Tri-Star charter hustlers banned in N.J., welcomed with open arms in Florida

Gallon, Kemp and Kelly in 2010 court hearing where they are banned from operating charters in N.J.

Former Plainfield superintendent and current charter school hustler Steve Gallon III's company, Tri-Star Leadership has been banned in the state of New Jersey. That in itself is no easy task to accomplish in the state where Gov. Christie has never met a corrupt charter operator he didn't adore. But not to worry for old Steve. Five months later, he and his company were welcomed with open arms in Florida where anyone with a pulse, no matter how corrupt or incompetent, can operate a chain of charter schools and receive millions in support from crony-corporatist Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott's regime.

In May 2010, Gallon was arrested and charged with hiring unqualified friends Angela Kemp and Lalelei Kelly and then lying about their residences so their children could attend schools outside their district. The charges brought against Gallon, Kemp and Kelly were dropped in January 2011 after the three agreed to serve probation and to never work in the New Jersey public school system again.

Just over a year after Gallon was hired to operate schools in South Florida, he rehired Kelly to work as a consultant and then hired Kemp to be the principal at Excel Leadership Academy in Palm Beach County.

Gallon then took up where he left off in N.J., making payroll decisions without prior authorization from the charter schools’ governing boards, drawing rebukes from the schools’ financial consultants. He hired a $40,000-a-year consultant who listed her residence as a Georgia home owned by Gallon. He launched a business venture with one of the volunteer board members responsible for overseeing Gallon’s work for the charter schools. The venture was later deemed a conflict of interest by Miami-Dade school district investigators. At least three consultants contracted by the governing boards warned their bosses of inappropriate actions under Gallon, records show. Yet Gallon stayed on as those who complained quit — or were fired.

Excel Leadership Academy in Palm Beach

Success Leadership Academy in Ft. Lauderdale and Excel Leadership Academy in West Palm Beach closed in the summer of 2013. Stellar Leadership Academy in Miami faced financial struggles but rebounded and continues to employ Gallon’s company. All three high schools for at-risk students were already reeling when their boards hired Gallon. The schools opened in 2005 under a private management company that selected the original board members and handled all school operations, from real estate and payroll to busing and curriculum. That company, White Hat Management, the most corrupt of a host of Ohio-based charter management companies, had operated a number of charter schools throughout Florida until they began pulling out of the state in 2011.

According to the Sun-Sentinel:

State statutes governing the conduct of public officials do not apply to the private operators that often gain power at charter schools, even though public money is at stake.
Both traditional public schools and charter schools receive public dollars based on their enrollment, and don’t charge tuition. Administrators at traditional public schools are accountable for every penny spent. But the private companies hired by many charter school governing boards don’t have to open their books.

And so it goes.

Follow up on the scrubbing of the Academica Charter story

Following up on the feds' investigation of Academica Charter Schools in Florida, and the scrubbing of the original Miami Herald story. Here's Bob Sikes' updated report in Scathing Purple Musings along with Kathleen McGrory's revised story in the Miami Herald.

Sikes writes:

Its hard to count the number of times that McGrory used “conflicts of interest” in her story. No word yet of whether or not the Federal Department of Education will use its SWAT team to raid the Zulueta compound. Or any of the offices belonging to the three Florida republican legislators with close ties to the Zuluetas.

According to McGrory:

A preliminary audit report obtained by the Herald/Times identified potential conflicts of interest between the for-profit company Academica and the Mater Academy charter schools it manages. One example the auditors cited was the transfer of money from Mater Academy to its private support organization, which shares the same board of directors. When asked about the potential conflicts of interest raised in the report, Academica attorney Marcos Daniel Jiménez, in an email to the Herald/Times, touted the charter school network's academic record and commitment to its students.

 Charter school critics said the Inspector General’s findings were a reason to push back on HB 7083, the bill that could weaken the power of school districts over new charter schools.

