Still No Answers on Fraudulent Document at Center of Charter Takeover

During a school board meeting on July 23 of 2019, the Manatee County School District used emergency measures to terminate Lincoln Memorial Academy's charter and return the school (which had converted from a district school to a district charter) to the district's control. At the center of the action was a water shut-off notice from the City of Palmetto that appears to have been fabricated for the exact purpose of facilitating the takeover. To this day, what should be very troubling questions about the bogus notice and the retaking of the popular school remain unanswered.

Lincoln Middle School began the rigorous process of attempting to convert to a district charter school in 2016. Eddie Hundley, a longtime educator with a distinguished history of success within the district, was its principal as a district school and remained principal while heading the charter school company after the conversion. The community response to the conversion was overwhelmingly supportive. A school needs 51 percent of parents and faculty to approve a charter conversion. In Lincoln’s case, over 87 percent of parents and over 93 percent of faculty voted in favor of the charter conversion, which took place ahead of the 2018/19 school year.

LMA enjoyed marked success right out of the gate. The students–who are among the least socioeconomically advantaged in the district–had been underperforming as a district school. In its first year as a charter school, LMA added an extra hour to every school day in order to provide additional resources to students, which sharply cut down on tardiness, absenteeism, and discipline referrals. Academically, the school showed improvements across the board, including in every single category of reading, an area in which its students had previously struggled.

Most impressively, under the LMA concept, Hundley was able to engineer a cultural change that was beyond impressive. One example was the 8th-grade college academy, in which students were encouraged to dream big while also confronting the realities of what they would need to do in order to achieve such success by way of a detailed portfolio outlining a road map for the high school accomplishments that would be required in order to gain acceptance to their targeted colleges.

This sounds like the sort of success story that would result in accolades of the highest order, yet that was hardly the case–at least when it came to the school district’s reaction. In fact, one of the tensions that the district charter system seems to create is a financial disincentive for districts to support communities going the charter conversion route.

For starters, if the charter conversion is successful, the physical plant and all of the school’s infrastructure are turned over to the charter management company. There’s also the matter of funding. Hundley said that when he was a principal and Lincoln was a district school, the budget was about $2.9 million. However, once it became a charter school, he realized that those same students generated about $3.6 million, giving the academy significantly more resources even after they paid money back to the district for required support services.

Regardless of why the district seemed to have had it in for LMA, the actions of its administration suggest that they were looking for any method available that would see it returned to a district school. At the emergency meeting, there were several reasons given by the district as to why it had to immediately retake the school under emergency measures, all of which were highly suspect upon closer inspection. It is also noteworthy that Hundley and other school officials were prevented from defending those claims at the meeting.

And while I’ll address the other supposed reasons the school was taken over in future columns, the water bill is the most important, because it was the cornerstone of using emergency powers instead of going through the prescribed process, which would have given LMA much more time and ability to defend itself against dubious charges, while requiring the district to support a recovery plan. In other words, anything else was the fruit of a poisonous tree.

By creating the notion of an "immediate and serious threat to the health safety or welfare of the charter students," the district made it monumentally easier to successfully retake the school, denying LMA the 124 days of due process it would have under a typical, 90-day termination (90 days of notice, 4 days to appeal, 30 days to prepare for a hearing).

The shutoff notice referenced by the district to support its emergency takeover claimed that the school was 45 days past due on its bill. That’s important because the City of Palmetto ordinance dealing with shutoffs (Chapter 29 Sec. 38 (a)) only allows the city to terminate service to accounts that are at least 45 days past due.

The timing of the July meeting was also instructive, as it represented the end of LMA’s first year as a charter, after which point existing data would be used for funding calculations, preventing the sort of miscalculations that led to highly questionable delays on the transfer of federal Title 1 funding owed to the school by the district. In other words, once LMA had its first year under its belt, it would be much more difficult were the district intent to undermine its success or retake the school.

Because of delays in receiving Title 1 funds from the district, LMA did fall behind on its water bill, which ranged from $3-4,000 per month. The school had kept up with the bill from July through November of 2018, but, because it was paying salaries that would have come from those Title 1 funds from the general operating budget, LMA was unable to keep up with expenses.

From December through March, LMA fell behind on four payments totaling $13,568.06. On April 19, Hundley met with Lana Patrick, who oversees billing for the City of Palmetto’s utilities department, and Jim Freeman (City of Palmetto Clerk) to discuss the funding issues LMA was having with the school district and the fact that the school would be financially challenged until July when the new fiscal year began and the school would receive all of the funds it was owed. The agreed-upon plan required LMA to make the monthly payments from April to June of 2019 to avoid falling further behind, then, beginning in July, make two payments per month for the next four months until the bill was current.

