say <\/em>these allegations mean.<\/p>\nBut more importantly, we need to look at what these charges actually mean in terms of individual charges against individual schools.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
A business manager for a Saint Paul area charter school talked with me about the allegations against his school.\u00a0 The school has reputation for academic excellence – and, more importantly, for turning around kids who’ve had a hard time in the traditional public schools.\u00a0 Based in Saint Paul, it draws students from Forest Lake, Prior Lake and Hastings (and remember – charter parents have to provide transportation themselves).\u00a0 But the MN2020 report tagged his school with four “violations”; Limited Segregation of Duties, Collateral Insurance, reporting of electronic deposits, and Cash Disbursements.<\/p>\n
Regarding the Limited Segregation of Duties – which tripped up the majority of charter schools – the manager said “nobody wants to be accused of this – we did our best to deal with this”; it was a matter, in his school’s case, it was a simple matter of him, rather than someone else, having access to the school’s blank checks.\u00a0 “But this was fixed before the 2008 audit”, the manager notes – as, indeed, were all of his school’s “violations”.\u00a0 He added “This trips up a lot of small organizations”.<\/p>\n
Eugene Piccolo of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools confirms this: “Every accountant will tell you that all small non-profits have trouble with this”.\u00a0 Piccolo noted that not only to charter schools have trouble with this, but so does every other small-non-profit, as well as smaller public schools, and <\/em>many small units of government.<\/p>\nAs to the lack of collateral – in other words, insurance to cover bank deposits above the FDIC-insured limit, which at the time of the audit was $100,000 – the manager notes “it was an issue in 2008; we received more money than we spent.\u00a0 It was immediately brought to our board’s attention.\u00a0 But we were over the limit for a total of about twenty days<\/em>.\u00a0 The board decided it wsn’t worth getting insurance for a very brief overage”.<\/p>\nDon Vance – a former Army Sergeant-Major – is the director of the General John Vessey Charter School, on the far south end of Saint Paul’s West Side.\u00a0 Vessey’s program is based on the Junior ROTC program, and draws students from as far afield as Taylors Falls, Forest Lake, and even Monticello, on the far northwest corner of the metro area.\u00a0 The school had 22 seniors graduate (from among 30 seniors) two weeks ago; among students that started at the school in Grade 9, 100% graduated on time – a little over double the graduation rate at the Saint Paul Public Schools.<\/p>\n
Vessey was tagged for collateral insurance.\u00a0 “We had an issue with too much money in our account.\u00a0 We moved the extra money into a different account!”.<\/p>\n
Vance points out that his school – like all of the schools I spoke with – corrected the problem, and that Vessey is listed in the Department of Education’s\u00a0 “School Finance Award” winners.<\/p>\n
Let’s go back to our original manager, to discuss his school’s third allegation, failure to report Electronic Fund Transfers.\u00a0 “We’re required by statute to report EFTs”, said the manager.\u00a0 “There was a brief stretch of time when these transfers were not noted in the school board meeting minutes<\/em>“.\u00a0 Not that the transfers weren’t legal, or otherwise undocumented, but that they didn’t get entered in the board minutes <\/em>as electronic transfers.\u00a0 “It was nothing out of the ordinary; it’s just that the medium of exchange was omitted from the minutes”.\u00a0 In other words, the minutes noted “Staffer X got $x hundred dollars”, rather than “Staffer X got $x hundred dollars via an EFT”.\u00a0 That was the “violation”.\u00a0 And, the manager notes, “it was corrected, and has been consistently correct since then”.<\/p>\nThe manager’s school’s fourth “violation” regarded documentation of cash disbursements.\u00a0 “Being the finance manager ,I need to have another person to sign the records for cash disbursements”, the manager notes.\u00a0 There was a brief issue with proper signatures\u00a0 <\/em>in 2008, but – this is important – the “violation” had nothing to do with misappropriation of actual money.\u00a0 “I don’t know the school’s safe combination, I can’t get to the blank checks”, and the issue, such as it was was corrected by 2008.<\/p>\nJudy Ingisson, director of Saint Paul’s German Immersion School, a charter on University Avenue, had the same problem.\u00a0 “If I recall correctly there was a time sheet and purchase order that hadn’t been signed by the director but she has verbally or in email approved the expenditures. Also, I don’t think the school did have a regular schedule for deposits but the only money that was collected regularly was milk money which in total was around $2,200 for the year. The money came is sporadically after parents were billed and I don’t think exceeded $62 in a week!”<\/p>\n
Hardly seems to be the kind of thing that bears much taxpayer scrutiny, much less John Fitzgerald’s call for shutting down the charter system.\u00a0 Oh, and Ingisson notes, as did Vance and the other manager, “Both of these problems were addressed in the 2008-2009 school year by implementing new procedures and I have emphasized to office staff that need for making sure everything is signed even if there was verbal or email approval.”
\nWhile it’s an infraction that must be reported to an auditor – as it was – it’s not a sign of irresponsibility with taxpayers money.<\/p>\n
So the great bulk of the “violations” in the MN2020 report were trifling in the extreme, but they are the same precise problems faced by most smaller non-profits, and indeed units of government<\/em>.<\/p>\nSo why do the report at all?<\/p>\n
Good question.\u00a0 “Matt Entenza’s MN 2020 report does nothing to advance the discussion of how to improve the academic quality of charter schools in MN”, says Al Fan of Charter School Partners<\/a>, a non-profit advocacy group. \u00a0 “It is simply an attempt to bully the charter school community.\u00a0 Making the assertion that all audit infractions are equal and that any infraction should lead to the charter application being revoked is ludicrous and a waste of taxpayer dollars.\u00a0 The report does nothing to show how audit infractions impact student learning or overall performance.”<\/p>\nIndeed.<\/p>\n
But the report does raise some interesting questions.\u00a0 Fitzgerald’s report lists five “Worst Offenders” at financial management:\u00a0 In addition to the scandal-riven Heart Of The Earth Charter, whose director allegedly embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars, it lists Aurora Charter School of Minneapolis, the Recovery School of Owatonna, the E.C.H.O Charter in Echo, and the Duluth School Academy charter.<\/p>\n
And on the Department of Education’s “School Finance Award Winners” list?\u00a0 Along with Vessey, and thirty-odd other charters?<\/p>\n
The E.C.H.O Charter School.<\/strong><\/p>\nSo – is the E.C.H.O. Charter School a Public (Accounting) Enemy Number One?\u00a0 Is the Minnesota Department of Education wrong?\u00a0 Or do MN2020’s shopping list of petty violations have a purpose very different from actually holding charter schools accountable for taxes spend on charter schools?<\/p>\n
More on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let’s look back at the MN2020 report from a couple of weeks back.\u00a0 The reports main allegations were that there is an epidemic of bad accounting; writer John Fitzgerald concluded that, because of this wave of fiscal malfeasance, Minnesota needed to end the Charter School experiment. Let’s back up a bit. Minnesota has 339 public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-school-choice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}