This is a 2012 article but it discusses a great point...who owns this school? Who owns the building?
http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2012/02/florida-charter-schools-under-scrutiny.html Who is profiting? Seems a lot of these schools engage in some shady dealings regarding the purchase and leasing of properties. While I'm not saying that the "F" School Windsor Prep is engaging in underhanded dealings, Charter schools in general have been a great cause for for concern.
The Federal Government is even investigating a Charter School Group in South Florida.( http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/charter-schools )
"In Florida, a local news outlet investigating charter school operations found millions of taxpayer dollars misdirected from classrooms and students to management companies. The report pointed to charter school chain Charter Schools USA that makes “tens of millions” by operating as, essentially, a real estate firm.
CUSA uses tax-exempt bonds to build schools that it then rents to CUSA-affiliated schools. Then the CUSA schools are saddled with rent payments back to CUSA and its management company at rates considerably higher than those charged to other non-CUSA schools in the area.
One CUSA school will pay “more than $2 million this year in rent” – a 23 percent share of its budget. “That’s money that won’t be spent in classroom resources or teachers,” the report noted.
Education historian Diane Ravitch, writing on her personal blog, recently highlighted a report from the Florida League of Women Voters that explained how these charter school real estate schemes work across the state:
After receiving a variety of grants, loans and tax credits for building a charter school, the for-profit chain charges ever escalating rents and leases to the school district, paid by taxpayer education dollars. The for-profit then reaps the profits when the building is sold in a few years. Meanwhile the properties with high, non-taxable, values based on claimed ‘commercial’ revenue streams from public taxpayer dollars are leveraged to borrow additional funds to build more school buildings.
The League’s report noted, “The high per student management fees (around $450 ) plus rent/lease fees (at least 20 percent of the total school budget) mean that there is less funding available for ‘instruction,’ including teacher salaries, books, etc.” The Tampa Bay Times ran it as well http://www.tampabay.com , and here's the link to the study: http://www.lwv-spacecoast.org/charterschools.pdf
The charter school racket goes beyond real estate deals.
Sunshine State Scam
A new investigation by the Orlando Sun Sentinel found, “Unchecked charter-school operators are exploiting South Florida’s public school system, collecting taxpayer dollars for schools that quickly shut down … virtually anyone can open or run a charter school and spend public education money with near impunity.”
Examples cited in the series include a man who received $450,000 in tax dollars to open two new charter schools just months after his first collapsed. The schools closed in seven weeks. Another example: A man with “a history of foreclosures, court-ordered payments, and bankruptcy received $100,000 to start a charter school.” It closed in two months.
Sun Sentinel reporters found an elementary charter school that “sometimes had no toilet paper, soap or paper towels in the student bathrooms … Students sometimes ate hours after their designated lunchtimes, often from fast-food restaurants.”
School districts have little to no recourse when charters fail to submit financial reports – “some don’t file them or turn in unreliable paperwork.” And management companies that run two-thirds of South Florida’s charter schools add to the problems of transparency and financial disclosure.
Despite these problems, charter schools continue to “pop up within blocks of each other – or in the same building – offering similar programs as neighboring schools. With such wild growth, district officials say, many new charters no longer fill a niche or offer innovation. Yet Florida lawmakers repeatedly have declined to tighten charter-school regulations.”
Florida’s score in the CER ranking: 2.
http://dianeravitch.net/2014/06/27/florida-weak-charter-laws-permit-self-dealing-waste-of-public-dollars/
This is another great article citing Charter School Shenanigans:
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/03/16/charter-schools-and-the-profit-motive/
I like the clear example he gives of what so many of them do:
"Gonzalez focused his research on the city of Albany—which, he wrote, “boasts the state’s highest percentage of charter school enrollments.” He provided an explanation of how lucrative investments in building new charter schools can be:
What happens is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government. In addition, this is a tax credit on money that they’re lending, so they’re also collecting interest on the loans as well as getting the thirty-nine percent tax credit. They piggy-back the tax credit on other kinds of federal tax credits like historic preservation or job creation or brownfields credits.
The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money. The problem is, that the charter schools end up paying in rents, the debt service on these loans and so now, a lot of the charter schools in Albany are straining paying their debt service–their rent has gone up from $170,000 to $500,000 in a year or–huge increases in their rents as they strain to pay off these loans, these construction loans. The rents are eating-up huge portions of their total cost. And, of course, the money is coming from the state. " ...
*****White Hat Management
In a 2011 Pro-Publica article titled Charter Schools Outsource Education to Management Firms, With Mixed Results, Sharona Coutts wrote about charter schools run by White Hat Management in Ohio:
Since 2008, an Ohio-based company, White Hat Management, has collected around $230 million to run charter schools in that state. The company has grown into a national chain and reports that it has about 20,000 students across the country. But now 10 of its own schools and the state of Ohio are suing, complaining that many White Hat students are failing, and that the company has refused to account for how it has spent the money.
The dispute between White Hat and Ohio, which is unfolding in state court in Franklin County, provides a glimpse at a larger trend: the growing role of private management companies in publicly funded charter schools.
Coutt reported that about one third of the charter schools in this country are now run by management companies, which can be either for-profit or non-profit, and not run locally. These companies not only have the right to hire and fire staff—they can also develop curricula and discipline students. She added that while the “shortcomings of traditional public schools” have been under scrutiny in recent years—“a look at the private sector’s efforts to run schools in Ohio, Florida and New York shows that turning things over to a company has created its own set of problems for public schools.” She said that government data on charter schools suggest that those with “for-profit managers have somewhat worse academic results than charters without management companies, and a number of boards have clashed with managers over a lack of transparency in how they are using public funds.”
The Ohio Department of Education joined the lawsuit in the fall of 2010..."
**remember former Imagine Schools, and White Hat employees are involved in Windsor and Newpoint (more to come on that)** look: http://newpointeducation.com/
Now, this is the 2013 Windsor Report on audited statements. Look at the 20year lease agreement they have and the rent agreement, and who they "lease" from. Wellington Crossings LLC which was filed as a Florida Limited Liability in the State of Florida on Wednesday, March 7, 2012
http://www.myflorida.com/audgen/pages/chschools_efile%20rpts/2013%20windsor%20charter%20school.pdf
So while I'm not saying "F" School Windsor Prep is doing anything shady, I am saying that I am definitely going to start digging. So far, here's what I have off of the County Tax Collector: https://www.pinellas.county-taxes.com/public/real_estate/parcels/R27250
Property Appraiser: http://www.pcpao.org/?pg=http://www.pcpao.org/general.php?pn=163103000002200101
and Corporation Wiki: http://www.corporationwiki.com/Florida/Boca-Raton/wellington-crossings-llc/101173912.aspx
http://www.corporationwiki.com/Florida/Boca-Raton/charter-school-properties-inc/108725584.aspx
Meanwhile, car counts stay right around 405 and up every morning, and higher in the afternoon. I think that may be because of after care club vehicles coming to pick kids up. All I know is it's worse in the afternoons.
Well, this is a long one, so I'll stop for now. But of course....
MORE TO COME!!
We called Pinellas County Sheriff's Office...let's see if they bother to do anything...they usually don't after all. **Note, they drove right past***