Trial of failed charter-schools chief begins
The head of two failed Columbus charter schools who is accused of stealing $7,500 in state education aid intends to call Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Richard Ross to testify at his trial, which got under way yesterday.
An attorney for Andre Tucker, who founded the two Talented Tenth Leadership Academies that opened in fall 2013 and closed weeks later, told Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Mark Serrott on Monday morning that she intends to call Ross and other officials to the stand, but didn’t elaborate.
But a spokeswoman for the state Education Department said that Ross had not been subpoenaed to testify in the criminal case, but rather in a civil case involving Tucker that has been postponed.
Tucker is charged with two counts of theft and one unrelated count of burglary.
Because of an unusual governance setup, it’s not clear who actually was running the two Talented Tenth Leadership Academies that closed in October 2013. Tucker was the founder and is listed in state incorporation papers as creating the charters, but he also was a $71,000-a-year employee of the school’s sponsor, the North Central Ohio Educational Service Center, The Dispatch reported last year.
After he was hired, Tucker was assigned by the center to work at Talented Tenth under the terms of a contract he signed with his sponsor — the supposed watchdog over the charter school. Tucker previously was an accountant for Honda and had presided over another failed Columbus charter school and had tried to start one in Pennsylvania but was refused under that state’s tougher oversight laws.
Serrott indicated that he might dismiss the burglary charge against Tucker because of problems prosecutors are having producing the witnesses in the case.
A woman told police she found Tucker inside her Near East Side apartment in January rummaging through her belongings. Her TV had been moved, and she found stacked on her laptop computer a silver necklace, a computer-game controller, a cellphone and a purse, Simone Helms told The Dispatch in February.
When she asked him what he was doing, Tucker started to talk with Trial of failed charter-schools chief begins | The Columbus Dispatch: