Curry shills for charter school pac to push referendum

 Lenny Curry is just plain gross. I have thought this for a while, be he really cemented it in his TV spot supporting the referendum (something I support). These commercials are funded by a charter school PAC and charter schools are about to make a huge windfall, as millions will be diverted out of our schools and the community and into the pockets of their owners. Millions will go to Curry's donors and not our schools.

So there are two groups ostensibly working for the referendum.

First, there is Duval Citizens for Better Schools, chaired by Warren Jones.  Let's call this the good pac.

Then there is Together for all our Students, run by Eric Robertson, a Republican operative who has worked for Lenny Curry and Jason Fischer. Its primary funder is Gary Chartrand, and let's call this the bad pac.

Jason Fischer and Gary Chartrand fought tooth and nail against the referendum. They said they wanted charter schools to get a cut based on enrollment, not based on need, but what they really wanted to do was get paid. You see, Chartrand is owed millions by the KIPP school, and Fischer is paid, well paid, to do Chartrand's bidding.

Now with dollar signs in their eyes, they are ponying up to make sure the referendum passes, and it is sickening.

I hope the referendum passes but let's not fool ourselves or sugar coat things, because the district is now required to share with charters, hundreds of millions of dollars will be diverted from schools and communities that need them to the bank accounts of charter owners and millions of that won't even stay in Jacksonville.

This gets a little wonky, so I apologize and hope I explain it well enough.

Charter schools will be able to spend the referendum money on lease payments. Not surprisingly, 29 out of the city's 32 charter schools are leased, including the KIPP schools, which owe Chartrand millions of dollars. Much of that money won't go to upgrades or filling needs or making improvements.  Nope, it will go to make charter owners richer, and that's because quite often, the charter pays its lease payment to a company that is also owned by the charter operator.

And here you might have thought charter schools were around to educate kids.

Lenny Curry, Jason Fischer, most of the Duval delegation and city council thought this, siphoning money out of neighborhoods and schools so rich people could get richer was a better plan than taking care of our schools, children, and neighborhoods. 

Hundreds of millions of dollars will be diverted from our schools and that hopefully outrages all of us. 

Oh, let's not forget our school board has approved the expansion of or just plain new ones something like 9 charter schools in the past six months. Curry's gross but in my eyes, they aren't much better.