Charter school board members found themselves powerless
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As president of the board of the Detroit Enterprise Academy, Sandra Clark-Hinton was pressing hard for detailed financial records from a representative of the charter school’s management company.
His response: The documents were “none of the board’s business,” Clark-Hinton told fellow board members at a 2010 meeting, recounting her phone conversation with the company official. She resigned later that night, saying she’d had enough.
Charter school board members are supposed to oversee the finances of their school, maintain independence from their management company and make information available to the public.
That’s the law in Michigan. But it doesn’t always happen.
■ Full Coverage: Free Press special report: State of charter schools
In its investigation into how Michigan’s charter schools perform and spend nearly $1 billion a year in taxpayer dollars, the Free Press found board members who were kept clueless by their management companies about school budgets or threatened and removed by a school’s authorizer when they tried to exercise the responsibilities that come with their oath of office.
Board members removed by an authorizer have no recourse in Michigan.
“There have been board members who have basically said, ‘We tried to make changes, we tried to instill our rights as board members overseeing a public school’ and were essentially told to back off,” said Casandra Ulbrich, vice president of the state Board of Education, which sets education policy and advises lawmakers. “You have to question who’s really running the show here because technically and legally, it’s supposed to be the board.”
In traditional school districts, with elected boards, members can’t be removed for asking tough questions. Voters get to decide whether to re-elect a board member.
It’s not clear how often authorizers remove board members who challenge their management company about excessive rents, management fees or lack of transparency. But critics say it underscores a shortcoming in state law: no penalties for authorizers that fail to ensure that the very board members they appoint are independent of the management company.
The result, said state Board of Education President John Austin: “You have private companies facilitated by authorizers in perpetuating money-making deals that really don’t stand the light of day.”Charter school board members found themselves powerless | Detroit Free Press | freep.com:
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