Charter School for Scandal (page 1)

So six months into the school's young history, Cosgrove firmly opted to focus on home-schoolers. Attendance accounting is a breeze with home-schoolers, because it's based only on samples of students' work. Once a week, Cato facilitators would swing by parents' homes to collect these samples, which could then be used as backup records for attendance claims. It was legal; it was lucrative. Thus did Cato headquarters become a full-time home-school resource center.

One year into the program, Snowline assigned Assistant Superintendent Jan Vondra to perform a snapshot review of Cato's progress. On the plus side, she found a regi-ment of satisfied home-schooling families - although she questioned the propriety of paying parents to teach their own children. On the downside, she noted that the school went through a whole year, including graduation ceremonies, without approving formal graduation requirements. Moreover, Cato had failed to organize mandatory employee retirement plans, had no procedures for performing employee background checks, and had no discipline or expulsion policies.

Vondra's lengthy report included notes from interviews with five Cato facilitators, including a 19-year-old high school graduate, a minister/real estate agent, a college graduate in Christian education, a former public school teacher's aide, and a parent with experience teaching at a Jenny Craig weight-loss center. In all, only five of the 19-member teaching staff had teaching credentials - which was allowed under charter-school rules, as teachers were exempt from certification requirements.

The business side of the operation was just as disorganized as the academics. Snowline officials said they discovered, to their dismay, that Cosgrove's formal accounting system consisted of only his checkbook register. Snowline staff then helped Cosgrove set up formal accounting procedures, which Cosgrove has dutifully followed since.

Only once were auditors asked to check the reliability of the numbers behind the balance sheets. And on that occasion, Cato fared poorly. continue