As most of you know, I’m a big supporter of charter schools. They provide parental choice and, at the good operations, direct accountability to parents that you can not get in a public school district (outside of a small town with a tiny school – the kinds of places the education establishment is trying hard to close down and consolidate).
The DFL hates them, of course, because – well, because they provide choice and accountability. They tried to kill the charter school movement in its cradle, and then in March of 2007 tried again to cap the number of charter schools in Minnesota.
Critics of charter schools – usually DFL apparatchiks like Nick Coleman, or media outlets that are basically flaks for the left – snipe at charter schools constantly. “What about the lack of oversight”, they bleat, or they wonder about the charter schools that fail due to financial mismanagement (never asking the question “how many public schools would succeed if they had to operate on 3/4 of their money and mind their own books?”).
So with all that said, this story here is a kick in the teeth; Joel Pourier, director of the “Heart of the Earth” charter school in Minneapolis, is under investigation, for gross mismanagement at best, embezzlement at worst:
The school, founded by the American Indian Movement in the 1970s to provide a nurturing environment for American Indian students, faces closure because of its damaged finances.
Poor financial oversight has been the downfall of a number of charter schools in Minnesota and across the country. But Eugene Piccolo, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools, said the Heart of the Earth situation is one of the worst cases of mismanagement he has seen.
People close to the 220-student school say they didn’t know just how bad things were getting until the director was suspected of embezzlement.
Bear in mind that Native American students – a big minority in Minneapolis, especially in the area around HOTE on East Lake Street – are, like most economically disadvantaged minority students, served worse than most by Minneapolis’ public system. And it’s the economically-disadvantaged-but-still-aware minority parents that are leaving the public school systems the fastest, both in Minneapolis and Saint Paul; parents who can’t afford private school, but want better for their kids than the public system offers.
Into this mess can step the occasional (alleged) charlatan:
Pourier was hired six years ago as finance director, to pull Heart of the Earth out of debt. Principal Darlene Leiding had worked with him at another charter school where he was an unlicensed math teacher. He told her that he had an MBA with an emphasis in finance. The school survived and Pourier was later named executive director.
But trouble came to light in a June 30 audit for the 2006-07 school year. The audit, six months late, noted that the school failed to implement a balanced budget and lost more than $78,000 for failing to provide accurate information to state and federal authorities. In addition, more than $160,000 in expenses were unexplained.
That same audit noted that Pourier had unfettered power to pay school bills. Leiding said she reviewed bank records and found multiple checks that Pourier wrote to himself, without a second signature. Many of those checks are at the heart of the investigation.
Of course, Pourier has not yet been charged. It’s possible he won’t be. And it’s almost pro forma to say “here’s hoping he gets charged and punished to the limits of the law, and sued back to the Stone Age to boot”.
Of course, the real problem is this: behind each of those 220 students are parents who cared enough about their kids’ education to get them the hell out of the Minneapolis system – but who didn’t know enough about bookkeeping to find a (alleged) fraud.
Where do they go?