This is one of the most curious, most convoluted charter scandals I have come across. Of course, it happened in Michigan, where about 80% of charters operate for-profit and where the state exercises minimal oversight of the charter sector.
In 1999, an optometrist named Steven Ingersoll was among the first to see the potential in the charter industry. He developed his own pedagogy called Integrated Visual Learning and opened the first of four charters, Grand Traverse Academy. The board of directors were other optometrists who liked Ingersoll’s ideas. Certainly, optometrists would be drawn to a teaching method based on “visual learning.”
There were chummy relationships among Ingersoll, the management company he hired, and board members:
“It was not until lawyers for the school began asking questions that the tangled financial relationship between Ingersoll’s management company and the charter he founded began to unravel, culminating in the most significant federal criminal case in the history of Michigan’s 20-year-old charter school industry. Ingersoll, who started Smart Schools Management, Inc., stands accused of illegally diverting construction loan money for another charter school to his private account, in part to pay back money he had taken from the Grand Traverse charter. His hand-picked members on the school board knew he had advanced himself money from Grand Traverse, but had no problem with the arrangement, school records show.
“Ingersoll will go on trial next month on seven criminal charges of bank fraud and tax evasion. The allegations of financial self-dealing and cozy relations between Ingersoll, his associates and board members could not come at a worse time for the Michigan charter movement. The state’s powerful, mostly for-profit charter school industry has found itself on the defensive since the Detroit Free Press published a devastating series last June chronicling how charters receive nearly $1 billion a year in state taxpayer money with little accountability or transparency on how that money is spent. The series detailed how board members at some charter schools were forced out when they pushed to learn more about finances from management companies, and how state law failed to prevent self-enrichment by those operating some low-performing charter schools.”
One blogger, Anita Senkowski, doggedly followed the case of Steven Ingersoll and posted documents. Her blog is called “Glistening Quivering Underbelly,” where she calls herself Miss Fortune. She described Ingersoll as the poster boy for Michigan’s lack of charter oversight.
Ingersoll was indicted in 2014 and convicted in 2015 for tax evasion and fraud.
Senkowski wrote last fall:
“Convicted in March [2015] on three counts of tax evasion and conspiracy, Ingersoll owned and formerly managed the Bay City Academy and managed the Grand Traverse Academy until days before his April 10, 2014 indictment.
“Between 2007-2012, Ingersoll misappropriated an estimated $3.5 million dollars from the Traverse City charter school — but has never been investigated or charged with embezzlement.
“And what about the Grand Traverse Academy’s Board of Directors? After much public posturing, it opted not to pursue any legal remedy to recover the money, and apparently that’s where it stands.”
Senkowski alleged that the board knew what Ingersoll was doing and didn’t care.
Now she has another bombshell report. Even after Ingersoll’s indictment, he continued to receive monthly payments of $12,500 from Mark Noss, a member of Ingersoll’s original board who started his own charter management company.
She writes:
“An accountant formerly employed by Mark Noss at his Full Spectrum Management, LLC (FSM) sent a stunning whistleblower email to the Grand Traverse Academy Board of Directors on March 15, 2016 at 6:00pm, alleging Noss deceived the Board when he stated during its December 17, 2015 meeting that he “has no business relationship with Dr. Ingersoll at the present time.”
“The former FSM accountant disclosed information to Board president Brad Habermehl and Grand Traverse Academy employee, Heidi Sych, that revealed Noss had been making monthly $12,500 payments to Steven Ingersoll for nearly two years.
“The incendiary email, sent by former FSM accountant Richard Lowe, and a March 16, 2016 response from Mark Noss, were both provided to the U. S. Attorney’s Office by counsel for Lake Superior State University.
“According to a supplemental brief filed late this afternoon by government prosecutors, FSM honcho Mark Noss acknowledged paying Ingersoll $12,500 per month since he took over the role of educational services provider for the Grand Traverse Academy on March 19, 2014, with the first payment issued in April 2014.”
Looks like Ingersoll’s vision has been corrected.
What else does the accountant know?
I await the scathing ripostes of Non Sequitur and his junior partner.
Although it can be aptly summed up in this rheephorm mantra: “it’s all about the kids!”
😎
Think about it this way. He ran it like a business. Who is anyone to tell him how to run his business?
One guess: Michigan taxpayers?
I live in the Grand Traverse region of MI–and our main newspaper, the Traverse City Record-Eagle, has done a terrible job of reporting (or, rather, not reporting) on this case as it unfolded in 2013-14. If it weren’t for Miss Fortune, the good folks in NW Michigan would have no clue about this scam artist. Steve Ingersoll has been working on his faux “Integrated Visual Learning” theory for a long time–in various charters, 20 years running, including Charyl Stockwell Academy in Hartland, MI, where I used to live. (You can’t go anywhere in MI without living near a charter school.) Stockwell eventually dumped the theory–because it DIDN’T WORK–but that didn’t stop Ingersoll from launching his own charter boondoggle up here and reviving it.
Here’s the weird thing–both counties where Ingersoll tried to get a toehold have fine public schools, among the best in the state, operating at the lowest per-pupil state funding. Charters that open have to offer something that public schools don’t–and most public schools in the two counties offer a great deal of programming, solid staffing, good outcomes. So charters make promises they can’t keep, to attract anyone who’s ever wondered if there isn’t something better for their very special kids. It’s a giant PR campaign.
