Keep your eye on Byron and Erika Donalds in Florida. Byron is running for the governor’s job as the MAGA candidate, while his wife is making a bundle as the queen of charter schools. As prescient pols figured out long ago, the school choice biz can be very lucrative.

Peter Greene has the story here:

Erika Donalds has long been a leading face of school choice in Florida, even as her husband Byron has risen through the GOP to become a major political player. Now a new story dug up by Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows how Donalds is a model of how folks in the charter school world can make a bundle.

The couple got together while Byron was still with his first wife (a public school teacher who still seems a bit grumpy about the whole business). He hooked up with the Tea Party, and Erika became an investment banker. Her school choice origin story is that in 2013, her second child had some sort of run-in with a teacher at school, and Donalds, unsatisfied with administrative response, put the child in a private school and transformed into an advocate for school choice.

Donalds has had a hand in the founding of a multitude of groups. She helped start Parents ROCK (Rights of Choice For Kids). When Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, Donalds helped launch School Choice Movement, a group that pushed for policies that would cut the throat of public education, including one that said charters must be approved by the state, not a local district; the group has since gone silent.

Back in 2015, while she was still serving as a school board member, she helped launch the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, meant to be a conservative alternative to the Florida School Boards Association. They started with four members– Donalds, Jeff Bergosh, frequent collaborator Shawn Frost, and Bridget Ziegler, future co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who called Donalds the face of charter schools in Florida. Tina Descovitch, another M4L co-founder, would later join FCSBM and was the president when they folded in May 2020, just a few months before the founding of M4L.

Donalds served on the Florida Constitution Revision Committee (along with Jeb Bush edu-pal Patricia Levesque), the group that tried to sell Amendment 8, yet another attempt to kneecap public schools. Fortunately, the Amendment was such a deceptive con job, a judge threw it off the ballot.

And she’s the CEO of Optima Ed, a private ed biz that offers school management and works with a variety of partners, including Step Up For Students, the outfit that manages the money fueling school vouchers–and that outfit is chaired by John Kirtley, who reportedly runs DeVos-funded PACS (included American Federation for Children) and who allegedly provided support for the FCSBM. Optima Ed also operates a chain of Hillsdale-powered charter schools.

Optima has raked in a ton of taxpayer money for its various charter school operations. But recent reporting from Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows another wrinkle. 

In 2021, for the first and only time in all records to date, the Optima Foundation reported payingErika Donalds a salary of $183,326. However, her husband did not report this income in his disclosures to the U.S. House Ethics Committee in either 2021 or 2022, despite filing an amended report the latter year.

But the congressman did report his wife earned more than half a million dollars in total salary between 2020 and 2022 from a firm called “Educator Solutions.” The Optima Foundation-run charter schools’ reports to the Internal Revenue Service show that they paid Educator Solutions $6,930,584 during those same years, while the foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216, all for “payroll services.”

State filings reveal that “Educator Solutions” is in fact a fictitious business name registered to ESI Technical Inc., a company founded by State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), whose father William Snyder was the longtime Martin County sheriff until earlier this year. Snyder’s financial disclosures show he has earned nearly $700,000 from ESI Technical since 2020, the year he was elected, and he has consistently identified the Optima-linked charter schools as ESI’s biggest customers. Snyder has come under fire for promoting policies favorable to charter schools while profiting from their operations, but no outlet has previously reported his company’s financial relationship with Erika Donalds.

Bredderman also notes that in 2023, three of Optima’s flagship schools fired the Donalds firm, apparently due to “deficiencies” in accounting.

Open the link to finish reading. One would have to be an accountant to decipher the many overlapping organizations in the Ed-reform-school choice business. School choice in Florida is a multi-billion dollar industry.