I suspect it was Jiménez' hollow denial of impropriety that caused the Herald to scrub McGrory's original story, although I still don't understand why they did it. The denial could have easily been reported in a follow-up story.  There must have been a phone call from somebody with clout. I suspect Rep. Frisen. Highly unusual.

Kenneth Wright, victim of D.O.E. raid in 2011. 

In some ways, it reminds me of a previously scrubbed article involving Duncan's I.G. troops invading  the Stockton, CA home of Kenneth Wright at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in 2011. As I recall, Wright was wrongly suspected of reneging on his student loans. The original ABC News story was scrubbed after a phone call from the D.O.E. The next day it was re-posted, minus an interview with victim Wright.

The Washington Post picked up my story (without crediting me) and then waffled after receiving the same call from the D.O.E.'s clean-up man Justin Hamilton. While a few papers and some bloggers ran with Hamilton's sanitized version of the raid, he couldn't make it go away. Chalk one up for the independent media.

What happened to McGrory's Miami Herald story on Feds' charter investigation? I asked...

Fernando Zulueta, president of Academica, gets a drink at the bar in Cain at The Cove, an exclusive beach club in the Bahamas' Atlantis resort. Academica held a leadership retreat for principals of several charter schools there. MIAMI HERALD PHOTO

Last month I wrote about Florida's great charter school profiteers, Rep. Erik Fresen, his sister Maggie, and brother-in-law, Fernando Zulueta who runs Academica Charter Schools, one of the largest charter chains in the country.

Today, Bob Sikes at Scathing Purple Musings re-posts a story which he credits to columnist Mary McGrory from the Miami Herald, "Academica Charter Schools Under Federal Investigation." Actually, Sikes got it wrong. The great Washington Post Reporter Mary McGrory has been dead for 10 years. The piece on Academica was written by Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald staff writer Kathleen McGrory. Regardless, it's a good, solid news piece about the Education Department’s Inspector General Office audit of the South Miami-based Academica Corp. as part of a broader examination of school management companies nationwide. The story implicates the powerful Zulueta family as well as Fresen.

McGrory writes:

The auditors found that three of the schools in the network — Mater Academy, Mater High and Mater East — entered into leases with development companies tied to the Zulueta family. Two of the leases were executed while Zulueta sat on the Mater board. In addition, Mater Academy hired an architectural firm from 2007 through 2012 that employs Fernando Zulueta’s brother-in-law, state Rep. Erik Fresen, the report said.

“We identified four related-party transactions, two of which indicated, at a minimum, the appearance of conflicts of interest between Mater Academy and its CMO [charter-management company],” the auditors wrote. Fresen declined to comment Friday.

But when I went to the Herald's site to look for McGrory's original piece, it was no longer there. Nor were there any links to it in any of the search engines. Was it scrubbed? Why? Did clout-heavy Rep. Fresen make a phone call? I wondered.

To find out, I called the Herald's news room and asked them what happened. I was told by Herald Editor Jeff Kleinman that the paper had "jumped the gun" and that the story was pulled because it was "incomplete" and would reappear in tomorrow's paper. Strange! Usually if a story is incomplete (which every news story is), you run a follow-up. You don't scrub the story and all the search engines.

But okay. I'll look tomorrow to see if and how McGrory's  piece been rewritten and find out what "jumped the gun" means.

The sun continues to shine on Florida's charter school hustlers

Barbara Smaller, New Yorker

Attention charter operators and ed profiteers. Florida is the place if you like warm weather and easy money in real estate. I got to see how the charter game is played in the Sunshine State during my days at USF when Jeb Bush was the guv. Now, under Rick Scott and his ed adviser Michelle Rhee (not to mention disgraced former ed commissioner Tony Bennett), the state has opened up even wider for charter expansion.

