Options PCS Featured in Today's Charter School Crime Log

A clip from WaPo:

In the court complaint, D.C. officials allege that the managers’ salaries were far out of line with what public officials make, especially given the size of the school.

Montgomery’s “salary and bonuses from Options PCS during a one-year period — at least $425,000 combined — totaled more than the salary of the President of the United States and more than twice the salary of the Mayor of the District of Columbia, even though Options PCS is a small school whose revenue comes mostly from public school funding,” the complaint says.

Despite the fact that this Options PCS has been an active crime scene since 1996, DC's charter board is "pretty proud" of their oversight:

“We see this as an event that is very much specific to Options, and we are pretty proud of the level of oversight that we have in general,” said Darren Woodruff, the board’s vice chairman. “We’re confident that this is something that is not going to be an issue beyond this one school.”

In case you have forgotten the many reasons to oppose public money going to corporate schools like Options PCS, Ravitch has a nice piece here.  A clip:

Because they are loosely regulated, charter schools are often neither accountable nor transparent. In 2013, the founders of an L.A. charter with 1,200 students were convicted of misappropriating more than $200,000 in public funds.  In Oakland, an audit at the highest-performing charter schools in the state found that $3.8 million may have been misused when the founder hired his other businesses to do work for his charters. 

Charter schools are "public" when it is time to claim public funding, but they have claimed in federal court and before the National Labor Relations Board to be private corporations when their employees seek the protection of state labor laws.