From the Miami NewTimes
by Gus Garcia Roberts
From June 2006 through November 2010, the woefully cash-strapped Florida Department of Education (DOE) forked over $2.057 million to Julius Brown, former middle school basketball coach and cofounder of a string of obscure sports apparel businesses.
Seth StoughtonJeb BushFlorida Department of EducationDisabilitiesPrivate EducationThe money was in the form of tuition vouchers for kids with physical and learning disabilities to attend the South Florida Preparatory Christian Academy, the Oakland Park K-12 private school of which Brown — a looming and lean former basketball pro with a slug-like mustache — was founder, president, principal, athletic director, and boys' basketball coach.
As is customary with schools that receive the vouchers, provided by the John M. McKay Scholarships for Students With Disabilities Program, the DOE didn't inquire about Brown's curriculum or visit South Florida Prep's campus to make sure it was safe for schoolchildren. In Florida, private schools essentially go unregulated, even if they're funded by taxpayer cash. South Florida Prep also received at least $236,000 from a state-run tax-credit scholarship for low-income kids.
While the state played the role of the blind sugar daddy, here is what went on at South Florida Prep, according to parents, students, teachers, and public records: Two hundred students were crammed into ever-changing school locations, including a dingy strip-mall space above a liquor store and down the hall from an Asian massage parlor. Eventually, fire marshals and sheriffs condemned the "campus" as unfit for habitation, pushing the student body into transience in church foyers and public parks.
The teachers were mostly in their early 20s. An afternoon for the high school students might consist of watching a VHS tape of a 1976 Laurence Fishburne blaxploitation flick — Cornbread, Earl and Me — and then summarizing the plot. In one class session, a middle school teacher recommended putting "mother nature" — a woman's period — into spaghetti sauce to keep a husband under thumb. "We had no materials," says Nicolas Norris, who taught music despite the lack of a single instrument. "There were no teacher edition books. There was no curriculum."
In May 2009, two vanloads of South Florida Prep kids were on the way back from a field trip to Orlando when one of the vehicles flipped along Florida's Turnpike. A teacher and an 18-year-old senior were killed. Turns out another student, age 17 and possessing only a learner's permit, was behind the wheel and had fallen asleep. The families of the deceased and an insurance company are suing Brown for negligence.
Meanwhile, Brown openly used a form of corporal punishment that has been banned in Miami-Dade and Broward schools for three decades. Four former students and the music teacher Norris recall that the principal frequently paddled students for misbehaving. In a complaint filed with the DOE in April 2009, one parent rushed to the school to stop Brown from taking a paddle to her son's behind.
"He said that maybe if we niggas would beat our kids in the first place, he wouldn't have to," the mother wrote of Brown. "He then proceeded to tell me that he is not governed by Florida school laws."
He wasn't far off. The DOE couldn't remove South Florida Prep from the McKay program, says agency spokesperson Deborah Higgins, "based on the school's disciplinary policies and procedures."
It's like a perverse science experiment, using disabled school kids as lab rats and funded by nine figures in taxpayer cash: Dole out millions to anybody calling himself an educator. Don't regulate curriculum or even visit campuses to see where the money is going.
For optimal results, do this in Florida, America's fraud capital.
Now watch all the different ways the flimflam men scramble for the cash.
Once a niche scholarship fund, the McKay program has boomed exponentially in the 12 years since it was introduced under Gov. Jeb Bush, with $148.6 million handed out in the past 12 months, a 38 percent increase from just more than five years ago.
There are 1,013 schools — 65 percent of them religious — collecting McKay vouchers from 22,198 children at an average of $7,144 per year.
The lion's share of that pot ends up in South Florida. Miami-Dade received $31.8 million, more than any other county in the state, and Broward was second with $18.3 million. Palm Beach ranked fifth, with its schools collecting $6.9 million.
But there's virtually no oversight. According to one former DOE investigator, who claimed his office was stymied by trickle-down gubernatorial politics, the agency failed to uncover "even a significant fraction" of the McKay crime that was occurring.
Administrators who have received funding include criminals convicted of cocaine dealing, kidnapping, witness tampering, and burglary.
Even in investigations where fraud, including forgery and stealing student information to bolster enrollment, is proven, arrests are rare. The thieves are usually allowed to simply repay the stolen loot in installments — or at least promise to — and continue to accept McKay payments.
There is no accreditation requirement for McKay schools. And without curriculum regulations, the DOE can't yank back its money if students are discovered to be spending their days filling out workbooks, watching B-movies, or frolicking in the park. In one "business management" class, students shook cans for coins on street corners.
And public schools now apparently help with the recruiting. Failing kids, who would sabotage all-important standardized testing scores, are herded en masse to dubious McKay schools.
