Judge orders school’s tax money cut off

Broward charter turned private, now accused of fraud

A Broward charter school once accused of inflating its enrollment numbers to get state dollars now faces more allegations of fraud after it closed and re-opened as a private school.

The Broward County School District was trying to shut down Pathway Academy charter school in Lauderdale Lakes in 2016 when Principal Yudit Silva decided to convert it to a private school called New Horizons. The school served the same students at the same location. It collected about $20,400 in state dollars through two voucher programs serving students with disabilities.

But a state judge says the school should now be cut off from all state money after it used questionable means to apply for vouchers through a program called the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which pro-

vides tax incentives for businesses to pay for lowincome students to attend private schools.

The state found that 39 parents at New Horizons turned in identical forms for the scholarship, all listing themselves as single, their birthplace as Miami and their income as zero, Administrative Law Judge John G. Van Laningham wrote this week..

“Obviously, to be a single parent without any income is to experience extreme poverty,” the judge wrote. “While it is theoretically possible that all 39 of the subject parents were destitute, this is highly improbable.”

The school denies the allegations and plans to provide a detailed response to the allegations before a final decision is made by the Department of Education, said Christopher Norwood, who is providing legal assistance to the school.

“Let me be clear. The judge has made a recommended order, but this case is not over,” Norwood said.

He said all the students qualified for free and reduced lunch when they attended the charter schools so their families met the income requirements for the scholarships.

Silva, who couldn’t be reached for comment, had previously come under scrutiny when she ran Pathway Academy Charter School in 2016. Charter schools are privately run but receive the same perstudent allocation as district-run schools. But Broward school district auditors said Pathways inflated its enrollment figures and received $49,000 more than it was entitled to.

Auditors also identified about $5,700 in personal items bought with taxpayer dollars, including resort stays, a refrigerator and a ceramic table-top torch. The school denied wrongdoing and said the district had been given misleading information by a former employee who stole records from the school.

The school district announced plans to terminate the school’s contract in 2016, partly because of the audit irregularities. Pathways changed to New Horizons private school before any final decisions were made.

After discovering this year that Silva oversaw both the charter school and the new private school, the state Department of Education decided to block her from receiving any more state funds, saying she had committed fraud and opened the private school as a way to “bypass the termination” of the charter school.

Van Laningham wasn’t convinced there was enough evidence to conclude Silva had committed fraud as a charter school operator. But he said the misrepresentations made in the private school voucher applications were serious enough to disqualify the school from receiving any more state funds.

The state has faced scrutiny for its lax oversight of both charter schools and private schools.

A recent investigation by the Orlando Sentinel found that private schools in Florida collect nearly $1 billion a year in state-backed scholarships through a system that is so weakly regulated that some schools hire teachers without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls and falsify fire-safety and health records. A principal under investigating for molesting a student at his Brevard County school was able to open another school under a new name and still receive the money. Another Central Florida school repeatedly violated program rules of the scholarship program, including hiring staff with criminal convictions.

A 2014 Sun-Sentinel investigation identified similar problems with the oversight of charter schools, where just about anyone who could fill out an application could one.