Billionaire gives $1M to pro-Husted PAC
A Dayton-area man who made his billions in dog food has contributed $1 million to a super PAC supporting Jon Husted’s campaign for the Republican nomination for governor.
Clayton Mathile, a longtime major GOP contributor who sold his Iams pet food company for $2.3 billion in 1999, made the seven-figure donation to Ohio Conservatives for a Change. The federal super PAC, which is legally forbidden from coordinating its activities with Husted and his campaign committee, raised $1.3 million through only four contributions in June, according to its filing with the Federal Elections Commission.
A media spokeswoman for Mathile did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. The Mathile family has contributed nearly $123,000 directly to Husted since 2013. Clayton Mathile is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 474th wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $3.8 billion.
Ohio Conservatives for a Change had not spent much money — only $10,298, atop
according to a notice on the school’s website. At that time, its sponsor was the Reynoldsburg School District, which created VCS in 2001 with the help of a former ECOT administrator.
VCS had billed the state for an attendance of 835 students for the 2015-16 school year. A department audit of student attendance found that number should be reduced to 280 students. Based on that, the school would have to repay about $4.2 million of the $6.33 million it was paid that year. The state found VCS, like ECOT, couldn’t document how
much time students were participating in classwork.
“The school has been offered a five-year term to repay those funds in a draft settlement,” Brittany Halpin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said in an email Monday. A copy of that letter was not immediately available.
Pending that offer, “we would be surprised if they said they were closing,” Halpin said.
However, VCS Superintendent Jeff Nelson wasn’t confident that the school would open this year.
“We are not certain that we could get through the entire school year,” Nelson said.
The school has only enough in its bank account to get through January, and “it wouldn’t be fair to families to shut down” in the middle of the school year, Nelson said. “The board really wants to take a look at what does the quality of service look like.”
The school, like ECOT, is facing having to refund the state even more money for the 2016-17 school year, when it was paid more than $5 million.
“It’s not as drastic” as the two-thirds cut for the previous year, Nelson said, but he declined to reveal what the latest attendance audit shows. That’s because VCS was able to better record how
much students participated online, a measure the state didn’t previously require.
Valerie Wunder, spokeswoman for the Reynoldburg City Schools, said that as of Aug. 1 the district was no longer VCS’ sponsor. Oversight was transferred to the Ohio Department of Education. The state revoked the district’s ability to sponsor charter schools after a new scoring system rated its sponsorship as “poor.”
VCS received all Fs and one D in major areas on the last state report card for 2015-16. It had an “absenteeism” rate of almost 50 percent, based on a full-time-equivalent enrollment of almost 850, three times the audited figure. It was the seventh-largest of 10 online, general-education charter schools in the 2015-16 school year.
The school’s stated enrollment peaked at over 1,400 students in the 2009-10 school year, when the state was paying it more than $10.2 million a year, diverted from the state financial aid that would have gone to more than 300 Ohio school districts.
Nelson said about 30 VCS teachers won’t report to work until the decision on the school’s future is made by Sept. 1.