Lincoln Memorial Academy: Requiem for a Dream

Over the past two columns, I described highly questionable justifications that the School District of Manatee County used in their retaking of Lincoln Memorial Academy, a district school that had successfully transitioned to a district charter. The justifications seemed to range from asinine to fraudulent, defying any application of common sense, once one delved deeper than the district’s own self-authored narrative. This week, we look at the third prong of the attack–the school’s finances–to complete the picture as to how unjust the ultimate outcome really was.

As I detailed previously, while the erroneous past-due water shut-off notice the school received from the city of Palmetto may seem like a small piece to a much larger puzzle, its crucial role in the outcome cannot be overstated. The district used this canard as the primary basis to use "emergency" measures to immediately retake the school, a factor that is paramount when it comes to the financial prong of their argument, as revoking the charter for non-emergency reasons (including its finances) involves a very different process, one that entitles the school and its management company 124 days of due process in which it may respond.

As it went, LMA received no due process whatsoever. In fact, LMA was even denied the opportunity to rebut the claims made by the district to the board on the day the emergency vote was taken. There was, of course, the second "emergency" justification that I covered in last week’s column, regarding LMA principal and CEO Eddie Hundley having been deemed a "danger to the safety and welfare of students." This, according to the district, was because he answered a reference request for a former teacher who was hired by Sarasota County.

Shortly after that teacher had been reassigned from Lincoln (when it was still a district school) because of an allegation that he had had an inappropriate relationship with a student (which investigations determined to be unfounded), he was accused by police of having a naked picture of an 18-year-old girl on his laptop that was allegedly taken when the girl was 16. The young lady, who was dually enrolled at State College of Florida at the time and had never been a student at Lincoln, was the daughter of close family friends and has maintained that she put the photo on the teacher’s computer when he left it unattended and has never had a sexual relationship with him.

Four years later, the teacher has yet to be tried and the former Lincoln assistant principal who also gave him a reference was not only rehired by the district but, according to sources at the school, is essentially performing Hundley’s old job. While those justifications have holes big enough to drive one of the school's buses through, the district has maintained that their veracity doesn’t really matter because, in the end, Lincoln’s finances were such a mess that there was never going to be any other outcome than a district takeover of the school.

As you’ll see in this column, while the part about this always having been destined to end with a district takeover is perhaps the most honest statement the district has made, it wasn’t because the outcome was fundamentally inevitable. In fact, in LMA’s worst-case scenario, the school would have been forced into a financial recovery plan, but that seems far less likely had the district not been able to completely control the narrative on its finances the way it did through the emergency takeover process.

So, if the goal was not to best serve the students and community that were benefiting from LMA’s success but rather reclaim a district asset and its funding sources (students) while sending a message to other Manatee County communities regarding district charter conversions, engineering the means to retake the school via the emergency method would be the absolute best way to do so because it ensured that the financial argument would never be meaningfully litigated.

Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides financial assistance to local educational agencies and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families in order to help ensure that all children meet their state's academic standards. According to the DOE, federal funds are allocated through four statutory formulas that are based primarily on census poverty estimates and the cost of education in each state.

One of the methods in which eligibility is determined is by way of participation in free and reduced lunch programs through the Florida Department of Agriculture. The Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, is for schools and/or districts with the highest poverty rates. It allows them to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students at no cost without collecting applications. CEP schools are reimbursed using a formula calculated with the percentage of students eligible for free meals based on their having qualified for other means-tested programs such as SNAP and TANF.

Manatee County Schools identifies two categories of Title 1 schools, CEP and non-CEP, ranking the latter by way of their percentage of directly served students (those having been declared eligible for programs such as SNAP or TANF). More than 80 percent of LMA's students were "directly served" for the 2018-19 school year, which put it at number seven in the district. LMA argues that the district ranked their school lower than 20 schools that had a lower percentage, in violation of federal regulations.

By instead ranking LMA 28th in the district, Manatee County Schools reduced LMA’s Title 1 funding from the initial estimate of $800 per student given to schools like Ballard Elementary (which had a lower CEP percentage than LMA's) to $385 per student, causing significant budgeting problems for LMA. To make up for the shortfall, the school’s management company had to take out multiple loans, the repayment of which further tightened its budget.

Four separate week-long "survey periods" are used by school districts to check, correct, and report student enrollment and demographic data to the Florida Department of Education to ensure funding for students is accurate and allocated to the correct schools. The second and third surveys are crucially important. The third is used as the basis for the next year’s initial funding and was the basis of Lincoln’s initial projection. The second survey, taken in October, is used to establish the final enrollment numbers for school funding in a given year.

LMA was designated a CEP school ahead of the collection of the second survey's data for the 2018/19 school year. LMA argues that this designation should have been used in establishing its Title 1 eligibility, as the department of agriculture uses the same poverty data the district uses in the determination. Furthermore, because the school’s initial projection was for 354 students and it actually wound up having 474 by the close of the second survey, it would have had a significant increase over projected funding. By cutting that funding by more than 50 percent per student, LMA says it received even less funding than was projected even when the school had far fewer students to serve.

During the July 23, 2019 work session that preceded the meeting during which the emergency takeover was approved, district officials claimed that adjustments made based on data collected resulted in a number of instances in which LMA received less money than they’d projected and budgeted for and then failed to make necessary adjustments via budget amendments. LMA has contended that the reason the district used the emergency takeover process was to avoid going through the traditional process in which the school and its management company would have been able to present its defense and, worst-case scenario, emerged from a financial recovery plan (a process that LMA officials contend would not have been deemed necessary).

