In Hawaii, the state revoked the charter of a school on the Big Island, alleging financial mismanagement and enrollment errors.
Charters open, charters close. The kids are out of luck.
The Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission voted unanimously Monday to revoke the charter of a school on the Big Island after finding 22 contract violations that included allegations of financial mismanagement and enrollment irregularities.
Ka’u Learning Academy is only the second charter school in the state to have its charter revoked. It opened its doors in 2015 in the rural area of Naalehu on Big Island, serving grades 3 to 7. It had a projected 93 students enrolled for the 2018-19 school year….
The revocation of KLA’s charter comes several months after the commission sent the Big Island school a notice of prospect of revocation outlining alleged violations.
Those violations included use of school funds and debit cards for employees’ personal expenses; irregular accounting; failure to comply with collective bargaining agreements; enrollment of students outside designated grade levels that resulted in overpayment of funds to the school; a failure to properly maintain student records; and failure to conduct criminal history background checks.
Additionally, KLA came under investigation by the Hawaii Department of Education for possible testing fraud, including excluding low-performing students from participating in state assessments and using unauthorized personnel to administer those tests. As a result, the school’s 2017 test scores “cannot be considered valid or trustworthy or relied upon and will be invalidated,” the commission outlined in a report.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
YAY! It’s about time those scabs are found out.
New Orleans has the most private schools, followed by Hawai’i. TERRIBLE!
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“The revocation of KLA’s charter comes several months after the commission sent the Big Island school a notice of prospect of revocation outlining alleged violations.”
I don’t quite understand why the charter received several months notice of what appears to be criminal behavior. That’s like telling a bank robber you are going to charge him several months after you have documented proof that s/he robbed a bank. Is there some reason to give them several months to cover their tracks and/or disappear?
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I wonder if this means that there is finally going to be a shift away from private schooling and that the focus would go back to revamping the idea of public schools. Obviously, having parents, organizations, and private sectors create and try to run an education system is not working, especially since the ultimate losers are the children. 93 students are now going to have to be resettled into different schools at no fault of their own.
And as a recent blog pointed out, Hawaii is not the only state where charter schools and privitization are proving to be fruitless. Charter schools and online programs started and run by private sectors around the nation have shut down, due to either misappropriation of funds or mismanagement. I’ll admit that at first, I was all for private-sector schools because I thought that it would benefit society to have specialized schools that catered to the arts or that catered to STEM subjects so that students would get the specialized education in fields that they are passionate about and that could better help society. I thought it would kind of be a nod to the John Dewey progressive education philosophy of having students learn through experience to advance society. But if all we are going to do is falsify information to gain money from the government, then what was the point of inacting the ESSA? If we are going to try and give control and power back to the local governments, then maybe we shouldn’t try to squander resources where they don’t belong and actually try to give the students, who are looking up to us, the chance they deserve.
Then again, that’s just my opinion.
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