Vendors for charter schools face rules
Private sellers and nonprofits, some religious, are paid with tax dollars. Lawmakers are taking notice.
Private businesses and religious organizations have long benefited from public school dollars administered through charter schools that allow parents to use taxpayer money to pay for various services for their children — a practice some lawmakers want to rein in.
Parents in some home school charters get as much as $2,600 a year in state grants, money that has gone toward Disneyland trips, religious educators, private businesses and others who provide educational, enrichment and recreational services for children.
“It was never the intent of the state Legislature to pass dollars through online charter schools to private vendors or religious organizations,” said Assembly Education Committee Chair Patrick O’Donnell (D-Long Beach). “This highlights a bigger issue that we’ve been grappling with in Sacramento for many years … that the charter school law, when it was originally written, was wide open.”
Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) says she plans to bring forward a bill in the new year that would require state oversight and rules for charter school vendors.
Garcia expects the bill will have guidelines about what kinds of vendors would be allowed to receive public school funds. She said her bill was partly inspired by the San Diego Union-Tribune’s reporting on home school charters.
It’s important “to make sure we are allowing (charter schools) to have the freedom that they were given, without it being abused and without it turning into a system where we’re privatizing education and taking advantage of loopholes,” Garcia said.
“We keep going to the fact that there hasn’t been enough oversight as to how charter schools are using the dollars,” she said.
“I think we’re seeing through this reporting that there’s a lot of blurred lines, and we need a lot more transparency and a lot more accountability.”
The vendors receive public dollars through home school charters, which are charter schools [privately run public schools] that allot parents money that they can spend on a list of schoolapproved vendors.
Some charter school vendors are businesses or nonprofits that cater to homeschoolers that operate like private schools in that they charge tuition and employ their own teachers, who often are not credentialed by the state. Some vendors provide a wide variety of classes, ranging from electives such as sewing and cooking, to core classes such as traditional English, math and science.
Many of these vendors don’t call themselves schools, but rather enrichment centers, learning centers, home school co-ops or tutoring academies. Some larger vendors, such as Homeschool Campus and Discovery of Learning, have several campuses, often at churches.
Enrolling in a home school charter can allow the student to use the charter school’s funds to pay the tuition for these schools, if their assigned charter school teacher approves it.
Other charter school vendors sell recreational activities, curricula, field trips and more.
There also are religiously affiliated vendors, like the Christian-owned Eden Learning Academy, which until recently said on its website that it is based on a “Christian worldview,” or the Christian Youth Theater, which says on its website that part of its objective is to “share the love of Christ in word and deed.”
Some charter school supporters say vendors can provide instruction to fill in the gaps when parents don’t know how to home-school their children in certain subjects. They argue that it’s legal for religious organizations to receive public dollars, as long as they teach a nonsectarian curriculum.
But some legislators and traditional public education leaders say they are concerned with the range of entities that are getting tax dollars to educate charter school students.
The state education department does not monitor or regulate charter school vendors. State law says nothing specifically about home school charters or charter school vendors. Multiple lawmakers said they did not know such vendors or charter schools existed until this year.
California does not allow public school funding to be used for private school tuition, except when a school district places a student with a disability in a private school to receive services the district can’t provide, according to the California Department of Education.
Home school charters assign a credentialed teacher to each student to ensure that families make educationally sound choices in spending their school funds and home-schooling their children.
That teacher is typically responsible for evaluating all the student’s work, whether it comes from vendors or parents. And teachers typically must meet with students once a month to go over their plans and progress.
“This process ensures that student work aligns to curricular standards and that they are making adequate progress towards those standards, but also allows flexibility in how the student does their work and what resources they tap into for support,” said Fabiola Prieto, spokeswoman for the California Charter Schools Assn., in an email.
But some critics say they are concerned that private vendors — who don’t have to employ credentialed teachers or go through the same background check that public school teachers must — are being paid to teach public charter school students with virtually no state oversight.
The question of whether businesses that operate like private schools can or should receive public education dollars is coming up for debate in a criminal case involving the A3 charter school management company. In May, A3 leaders were indicted for building what prosecutors say was a statewide network of fraudulent virtual charter schools.
Some vendors — including churches and private entities — are now asking the court to grant them money they say they are owed by A3 or its charter schools.
The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting the case, argues that those vendors were never supposed to receive public education dollars in the first place, partly because the vendors are not registered with the state as private schools and they were not authorized to provide public education.
“They basically operate a school and they’re not authorized by the government to do so,” said Kevin Fannan, a lawyer for the District Attorney’s Office, at a court hearing this month. “We don’t believe they would be entitled in the first instance to such public funds for enrollment.”
Some charter school officials say that allowing vendors to teach students does not mean the charter school is passing its instructional responsibility to private entities.
Sarah Reid, executive director of Eden Learning Academy in Murrieta, said she started her academy so she could provide tutoring and enrichment to supplement home-schooling families’ education, especially in complex subjects like geometry and algebra, which some parents struggle to teach. Eden Learning Academy has been approved as a vendor by nine charter schools in California, according to its website.
Reid said she acknowledges that there is confusion about the differences between private schools and vendors such as herself.
“Over the years, a lot of people are starting to cross over the terminology and it’s confusing a lot of people. We are not a private school. We are a tutoring service,” Reid said. “We work really hard to call our instructors instructors and not teachers.”
‘There hasn’t been enough oversight as to how charter schools are using the dollars.’ — Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens)