Outside auditors are recommending the immediate closure of a charter school in Plaquemine for, among other things, charging parents thousands of dollars “in tuition and fees” to educate their children at remote locations across the state — even though the school received between $14,000 to $16,000 a year in public education funding for each of those kids.
The auditor found that Iberville Charter Academy had students on its roll not just at its campus in Plaquemine but also at seven previously unreported “learning pods," where students receive a mix of virtual and in-person instruction. All seven pods assessed a range of unusual charges. The pods were discovered in Baton Rouge, Breaux Bridge, Gonzales, Houma, Metairie, Pierre Part and Thibodaux.
The auditors say the parent charges violate state law. But the charter school argues they are legitimate fees and that the children still received “basic education services” for free.
Whatever the legality, these pod arrangements are testing how far a public school can go in the kinds of things it asks parents to pay for out of their own pockets. Charter schools are public schools run privately via charters, or contracts.
Leaders of Iberville Charter Academy are fighting back aggressively.
In a nine-page response sent to state officials Friday, Gary McGoffin, a Lafayette attorney representing the charter school, trashed the audit, saying it is “of no value and should be totally disregarded.” The attorney says the money being charged to parents is not tuition at all, but the kind of fees that other public schools routinely charge parents for extra educational services such as before and after school care or music lessons.
The Louisiana Department of Education commissioned the audit in January, and it was completed Sept. 29. It was conducted by , a Washington, D.C-based consulting company with an office in New Orleans and which works with lots of charter schools.
The Advocate obtained a copy of the audit and the response Monday via a public records request.
Breaking the law?
, charter schools shall not “charge any pupil any tuition or attendance fee of any kind.” TenSquare auditors says that Iberville Charter is not only breaking this law but is violating its charter contract, which also says the school “shall not condition the enrollment, registration, earning of credit, or receipt of grades of any student on the payment or nonpayment of fees.”
TenSquare says it would have learned more, but said charter school representatives failed to provide key information it requested on finances as well as the contracts with the pods, saying they offered a series of “excuses” for not doing so.
In addition to closing the school, TenSquare auditors urged the state Department of Education to enlist “other state agencies to legally compel” the charter school and affiliated entities to “to provide all of the financial documentation requested by the TenSquare audit team that was not provided during this audit.”
Louisiana Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack on Tuesday acknowledged that he has received a copy of the audit and that his team is “looking into it,” but would not say anything more. Waguespack also acknowledged that his office received an official notification of a similar inquiry conducted by the East Baton Rouge Parish school system into the questionable charges paid by families at , a remote pod in Baton Rouge, in which the students were also on rolls of .
That charter school is governed by the , the same nonprofit board that oversees Iberville Charter. Both schools are operated by , a large, for-profit charter management company based in Fort Lauderdale.
Students not on campus
TenSquare auditors found that 263 out of the 503 students Iberville Charter had enrolled in February were not learning on-site but were in these pods. It found no evidence that the charter school had previously notified the state of these pods.
Before the pods were launched in 2019, prior to the pandemic, Iberville Charter’s enrollment hovered around 250 students.
Six of the seven pods were not built to be schools.
“The locations range from one or two rooms in a strip mall to a set of offices in a commercially zoned building,” the auditors found.
The exception is Red Stick Academy. It was formerly part of Runnels School and is located at 6455 Jefferson Hwy in Baton Rouge. by , a sister company of Charter Schools USA.
None of the other pods were built to be schools.
At the pods, students receive a mix of in-person and online instruction. The private company providing the instruction, , operates out of the same Bluebonnet Boulevard office building as the charter school’s board and Charter Schools USA Louisiana.
Fees or tuition?
A good illustration of how this works is Iberville Charter's partnership with eLearning Academy. It’s an online private school with locations in Houma, Metairie and Thibodaux. The audit includes an information sheet, , detailing eLearning’s tuition and fees.
According to the sheet, parents have the option of paying full tuition for the private school or they can get a substantial discount if their children are “jointly enrolled" in eLearning and in an unnamed charter school.
If they go the joint private/charter school route, their tuition drops considerably but doesn't necessarily disappear. The free version provides either one full day or two half-days of in-person instruction. The rest of the week, students receive online instruction.
Parents, though, have “the option to purchase extra days and hours if you wish” of in-person instruction, according to the sheet. For students in grades kindergarten to eight, that ranges from $1,100 for one more day to $5,430 for five full days of in-person instruction.
That’s a $3,000 discount compared to the $8,430 cost for eLearning students who don’t jointly enroll in the charter school. And jointly enrolled students receive a free “Chromebook or similar device.”
All students, however, are obliged to pay additional fees, including a $225 registration fee for new students.
"Major violations"
The auditors found other “major violations” at Iberville Charter, including operating a virtual school without prior authorization, special education noncompliance and lack of an attendance policy at its remote sites.
Iberville Charter Academy is one of seven schools in Louisiana operated by Charter Schools USA. With more than 6,000 students, the company runs the second largest charter school network in the state.
Its biggest school, in Youngsville, has more than 1,600 students. Its other Lafayette-area school, , has more than 1,100 students.
The audit was distributed over the weekend to members of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which now has to decide what happens next. If BESE does not want to close the school, the auditors say BESE could force management changes or wait until the school’s charter comes up for renewal again and turn down that renewal. BESE also has the option of taking no action at all.
BESE member Belinda Davis, who has expressed concerns for months about learning pods and Charter Schools USA in particular, said the audit raises serious issues and said further investigation is needed.
“The legislative auditor and the inspector general need to conduct a forensic audit of South Louisiana Charter Foundation,” Davis said. “If parents were being charged registration fees and tuition while the school was collecting (state education) dollars, how is this not fraud? The taxpayers of Louisiana should demand that those dollars be recouped.”
In an interview Monday, Robert Logan, vice president of academics and technology for BOSS, said the charges in question were optional and that students who opted not pay them received the level of instruction Louisiana requires public schools to offer.
“At the end of the day, you have that full choice to say yes or no,” Logan said.
TenSquare auditors list Logan as their main contact as they were conducting the audit. TenSquare describes Logan incorrectly in the audit as BOSS's executive director and as an employee of Charter School USA — Lonnie Luce is actually BOSS’s executive director and is simultaneously state director of Charter Schools USA in Louisiana. Logan said such errors are indicative of bigger problems with the audit.
“If you can’t get those things right, then what is the meat of the document about?” Logan said.
Logan also rejected the accusation that he was obstructing auditors’ work. He said rather the auditors betrayed “inherent bias.”
“A tremendous amount of information was handed over starting way back in March and sent time after time, repetitive, again,” Logan said. “It was, ‘Clarify again, clarify again.”
Logan said that throughout the auditors demonstrated continued ignorance of a 2021 law known as the
“Having an understanding of the pod law would really have solved these questions that were asked time and time again,” Logan said.
In his letter responding to the audit, McGoffin makes this same point at length. He also questions a section of the audit that cast doubt on the legality of the arrangements between Iberville Charter and the pods since they occurred before 2021 pod law and before BESE has enacted rules for pods — BESE has repeatedly delayed adoption of such rules.
“This infers that learning pods could not be utilized until adoption of the learning pod law and cannot be utilized until BESE enacts rules for their operation,” McGoffin writes. “Both inferences are erroneous.”