I belong to the League of Women Voters and sat for a time on their education committee. I was shocked to learn that the local LWV took a “neutral” stance on charter schools (although they’re always “investigating problems” with public schools). I spoke up–charter schools’ purpose in places where the public schools have traditionally been strong is chipping away at that strength, through diversion of per-pupil funding, and destabilizing democratic operation of public ed.
The LWV had drunk the “charters are public schools” and “parents deserve choice” kool-aid. They were singularly uninterested in charter fraud, or discussing Ingersoll, seeing this as a one-time business-ethics issue. They forget that it’s our tax money funding Ingersoll’s schemes.
Nancy Flanagan,
The League of Women Voters did a statewide analysis and critique of charters in Florida. It was outstanding, not only because it identified really awful charters but it also identified massive conflicts of interests, with legislators who are members of charter owning families.
Ed reform has been a disaster in the Great Lakes states, in my opinion. There isn’t a single one of these states where public education has benefited.
I don’t think anyone in the “movement” cares. As long as they can point to “high performing” charter chains in Boston or NYC or DC it doesn’t matter what happens in Michigan or Ohio or Illinois.
It appears to me that K-12 education systems all have their share of problems like this. Last week I read of some 15+ Detroit Public Schools officials (Principals, etc.) involved in money kick backs even while their own schools suffered thru budgetary shortfalls. Here in GR we had a Parish Priest in 1998 caught taking over $60,000 in donated funds earmarked for the Parish school to use for other unknown purposes. A few inner city charters have also failed here while the suburban charters forever harp at how successful their programs are. Maybe they work in the wealthy suburbs. But nearly all systems (public parochial, and charter) struggle in the inner cities everywhere. Charters were supposed to change all this. They haven’t. Not at all.
Alex,
“Last week I read of some 15+ Detroit Public Schools officials (Principals, etc.) involved in money kick backs even while their own schools suffered thru budgetary shortfalls.”
Please provide a link so we can read about this. TIA, Duane
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/03/29/feds-charge-9-current-and-former-detroit-school-principals/82375712/
Here’s another kicker to this story. On December 8, 2015, the Grand Traverse Academy’s Board President, Brad Habermehl, was called as a defense witness. Unbeknownst to Habermehl, Prosecutor Janet Parker was in possession of a series of emails back and forth from Habermehl to a longtime family friend and businessman. Habermehl was soliciting the person for a $300,000 loan/investment for a new private school venture. Before showing her hand, Parker asked Habermehl to confirm that he and Steve Ingersoll’s relationship went back to 1984, when Ingersoll wrote a reference letter for Habermehl to be accepted into optometry school. She went on to question Habermehl as to whether or not he had ever been in any business dealings with Steven Ingersoll. He acknowledged that the two had once looked at starting a private school. When asked who else was involved in that venture, Habermehl repeatedly stated that it was just he and Ingersoll, but that the project never got off the ground. Parker then presented Habermehl with the first of the emails. In the emails, Habermehl stated there were five investors and, “I and Steve are two of the five…” When presented with the emails, Habermehl had to acknowledge that not only did he write them, but they began while Ingersoll was under indictment and some of them were written AFTER he was convicted of tax evasion and fraud in March of 2015. Additionally, when pressed by the prosecutor to disclose who the other three people were, Habermehl said “I can’t recall.” This was just months earlier and he’s looking to open a new school, but he can’t recall with whom. But because he made a reference in the emails to one of the investors being a retired Lake Superior State University employee, Prosecutor Parker was finally able to get him to admit that Bruce Harger , the director of the university’s charter school office responsible for authorizing the schools managed by Ingersoll’s management company, was in on the deal.
So, here it is. Brad Habermehl is the president (and remains so today) of the GTA board when that board decides not to pursue millions of dollars they contend Ingersoll owes them, but instead to write it off to bad debt. And the former head of LSSU’s Charter School Office and authorizer for the school, who is supposed to provide oversight to the board and the school, is also in on the same business dealing with this convicted felon.
I’ve felt, since, the chartering of these academies, that, with few exceptions of success occurring with large inner cities, that this was an attempt by parents to exempt their children from working, studying, playing, and, generally, socializing with children/students of other “social classes”, in some cases “people of color”, and people who are viewed as being too secular for those parents’ religious views.
Transparency: We’re fairly secular parents, but we sent our children to parochial (Catholic) school for K-5 (then on to public middle school and high school). It may sounds like hypocrisy for me to say these things about Charter Academies. The difference is that results of high academic achievement student success (WITHOUT using public funding) were well documented and measured in the school. Catholic schools are, generally, racially (and even religiously) diverse.
Public academies are not held to the same testing standards, no matter what official sounding statistics their spin meistering proponents throw back at you. The students of these academies are not evaluated on the same testing or subject/curriculum levels and held to the same public standards and scrutiny.
Public academies, with few exceptions, drain and divert important monies for traditional public schools. For most purposes, they are a money-sucking black hole of school dollars proposed by Republican legislators who tout their false success.” A BILLION (!!!) dollars” spent on Charter Academies in Michigan without any rock-solid proof of success??!! I want my taxes to go to and support the public schools that I am so grateful to, and that I was able to attend.
Am I surprised about this money scandal? Hell no. It’s the same kind of hypocrisy that we see when Bible thumping politicians are caught with their wicks in someone else’s dipper…