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ECOT Supreme Court Case Paves Path for Criminal Convictions,
Says Lawmaker
Failed charter school system designed to fund campaigns, not
educate children
After the Ohio Supreme Court last week ruled the online
charter school ECOT violated state law by fraudulently
boosting student attendance records to cheat taxpayers of
some $80 million, state Rep. Teresa Fedor says the next step
is holding the operators and founder criminally accountable.
“Today’s ruling brings us one step closer to fully
understanding the extent of this tangled web of political
payoffs and taxpayer fraud,” said Fedor. “Elected officials
at the highest level of power turned a blind eye to this
criminal empire while they took huge sums of campaign cash.
Obviously, federal authorities now have an even more
important role in independently determining the scope of
corruption and malfeasance – not only within the school, but
within state government.”
Three years after it was
exposed
that Gov. John Kasich’s handpicked charter-czar David
Hansen, husband of Kasich’s chief of staff, was illegally
changing charter school grades to allow failing charter
schools like ECOT to draw down on more taxpayer funding,
little has happened at the Republican-controlled Statehouse
to crack down, once and for all, on Ohio’s largely
unregulated charter school industry.
“There is no doubt that the corrupt charter school system in
Ohio was designed, not to help our children prepare for
their future, but to help pad Republican campaign coffers,”
Fedor added. “Today’s ruling reiterates what Bill Lager
allegedly said, this whole scheme ‘isn’t about the
children.’”
Before last week’s court decision, Ohio Supreme Court
Justice Pat DeWine
recused
himself from the ECOT case a year after hearing oral
arguments. DeWine took campaign cash from ECOT, like his
father, Attorney General Mike DeWine.
“Charter school corruption in Ohio has been a long and
winding road, with numerous stops and breakdowns along the
way,” said Fedor. “I think today’s court decision brings us
very close to fully understanding what is at the end of a
corrupt road that was paved with political donations,
falsified documents and broken promises to our children and
families.”
The senior DeWine shied away from cracking down on ECOT
after some $80 million in tax dollars was found to be
fraudulently received by overinflating student attendance
records. After saying there was nothing his office could do,
AG DeWine
decided
to pursue collections of the ill-gotten money
after numerous news reports and mounting public pressure.
Over a year ago, an ECOT whistleblower contacted Auditor
Dave Yost about fraud and corruption at the school,
a call
Yost ignored
until acknowledging the apparent fraud at ECOT recently. At
the time,
Fedor
called on Yost to thoroughly investigate ECOT and Hansen’s
illegal data scrubbing at ODE,
something Yost failed to do. Yost also took substantial
campaign donations from ECOT’s founder.
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