Jon Fishbane Presents Investigation Report to CCPS School Board – June 3, 2019
Excerpts:
6:00 “We are able to track those that leave Mason, for example, any charter school and reenroll here, or go into home schooling or private schooling. What did we find? Since 2014, 614 students have left – that’s a lot of people.”
7:22 (On Methodology for conducting the Investigation) “We had a huge amount of emails, but I reviewed the entire records of minutes from 2014 to the present along with the policies and procedures and other documents that Mason is part of it and the rule of thumb I took was: Well let’s let the documents speak for themselves.”
9:45 “While they voted on a committee, or an oversight committee to create it, so to speak, it never went forward, it was never staffed, it was never followed up with members, there was never any outreach that would allow people to come forward. So what began as a Finance Committee ultimately collapsed and there has been no Finance Committee since 2016, no Finance Oversight Committee. Why this becomes important is if you look at the application of 2013 to become a Charter school – it’s an extensive document and it is incorporated by reference into our Charter. In there, there are multiple standing Committees that are Required: Finance Committee, Student Advisory Council Committee, an Audit Committee, and so on. Well at the end of 2016, out of nowhere they decided they were going to create an Audit Committee that was going to be staffed by their Compliance Officer and two Board Members. They didn’t follow the membership criteria nor did they include anybody that would staff it that was in the community that was required – it became a shell as well – it never went forward. The same thing happened for the Student Advisory Committee. For a while you had a PTA/PTO and so on. And then what I found, and I am kind of going into other sections because thematically it’ll be clear, is that in their policies and procedures there was supposed to have been an Employment Committee. That Employment Committee, which was like a standing committee, was supposed to advise all Board members, for example, as to data received concerning staff salaries, including the Principal’s. That never happened. So, you now see all of these committees that should have occurred, not occurring. And so it became almost a rubber stamping in terms of accepting contracts, looking at staffing report salaries and so on without the review that was supposed to be required on the basis of application and policy.”
13:33 “I think it’s quite astonishing that a Board chair would tell another Board member how to conduct their duty as a Treasurer and “back off”, but even more important is that she wrote the letter to another Board member, thereby creating a Sunshine Law violation.”
19:11 “At least four (Board) meetings that I could find went forward without a Quorum. For me, that’s serious business because it’s against the law. The Attorney General opinions are clear on that.”
(Continued) “I understand that within the charter statute there is language that indicates that people can appear by means of electronic communication, but the telling point of all of that is, as you know, there needs to be a quorum physically present. And when you read Mason’s own policies, there is a section called Proxy Voting. It indicates that those that appear electronically may not count toward the counting of a quorum. So if you have three people, one is present and two are there electronically, how do you have a quorum. Nevertheless, you have on the minutes of the meeting saying “Quorum was present”, which of course any reader would be misleading. That is of particular concern in one instance, I believe it was June 2018, on a Saturday they held their budgetary meeting. There was no quorum. The meeting lasted 9 minutes long and that was it. People weren’t present for it. There was no quorum. There may have been one person present, the other by electronic means. Now, somebody got wind of that might being a problem and then when you look at the minutes of November of 2018 something interesting happens: somebody puts, makes a motion to ratify the budget of June. Why would you do that if you weren’t aware of a problem? But nobody comes forward and says “Houston we had a problem, it’s time for us to acknowledge it and clean it up.” So the irony of it all is you have the ratification at one meeting ratifying an illegal act from a previous one. So what have you ratified? You’ve ratified the illegality which itself creates a difficulty. And, sadly, in December they voted in without a quorum another Board member. Well, if you don’t have a quorum, then you really don’t have a Board member. So what we are left with, and if I’m correct, is that over many months, for example, you would have only two Board members conducting business, yet our Charter says there has to be a minimum of three, which for me is a material breach in that area.”
22:18 “There are some very serious issues in the way parents were treated.”
27:47 “And so by sending all of this information, there is a serious violation of FERPA.”
28:39 “We have other issues, Conflicts of Interest issues, such as the creation of a Management company that goes out to multiple districts in the state to oversee, give consulting advice to different charter schools they want to support, that it’s going to be high-performing like Mason. These include: initially Mrs. Lichter, her Principal, and Gena Smith the Curriculum Coordinator. Mrs Lichter later stepped away and substituted herself with her husband. But what we find initially is the fact that when evaluations are done, in essence, we have a Board chair giving a positive evaluation of her own partner when she should have recused herself or disclosed the fact that this is going on.”