The McKay fund is not the only cash cow that unregulated schools can dip into. There's also the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which gives tax breaks to corporations in return for private school scholarships. With Gov. Rick Scott pushing privatization of education in all forms, legislation that passed in May is set to skyrocket both programs.
The tax-credit fund saw its cap increased by $30 million to $175 million, while the McKay program could nearly quadruple. Thanks to the amended law, a kid with a peanut allergy could now find himself eligible for a scholarship created for students with learning and physical disabilities.
Jacqueline Cermeno, along with her husband Erick, of Hialeah's Muskateer's Academy were indicted for stealing disabled kids' identities.
Seth StoughtonJeb BushFlorida Department of EducationDisabilitiesPrivate EducationNew Times shared findings from this investigation with state Sen. Stephen R. Wise (R-Jacksonville), one of the co-introducers of the McKay program in 1999. "It's appalling," Wise says. "I'm amazed that there's not more scrutiny about where the money is going."
"After I get done with you," he tells a reporter, "I need to talk to my staff director. We need to have some hearings and do whatever we can to make some changes."
According to Republican lore, it started with a senator's child and a nun.
In the mid-'90s, state Sen. John M. McKay (R-Bradenton) struggled to find a proper school for his daughter, who had a learning disability.
"I called every public school in my district," McKay, who has since retired from office, tells New Times. He ended up sending her to Dreams Are Free, an idyllic, specialized school in Sarasota run by Sister Gilchrist Cottrill.
McKay's epiphany: Create tuition vouchers so that all Florida children with special needs could go to schools like Sister Gilchrist's. As senate president in 1999, he tacked his namesake program to Gov. Jeb Bush's fledgling A+ Plan for Education, a voucher program paying private school tuition for students from poorly performing public school districts.
Two years later, Republican lawmakers passed the Tax Credit Scholarship program for low-income kids, which offers a smaller tuition cap — currently $4,106 — but is available for more students.
The add-ons were politically shrewd. Bush's program was hugely divisive and, as it turns out, doomed. In 2006, the state Supreme Court ruled that the A+ Plan was unconstitutional and a drain on public school coffers. But the McKay and Tax Credit scholarships chugged onward.
To be eligible for a McKay voucher in the early days, a student would have had to qualify for an individual education program (IEP) — which encompasses conditions ranging from attention disorders and autism to physical disabilities — and be failing in public schools. The latter requirement was eventually scrapped by legislators. A cap limiting the number of McKay kids per district was also tossed.
Today, students with an IEP are required only to spend at least one year in a public school to qualify for the McKay program. But even in that, there is fraud. In June 2010, Deborah Swirsky-Nuñez, a special-education supervisor in Miami-Dade County Public Schools and wife of region superintendent George Nuñez, was arrested for playing a sort of three-card monte with the McKay system in order to have her two kids' private school tuition paid by the state.
According to investigators, Swirsky-Nuñez fabricated address records. She falsely enrolled the children at the public Dr. Michael M. Krop High even though they attended Plantation's American Heritage Private School. And she used her sway with test administrators to rig her kids' performance on the IEP exam, securing a combined $19,000 annually in McKay payments.
At least seven others, including her husband George, were implicated, but only Swirsky-Nuñez was charged with organized fraud. She has pleaded not guilty, and her trial will begin in October. Krop's principal, Matthew Welker, was suspended for 30 days for alleged complicity in the scheme.
The recent expansion of the McKay program should only make it easier to milk the system. The new law, which last month easily passed the Florida House and Senate and was signed by Governor Scott, makes students with "504 plans" — special accommodations for physical impairments — eligible as well.
That includes asthma and allergies to anything from peanuts to bee stings, says Ron Meyer, a lobbyist for the Florida Education Association, who argues that the expansion is "undermining the validity of the program."
An additional 52,000 students will be eligible, almost quadrupling the pool.
McKay waffled with indecision before throwing his support behind the expansion. He insists he "would never want this program to be a Trojan horse towards the destruction of the public school system." After reading a partial draft of this story, McKay hedged that "there are sins in every program" but added that the state is unwise to "abandon all oversight... Somebody better get off their ass and fix those problems."
The nun also has misgivings. Sister Gilchrist, of the prototypical McKay school, has seen her copycats. "There are a lot of people who are starting these little schools, and the teachers aren't qualified," she says. "There needs to be some oversight."
Department of Education investigator Seth Stoughton, who specialized in voucher fraud, had a strategy when he'd go on field trips from Tallahassee to other regions around the state. He'd print out a list of every McKay school in the area and drive his rental car past the addresses, just to make sure the schools were there.
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2011-06-23/news/mckay-scholarship-program-sparks-a-cottage-industry-of-fraud-and-chaos/2/
No comments:
Post a Comment