Subtitle: School Board Member Martin Karp is afraid of his own shadow...
Check out What’s the ‘Mater’? A Morality Play in Which Our Craven School Board Humbly Washes the Feet of One Fernando Zulueta, Charter School Magnate An excerpt:
"Later on in the meeting, Jane Moscowitz, chairwoman of the ethics committee, stood at the podium and said she brought the matter to the committee because after reading all the material from both sides, “I was appalled. There’s no question that … this board should not be approving those schools."
The Herald was on target with their 2/21 editorial on this same subject Wrong to ignore dubious practices. OUR OPINION: SCHOOL BOARD MISFIRES ON CHARTER-SCHOOL OVERSIGHT
However we should have had more reporting between Nov. 14th, when I wrote and spoke to the reporter and I told the reporter, Tania deLuzuriaga, that this Mater/Zulueta story was very important and that she must follow up on it and do some digging. Then Dec. 10th, I wrote to Tania DeLuzuriaga again asking her: " What about the follow-up to the Zulueta story/Mater Academy? We don't know the outcome on this story." So it took 3 months for the Herald Editorial (Feb. 21st. ) to come out with no reporters DIGGING UP anything in between.
Herald: You could have changed that vote -- not with an editorial but with research and at the very least publishing parts of the audit. It would have shamed the school board having the public see the audit findings. You might have changed the vote of wimpy school board member Martin Karp at the very least and maybe Marta Perez...what a disappointment this vote was and it is going to cost us, the taxpayers, money in the long run and make Zuleta richer.
Let me end with a quote from the Wakefield article:
According to an audit presented by chief auditor Allen Vann, the principals who control Academica Corp. and one of its schools, the Mater Academy, have set things up in such a way that they personally benefit from how the company and school handle money. Specifically, the audit said that Academica CEO Fernando Zulueta and his brother Ignacio had used another company in which they are principals to buy land the school sits on, then lease it back to the school at a handsome profit. The audit also decried the fact that the same auditors handle all 21 schools Academica runs, and some of the schools share the same board members.
5 comments:
Great column by Rebecca.
I totally agree. Rebecca is the master of school issues in Miami.
Rebecca follows many issues well.
Thank you, folks, for your kind appraisals. Glad people actually read this stuff. Sometimes, I'm not sure it's worth trying...but then some politician does something ridiculous and I'm briefly reinvigorated.
You know what kills me, is that anyone could say I'm the master of school issues, considering I write about the school district maybe 3 times a year. People have told me the same thing for black diaspora politics and half a dozen other topics I touch on here and there.
More than anything, it speaks volumes about the lack of analysis and institutional knowledge by the mainstream media companies in town.
With the exception of the occasional "House of Lies" type project, we aren't getting much more than a daily run down of meetings, reports, and press conferences.
I'm biased, but damn, I'd love to see reporters freed from that hamster wheel much more often to dig into the juicy muck. Give me a sense of where we live, who the personalities are.
you said it=== so I am going to repeat what you said twice Rebecca, maybe someone from the Herald will read it:
More than anything, it speaks volumes about the lack of analysis and institutional knowledge by the mainstream media companies in town.
More than anything, it speaks volumes about the lack of analysis and institutional knowledge by the mainstream media companies in town.
I have been saying this but you said it better.
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