Florida boots Melbourne private school from low-income scholarship programs
A private school in Melbourne with ties to two other schools already sanctioned by the state will be revoked from Florida’s scholarship programs, the Florida Department of Education said Tuesday.
Yakol Christian opened in August with fewer than 20 students, all of them on one of the state’s three scholarship programs that pay nearly $1 billion in private school tuition for children from low-income families or those with a wide range of disabilities.
The Orlando Sentinel reported last week that the church that shares the same name and storefront space as the school has ties to a pastor who ran two earlier schools and was charged earlier this year with lewd or lascivious molestation after a 15-year-old student said he improperly touched her.
Samuel Vidal, 41, denies the allegations through his attorney, and no trial date has been set.
The education department’s letter to Yakol did not mention
Vidal. It said it is revoking Yakol’s ability to accept state scholarships because it switched principals and had no students on campus when an employee of Step Up for Students, the nonprofit that distributes most of the scholarships for the state, visited, according to an Oct. 17 letter from Education Commissioner Pam Stewart.
In her letter, Stewart said an employee from Step Up for Students visited the school Aug. 23 and a man from the school advised him that the woman listed as the school’s administrator is “elderly” and that he “really ran the place.”
“As a result, the Department has concluded Yakol failed to notify the Department of a change in directors,” Stewart’s letter stated.
Scholarship rules require schools to notify the department of a change in leadership within 15 days.
It also said on Sept. 22, the Step Up employee visited Yakol again and no students, parents or teachers were there. Schools are required to maintain a location where students regularly attend classes.
An education department spokeswoman did not respond to a question about why the department waited almost two months — from the first visit on Aug. 23 by Step Up for Students to Oct. 17, the date on the letter — to take action against the school.
Yakol Christian was included in an investigation by the Orlando Sentinel into Florida’s growing scholarship programs, which now serve 140,000 students at 2,000 private schools, with little oversight from the state.
The investigation found schools that hired teachers with criminal records, submitted falsified health or fire inspection documents to the state, or — in Vidal’s case — a principal under investigation for molesting a student who was allowed to open another school under a new name and still receive state scholarship money.
Herick Hernandez, a pastor who said he helps run Yakol, told the Sentinel on Tuesday that the school is challenging the state’s assertion that it violated scholarship rules.
“We are disputing the letter that was sent out,” he said. “We’ve sent the information they [the department] needed.”
He said he recalled someone coming to the school and telling that person that Inez Honsell was “unavailable” but doesn’t recall whether that occurred on Aug. 23, as the department’s letter stated, or on another date. Hernandez said he did not refer to Honsell, who is listed as president of Yakol, as “elderly.”
Hernandez said he has now updated the school’s paperwork with the state to reflect his role as an administrator there and hopes that helps resolve the state’s concerns.
He said there weren’t any children or teachers at Yakol on Sept. 22 because the school takes students to a park on Fridays for physical education.
When a Sentinel reporter visited the school on Sept. 28, Hernandez, Honsell and students were there. The students sat at partitioned desks working on a curriculum of self-taught workbooks that is popular among some Christian schools.
The Sentinel reported last week that Vidal shut down another school, Restoration Church and School in Palm Bay after the student made the allegation against him.
The department revoked Restoration’s scholarship eligibility in August 2016 because Vidal failed to respond to letters sent by the department asking for information after it was made aware of the student’s allegation.
But by the time the education department finalized the sanction against Restoration, Vidal and his wife had already opened a new school called Overcomers Ministry Inc. and received approval from the state to begin accepting scholarships there.
After Vidal was arrested and charged in February, the department also revoked Overcomers from the scholarship program, and that school shut down sometime in the spring.
The department approved scholarships this summer for Yakol. When Sentinel reporters visited Yakol on Aug. 9, the day before public schools opened in Brevard County, Vidal’s wife, Alicia FoxVidal, said she and her husband are only involved in Yakol’s church and not the school. She said Vidal sometimes gives the sermons.
“When Overcomers closed down, this school opened up so that the kids that didn’t have another place to go, they could walk in here,” Hernandez said.
But, he said, not every child from Overcomers came to Yakol and Yakol also has some new students who never attended Overcomers.