29:55 “Part of the issue too, unfortunately, is the lack of disclosure in these applications and I’ve read them all from these different districts, is that the very school, Hillsdale College, that provided the instructional model for the school’s success, is never mentioned in any of these, when in fact, in the actual Policy Binder there is a whole section that has to be acknowledged that Hillsdale College provides the curricular support, curricular structure, training and so on and yet, you knowingly exclude that from your Consultancy. I think that’s a problem”
30:45 “I provided to you extensive recommendations and conclusions – we don’t need to go into all of them – suffice it to say that the actions of the Board members warrant very serious review, same with the Principal, same with the Vice Principal. I personally think the two Board members, because of all the commentaries that were out there, need to seriously think of resigning so that we can see the school reconfigure its Board into 5 people instead of the same 3.”
CCPS Board Comments:
33:38 Carter: “Is it right, Mr Fishbane, that MCA Board breached the terms of its own application and Charter contract since the dissolution of the Financial Oversight Committee? Did that breach contract with the District in doing that?” Fishbane: “Well, it would because if you assume that the application is incorporated, made part of the actual Charter document, then there is a presumption that the requirements in that application will be honored as part of the Contractual process.” Carter: “So, once again I think you did a great job in sticking to the facts … most everything in your report … was based, in my opinion, solely on factual evidence.”
35:32 Carter: “I don’t know where we go from here. I think you turned it into the State you had said.” Fishbane: “Yes, it’s been sent to the Dept of Education, Charter School Division” Carter: “So, what oversight do we have as a District Board in these type of matters?” Fishbane: “I have to determine what authority we have with Board members. The intention, ultimately, is the following: I represented at the last Board meeting and I represent in this report I have no interest in shutting down the school, the instructional model is a good one. We should honor that and the teachers and the kids. So we have to think through what our next steps are going to be – that’ll take a little bit of time.”
36:31 Fishbane: “They (Hillsdale) are a very fine Liberal Arts program and, as you’ll notice in some of my recommendations that they should be very much involved in training of the Board, training in Classical values for staff and so on.”
37:10 Terry: “From what I see, basically, if you stood by the letter of the law, they were acting illegally on a lot of things over the last couple of years.”
38:57 Lucarelli: “A school that had many parents excited for its opening and actually offers something different than what CCPS does has leadership who clearly do not represent the values and idea that the school supposedly represents.”
40:35 Lucarelli: “This is, at least in my tenure, the only charter school that I have received emails from and have had to hear complaints about. We do have other charter schools in the county that don’t have these issues. It’s unfortunate that we have had SO many, yet we have six charter schools. I think that in the very beginning, the leadership at Mason Classical had an opportunity to correct the issue, unfortunately they did not so here we are. I guess at this point I hope that the State steps in and does the right thing by way of all of the MCA teachers and parents, students and families and finds a way to correct the situation.”
42:05 Mitchell: “I think I’ll start by saying I don’t think the irony is lost on anyone in this room, I know it’s certainly not on me. That for all the times that Mrs. Lichter, during her time on the (CCPS) Board called into question the integrity of people here at CCPS, the transparency of our processes, the three meetings that were spent fighting over meeting minutes, agenda items, that her own house was not in order.”
43:04 Mitchell: “The best that we can do it sounds like is recommend the resignation of the leadership over there because we certainly don’t want to close a school or would even recommend closing a school that’s performing as highly as Mason. But ultimately, we can’t enforce that resignation most likely. So, I’d like to speak to the MCA parents directly and ask you to Rise Up and contact your Legislators, contact the Board of Education. Anyone who will listen. Contact Hillsdale. Fight to Save your School. By all accounts it’s a highly performing academic school. You deserve better, your students deserve better, your staff deserves better.”
43:55 Mitchell: “I think that Mrs. Lichter and others created an Us vs Them dynamic which was very clever in the beginning to drum up this sense of team unity, but at the end of the day it was based on a false premise which was that we had it out for Mason, that we were trying to close them down because as Mr Fishbane has said at previous meetings we are saying it again tonight, that has not been even discuss. I would just like to implore Mason parents to Fight for their children’s education, fight for new leadership at MCA, however we can help you I know this Board will support whatever we can do to that end to make it a great school for the kids.”
46:17 Fishbane: “I have sent them (Hillsdale), along with the State, a copy of this report because they are a central player in all of this.”
