The Palm Beach County Commission allocated $20 million to enable a new charter school to borrow money for school construction. Some members of the commission opposed it, but the majority thought it was just another business that needed public funding.
The County Commission voted in favor of allowing Renaissance Charter School at Cypress on Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach to borrow money by accessing tax-exempt bonds. Those bonds can help the charter school pay for the cost of buying land, constructing the new building, adding equipment and other educational expenses.
While the money comes from private investors, those bonds are supposed to get paid back by school revenues. Those revenues include the portion of school tax dollars that go toward charter schools.
Palm Beach County shouldn’t be enabling charter school companies to profit from the bond deals, said County Commissioner Paulette Burdick.
“It’s not about educating children. It’s about making money,” said Burdick, a former school board member….
Charter schools are billed as a way to provide parents more educational alternatives for their children. Private companies, nonprofit groups and other organizations can use public funds to start charter schools, which can operate without many of the regulations of traditional schools.
But a proliferation of charter schools has sparked concerns that they are poorly regulated and too often fail to deliver on promised educational improvements. Critics say charter schools are taking too many tax dollars away from educational efforts at existing public schools.
The Palm Beach County League of Women Voters on Tuesday opposed approving a bond deal for the Renaissance Charter School.
Charter school companies are using public financing help to profit off land deals and the county shouldn’t help, according to Elaine Goodman, of the League of Women Voters.
“What is happening to our traditional public schools?” Goodman asked. “Where are our priorities?”
Despite the critics, the commission approved the deal by a vote of 5-2.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And the corruption keeps getting more blatant.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Bonds are to be paid back “from school revenues [which] include the portion of school tax dollars that go toward charter schools.” Who ends up holding the bag if the school goes bankrupt?
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Not to mention that borrowing money from taxpayers and then “paying back the money” using more tax dollars seems like robbing Peter to pay Paul…
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And then, who owns the property?
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The disconnect between the national ed reform lobbyists and what’s actually happening in these states is amazing.
It can’t last. There’s just too big a gulf between how this is sold nationally and the reality on the ground. I know it’s different in the media-heavy areas like NYC and DC, but whole states are now like Florida. Big swathes of the country. At some point reality has to crash into the narrative.
“Renaissance plans to use the bond money to refinance the newly constructed school through a “normal process” that doesn’t put taxpayer money at risk, according to Colleen Reynolds, spokeswoman for Charter Schools USA, the company that launched Renaissance.”
Charter Schools USA is a huge national company. They can simply roll a county commission (as they did here) because they’re the more sophisticated party at the table.
Who owns this publicly-funded asset after it’s built? Would any of the billionaires that are backing public school privatization invest in an asset where they don’t receive any ownership interest? No? They why do they want the public to make such a bad investment? People will be purchasing a service from a company they paid to build. They’ve gone from being owners to being customers. It’s a bad deal.
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Voters there need to vote these commissioners OUT as soon as possible.
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This Ohio charter story is interesting, not because the leader was indicted, but because of this:
“Tucker is listed on state incorporation papers as having created the schools, but he also was an employee of the North Central Ohio Educational Service Center, which sponsored the Talented Tenth charter schools.
In March, Tucker told The Dispatch that he had turned the money over to the sponsor, but Jim Lahoski, superintendent of the service center, said yesterday that Tucker was lying. The service center fired Tucker shortly after the schools closed.
Under Ohio law, charter-school sponsors aren’t supposed to run schools but rather be the watchdogs for taxpayers, monitoring schools’ performance and spending and ultimately deciding whether they remain open.”
I haven’t seen that before, where the service center is also corrupt. That’s pretty scary, because it calls all their other schools into question, or should. Not that it will. There is just no regulation at all outside of actual criminal conduct or laws.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/09/08/Charter-schools-Columbus-founder-indicted-theft.html
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Sponsors making money off the charters seems a bit unseemly – it seems to provide the wrong incentive – it should probably be contingent on outcomes like they’re so fond of making public schools do.
As for financing the land purchase and development, if it’s simply going to be handed over to the charter owners should they shut down to sell, they could still walk away with a massive profit even if they completely fail because they will have had land and development handed them on a silver platter simply for promising to try building a school that works.