Of course, that didn’t happen, and once the district took over the school it not only had control of the narrative but of the building, its infrastructure, records, and its contracts with vendors. Rather than continue managing the school, the district canceled Lincoln’s long-term contracts with vendors and entered new ones, causing the full balance of LMA’s contracts to become immediately due, drastically altering the perceived health of their ledger. These newly-owed balances were then continuously used in both the press and legal proceedings to distort LMA’s financial challenges and even suggest that there may have been financial fraud.

Once the district gained control of the school and cemented a simple narrative into the community's understanding of what had transpired, LMA never had a chance. The school district prevailed in a Department of Administrative Hearings case and LMA was subsequently ordered to pay the district’s legal fees. A federal lawsuit, however, is still pending and would seem to be Hundley and LMA’s final and perhaps best opportunity.

It seems patently obvious to me, however, that regardless of what ultimately comes to pass, the process through which all of this transpired was never close to being above board. As I laid out in my first two columns, the justifications for the use of the emergency method–the bogus water shutoff notice and Hundley being a danger to the safety and welfare of students–were nothing short of absurd, and I have little doubt their use was merely an attempt to avoid a more fair and equitable process in which the district would have been less likely to have prevailed.

If you need more proof, just look at the staggering amount of rank hypocrisy involved. As I’ve noted, the School District of Manatee County and its board have shown an embarrassingly low level of concern for the safety and welfare of students for years. From allowing administrators found to have been at fault in failing to report sexual misconduct involving students to resign in lieu of termination so that they can go to work in other districts and allowing a staff member who impregnated a 16-year-old student to continue working in the school for more than a year afterward, to failing to alert parents when a 15-year-old female student was raped after school, even though the rapist was still at large, the safety of the students has never been an area in which the district has seemed to place any sort of premium.

What’s more, as for charter schools, the district has never shown a similar enthusiasm when it comes to charters that did not convert from a district school. Simply look to Team Success, a public charter school sponsored by the district, and ask why the district wouldn’t have applied the same concern for their ongoing issues regarding financial management and solvency, or the backgrounds of those involved in its management. Once you do, it becomes increasingly difficult not to draw the conclusion that the fact that LMA converted from a district school was the primary difference between the two.

While some charters can be seen as competition to nearby public schools, others provide something of a service in that they often draw away the socioeconomically disadvantaged and students with behavioral problems or other learning challenges that make for significant difficulties when it comes to the metrics for which districts receive their grades from the state. And while a charter conversion means losing capital assets from the district books, non-conversion, public charters must secure their own infrastructure.

When it came to LMA and Hundley, however, there seemed to be a deeper animus, particularly within the administration. Former Manatee School Board member Karen Carpenter, who retired in 2017, lauded Hundley and, in particular, his curriculum. However, Carpenter said the following when asked about the subject of LMA’s fate:

"It was clear to me when I was a board member that the former Superintendent (Diana Greene) not only did not embrace charter schools but also did not want Mr. Hundley’s charter school in particular," Carpenter told me. "If the Ôancient history’ from that time influenced subsequent actions, I do not know."

Other district employees who would only speak off the record for fear of reprisals, also attested to Greene’s zest for regaining Lincoln and her acrimony for Hundley, whose talent and success they thought she felt threatened by.

Regardless of exactly why Lincoln Memorial Academy was the subject of so much district animus may not ever be known, yet it seems clear that it was treated inequitably and its outcome engineered from the start. In the big picture of all of the corruption, incompetence, and ill-advised policies foisted upon this community by our school district in the past decade or so, LMA’s fate seems, sadly, par for the course. But the wreckage it has left behind is a testament to all who have ever argued that the monolithic county school district system Florida uses has proven itself utterly incapable of delivering the increased efficiencies it promised.

The idea was that by having an entire county’s tax base support all of its schools, there would be a more balanced funding mechanism that would prevent great disparities in public education quality as you moved from places like Lakewood Ranch or the islands to Palmetto or southeast Bradenton, and that the scaling of logistical support like transportation, social work, curriculum, ESE and food services would mean less duplication and greater economic efficiency.

Instead, it has led to giant bureaucracies that manage billion-dollar budgets, always finding a way to spend and grow, both hands perpetually extended as they endlessly ask communities to give more and more because, after all, it’s for the kids. Modern Florida school districts are leaky sieves in which the privileged few who’ve successfully navigated the political labyrinth lord over fiefdoms of their own making in which the loyalty of the mediocre is always elevated above the merit of the truly elite.

How do we fix public education? is one of the most common questions our society asks. I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that community-driven, not-for-profit projects like LMA hold a lot of the clues. The fact that the old guard in the long-failing system of the status quo is so clearly threatened by promising results from elsewhere seems like a good reason to look even more closely at such alternatives. But we live in a society in which we are notably cynical regarding institutions at large, yet, paradoxically, seem to so often shift to the blind trust of such institutions when they act individually.

The school district’s narrative for what happened to LMA had the additional advantage of presenting the public with a simple, neat, black and white story that allowed one to skip the mental heavy lifting and just jump on the side of the accredited folks with giant salaries and big titles who told you its leaders were harming the kids. For those who took the time to read these three admittedly long installments about all of the parts you likely hadn’t heard in that convenient telling, I hope you’ve seen that the truth, while often messy and requiring the will to open our minds and challenge our biases, is worth the time and effort required. For if we don't pursue it doggedly, we will fail to see the answers to our most important questions, even when they look us straight in the eyes.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. He is also the host ofPunk Rock Politixon YouTube. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His latest book, Burn Black Wall Street Burn, is scheduled for release in early May. His other books are availablehere.