Where have the state watchdogs been while Imagine Charters have profited handsomely with taxpayer dollars?
Where has the media been!
The Toledo Blade reports:
“The charter school Imagine School for the Arts is paying rent of nearly $1 million a year on a downtown building with the education funding it gets from the state, prompting criticism from a progressive advocacy group that studied charter-school finances around the state.
“The complicated financial arrangement also involves a school-affiliated trust company spending more than $7 million last year to buy a building valued at less than $2 million.
“The liberal advocacy group ProgressOhio attacked the size of the rent payments at charter schools operated in Toledo and other Ohio cities by Imagine Schools Monday as excessive. Imagine is a national for-profit educational management company.
“According to ProgressOhio, Imagine’s subsidiary, Schoolhouse Finance, collected at least $14.4 million in public money last year for the company’s 17 Ohio schools. Of that, $8.9 million covered rent for long-term leases to Schoolhouse Finance. The $5.5 million balance went to pay “indirect costs” to Imagine to provide management services.
“The state of Ohio and its oversight have been asleep at the wheel. If you look at the Imagine schools and the annual rents, they are outrageous,” said Brian Rothenberg, executive director of ProgressOhio in Columbus. “These for-profit management corporations have become profiteers, and they are taking this money to enrich themselves.”
The story says ProgressOhio receives union funding, as though that changes the facts. No, it does not. If the state won’t investigate, then welcome to anyone who does.
“According to ProgressOhio, Imagine Schools pays annual rent of $301,320 for the Clay Avenue Community School building, $175,464 for the Hill Avenue Environmental School, and $942,549 for the Madison Avenue School for the Arts.
“In addition, all three pay a management fee to Imagine: $483,852 for Clay Avenue, $124,646 for Hill Avenue, and $608,020 for Madison Avenue.
“All three had a performance index grade of D in the most recent statewide report card. The district in which those schools are located, Toledo Public Schools, had an overall performance index grade of D.”
Imagine buys the building, then leases it to itself at inflated rentals. That’s the business plan.
Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2014/10/14/Charter-school-rent-stirs-debate.html#c7BTQOGG4UQjbbxI.99
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is there media anywhere?
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Maybe someone can explain to me how this is “empowering” when the charter board has to beg the private company to lower the rent so they can pay teachers and purchase supplies for students?
How is it “empowering” when this out of state company is taking state tax money and paying their teachers, who live in “our local communities”, 29k a year? Why would I want the people who live here paid less and the executives who run this company and don’t even live here paid God knows what? How does that benefit “my local community”? Why wouldn’t I keep my state education dollars in-state? I really don’t think we need any more lower wage, race the bottom employers in this state. We’re full up, thanks!
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“Imagine School for the Con-Arts is paying rent of nearly $1 million a year on a downtown building with the education funding it gets from the state”
Fixed.
“Manna from Heaven (or the state of Ohio,at least)”
Imagine School for Con-Arts
Is paying pricey rent
To boost the owners’ profit charts
The funds are
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cross-posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Toledo-Imagine-Charter-Re-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-Schools_Corporations_Diane-Ravitch_Education-141021-200.html#comment516865
with this comment: (which has links at the Oped News site:)
And, look at New Orleans: “Mike Deshotels, veteran educator and blogger in Louisiana, reviews the accumulating evidence and concludes: the claims of success in the Recovery School District are a complete fraud.
and look at: Denver: Jeannie Kaplan reports here on Jonathan Kozol’s recent visit to Denver. Denver is a city that has become totally devoted to corporate style “reform” for a decade. Now the corporate reformers own the entire school board plus they have a U.S. Senator Michael Bennett.
How about Nevada? Angie Sullivan is a teacher who regularly emails a long list of legislators, education advocates, journalists….and me. Here is her outraged commentary about Democrats who collect money from teachers and betray them and refuse to fund public schools. And her outrage at her own state union for supporting Democrats who don’t support public education. In many other states, the Democrats act no different from Republicans in their fealty to privatization and high-stakes testing. See New York and Connecticut as examples.
Or look at Keystone State Education Coalition of public school advocates, offered the following summary of K12 Inc.’s Agora charter school in Pennsylvania, where Agora Cyber Charter, managed by K12, Inc. never made adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind and in 2013 , Agora’s Pennsylvania School Performance Profile score was 48.3 on a 100 point scale; Acting Sec’y of Education Carolyn Dumaresq has indicated that a score of 70 is considered passing.
I could go on, but nothing will change until YOU demand that our public schools be funded and run like the INSTITUTION they are, the one that underlies our democracy and provides for the COMMON GOOD, as our Constituion’s preamble describes.
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