The April and May payments were made without incident. However, just ahead of the June payment, Palmetto Mayor Shirley Bryant publicly announced her intent to disconnect service to LMA, although Hundley says no communication was made to him that the repayment plan was being revoked, let alone why that would be the case. On June 18, Mayor Bryant emailed Manatee Superintendent Cynthia Saunders a copy of the shut-off notice, dated June 17, 2019–although it was not issued to LMA until June 18. Saunders emailed Bryant back with guidance on how to execute the shut-off with regard to students being on campus when it takes place.

Because of what followed, this communication, which other emails demonstrate was preceded by lunch meetings between the mayor and superintendent earlier that month, raises serious concerns as to whether the two officials were conspiring to orchestrate circumstances conducive to the district’s retaking of the school, especially since the mayor’s communications with the superintendent were never communicated to Hundley or LMA. It’s important to note that such obvious concerns were never investigated.

However, in what I imagine was a surprise to all parties, when a City of Palmetto utility worker delivered the shut-off notice to LMA, the worker was presented with a payment for the entire past due balance of $12,439.23. That day, Bryant emailed Saunders again, informing her that the school's account was paid and current, then emailed Palmetto City Commissioners to inform them as well.

That evening, Saunders emailed Mayor Bryant back, acknowledging receipt of the email regarding LMA paying the balance in full and being current. Here's where things get weird. On July 22–the day before the infamous school board meeting–Patrick seems to have manufactured a second water shut-off notice for LMA, which inaccurately stated that the bill due on 7/5/19 was "Now 45 days PAST DUE," emailing it to Saunders and indicating that she was doing so at the mayor’s instruction.

It was this bill/notice–the type and font of which did not match the more than 100 others issued by the city that month–that was displayed at the next night's school board meeting and used as justification for the assertion that LMA's finances had resulted in a threat to the health, safety, and welfare of its students. The board voted that night to retake the school, using emergency measures, and the same fabricated bill was used again the next month as evidence when the case was heard before the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings as justification of "serious and immediate danger to the health safety and welfare of the students." The Administrative Law Judge who ruled in favor of the district in that hearing even cited it in his ruling as "the most inexplicable failure to pay.“

City officials and attorneys have since cited everything from a computer glitch to a typo, none of which make one lick of sense in explaining why an account that had just been brought current had somehow lapsed into such inexplicable arrears, why there was more of an effort to communicate the matter to the district than the account holder, or why the demonstrably inaccurate document was continuously used as a piece of "evidence" even long after anyone who was paying the slightest bit of attention would have known it was illegitimate, including LMA’s appeal of the DOAH hearing, where it was again cited in the judge’s ruling.

What’s more, the fact that retaking LMA was brought up at a meeting for which it was not on the agenda prevented LMA from being able to properly counter the assertions being made at the meeting ahead of the takeover vote, and the immediate takeover saw Hundley and other officials locked out with no means to access records that could have been used in the hearings that followed.

This past December, board member Charlie Kennedy gave a sworn affidavit asserting that "City of Palmetto utility bills, emails between Palmetto Mayor Shirley Groover Bryant and Manatee Schools Superintendent Cynthia Saunders, and banking information of Lincoln Memorial Academy show there was no legal reason for a 45-day shut-off notice to be issued to LMA.“ Kennedy concluded his statement (click here to read in full) with, "it is my belief that the termination of LMA was not based on an immediate threat to the health, safety and welfare of the children."

At that point, the district's narrative simply shifted and officials began asserting that the shut-off notice wasn't even a major factor in the decision to retake the school and that regardless of any issues with the Title 1 funds, the school's finances were otherwise irreparable. In other words, none of this matters, the school just needed to be taken over by the district, end of story, nothing to see here. This narrative is also demonstrably false and, as I noted, I'll address it in future columns. However, there is simply no escaping the fact that the water bill ruse was central to the district's ability to use the emergency takeover process, denying LMA the 124-days of due process that all evidence suggests would have allowed them to successfully emerge from the district's efforts to take over the school.

This should be a scandal of epic proportions, much bigger than the sham Lena Road Landfill controversy and the county administrator scandal that followed, or even Vaccinegate. Should be, but because it only involves the loss of improved education for a bunch of underprivileged, mostly black and brown kids from a part of the county that most people avoid at all costs, its narrative has been successfully controlled by the victors at the expense of the victims.

What happened to Lincoln Memorial Academy was able to occur, perhaps above all else, because it happened in Manatee County, where there is an institutional rot so deep that its metaphorical stench is fouler than the third week of a nasty run of red-tide. That's right, not even a few thousand dead fish, their bloated flesh decomposing in the sweltering August sun, could stink this place up as badly as the politics so regularly do. And so long as the people who benefit from such injustices are allowed to control the narrative and operate with relative impunity, they’ll continue to keep busy by patting each other on the back and rewarding their own misdeeds while the less empowered suffer the consequences of their corruption.

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.