JPEF says that while they support the Urban Education Symposium, they didn't create their agenda.

This years agenda was how to get more black students to attend charter schools.

JPEF says this despite the fact the symposium was promoted on their web-site, Gary Chartrand the founder and a board members of JPEF and a huge charter school proponent was a featured speaker and they admit providing materials for the conference they didn't really have anything to do with it.

Below is a note I received for Trey Csar the president of JPEF and you can decide for yourself what their motives were but I for one remain convinced their motive was to recruit students away from our public schools to attend charter schools.

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I wanted to to take a moment to clarify for both you and your readers that the 8th Annual Urban Education Symposium (UES) held last weekend was not a Jacksonville Public Education Fund event.  In some of your recent posts, the Symposium appears to be characterized as an event primarily put on or sponsored by JPEF.

This is not only an inaccurate representation of JPEF’s role in the event but also a disservice to the Jacksonville Community Engagement Group (CEG), who have been putting on this event since before JPEF existed.

While the UES is not a JPEF event, we are among a number of community organizations involved with supporting the Community Engagement Group’s efforts to bring the symposium together every year, primarily through providing a written data update that goes into the event’s program booklet. We promoted the event on our calendar (as you highlighted in a previous post) the same way we do for any relevant education event in Jacksonville.  

We continue to provide that service because we have a deep commitment to improving racial equity in our city’s education system, and believe that the CEG has been instrumental in keeping the challenges facing Jacksonville’s young black men front and center in the public discussion. As I said at our ONE by ONE Convention a few weeks ago, we know our city can’t succeed until all of our children succeed, and CEG’s focus on young black men is vital to this goal.

For more information on the sponsors of this year’s UES and steering committee members, I encourage you to visit their website at http://www.urbanedsymposium.org/.

Trey Csar