Just what the Valley needs: another charter school

Nowhere is the Ohio legislature's folly in refusing to rein in charter school approvals more evident than in the charter approved by the Lucas County Education Service Center to Legacy Academy, a new community school being established by Bishop Norman L. Wagner of Mount Calvary Pentacostal Church.
A loophole in the legislation that permits charter schools allows agencies like that in Lucas County to bypass the Ohio Department of Education in approving schools that would never pass state muster.
The most controversial of the Lucas center's approvals was granted to Ecot, a so-called electronic school. As we noted in an editorial last January, on the basis of the $5,500 per student the state would provide, Ecot and its management company, Altair Learning.com, could be raking in more than $63 million.
With the school projecting only $31 million in expenses, we said that was quite a tidy sum left over for a so-called nonprofit school that has no buildings to maintain, no laboratories to equip, no gymnasiums to furnish and no textbooks to buy -- and no track record of educating any children anywhere in the past.
One suburban Youngstown school superintendent says that of the nine students from his district enrolled in Ecot at the beginning of the last school year, two got both phone line and computer that the company promises, three came back to the public schools and the other four received either a phone line or a computer.
Revenue sharing? Now the Lucas County Educational Service Center appears to have facilitated the transfer of another chunk of taxpayer dollars to an organization that has a documented record of fiscal mismanagement in Mahoning County.
For example, Mount Calvary Pentacostal Church has owned the Idora Park property since 1985, and for those 16 years allowed the property to deteriorate significantly. Last March a fire consumed the old Idora Park Ballroom, endangering firefighters and the community with asbestos ceiling material and leaving within the city a hazardous mess.
A little more than two years ago, the Youngstown School District was bending over backward trying to collect nearly $40,000 in past due rent from Mount Calvary for the former Princeton Junior High School building that the church was using as Calvary Christian Academy, a private, tuition-funded religious school. That school closed at the end of last school year after a legal dispute with the city schools.
Taxpayer dollars: But why should Wagner worry about minor details like money? Instead of asking his pupils' parents for tuition fees, he'll be getting some $5,500 per student from the state. WIth the 300 students he anticipates, that's $1.65 million coming from Ohio taxpayers to fund his "educational" endeavor.
That's not all, however. One of the key state requirements for charter schools is that they be nonreligious. However, Deborah Benton, Legacy's publicist, said the school is accepting enrollment daily at Mount Calvary Church.
If the warning bells are not going off in Toledo, they ought to be chiming furiously in Columbus. Does the Lucas County board intend to send someone from Toledo to assure that it is not funding a parochial school with state tax dollars? Until academic and financial accountability can be assured for every charter school, there must be a moratorium on new charter applications.