Sacklers’ school donations marred by opioid crisis
NEW HAVEN — The Sackler family — which owns Stamfordbased OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma — has donated millions to political and philanthropic causes in Connecticut for years, while a recent lawsuit
alleges the family’s money comes from “a web of illegal deceit.”
Eight members of the Sackler family, dubbed “the family that built an empire of pain” by The New Yorker in 2017, were recently named as defendants in a suit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey that alleges the family, which holds a majority of seats on the company’s board, peddled falsehoods to increase revenue and treated patients as “targets” despite knowing people were addicted and dying.
A spokesman for Purdue Pharma disputes the claims of the lawsuit, and the company has filed a motion to dismiss. The company also is reportedly exploring bankruptcy in response to the more than 1,000 lawsuits like Healey’s.
Jonathan Sackler, one of the eight defendants listed in Healey’s lawsuit, donated millions to local charter schools and charter school advocacy groups, dating back at least 15 years but predominantly since 2013, through his private family foundation he has with wife, Mary Corson.
“Any philanthropy that Achievement First receives is used to make sure students get the education they need and deserve,” said Amanda Pinto, spokeswoman for the charter network Achievement First, which has schools in Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven and has received Sackler foundation donations.
In response to emailed questions about Sackler’s relationship with Achievement First and advocacy group 50CAN, from board affiliations to donations past and present, Sackler released a brief statement through a spokesman.
“When I had the opportunity to visit an Achievement First school many years ago I was tremendously impressed by the quality of education they were providing undeserved communities and the success being enjoyed by the children. I have been proud to support their important work, and encourage anyone interested in improving education to visit and see for themselves,” Sackler said in the statement.
Charter groups and other nonprofits and organizations that had received money from the Bouncer Foundation are reluctant to declare a decision to part with the money the foundation donated.
By the numbers
An examination of 990 donor tax forms draws a wider picture of how Sackler largely came to underwrite many pro-charter entities over several years.
Sackler made donations to charter schools and charter groups dating back to at least 2003, including a $50,000 unrestricted gift specifically to New Haven charter school Amistad Academy, which received $365,000 from the foundation in 2004 and $20,000 in 2005. The foundation also donated to the Arizonabased Alliance for School Choice in 2004 and 2008, and donated $250,000 to pro-charter organization ConnCAN in 2004 before its official launch, for which he is listed as an interlocking directorate.
According to forms filed by the Bouncer Foundation, which is Sackler’s foundation, Impact for Education, a New Haven-based “philanthropic advisory practice,” received nearly $100,000 from the foundation for offering “philanthropic advice” in 2013.
The year “2013 was the heyday for charters and charter expansion,” said Wendy Lecker, a senior attorney at the Education Law Center and a contributing columnist to Hearst Connecticut Media.
Two years prior, New Haven-based Amistad Academy charter school co-founder Stefan Pryor was named commissioner of the state Department of Education. Also, around that time, then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy publicly stood with charter school advocates, Lecker said.
“(Sackler’s) fingerprints are all over the charter movement, particularly in our neck of the woods, and that’s another stain on the charter movement,” Lecker said. “The most vulnerable are in their schools, and for the charter industry to take this money when they’re claiming to help these kids is pretty questionable.”
The foundation’s yearly reimbursement for Impact for Education’s annual philanthropic advice increased to $130,454 in 2014 and, after a payment of $90,000 in 2015, was reported to be $470,000 in 2016 and $262,500 in 2017, the most recent year available on searchable public databases.
“Impact for Education engages forward-thinking philanthropists to catalyze systemic change in public education,” the practice says on its website.
Impact for Education’s president and founder, Alex Johnston, also cofounded the pro-charter advocacy group Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, or ConnCAN, with Sackler in 2005. Johnston served as executive director, while Sackler sat as chairman of the board.
According to his biography on Impact for Education’s website, Johnston also is a board member of FaithACTS for Education in Bridgeport, a registered nonprofit coalition of religious education advocates that received $700,000 from the Bouncer Foundation between 2015 and 2017. The group’s founder, the Rev. William McCullough, told the Connecticut Post that the group believes in school choice.
Neither Johnston, a former member of the New Haven Board of Education, nor Impact for Education returned a request for comment.
In 2009, the Bouncer Foundation had begun making gifts to Yale University that would ultimately culminate in a $3 million endowment for the Richard Sackler and Jonathan Sackler Professorship, but other donations effectively ceased until 2011, when the foundation gave $100,000 to Students for Education Reform and $5,000 to the conservative Alliance for School Choice. After an austere 2012, the foundation donated to eight groups affiliated with charter schools, including ConnCAN and its subsequently founded national counterpart 50CAN, Students for Education Reform, New Haven’s Booker T. Washington Academy, the Northeast Charter Schools Network. In 2013, Achievement First, the charter network co-founded by Dacia Toll, and which operates Amistad Academy, was named a recipient of a donation.
Separately, Raymond and Beverly Sackler’s gift to Yale brought the university the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering.
In 2013, Achievement First, which runs 35 other schools in three states, received $151,571 from the Bouncer Foundation. The contribution was increased to $250,000 in 2014 and 2015 and was more than doubled in 2016, when the network received $600,000 from the foundation. By 2017, the foundation’s gift to Achievement First was $350,000.
For 2013, 990 forms show Achievement First reported $29,253,402 in contributions and $40,396,539 in revenue, so contributions were about 72.4 percent of revenue. In the most recent year for which data is available, Achievement First reported for 2017 about $22 million in contributions and grants, of $46 million in revenue.
For the entirety of the Bouncer Foundation donations, Sackler sat on Achievement First’s Board of Directors.
“To the best of my knowledge, he joined (the board) in 2005,” said Achievement First’s Pinto. On Jan. 23, 2018, he resigned. Pinto said she does not know why.
