Charter Schools Crime Log

Could be any few days of the school year.

from Ohio:

State Auditor Dave Yost plans to have employees fan out across the state again this year in an attempt to verify that charter schools’ enrollment reports match up with the students sitting in their buildings.
Yost also noted that although the Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled that charter-school operator White Hat Management can keep furniture and equipment paid for with taxpayer money, the majority of justices made a key finding that could keep operators from getting the upper hand in future contract negotiations.
Last fall, auditors from Yost’s office made unannounced visits to 30 charter schools to count students. They found significantly lower numbers than expected at half the schools.

from California:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. (BCN) -- A Sunnyvale charter school that was temporarily closed after the arrest of an employee revealed that the school had failed to complete background checks and tuberculosis tests has been cleared to reopen, the Santa Clara County Office of Education said Thursday evening.
Spark Charter School was shut down at the end of the day last Friday after county education officials found the school could not confirm they had complied with all state procedures regarding employee background checks, TB clearances and teacher credentials.

from New Jersey:

PATERSON – In the latest salvo over the role of charter schools in New Jersey, a Newark-based education advocacy group issued a report that says Paterson-based charters accumulated $6 million in surplus funds this year while the local school district was forced to impose layoffs because of financial problems.
The group, the Education Law Center (ELC), says in a report issued on Thursday that the state has not imposed the same two-percent limit on charter schools’ unrestricted fund balances that it applies to regular school districts.
The Law Center reports says that if the state’s two-percent cap on unrestricted fund balances were applied to charter schools, then the four charters in Paterson would have to return $5.4 million to the city school district. The report says that statewide charters ought to return $77 million to local districts.
“This speaks to the favoritism that the state seems to extend to the charter schools at the expense of the vast majority of the students in the district,” said Paterson Board of Education President Jonathan Hodges, after reading the report.

from Seattle:

First Place Scholars, the state’s first charter school, received about $200,000 more public money than it should have in the 2014-15 school year because the Seattle school reported incorrect information about its staff and enrollment, according to the Washington State Auditor’s Office.
The audit, released Monday, also found that First Place Scholars:
• Did not properly account for the use of some public funds;
• Inappropriately mixed business expenses of First Place’s private parent organization with those of the public charter school;
• Failed to follow provisions of the state’s open-meetings laws.
The state’s Charter School Commission had already reported those problems, and the school remains under close watch as it starts its second year.