Columbus Dispatch...
Sunshine is best
Judge right to order charter-school company to account for tax dollars  
October 29, 2011 

Of course, taxpayers and the charter schools that hire operating companies such as White Hat Management Co. should be able to see records of how such companies spend public money and run public schools. 

A recent ruling by Franklin County Common Pleas Judge John F. Bender underlined the point. 

Akron-based White Hat operates more than 30 charter schools in Ohio, under contracts with the governing boards that established the schools. But, in many cases, the relationship isn’t a good one: 10 schools that have contracts with White Hat are suing the company because it refuses to share with them any details of how it spends the taxpayer dollars the schools pass on to the company and has insisted it owns all the schools’ property, such as desks and computers, bought with the schools’ tax dollars. 

White Hat has claimed that, as a private company, it has no obligation to reveal how it does business. 

That might be true for a maker of widgets for private industry, but not for a company that accepts   tax money to provide public education. 

White Hat’s reluctance to make its use of tax dollars and its public-school operations transparent, even to the schools that hired it, means that no one can monitor whether the company is spending and operating as it should. 

Bender ruled in August, as part of the same lawsuit, that White Hat should turn over to the school governing boards a detailed accounting of its tax-dollar spending. So far, the schools say, it hasn’t done so. Now, Bender has gone further, ruling in response to a different motion that, in its capacity as operator of a public school, the company is in effect a public official, meaning its operation of the schools is open to public scrutiny. 

White Hat’s approach is symptomatic of the weak oversight and lack of accountability that have made Ohio charter schools among the nation’s worst. 

Legislators, to whom White Hat was the second-largest political contributor, have been far too willing to keep the rules skewed in the company’s favor.

School choice is a boon to thousands of Ohio families and students, but only if the schools they choose are operated transparently and in the interest of the public. 

Read this and other articles at Columbus Dispatch