Excerpts:
6:00 “We are able to track those that leave Mason, for example, any charter school and reenroll here, or go into home schooling or private schooling. What did we find? Since 2014, 614 students have left – that’s a lot of people.”
7:22 (On Methodology for conducting the Investigation) “We had a huge amount of emails, but I reviewed the entire records of minutes from 2014 to the present along with the policies and procedures and other documents that Mason is part of it and the rule of thumb I took was: Well let’s let the documents speak for themselves.”
9:45 “While they voted on a committee, or an oversight committee to create it, so to speak, it never went forward, it was never staffed, it was never followed up with members, there was never any outreach that would allow people to come forward. So what began as a Finance Committee ultimately collapsed and there has been no Finance Committee since 2016, no Finance Oversight Committee. Why this becomes important is if you look at the application of 2013 to become a Charter school – it’s an extensive document and it is incorporated by reference into our Charter. In there, there are multiple standing Committees that are Required: Finance Committee, Student Advisory Council Committee, an Audit Committee, and so on. Well at the end of 2016, out of nowhere they decided they were going to create an Audit Committee that was going to be staffed by their Compliance Officer and two Board Members. They didn’t follow the membership criteria nor did they include anybody that would staff it that was in the community that was required – it became a shell as well – it never went forward. The same thing happened for the Student Advisory Committee. For a while you had a PTA/PTO and so on. And then what I found, and I am kind of going into other sections because thematically it’ll be clear, is that in their policies and procedures there was supposed to have been an Employment Committee. That Employment Committee, which was like a standing committee, was supposed to advise all Board members, for example, as to data received concerning staff salaries, including the Principal’s. That never happened. So, you now see all of these committees that should have occurred, not occurring. And so it became almost a rubber stamping in terms of accepting contracts, looking at staffing report salaries and so on without the review that was supposed to be required on the basis of application and policy.”
13:33 “I think it’s quite astonishing that a Board chair would tell another Board member how to conduct their duty as a Treasurer and “back off”, but even more important is that she wrote the letter to another Board member, thereby creating a Sunshine Law violation.”
19:11 “At least four (Board) meetings that I could find went forward without a Quorum. For me, that’s serious business because it’s against the law. The Attorney General opinions are clear on that.”
(Continued) “I understand that within the charter statute there is language that indicates that people can appear by means of electronic communication, but the telling point of all of that is, as you know, there needs to be a quorum physically present. And when you read Mason’s own policies, there is a section called Proxy Voting. It indicates that those that appear electronically may not count toward the counting of a quorum. So if you have three people, one is present and two are there electronically, how do you have a quorum. Nevertheless, you have on the minutes of the meeting saying “Quorum was present”, which of course any reader would be misleading. That is of particular concern in one instance, I believe it was June 2018, on a Saturday they held their budgetary meeting. There was no quorum. The meeting lasted 9 minutes long and that was it. People weren’t present for it. There was no quorum. There may have been one person present, the other by electronic means. Now, somebody got wind of that might being a problem and then when you look at the minutes of November of 2018 something interesting happens: somebody puts, makes a motion to ratify the budget of June. Why would you do that if you weren’t aware of a problem? But nobody comes forward and says “Houston we had a problem, it’s time for us to acknowledge it and clean it up.” So the irony of it all is you have the ratification at one meeting ratifying an illegal act from a previous one. So what have you ratified? You’ve ratified the illegality which itself creates a difficulty. And, sadly, in December they voted in without a quorum another Board member. Well, if you don’t have a quorum, then you really don’t have a Board member. So what we are left with, and if I’m correct, is that over many months, for example, you would have only two Board members conducting business, yet our Charter says there has to be a minimum of three, which for me is a material breach in that area.”
22:18 “There are some very serious issues in the way parents were treated.”
27:47 “And so by sending all of this information, there is a serious violation of FERPA.”
28:39 “We have other issues, Conflicts of Interest issues, such as the creation of a Management company that goes out to multiple districts in the state to oversee, give consulting advice to different charter schools they want to support, that it’s going to be high-performing like Mason. These include: initially Mrs. Lichter, her Principal, and Gena Smith the Curriculum Coordinator. Mrs Lichter later stepped away and substituted herself with her husband. But what we find initially is the fact that when evaluations are done, in essence, we have a Board chair giving a positive evaluation of her own partner when she should have recused herself or disclosed the fact that this is going on.”
