Ohio Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments Today in Case Involving White Hat Management
Today, September 23, 2014, the Ohio Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a long running case that has pitted Ohio’s notorious White Hat Management Company, which manages charter schools for-profit, against ten of its schools whose boards set out to dissolve ties to the management company and bring in a new manager. White Hat at first refused to disclose to its schools how it had spent the 96 percent of taxpayer funding for the schools that went directly to the management company without the charter boards’ oversight. The schools had to go to court to force White Hat to disclose this information to the schools it managed. Now the question is: Who owns the school buildings, furniture, and all equipment?
The case involves basic and important questions: whether charter school boards are in charge and can cleanly terminate contracts with poorly performing management companies they have hired to run the schools, whether management companies can create subsidiaries with taxpayer funds to amass real estate empires and then rent buildings back to the management companies with whom they are affiliated at rents well over market rates, whether buildings and other assets purchased by the management companies with tax dollars are owned by the charter school boards or the private management companies, and finally whether charter schools themselves—that draw funding from Ohio’s state education fund and the state’s over 600 public school districts—are public or private entities.
Doug Livingston, an Akron Beacon Journal reporter and Ohio’s top education writer, explains the case succinctly: “The case involves Akron-based White Hat Management and 10 charter schools. The schools’ boards, after paying White Hat millions to run what turned out to be poorly performing schools, fired the company when they were unable to obtain answers as to how the money was spent. But after the firing, White Hat argued that it owned most of the assets and it would be the boards that would have to move and start up new schools from scratch. Meanwhile, the buildings that were vacated often became the home for new charter schools run by the for-profit White Hat… The case illustrates a larger issue: Ohio charter schools were created more than 15 years ago as independent public agencies. But as so many for-profit companies now own the real estate, furniture and computers, the questions are raised: Are charter schools still public? Are they independent? Or are they now privately run, for-proft businesses?”
Livingston points out that a recent investigation by the Beacon Journal and the News Outlet at Youngstown State University uncovered a number of instances when members of charter Ohio Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments Today in Case Involving White Hat Management | janresseger: