate entity and promoted Barbara Black to that position, while assuming an undefined administrative role in the academy. Roche simultaneously created a for-profit entity, Edlighten Learning Solutions, in which she is the central figure and prime mover. Then, apparently at Roche’s direction, Oxford Charter Academy entered into a contractual arrangement that would have paid Edlighten $1.5 million to, essentially, employ Roche as the school’s contract administrator/executive director…
Unfortunately for Roche, the district caught wind of that arrangement in the months prior to its scheduled vote in March to renew the charter for five years. According to Chino Valley Unified School District Superintendent Wayne Joseph, who had been instrumental in convincing the district to proceed with the original charter in 2010, Roche had betrayed the faith of everyone involved by seeking to exploit the non-profit Oxford Preparatory Academy and line her own pockets. Joseph said Roche had engaged in “arrogance, overreach and greed” by employing “machinations” to cynically manipulate the academy’s reliance on consultants to cash in. It was, Joseph said, “alarming” that the Oxford board had hired Edlighten Learning Solutions to operate the academy as part of a contract which called for ten percent of Oxford’s revenues to be diverted to Edlighten for that service, representing a radical increase in consulting fees the academy was being budgeted to pay out over the next several years, the lion’s share of which were to be steered to Edlighten. “This is a classic example in which a very, very successful charter school, somewhere along its journey, lost its way,” Joseph said. “It breaks my heart.” The Chino school board voted not to renew Oxford’s charter and Oxford is appealing that decision to the San Bernardino County Board of Education…
Somewhat belatedly, the relationship between Oxford Preparatory Academy and Edlighten Learning Solutions last week was terminated, although it is difficult to determine which party severed the connection. The move seems to be a calculated one on the part of Oxford to convince the San Bernardino County Board of Education that it deserves to have its charter perpetuated. On the other hand, it was Edlighten which put out a press release on May 25 that stated, “Acting in the best interests of the charter students it ultimately serves, the board of directors of Edlighten Learning Solutions voted Tuesday to propose terminating its business relationship with Oxford Preparatory Academy.”
Whichever entity drove the decision to terminate the contract between Edlighten and Oxford, the point that needs to be made here is that the contract from the beginning was a horrible idea. How horrible? So horrible that by my interpretation, though I am not a lawyer, it put Sue Roche, right up against the legal line, if not actually across it. There is a section of California’s Government Code – 1090 – which outlaws people involved in the government from having a personal financial interest in the decisions they make. Now, was Sue Roche, a government official? In a way she was, when she was the executive director of the Oxford Charter Academy. She was spending taxpayer money on behalf of the government, for sure. That makes her at least a quasi-governmental official, just like the superintendent of a school district or a principal of a school is a government official. A superintendent of a district or a principal of a school would not be allowed to arrange a contract in which he or she would be paid as a vendor for delivering equipment or materials to the district or the school or as a consultant to render some service to the district or school. How then was what Sue Roche did any different? Did she not set it up so that Edlighten would be hired by Oxford? Or did her successor, Barbara Black, whom she had promoted to take her place, come up with that on her own? What do you think, gentle reader?
The thing is, what Sue Roche did is not unique. Long before Oxford was chartered, Charles Steven Cox had likewise exploited the charter school system for all he could. In 2000, Cox convinced first the parents and then the school board members in the Snowline-Joint Unified School District in the High Desert communities of Pinon Hills and Phelan to allow him to establish the California Charter Academy. After he set up the academy’s first campus under the auspices of the Snowline-Joint Unified School District, Cox managed to expand the California Charter Academy in relatively short order into the largest charter school operation in California. He convinced Snowline to charter a second academy, then obtained two more charter sponsorships, one from the Orange School District in Orange County, and one from the Oro Grande School District, located in San Bernardino County’s High Desert.
