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Columbus
Dispatch...
Raise the bar
State Auditor Dave Yost is right that Ohio needs higher standards and
stricter accountability for charter-school treasurers. As some recent
high-profile cases involving ruined schools and misspent tax funds make
clear, it’s easy for hundreds of thousands of dollars to be lost before
corrective action takes place.
The worst case might be that of Carl W. Shye Jr., who is accused by the
Ohio Department of Education of repeatedly violating the law and
failing to accurately report information, observe ethical standards,
protect assets, manage employment contracts and correct problems. At
Montessori Renaissance Experience in Columbus, he accepted about
$100,000 total in per-pupil payments after the school no longer had
students. He improperly used the money to pay past bills.
At a Dayton school, Shye failed to pay $65,000 in state and federal
taxes that had been withheld from employees’ paychecks.
The list of similar allegations, involving several schools, is 12 pages
long.
Shye, whom Yost called “a serial abuser of public dollars and taxpayer
trust,” has been fired by all of his charter-school clients and
voluntarily surrendered his school-treasurer’s license March 6, as the
Education Department pursued steps to revoke it.
Ohio’s charter-school law doesn’t require treasurers of those schools
to have a license, even though it’s required for treasurers of
conventional public school districts. Obtaining a license requires a
business degree or extensive college-level credit in school law, school
accounting and accounting.
As an alternative to the license, people can serve as charter-school
treasurers if they complete 16 hours of training in school accounting
before taking the job, as well as 24 more hours during their first year
on the job and eight hours per year after that.
As it happens, most charter-school treasurers are licensed, and Shye’s
case shows that a license is no guarantee of competence or ethical
behavior.
Still, the law shouldn’t leave open the door to even-worse performance
by continuing to allow for charter-school treasurers with so little
background and training for the job.
Closing that loophole is one thing Yost wants to accomplish with a bill
he’s developing with Republican state Rep. Christina Hagan of Alliance.
The bill, which he hopes to see introduced by the end of the month,
also would make treasurers more accountable for their handling of
public dollars and give state officials the ability to intervene sooner
when a school’s finances are in disarray.
That involves a trade-off, Yost said; in the past, officials have been
reluctant to use their strongest tool — withholding funding — against a
school, because they didn’t want to disrupt students’ education. But
allowing financial mismanagement to fester typically “doesn’t end
well,” he said, and allowing kids to stay in badly managed schools does
them no favor.
For Ohio, getting charter schools right appears to be a decade-long (or
longer) process. This important form of school choice got off to a bad
start, with weak oversight and lax standards that led to a lot of
poorly run schools and a failure rate twice the national average.
Since then, lawmakers have made progress in firming up standards for
charter schools and holding them accountable for their performance,
both in educating children and managing taxpayers’ money. Ohio now has
one of the nation’s toughest laws regarding failing charter schools:
Those that earn a failing grade two years out of a three-year period
must close.
It’s past time to bring similar accountability to the fiscal side.
Read this and other articles at the Columbus Dispatch
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