Pinto said she is also unaware of whether the Bouncer Foundation donated in 2018 or in 2019.
Connections
Pinto said philanthropy is “unfortunately a reality of what we need to operate” but the network is “not beholden to donors in terms of any programmatic decisions.”
However, Sackler does continue to have influence over 50CAN, which ultimately wrested control over ConnCAN in 2018, leading to the majority of the staff being laid off, according to three former employees of ConnCAN who requested anonymity.
“I think the struggle was with getting their agenda passed in the state legislature,” one former employee said. “ConnCAN did not come under the purview of 50CAN until they decided to sunset things in New Haven, and then it became a subsidiary of 50CAN.”
A spokesperson for 50CAN said Sackler served on 50CAN’s board from 2010 to 2018 and “stepped down from the 50CAN board last year.”
ConnCAN, which is now one of 50CAN’s state-level campaigns, has its own advisory board, just like 50CAN’s campaigns in Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, New Jersey, New Mexico and Tennessee. 50CAN’s spokesperson said Sackler currently serves on ConnCAN’s advisory board.
Toll sits on the 50CAN Board of Directors, as does Campbell Brown, a school reform advocate who cofounded The 74, a nonprofit education news site, in 2015. The Bouncer Foundation donated $100,000 to 74 Media in 2016 and $50,000 in 2017.
Giving back
The Hartford Courant reported in January that political contributions were made by Sackler and his mother, Beverly, to the state Democratic Party and candidates such as Democratic Connecticut U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy.
“We are currently looking into the situation and will certainly not be accepting any future donations, ” Christina Polizzi, the party’s spokeswoman, told the Courant.
Blumenthal told the Courant he intended to donate the money to “an opioid abuse and addiction charity” and a Murphy spokeswoman said he donated the contributions to a national nonprofit to combat addiction in 2017.
Pinto said all philanthropy Achievement First receives benefits students’ educational needs. A 50CAN spokesperson said neither 50CAN nor ConnCAN has received money from Sackler or his foundation yet in 2019.
“We follow the standard nonprofit practice of publishing our donors and their gift amounts by range in an annual report,” a 50CAN spokesperson said in an email. “The next report will be coming out this summer.”
Spokeswomen for Planned Parenthood of Southern New England — which received $10,000 from Bouncer in 2002 and $25,000 in 2015 — and the Community Foundation For Greater New Haven — which received $150,000 earmarked for “education support” in 2014 — said their groups don’t comment on donors publicly. Trish Caldwell, director of communications for the community foundation, said future donations from the Bouncer Foundation are a hypothetical and it “will cross that bridge at that time.”
Representatives for Northeast Charter Schools Network and Booker T. Washington Academy did not respond to requests for comment.
On Wednesday, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, who is a school board member, announced her participation in a coalition of state municipalities working to change the law to allow municipalities to seek damages from corporations like Purdue Pharma after a Superior Court judge dismissed more than 20 lawsuits from municipalities seeking damages from Purdue Pharma and other drug manufacturers. A city spokesman said a request for comment from Harp, who sits on the city’s school board, could not be completed Thursday.
As to why Sackler chooses to fund causes related to charter schools, multiple people said they cannot know his internal dialogue, but can speculate on the reasons.
“Some of the worst things are done with the best intentions,” said New Haven Board of Education member Ed Joyner, who is critical but not outright dismissive of charter schools. “In this case, I don’t know if it’s the best intentions.”
Joyner said a number of wealthy people never attended public schools, so they may approach educational philanthropy with good intentions, but they don’t have firsthand experience to understand what their money is supporting.
“It’s hypocritical,” he said.
The Education Law Center’s Lecker said wealthy donors receive tax incentives for donating to charter schools, so a number of wealthy charter donors are seeking financial advantages. However, she believes there’s also a basis in undermining public services.
“The whole privatizing of public education is an effort of the uber-wealthy to tamp down the expectations of what people should want in the public sphere,” she said. “A smaller public sphere in terms of public education and local democracy means people have less of an expectation of what they can get from the public.”
Lecker said she believes a number of philanthropists believe they are doing a good thing, but the fact that some, like Sackler, “are so aggressively involved, and have been since the beginning, means they have to know what goes on in charter schools and what impact they have on funding for public schools.”
Advocates for district schools such as Joyner and Lecker see charter schools as a movement to undermine teacher unions and hand governmental control of education to charter management companies and moneyed interests.
One of the former employees of ConnCAN who spoke anonymously said they believe 50CAN absorbed ConnCAN largely because it seemed as though the charter movement had stalled in Connecticut.
“I think the charter industry is in a bit of trouble right now,” Lecker said.
Gail D’Onofrio, chairwoman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said the medical community is largely in agreement that Purdue Pharma contributed to the present opioid epidemic by having the pill overprescribed, but the epidemic has evolved beyond pills to involve cheaply made, synthetic opioids.
D’Onofrio said the consensus in the medical community is that Purdue Pharma pioneered a pharmaceutical strategy called academic detailing, where representatives travel to medical providers and market drugs. About 20 years later, she said the accreditation agency for hospitals shifted to see treating pain as a priority of the medical profession. OxyContin, a long-acting version of oxycodone, is effective at numbing pain, she said, but there was no evidence presented about its addictive potentials.
“People get tolerant to certain doses and have to go to higher doses; they get all the complications of the medicine and none of the benefits,” she said.
“I don’t think there is any question that the widespread use of opioids was fueled by Purdue,” she said, “but I don’t think that explains what’s happening now.”
On its website, Purdue lists several steps it claims it is taking to address the ongoing opioid crisis. D’Onofrio said she believes it’s too late for a single company to end the crisis, no matter what role it played in starting it.