For the fourth time in only five years, the leader of a charter school has been arrested for siphoning money away from the school.
The Houston Chronicle reports:
The founder of a now-closed Houston charter school network failed to properly disclose more than $1 million in payments to his brother’s companies and used taxpayer funds to cover costs associated with a timeshare in Hawaii, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
Richard S. Rose, who served as superintendent, CEO and chief financial officer of Zoe Learning Academy, was arrested Monday after a grand jury returned an 18-count indictment against him. The charter school enrolled several hundred students per year at campuses in Houston’s Third Ward and Duncanville, a city south of Dallas, prior to its abrupt closure in 2017.
Rose is the fourth Houston-area charter leader in the past five years arrested on charges related to illegally taking money from a school.
The Varnett Public School founders Alsie and Marian Cluff were charged in 2015, and sentenced to prison last year for spending more than $4 million in campus funds to support their lavish lifestyle. Houston Gateway Academy Richard Garza awaits sentencing after pleading guilty in October to participating in a $160,000 kickback scheme involving an information technology contractor.
Investigators said Zoe Learning Academy paid bus service fees totaling more than $1 million over four years to companies owned by his brother, as well as about $60,000 to Rose’s wife and a company the couple owned. Rose failed to disclose the payments to the Texas Education Agency on annual governance forms, violating a state law that requires charter leaders to detail any school funds paid to their relatives, federal officials said.
Investigators also said Rose withdrew money from Zoe Learning Academy accounts and used the charter’s credit card to pay for a Honolulu timeshare, a $75,000 personal legal settlement and $30,000 in fees to a lawyer who represented him in matters unrelated to the school. Rose’s indictment did not detail the amount paid for the timeshare.
The charges against Rose include money laundering, conspiracy and theft from programs receiving federal funds. Rose did not have a defense lawyer listed in court records Wednesday. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.
The charter elementary opened in 2001 and shuttered in September 2017, weeks after Hurricane Harvey landed in Houston. At the time, Rose said the school’s enrollment was too low to generate enough revenue to remain open.
Zoe Learning Academy received a failing grade on the 2017 state financial integrity rating scale for schools, one of four Texas charters to receive the designation. The charter district also failed to meet state academic standards in 2013, 2015 and 2017.
Will Betsy DeVos and other charter cheerleaders claim that the parents chose Zoe Learning Academy and we should respect their choices regardless of its academic ratings or its founder’s financial practices?
After all, it is the parents’ choice and we should respect that choice, right? Even if the founder has been indicted and arrested.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’d love to know how many of these unmasked schools would be labelled as “good charters” prior to revelation of criminal activity.
The really big, man bites dog story would be one about a charter management company CEO who was not doing illegal self-dealing.
Too rarely do we hear about the convictions and sentencing of the people who are caught in the many illegal activities in the charter industry.
This is a perfect example of the corrupt charter industry. So now the people of Houston should stand by and let the state privatize all of Houston schools because of concerns about one school? Why should Houston tax payers like me send our tax dollars to support endless profiteering and highly paid grifters with little to no oversight or accountability? Why should the public be forced to pay for privatization they neither want nor need?
I ask the same question every day!
when the word “forced” could be interchanged with “bamboozled.” Too many citizens are blindly led
We shouldn’t forget those responsible- Chester Finn’s Hoover Institute, Mike Petrilli’s Fordham, the hedge funds of DFER and, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/Directors of state Catholic Conferences, whose political clout enabled privatization of the common good.