Fresen (R) chairs the Education Committee

Florida Rep. Erik Fresen,  a Tea Party Republican, chairs House Education Appropriations hearings on charter expansion. But his sister Maggie, and brother-in-law, Fernando Zulueta  run Academica Charter Schools, one of the country’s largest and wealthiest for-profit charter school management firms, with more than 90 schools in Florida alone. Fresen also has worked as a land-use consultant for Civica, an architectural firm that has designed several Academica schools. Really?

Fresen is pushing a bill HB 7083 that would require school districts to make public school buildings available to charters and turn over closed public school to charters. It would also make it easier for out of state charter operators to compete for schools and school real estate.

Does this sound like N.Y.? It should. Only FL has no pols like N.Y. Mayor de Blasio ready or able to really take on the powerful charter hustlers like their state's versions of Eva Moskowitz. Florida charters are among the worst in the country. Gee, I wonder why.

The most recent windfall for Fresen (who also represents the state's gaming interests) and family came when Palmetto Bay council members on Monday unanimously approved plans for a 1,400-student charter school within a residential and commercial complex development. The charter school will be part of the Somerset Academy Inc. franchise managed by Academica. Fresen’s district includes a part of Palmetto Bay and in 2011, he sponsored changes in state law to limit municipal power over charter schools.

The Miami Herald reports:

According to Palmetto Bay Mayor Shelley Stanczyk, the property’s zoning designation and laws governing charter schools all converged in “a perfect storm” to force the council’s hand to approve, with no guarantees that the school would adequately address the traffic and congestion issues sure to arise with an added influx of 1,400 students every work day...

...“If you want a place with as little control as possible, put it in an Enterprise Zone. And then if you’ve got a school with legislated protection, so that [municipal] control over approving and not approving is very limited, you’ve got a double whammy of not being able to control any of the effects,” Stanczyk said.

BASEBALL CHARTERS...Bloomberg News reports that the politically connected Zulueta is working on a deal with Major League Baseball and celebrity (why?) Pitbull to have his charter school company partner with the Washington Nationals on a D.C.-based charter operation. The Rhee connection with D.C. pols and Sec. Duncan, should play a big role here. Academica opened Somerset Preparatory Academy in Washington last September as a toe-hold in the region. Pitbull opened up last year's National Charter Schools Conference and was introduced by Zulueta.

Names that pop up in the deal include Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, who insists "it’s not a gimmick. Since most charters don’t have a building when they receive authorization, she said, they need a cash infusion up front..." AND Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, who "agrees that celebrity-brand schools are not to be dismissed."

I think Richmond, Zulueta, Rees, Fresen, Duncan, Scott, Pitbull... and their whole gang need to be dismissed.

K12 Inc. lags far behind face-to-face schools in Florida

The thing about privatization is, there's little or no public accountability. Take for example, K12 Inc., the e-learning company that competes with traditional schools for a piece of the  multi-billion-dollar education pie.

Progress Florida also found that K12 schools are not only lagging behind in performance, but they also have “fewer students qualifying for free-or-reduced-lunch, fewer students with disabilities, fewer ELL students, and fewer minority students.” But K12's poor performance hasn't hurt their bottom line any.  In 2012, K12 Inc. experienced “a 35 percent increase in revenue to more than $700 million, the report found.”

According the report:

“…Notably only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc. schools make adequate yearly progress—a national metric of measuring student achievement—and this figure is merely half nearly half the rate achieved by public face-to-face schools. The on-time graduation rate for K12 Inc. schools is 49.1percent, compared to 79.4 percent for all students in the states in which K12 Inc. operates.”

 Lisa Larson-Walker (Slate)

Speaking of Florida, Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott's regime is awash in scandal and corruption. Not only has he lost his privatizing school chief, Tony Bennett, to a grade-changing scandal, but now his biggest outside campaign contributor, Bill Edwards, has been caught swindling Florida military families and veterans.

Ironically, the one's crying the loudest over the Bennett resignation, besides Jeb Bush and his GOP pals, are the so-called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Obama's ed chief, Arne Duncan.

Who says there's no bi-partisanship?