Do you wonder which businesses, schools, and nonprofits in your neighborhood or state got a piece of the hundreds of billions of dollars handed out by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in the Paycheck Protection Program? He tried to keep the names of the recipients secret but eventually released the list.
Now you can easily review the list.
ProPublica put all the awards into a search engine which anyone can use. Here it is.
You can satisfy your curiosity about who got the money. I looked at my zip code and was shocked to see some very wealthy institutions listed as well as some local businesses who probably thought they won the grand prize in the lottery. Those on the know cashed in. Many worthy small businesses and colleges never applied. They were not in the know.
Would you like to do some volunteer work for the Network for Public Education? We would love to have your help identifying the charter schools in your state that received PPP money.
Public schools were not eligible to participate in the PPP, but charter lobbyists made sure that charter schools were. Thus, they got money designated for public schools, and they went back to get more money as small nonprofit businesses.
NPE is developing a spread sheet for every state but we don’t have the staff to review all of them. If you would like to help, please contact Darcie Cimarusti, our Communications Director, who is coordinating the project.
You would need to go through your state’s list of grantees and identify the charter schools and how much each one received.
If you want to help, contact Darcie and she can answer your questions. Dcimarusti@networkforpubliceducation.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sent some info on Ohio charter and private schools that received funds. One of the most obscene is the following.
CINCINNATI COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL Location CINCINNATI, OH Business Type Corporation Loan Amount $2-5 million Date Approved April 13, 2020 NOTE: This is one of the oldest private schools in Cincinnati, located in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Cincinnati. It has an endowment see facilities, staffing, enrollments and more at
https://www.countryday.net/about-ccds/school-profile
Laura,
I went to my zip code and was surprised to se that elite private schools with endowments received funding.
Same in my neck of the woods. Oakmont Education (https://www.oakmontedu.org/schools/), which is headquartered near where I live and has school in the Cleveland, Akron, Columbus and Dayton areas, received $2-5 million. Its “business type” is a LLC. Old Trail School, the hoidy-toidy independent day school near Akron, got $1-2 million (https://www.oldtrail.org/about-us). St. Hilary Catholic Church, which, like Palin and Russia, I can see from my front porch, got $350,000-1 million. Kids Country (https://www.kidscountry.com), a chain of preschools got between $150-350,000. Kosmic Korner (https://www.kozmickorner.com/directions.html), a preschool chain, got $150-350,000. That’s just in one zip code.
In East Hampton, one of the richest zip codes in the USA, the big winner was The Ross School, founded by Courtney Sale Ross, widow of the founder of Time Warner and a very wealthy person. The school scored $2-5 million.
Just when I thought I could get more p-oed. Isidore Newman School and Metairie Park Country Day Schools, the two most affluent schools in the New Orleans area, each got $2-5 million. Newman (where Drew Brees’ kids go, where the Mannings graduated and Archie’s grandson currently attends, Walter Isaacson is another grad) could easily be bankrolled by a number of their board members or their parents. Same with Country Day. Disgusting on so many levels. Meanwhile children throughout the community are going hungry.
And Archbishop Rummel High School, Steve Scalise’s (and, unfortunately, my) almama got $350,000 to 1 million. It’s a high school attached to a football team, like most Catholic high schools in LA and around the country.
Thank you, Diane. I immediately made use of the Pro-Publica searchable database that you publicized. I found that St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Midland, TX, received a loan for $150,000-$350,000 on April 7. This worked so well that they applied for a second loan and their parochial private school, St. Ann’s School, that meets in church classrooms, got a PPP loan for $350,000-$1 million approved April 28. One might think that these PPP loans violate the U.S. Constitution (First Amendment, Establishment Clause). I will write a letter to our local paper and to the SBA pointing out the legal violation. It appears that some church’s believe that avarice is not only not a crime, it is no longer a sin.
when god is actually money…
Diane and schaferman Up-front, I am against Catholic schools taking advantage of this funding, especially in the light of the Dept of Ed’s apparent ignoring of public schools and their voices. In my view, the switch to charter-school status is an abandonment of several Church tenets to the principle of greed, or in the best scenario, to having to close altogether.
My abhorrence of the practice, however, is also about (1) public sentiment against the Catholic Church, (2) the increased fogginess of the church-state relationship in a secular democracy; and (3) the Church being used as a kind of “front-man” by profiteers who have nothing to do with following the moral or social teachings of the church . . . than it’s about the actual use of those funds.
Let us clarify a distinction, then, between (1) corporate-profit-oriented charter schools (regardless of the so-called public-private state of affairs) and (2) Catholic and other religious-school systems which are a part of a social-good and non-profit religious institutions.
Though some Catholic schools are taking advantage of the situation, and though I am sure graft and mismanagement of monies is always a problem, as with ANY institution, the Catholic Church, and many other religious organizations, has long had the poor and those in need at the constant center of their mission; and their many programs that do good service in so many communities gain their support from church supporters.
Lumping religious organizations with greedy capitalists and profit-making corporations is a travesty against reality. (Now I am waiting for Linda the Catholic-hater and her cherry-picked list of only-Catholic “takers.”) CBK
But it’s “one off” and that makes it fine, or so I’ve heard.
In my area, elite private schools, the one charter school (Princeton Charter School), religious schools, Montessori Society, the YWCA and YMCA all got the PPP money.
I had to search by name of company, rather than ZIP code, but there are a bunch of charter management organizations in Utah that got money. That includes Academica West, which does a bunch of charters in my area. They got between $350,000 and $1 million. One of the state senator’s sons works for this group.
And Utah Military Academy got between $1-2 million. They are a consistently failing school that has several current and former state legislators on their board. And those are just two of what I assume are many more. Meanwhile, Utah spends the least per pupil in the country for real public schools.
NYC charter schools receive huge amounts of contributions and grants according to IRS 990 filings. Now they also receive these loans and grants from PPP. The public schools don’t qualify. Charters claim to be public schools when they want tax payer funds but then they also claim to be private schools when they want these loans or to be exempt from public oversight and regulations. Outrageous!!!