Simultaneous to his founding of the non-profit California Charter Academy, Cox created Educational Administrative Services Corporation (EASC), a for-profit company which was then hired by all four charter schools to manage the day-to-day operations of the charter schools and provide academic supplies such as books, paper, pens, pencils, desks, chairs, projectors, computers, etc. The rates charged by EASC reflected in the billings were inflated. In some cases, educational materials that were paid for by the charter schools were never delivered. By 2003, teachers at several of the schools were going public with accounts of how students’ educations were being neglected and books and other educational materials were not being provided. In 2004, the superintendent of the California Department of Education, Jack O’Connell, launched an investigative audit into California Charter Academy, alleging financial irregularities. In August 2004, four years after California Charter Academy’s creation, it ceased operations abruptly, throwing teachers out of work and forcing students to hurriedly matriculate back into public schools…
The audit O’Connell commissioned through the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Team was delivered in 2005, showing $23 million in taxpayer money paid to the private management company Educational Administrative Services Corporation was misappropriated. Among the findings were that Cox had hired several of his family members into what were essentially do-nothing clerical and non-productive administrative positions, that Cox, his family members, other EASC and Charter Academy employees were provided with luxury automobiles, and that among the expenses accumulated by the Charter Academy were accommodations in Las Vegas, at Disneyland and the Disneyland Hotel, studio musical recording equipment, spa visits, fishing trips and jet skis. The audit alleged multiple conflict-of-interest violations, the improper conversion of private schools to public charter schools, and the falsification of documents and claims to receive public funds. Ultimately, 147 yet outstanding criminal charges against Cox and his associate, Tad Honeycutt, were filed by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office. That case is supposed to go to trial later this year…
In 2009, the Adelanto School District chartered the Adelanto Charter Academy, based in large measure on the advocacy of a band of so-called political conservatives who maintained that an alternative to what they called the liberal public school system was needed in the High Desert. In 2011, the district revoked that charter after it was demonstrated that a number of public figures, including indicted and now convicted former San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus, Hesperia School District board member Anthony Riley, the indicted former California Charter Academy founder Charles Steven Cox, Peggy Baker (Cox’s sister-in-law), then-San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, Mitzelfelt’s field representative Jessie Flores, indicted former assistant assessor Adam Aleman and indicted local businessman John “Dino” DeFazio all siphoned off money from the Adelanto Charter Academy or entities deriving money from the academy…
In March 2015, Excelsior Charter Schools, which is chartered under the authority of the Victor Valley Union High School District, serving students in grades seven to twelve and consisting of five campuses including two in Victorville and one each in Phelan and Barstow as well as in Norco in Riverside County, conferred severance packages upon former superintendent Bill Flynn and former assistant superintendent of student services Minda Stackelhouse. Unofficial reports were that the severance packages Flynn and Stackelhouse received were $635,000 and $298,000 respectively when they made their departure from Excelsior the previous month. Flynn and Stackelhouse resigned on February 19, 2015 with no indication being given as to why. Their lawyer, however, maintained they were due the remaining amount under the nearly four years unexpired in Flynn’s contract and the nearly two years remaining in Stackelhouse’s contract…
In April 2011, three Morongo Valley Unified School District teachers, including Jared Mecham incorporated Hope Academy, Inc as a charter school devoted to underserved at-risk students in the Yucca Valley region after originating a petition to create a charter school. Mecham convinced the Morongo Unified School District to charter Hope Academy to operate as a charter school for five years starting July 1, 2011 and running through June 30, 2016. Late last year, Morongo Valley Unified officials sought an audit into Hope Academy by the states Fiscal Crisis and Management Team. That audit revealed that without the district’s knowledge or permission, Hope Academy’s operations were expanded into several adjacent counties and districts located in San Bernardino, Kern and Riverside counties and that Jared Mecham arranged a $220,275 annual compensation for himself as the academy’s founder/administrator/superintendent and then promoted his wife, Christine, who was originally hired as a teacher, to senior director of programs in August 2013 at a salary of $159,583 during the 2014-15 school year with an increase during the 2015-16 school year to $195,666. Mecham also set up three companies that existed essentially to provide services to Hope Academy: SavantCo Financial, Inc. for automobile lease agreements; SavantCo Education, Inc. as a “back-office service” provider; and Savantech, Inc. for technology services. After canceling a previous $9,771.25 monthly contract with EdTec Inc. for accounting, finance, payroll, and attendance, grant administration, human resources, governance support, board presentation, compliance and accountability and facilities services, in 2014 the Hope Academy governing board at Mecham’s direction approved a master services agreement with SavantCo Education effective July 1, 2014 through June 30, 2015 for a monthly fee of $58,000, almost six times the amount previously paid to EdTec for similar services. The fiscal crisis management and assistance team found $130,890.40 in unauthorized payments to SavantCo, including $103,440 for what was invoiced as a “monthly retained fee,” an apparent bonus paid to Mecham for just showing up. In all, the fiscal crisis management and assistance team conservatively estimated that Mecham and his wife and his various corporate affiliates had misappropriated more than $900,000 in public money…
My basic philosophy is that we already have enough laws. We may have too many laws, to be more accurate in paraphrasing my thinking. I think we ought to enforce the laws we have, generally, before we busy ourselves with making new laws. I think a full-time legislature is superfluous, actually. I am in favor of a part time legislature and I would go even further in saying I think that part-time legislature should be a voluntary and unpaid one. But I digress. The point here is that if I think there is a need for a new law, it is a safe bet that law is probably needed. And I think we need a law that explicitly states that anyone running a charter school cannot have a financial interest in its operations. The law should state that a founder or operator or superintendent or principal or teacher or employee or board member of a charter school cannot be a vendor to the school, cannot be a service provider to the school, cannot be a consultant to the school, cannot own a company that provides any goods, services or anything to the school. If, as I suggested earlier, such activity is already afoul of the law, it seems to me too many charter school operators are hiding in the thicket of liberality and goodwill and faith that attends our shared duty to educate our progeny and we need to be explicit in preventing them from abusing our trust…

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