New Orleans charter school employee embezzled $70,000, audit says
From the Times-Picayune:
An employee of New Orleans' second-largest charter school network embezzled $69,840 in the 2012-13 academic year, according to an audit released Monday. The money has been recovered, the employee was fired and a criminal investigation is underway, KIPP spokesman Jonathan Bertsch said. Short for "Knowledge Is Power Program," KIPP New Orleans educates 3,755 students, or 8 percent of New Orleans' public school enrollment. It will open its sixth school this summer. The network received $37.4 million in public money in 2012-13, according to the audit report. The fired employee worked in the organization's central administration office and took two checks in April 2013 from batches waiting to be sent to vendors. The second time, the employee signed on to a co-worker's computer and created the check herself. The theft was discovered when the vendors asked why they hadn't been paid. KIPP administration reported the matter to the police, bank and insurance company. The employee admitted to the theft and was immediately fired. Auditors said the theft could happen because the accounts payable department both created and mailed checks. Management has since changed procedures so signed checks are sent out by people who are not in the accounts payable department.Read the full article here.
CA Charter Handed $750,000 to Board Member
Lack of oversight isn’t always immediately apparent, though sometimes it eventually becomes apparent months or years later when a crime is reported.* That’s what happened in Orange County, Calif., when prosecutors filed charges against a former board member of the California Virtual Education Partners, an online charter school in California. According to the Los Angeles Times, former board member Jeremy Landau persuaded the board of the charter school chain to give him $750,000, which he would speedily turn into $3 million dollars and return to the charter school. But Landau never returned the money, instead laundering the money for personal gain by moving it through various bank accounts, Orange County prosecutors said.
NEPC charter study: for-profit education management organizations surpass non-profits in enrollment
For the past fourteen years, the National Education Policy Center has published an overview of the charter school management landscape. Detailing the reach of so-called "education management organizations" (EMOs), the vendors that manage the daily operations of charter schools. NEPC charts trends and exposes the relationship between EMOs and the schools they manage-- which is not always transparent. This year's figures are interesting becuase they show that, despite huge growth in enrollment at non-profit charter schools, which jumped from 237,591 in 2009-10 to 445,052 in the 2011-12 school year, enrollments at non-profit EMOs are still lower than at for-profit schools. The largest for-profit EMO? K12 Inc., which educated more than twice as many students in 2011-12 school year than KIPP, the largest non-profit EMO.