ECOT ad blitz paid for with tax money
Even after ECOT announced that it will lay off 350 workers within weeks, the internet charter school continues to use taxpayer dollars for a barrage of television ads attacking the Ohio Department of Education’s decision to claw back $60.4 million because of the charter’s poor attendance records.
“The Ohio Department of Education wants to end school choice and stop parents from deciding what’s best for their children,” says a former student identified in the ECOT ad as Lionel Morales, a 2017 graduate, in an ad airing in Columbus. The end of the ad is signed “Ohio’s children.”
“That’s why I and the over 36,000 students and alumni of ECOT are hoping our elected leaders fix what’s broken and save our school.”
“Sadly, the Ohio Department of Education says many of us don’t count,” Morales says.
The department said it is ECOT that wasn’t counting how many kids actually participated in classwork after logging in. The department found that ECOT had overbilled the state, invoicing for more than double the number of students it could document.
An ECOT spokesman confirmed that public dollars are paying for the ads.
“ECOT has a right, and a fiduciary responsibility, to employ, fund and use resources for any activity that they believe can lead to making ODE change its current position or affect the General Assembly to try to change ODE,” said ECOT spokesman and lobbyist Neil Clark.
Clark had no information on how much ECOT has paid for the ad campaign, but he said stopping it would not save any employee’s job. The state’s retrieval of funding “would result in a reduction of employees under any conditions,” Clark said. ECOT has been running such ads since at least last summer.
Asked to respond to the allegations ECOT makes in its ad, a spokeswoman said the Education Department “supports quality school-choice options for students and is committed to making sure that all community schools receive their correct funding.”
When the office of state Auditor Dave Yost was asked whether public schools may use tax dollars to run political ads, the office issued this statement on the Morales ad: “Public money shouldn’t be used for advertising designed to sway the General Assembly. If this is allowed, where does it end? Every public agency would flood the airwaves whenever the legislature is in session. There is no proper public purpose, and if these ads were in fact paid for by a publicly funded school, they cross the line.”
Even before ECOT turned to the airwaves to fight the state over its funding, the school was a big advertiser. The Dispatch reported in 2015 that ECOT spent $2.27 million on advertising to attract students, about 2 percent of its state tax receipts.
But it is unclear whether a school district can legally spend tax money on political ads to urge the legislature to take action.
In the case of ECOT, if the ad campaign succeeds, the tax revenue spent on it could protect the profit of ECOT founder William Lager via two for-profit companies, IQ Innovations and Altair Learning Management. According to ECOT’s latest audit, for the 2015-16 school year, the school paid the two firms almost $22 million, or about one-fifth of all the tax revenue the school received. Altair is paid to manage the school, while IQ Innovations provides curriculum software.
By comparison, it spent about $47.2 million on salaries, 43 percent of revenue, the audit states.
Lager is one of Ohio’s largest political donors to the GOP, having rained millions of dollars on Ohio politicians.
If Columbus schools spent 2 percent of its tax revenue on an ad campaign, it could mount a $16.24 million advertising blitz.
But that would be wrong, said Columbus Board of Education President Gary Baker. “We would never do that,” Baker said, calling ECOT’s ads “out-and-out politics” being funded by state taxpayers.
“It is wholly inappropriate; it is not an acceptable use of taxpayer dollars,” Baker said. “It points again to the real issue here, which is, you know, ECOT is a business. I don’t think most school districts would ever contemplate an expenditure like that.”
School districts are prohibited from spending tax dollars on levy campaigns. According to a primer on the website of the Columbus law firm Bricker & Eckler, “a series of court cases and Ohio attorney general opinions sets forth a ‘firmly established background rule (that) a public entity is prohibited from expending public monies in the promotion of a ballot issue’ without clear statutory authority to do so.”
A district may fund “factual information” about the impact of the levy or bond issue as long as “the information is unbiased and does not suggest or encourage support for or against the levy.”