29:55 “Part of the issue too, unfortunately, is the lack of disclosure in these applications and I’ve read them all from these different districts, is that the very school, Hillsdale College, that provided the instructional model for the school’s success, is never mentioned in any of these, when in fact, in the actual Policy Binder there is a whole section that has to be acknowledged that Hillsdale College provides the curricular support, curricular structure, training and so on and yet, you knowingly exclude that from your Consultancy. I think that’s a problem”
30:45 “I provided to you extensive recommendations and conclusions – we don’t need to go into all of them – suffice it to say that the actions of the Board members warrant very serious review, same with the Principal, same with the Vice Principal. I personally think the two Board members, because of all the commentaries that were out there, need to seriously think of resigning so that we can see the school reconfigure its Board into 5 people instead of the same 3.”
CCPS Board Comments:
33:38 Carter: “Is it right, Mr Fishbane, that MCA Board breached the terms of its own application and Charter contract since the dissolution of the Financial Oversight Committee? Did that breach contract with the District in doing that?” Fishbane: “Well, it would because if you assume that the application is incorporated, made part of the actual Charter document, then there is a presumption that the requirements in that application will be honored as part of the Contractual process.” Carter: “So, once again I think you did a great job in sticking to the facts … most everything in your report … was based, in my opinion, solely on factual evidence.”
35:32 Carter: “I don’t know where we go from here. I think you turned it into the State you had said.” Fishbane: “Yes, it’s been sent to the Dept of Education, Charter School Division” Carter: “So, what oversight do we have as a District Board in these type of matters?” Fishbane: “I have to determine what authority we have with Board members. The intention, ultimately, is the following: I represented at the last Board meeting and I represent in this report I have no interest in shutting down the school, the instructional model is a good one. We should honor that and the teachers and the kids. So we have to think through what our next steps are going to be – that’ll take a little bit of time.”
36:31 Fishbane: “They (Hillsdale) are a very fine Liberal Arts program and, as you’ll notice in some of my recommendations that they should be very much involved in training of the Board, training in Classical values for staff and so on.”
37:10 Terry: “From what I see, basically, if you stood by the letter of the law, they were acting illegally on a lot of things over the last couple of years.”
38:57 Lucarelli: “A school that had many parents excited for its opening and actually offers something different than what CCPS does has leadership who clearly do not represent the values and idea that the school supposedly represents.”
40:35 Lucarelli: “This is, at least in my tenure, the only charter school that I have received emails from and have had to hear complaints about. We do have other charter schools in the county that don’t have these issues. It’s unfortunate that we have had SO many, yet we have six charter schools. I think that in the very beginning, the leadership at Mason Classical had an opportunity to correct the issue, unfortunately they did not so here we are. I guess at this point I hope that the State steps in and does the right thing by way of all of the MCA teachers and parents, students and families and finds a way to correct the situation.”
42:05 Mitchell: “I think I’ll start by saying I don’t think the irony is lost on anyone in this room, I know it’s certainly not on me. That for all the times that Mrs. Lichter, during her time on the (CCPS) Board called into question the integrity of people here at CCPS, the transparency of our processes, the three meetings that were spent fighting over meeting minutes, agenda items, that her own house was not in order.”
43:04 Mitchell: “The best that we can do it sounds like is recommend the resignation of the leadership over there because we certainly don’t want to close a school or would even recommend closing a school that’s performing as highly as Mason. But ultimately, we can’t enforce that resignation most likely. So, I’d like to speak to the MCA parents directly and ask you to Rise Up and contact your Legislators, contact the Board of Education. Anyone who will listen. Contact Hillsdale. Fight to Save your School. By all accounts it’s a highly performing academic school. You deserve better, your students deserve better, your staff deserves better.”
43:55 Mitchell: “I think that Mrs. Lichter and others created an Us vs Them dynamic which was very clever in the beginning to drum up this sense of team unity, but at the end of the day it was based on a false premise which was that we had it out for Mason, that we were trying to close them down because as Mr Fishbane has said at previous meetings we are saying it again tonight, that has not been even discuss. I would just like to implore Mason parents to Fight for their children’s education, fight for new leadership at MCA, however we can help you I know this Board will support whatever we can do to that end to make it a great school for the kids.”
46:17 Fishbane: “I have sent them (Hillsdale), along with the State, a copy of this report because they are a central player in all of this.”
To view Jon Fishbane's 61-page file, open the files below:
investigative_report_mca_june_2019_pages_1-28.pdf | |
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investigative_report_mca_june_2019_pages_29-61.pdf | |
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