Is this how privatization and the free market works? The government holds up people for tax money and then hands it over to cronies and other suspect businesses even if the benefit is at best highly dubious and the definite outcome is the enrichment of the private sector at the expense of the public?
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This is the part that really bothers me. How on earth to charter promoters justify handing public money over to a private, for-profit entity to buy land that they then own no matter what happens?
My mortgage is still underwater 6 years after the crash. Maybe I can turn my house into a charter school to pay off the loan. Who says I actually have to educate any kids? Oh, right, because I’m not too big to jail.
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There’s a mismatch in the sophistication of the two parties to the contract, because the charter school management companies are big national companies and they’re contracting with county commissioners and school boards.
One party will be more sophisticated and better-advised than the other. Too, Charter Schools USA is negotiating these deals all over the country. They do this for a living. They’ll be vastly more experienced in the transactions, because it will be four or five for the commissioners over their term(s) in office, and hundreds for the charter school management companies.
We saw something like it in Ohio when charter school parents contracted with charter school management companies, 15 years ago, before it was all big chains. They got really bad deals, because there was a mismatch in information and sophistication at the negotiation of the contract.
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comingle…comingle…dam poet – please help here…
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‘gift of public funds’. “The starting point for any analysis concerning the misuse of public funds begins with the principle it must be expended for an authorizing public purpose. An expenditure is made for a public purpose when its purpose is to benefit the public interest rather than private individuals or private purposes.”. State of California website …my sister is retired from county of Sonoma- she told me this term…
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This is Michelle Rhee on her plans. Try to find something positive she’s offering for public schools kids or parents. It isn’t in there. The mentions of public schools are all negative; test scores, teacher rankings, a vague reference to more screen time in classrooms.
Compare with her plans for charter schools- expansion, increased funding, yet another promotion of a specific chain (Success Academies).
Any positive plans for public schools simply aren’t on their radar. The schools aren’t even discussed. It’s as if there is nothing of value in any public school, anywhere.
It’s not even “anti-public schools”. Existing public schools don’t exist in this narrative except where they happen to intersect with national ed reform goals on teachers unions, standardized testing, and the expansion of charter schools.
http://www.ozy.com/c-notes/michelle-rhee-educations-lightning-rod-shifts-focus/33719.article
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Man, the edudeformer hogs are finding ever new ways to enhance their revenue streams. Talking about sucking at the government’s teats!
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You sort of knew it was coming. The donations and billionaire funding were just to get their foot in the door- then they’d shift to public funding of facilities.
Nothing is ever free. You’d think adults would know that. They don’t know the total cost of losing their public school systems in Florida, the downside risk, but they’re going to find out.
I don’t really understand people who don’t consider downside risk. I don’t think I have a lot in common with them. Even if I were 100% privatization I would CONSIDER the risk, what people there might lose. I love the county commissioner who insists it isn’t his job to analyze this. What is his job, then? He just transfers funds? Why do we need him at all?
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This is probably viewed by the chamber of commerce and the school board as not different from a tax perk for business development, job creation, with the bonus of serving the children. Watch while the charter school industry packs schools boards to make this kind of scam seem to be perfectly normal.
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I agree, but it’s really sad how they have completely bought the “schools as businesses” line. There’s not one person who said “wait a minute, these schools aren’t supposed to be a business?”
They adopt this categorization with such ease. One of them questions their right to even analyze it, so it’s the worst of both worlds. They won’t look at it as a school at all, because they think that’s outside their purview.
I just compare with building a public school. I don’t know if you;ve ever been part of that, but in this state there’s a vote on the funding which involves endless debate and sometimes several elections, there’s a whole round of public meetings and revisions to the plans, and the process (contractors, etc.) is transparent.
They just do an end run around all of that. Amazing. It also creates a really uneven playing field. It will be MUCH EASIER to build charter schools than to build public schools. They can simply dominate the market, and push the heavily regulated actor 9the public school) out. It’s almost guaranteed that will happen.
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It makes one wonder what other inanities our tax dollars support. We notice this bogus waste because education is our expertise, but how many other fields run into the same issues?
It makes my stomach churn!
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Renaissance is really Charter Schools USA too.
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We have to change our wording when we talk about charter and voucher schools. If we start referring to them as taxpayer subsidized businesses, people may not be so neutral to the concept of giving their money to a second, lower quality school system. Most people disagree with subsidies for business, which these schools are.
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