Another day, another charter scandal. This one is in Lauderhill, Florida, in Broward County.
“LAUDERHILL, Fla. – The Paramount Charter School was, by all accounts, a disaster for its young students, but now that the publicly financed, F-graded K-8 school is closed, there is a big question that remains: Where did the money go?
In all, taxpayers coughed up more than $3 million for the charter school in Lauderhill, which promised a first-rate education for its predominantly financially disadvantaged students.
“Now American Charter Development, the Utah-based charter school company that was Paramount’s landlord and primary investor, alleges it lost well over $1 million during the two years the school was in operation and suspects public funds were misappropriated.
“In our view, there’s been fraud,” Rob Giordano, senior vice president of business development at American Charter Development, told Local 10 News.
“Giordano said the company conducted its own examination of the school’s finances and found that, in addition to a nonprofit company that had been set up to run the school, called the Advancement of Education in Scholars Corp., there was a second for-profit company formed with an almost identical name.
“Giordano said his firm obtained Paramount bank documents showing large sums of money going to the for-profit company.
“It was tens of thousands of dollars in excess of $30,000 a month going to this shell organization,” Giordano said.”
Not to worry. This failed “public charter school” will be replaced by another. The taxpayers’ money? It’s gone, along with the time that children lost in this school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How many of these repetitive stories of waste and fraud do public schools have to endure before states decide to oversee and regulate charters? Taxpayers should be angry, and the parents of public school students should be doubly angry. The education of their children has taken a backseat to paying grifters to cheat the state. The only “choice” given to them is the choice to be fleeced. If some clever lawyer can figure out some grounds on which to sue the governor or legislature, maybe it is time for lawsuits in Florida and some other states like Ohio? In Florida’s case the complicit government’s refusal to oversee public funds should be provable negligence, especially when the government does nothing to prevent it from happening again and again.
What Diane has done, and continues to do so awesomely here, is to expose and illustrate ‘education reform” as nothing more than a legalized money grab for private interests. And how many stories will we have to endure? Well, I look at it this way: public school teachers have little to NO friends in state and national politics because Big Business Billions have have politicians bought off to do their bidding, setting up bogus front companies, PR firms, and my personal favorite irony in this, “think tanks,” that have innocent sounding names to mask and veil their true mission, which has been proven time and again to be profit, profit, profit. There will continue to be this waste, fraud, and corruption involving taxpayer money as long as the money stream to whatever respective politicians remains untouched and ever-flowing.
We can THANK BOTH the GOP and the DNC for this mess. Public Schools and Public School Teachers have been and continue to be HAD by big $$$$$$. It’s all just so repulsive and sick.
Cross posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Florida-Charter-School-Cl-in-General_News-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Diane-Ravitch_Fraud-170812-263.html#comment669556
with his comment with embedded links at that address.
re charter fraud: It is no secret that I follow the RAVITCH BLOG, of FORMER UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE’, DIANE RAVITCH who wrote How Not to Fix Our Public Schools AND Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools
GO TO MY SERIES onCHARTER SCHOOL FRAUD, right here at OEN and learn how taxpayer money is being robbed! https://www.opednews.com/Series/CHARTER-Schools–the-scho-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-141014-281.html
scholars ? If I hear that word again….