Lawmakers tackle charter school bills after scandal, ruling

A specific group of charter schools must buy back equipment like textbooks and computers from their management company, even though the company used taxpayer dollars to purchase the items for the publicly funded schools originally, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

The ruling represented a victory for the charter-school operator, White Hat Management Co., and a defeat for 10 now-closed schools in Northeast Ohio that claimed they owned the property since it was bought with public funds. The school boards wanted to change management companies, but White Hat said that by virtue of its contract, it owned the assets of the schools, and the boards would need to move to a new location and acquire their own equipment and supplies, or buy the assets of the school from White Hat. He recently wrote an article in Commondreams about the ruling called, Challenging Charter Schools and the Privatization Agenda in Washington State. White Hat received 95 percent of each school’s state funding to pay teacher salaries, building rentals, utilities and other expenses.

But in a second, 4-3 decision with broader implications that favored the schools, the court said White Hat had so much control over the schools’ operations that it amounted to a business partnership known as a fiduciary relationship.

The state court ruled earlier this year that the city’s method for taxing athletes based on the number of games played violates players’ due process rights. However, not everyone is a former state Supreme Court justice.

“We hold that the term is enforceable and that this case must be returned to the trial court for an inventory of the property and its disposition according to the contracts”, the majority added.

“Some of these things that have occurred just sharpen the publics focus on the need to make sure that we really do have a good charter school regulatory infrastructure in place, ” Aldis said Wednesday.

Board member Pat Bruns said she perceives the state Department of Education as hard on traditional public schools while giving charter schools a pass.

In their dissents, Justice Bill O’Neill and Paul Pfeifer blasted both White Hat and the decision.

The schools’ lawyer had argued the funds remained public despite their payment to White Hat and that classroom equipment belonged to the schools. Sandy Theis is the executive director of ProgressOhio, which has long been critical of Ohio’s charter-school industry. And O’Neill also wrote that the ruling “rewards failure and encourages its repetition in the future in the name of profit”.