Important, if disgusting, article on how nonprofit and for-profit charter schools—more than 1,300—double-dipped, securing between $925 million and $2.2 billion from both the emergency stimulus monies that traditional public schools took from and federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) monies of the Small Business Administration program. 

California charter schools alone received a disproportionate amount of PPP funding, reaching half-a-billion dollars.  This number included well-funded charter schools that didn't need the money at all. For example, it's sad to read about how one Los Angeles area charter school, Palisades Charter High School, which $4.6 million dollars that they admitted they didn't need, turned around and fired five member of their staff while reducing the hours of 18 others. A home-schooling network, Inspire Schools, that had been "expelled last fall from the California Charter Schools Association," took at least 29.7 million.

As per the investigation of these monies by Carol Burris and members of the Network for Public Education, even though charter school funding had not been cut, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools encouraged charter schools to apply. according to public minutes in one meeting one person mentioned below expressed concerns about being investigated by the federal government and how this might be bad for public relations. 

All of this was happening as businesses and nonprofits were shutting down, particularly impacting African American and Latina/o small-business owners with only 12 percent receiving loans for which they had applied.

Taking money you don't need is highly unethical and disturbing—and doing so during a pandemic is unscrupulous, if not criminal. Charter schools need to stop defrauding the public and they need be held accountable.

-Angela Valenzuela

#CoronavirusCapitalism

Charter schools and their management companies won at least $925 million in federal coronavirus funding, data shows

 

By Valerie Strauss | July 27, 2020 | Answer Sheet

 

The Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, is a $660 billion business loan program established as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus legislation that Congress passed in the spring. PPP was aimed at helping certain small businesses, nonprofit organizations, sole proprietors and others stay in business during the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S. Small Business Administration administered the program, and recently the SBA and the Treasury Department released some data on what organizations won loans from the program and how much they received. (Some loans can be forgiven if the PPP money is spent on keeping employees on the payroll.)

The release of funding details sparked some controversy about whether some of the organizations that received funds should have gotten them, including public charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — and some elite private schools. (A Washington Post database shows the data.)

 

Charter schools received emergency stimulus money from Congress from the same fund that traditional public schools did — but some charter schools decided to apply for PPP loans as well, saying that they are underfunded through regular funding formulas and had a right to seek more aid. Other charter schools chose not to apply for loans, saying it would be double-dipping in federal aid funds.

Among those charters that did were some that knew they didn’t actually need the money to maintain financial stability. For example, 2KUTV in Salt Lake City did an investigation into Utah charter schools taking PPP funding and found that they took a total of $7.9 million. It reported on a discussion at the June 25 meeting of the governing board of the Utah Military Academy, a charter with two campuses, in which an unidentified board member explained how the $1.15 million in PPP funding that the school was expecting would be spent.

The conversation, heard on audio tapes, went like this, according to the CBS affiliate:

“So we take this money to pay the salaries, and the money we were going to pay salaries is going to go into our accounts to help flush up our funds,” said the board member.

“Can I ask a question?” a female voice said. “My understanding was that this money is for businesses who, because of the drop in business, were having trouble keeping all their employees. How do we qualify for that? Because our funding wasn’t cut at all.”

She also notes that no employees have been laid off by the school because of the covid-19 pandemic. Two more voices interject, “We’re a business,” and, “We’re a nonprofit.” A third voice is heard saying, “It’s some of that good free government money!”

With that, here is the post about just how much charter schools did get in PPP money, written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education. Burris, a former award-winning principal in New York, has been chronicling the charter school movement and the standardized-test-based accountability movement on this blog for years.