Escambia Charter School Location: Gonzalez
Last enrollment: 101
Type: Alternative high school
Opened: 1996
Students: 69.percent poor, 10.percent disabled
Grade: None

For nearly half a decade, Escambia Charter School hired out a group of students to cut roadside grass and weeds during class time for about 32 hours per week. No part of Florida's public education system stopped it. The privately run high school made about a $200,000 profit by paying the children less than required under a state Department of Transportation contract. Meanwhile, it continued accepting tax money from the state Department of Education to teach the children five hours a day. Until state prosecutors investigated complaints from teachers at the campus north of Pensacola, the falsifying of attendance records, course schedules and grade reports went unchecked. Even after pleading no contest to grand theft, the campus remains open. No more than 12 percent of its students have ever been able to read at grade level, test scores show. Principal Jerome Chisholm said the school no longer has the road crew, but that it had provided an incentive for kids to work hard in school. Students were selected based on their grades. “It was a great program because a lot of our students learned work ethics and balancing homework,” he said. “This was a real-world scenario.” Enrollment at Escambia has dropped a quarter, to about 100 students, since the scandal. Only 3 percent of students could read at grade level last year and less than a quarter could do math proficiently. The school received nearly $1 million in tax money last year. As part of an improvement plan, Escambia is raising salaries to help slow teacher turnover. Low-scoring children have been placed in intensive reading and math classes and are being offered tutoring. The charter also is testing children periodically throughout the year to assess their progress. Maresha Foster, a first-year biology teacher at Escambia, said she wanted to work at a school where she could make a difference. So far, her experience has been positive, she said. “The entire staff cares about these children,” Foster said. “We are giving the individual care and boundaries that they so need.”

View financial records for this schoolC.K. Steele-LeRoy Collins Charter Middle School Location: Tallahassee

Enrollment: 71

Opened: 1996

Type: Grades 6-8

Students: 51 percent poor, 1 percent disabled

Grade: A



Named for civil-rights-era minister C.K. Steele and former Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins, Tallahassee's only charter middle school has overcome financial, academic and management struggles. Located in a former Western Sizzlin restaurant near downtown Tallahassee, the school operates under the wings of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, paying the church rent on the former restaurant and buying meals from a church-operated restaurant in past years. C.K. Steele Principal Mary Henry, who had been a retired Miami-Dade County principal, took over the school three years ago at the request of her pastor, helping bring up the grades from C's and D's to A ratings. She said she pays teachers the same as in district schools and does not tolerate student-behavior problems. All students are black, and more than two-thirds qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. The school focuses on teaching students entrepreneurial skills and improving their Florida standardized-test scores. The school got its charter with the promise of driving academic accountability and tying learning to entrepreneurial skills. But in its startup year, the school suffered from bookkeeping problems, such as late payments on withholding taxes that resulted in $3,500 of penalties to the Internal Revenue Service and missing invoices on more than $10,000 in payments. One of the school's principals had a criminal record. It also faced financial penalties for not paying federal payroll taxes and for failing to report to the National School Lunch Program.



View financial records for this schoolLiberty City Charter School Location: Miami

Enrollment: 364

Type: K-6 school

Opened: 1996

Students: 73 percent poor, 0.3 percent disabled

Grade: A



Before Jeb Bush became governor, he co-founded Florida's first charter school in 1996 -- Liberty City Charter -- primarily to serve poor, black children. Bush stepped down from the charter board after he was elected. As governor, he oversaw a program to grade schools and saw his old charter struggle with a D or no grade before it got an A in 2006. The school is in a two-story building just outside its namesake Liberty City, a high-poverty pocket of Miami. Though three-quarters of its students qualify for lunch discounts, surrounding schools have more poverty. With few special-education students, the school has one of the best reading records in the overall Liberty City area. Eighty-four percent of its third-graders were reading on target. Florida's original charter school has had its controversies. In 1998, the district determined that two teachers had helped students with the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, and the school fired the teachers, said State Board of Education Chairman Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, which co-founded the charter. Liberty City Charter has been criticized for high rates of teacher turnover. With 26 students per classroom in higher grades, it did not meet state class-size rules this year. It also has fewer certified teachers than average for Miami-Dade County or Florida, according to state reports. The school shifted $24,000 from its accounts to North Dade Community Charter after the Dade County School Board appointed Liberty City's principal to oversee the struggling charter. Meanwhile, Liberty City's spending on instruction declined. It spends 25 percent of its budget on instruction. Dade County came to us and asked us to take over some charter schools about to go out of business, Fair said. It's something we would never do again. It made our operational budget go out of whack.



View financial records for this schoolThe Apple School Location: Lakeland

Last enrollment: 147

Type: K-8 school

Opened: 1996

Closed: 2006

Last students: 72 percent poor, 25 percent disabled

Last grade: C



Catering to students with attention disorders and hyperactivity, the learning environment of The Apple School was sometimes likened to a fire drill in its early years. It was chaos, said former Polk County transportation administrator Arby Creach, who now works for Orange schools. Closed in June, the school represents the most common reason charter schools that go out of business: financial difficulties. Issues included a teacher exodus in the first year; parent complaints that the school lacked books and desks; audits showing some employees got cash advances; irregularities in the way the school administered the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test; and a string of D ratings from the state. The school's founder could not be reached for comment, but she told district officials she wanted the school because she knew firsthand how difficult it was to educate students with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder because her son struggled with the learning disability. Despite its challenges and low grades, Polk County school officials were pleased with students' learning gains, said Carolyn Finch, who oversees charter programs for Polk County. It earned a C in its last year. With 17 percent of its students missing more than four weeks of school, Apple had one of the highest absentee rates in the area. The school also was challenged by its location in a neighborhood clubhouse off New Jersey Avenue in southeast Lakeland. When it tried to increase enrollment by adding middle-school grades, the extra overhead became a financial burden. The school ultimately cut its bus service, which hurt enrollment. In its last year, The Apple School had 147 students.



View financial records for this schoolSeaside Community School Location: Seaside

Enrollment: 113

Opened: 1996

Type: Grades 6-8 (charter calls for grades 6-9)

Students: 0 percent poor, 2.6 percent disabled

Grade: A



While most charter schools scramble for space in office buildings, former restaurants, churches and portable classrooms, Seaside Neighborhood School is a neotraditional architectural showcase built with fees from the 1998 movie The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey. Parents in the idyllic Panhandle community started the school because the nearest one was 17 miles away. The consistently A-rated school draws students from as far as 25 miles away. This year, none of the students actually comes from its namesake community, which has mostly seasonal residents. Most students come from surrounding coastal towns and developments. About 50 children are on the waiting list, which grows every year, Principal Cathy Brubaker said. She said two key things that make the school successful are the school's small size and the fact that students keep the same teacher every year. A quarter of the students are classified as gifted, and very few have disabilities or come from low-income homes. Seaside's charter school will likely remain a middle school. If it grew much more, you'd lose the integrity of the space, Brubaker said. The school's biggest challenge, she added, has been space. The school spends more than half of its budget on facilities, the most recent audit showed. The school raised about $160,000 from its annual half-marathon fundraiser, which helps pay for technology and the library.



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