This blog post is intended as a resource, compiling recent problems of public access to information held by the DC charter board, with a list of related decisions by the DC office of open government (OOG) as well as other examples.

For background: OOG handles complaints around violations by DC government agencies of DC’s Open Meetings Act (OMA). While OOG is not the only district agency that handles concerns about DC agencies, I have found that other DC investigative agencies (DC inspector general and BEGA, the latter of which OOG is a part) don’t have any listing of (and/or any investigative imperative around) charter board cases. And but for one report on charter board oversight of DC charter schools, the DC auditor appears to have had no specific investigations of the charter board or of individual DC charter schools in the last decade.

(If any of that is wrong or incomplete, please let me know and I will add and correct as needed.)

The examples here are necessarily idiosyncratic, inasmuch as they are what individual citizens have noticed and reported. Given the extent to which these examples show, over less than a decade, the charter board repeatedly leaving out the public from notification of, and information about, its meetings and decision making, it stands to reason that these examples are likely a fraction of the total of such occurrences.

As a result of such citizen reporting, OOG has worked with the charter board in both monitoring of, and training around, its compliance with the OMA. The sheer breadth of repeated problems, however, suggests that such training and monitoring may not be effective in the face of few, if any, other consequences.

Although this blog post is focused on the charter board, DC’s other publicly funded education sector, DCPS, is not a shining example of public accessibility. But the chief difference between the charter board and DCPS in this regard is that no elected official in DC can claim to have a formal oversight role with respect to DC charter schools, while there are statutory imperatives for DCPS oversight.

That is small consolation, of course, as DCPS often handles information with a disregard for the public similar to that in the examples here. (A search of this blog with the word “accountability” yields plenty of problems in both sectors.) Indeed, this blog and this post could never exist in a place in which public interest in its publicly funded schools is squarely centered on the public. It is not now (and possibly never has been) in DC.

Thus, I hope these examples prove inspirational for all readers to demand better governance around DC’s publicly funded schools, to which we here in DC give $2 billion annually of our own money.

DC, do better.

Recent OOG decisions around charter board information sharing (in roughly chronological order)

–On August 9, 2017, OOG determined that the charter board’s June 2017 meeting was improperly noticed. That meeting involved the board re-voting on (and approving) DC Prep’s enrollment increase application that two months prior had been rejected by the charter board. The re-vote was taken without the public being notified that it would be discussed and voted on.

A month after OOG’s determination, the charter board fought back, noting an apparent conflict between the board’s enabling legislation and the OMA. When later asked by DC citizens to reconsider the vote taken at the improperly noticed June 2017 meeting, both the head of the charter board and its executive director never responded. Since then, both OOG’s determination and the charter board’s response to it have been posted on the charter board’s public comment website.

–On June 28, 2018, OOG determined that lack of notice to an ANC about the charter board’s consideration of a charter school was not something it could weigh in on, as it didn’t involve the OMA. While that lack of notice did appear to be a violation of a law specifying that ANCs need to be notified by the charter board, OOG had no jurisdiction and dismissed the complaint.

–On March 28, 2019, OOG determined that the charter board met in several improperly noticed and closed sessions. In the complaint that gave rise to OOG’s determination, I documented frequent closed charter board meetings in a relatively short span of time. OOG promised to monitor charter board compliance with the OMA for 6 months thereafter.

–On September 20, 2021, OOG determined that the charter board failed to provide required notice of a special meeting held on April 5, 2021. The complaint’s author and the charter board participated in a conciliation meeting, during which the charter board admitted its error. But the charter board also apparently maintained that following the law was not practical, as the issues discussed at the special meeting were time-sensitive. The OOG ordered the charter board to issue a plan to ensure staff were on notice and to undergo training.

–The following relates to two actions by OOG: An August 30, 2021 advisory letter to the charter board on retaining records and a January 4, 2022 determination that the charter board did not include links on its website to some meetings and failed to notice cancelled and rescheduled meetings. The January 2022 determination recommended OMA training within 60 days.

Background:

On April 30, 2021, I filed a complaint with OOG that some records of charter board meetings were inaccessible and/or not retained and incomplete. In its June 16, 2021 response to the complaint, the charter board admitted to some of the problems while denying others.

I had no idea of that June response by the charter board when OOG asked me on July 8, 2021 whether I was interested in engaging in the conciliation process to resolve my April 2021 complaint. Weirdly, 26 hours later (and before I responded), that offer was rescinded, and OOG notified me that it would issue a decision on my complaint. When I noted that I had not been notified of a deadline for responding, OOG re-extended the offer of conciliation.

I quickly accepted–but weeks later, OOG again rescinded the offer of conciliation because the charter board apparently decided not to participate. I was then told that my complaint was time-barred, and I was given the choice of having my complaint rejected or withdrawing it myself.

When I protested, I was then offered a meeting on August 12, 2021 with OOG staff to hear directly from me concerning my April 2021 complaint and any related issues.

Most, if not all, of those related issues are contained in this blog post. In fact, because video of that August 12 meeting would have been a handy summation of these issues, I tried to get it publicly released. Here is the denial of my FOIA request–and here is my fruitless appeal.

Recent examples of publicly inaccessible/obscured information by way of the charter board (in roughly chronological order)

–All videos of charter board meetings before January 2018 have been destroyed; as far as I know, there has never been public acknowledgement of that by the charter board. I became aware of this on April 29, 2019. On that day, in response to an email from me asking where previously available videos of charter board meetings were on the charter board website, spokesperson Tomeika Bowden noted that “our video provider destroyed our video archives prior to Jan 2018 in error. We’ve worked unsuccessfully for months to get access. Please know a transcript is available for every meeting.”

–Not all charter board meetings on the charter board website have transcripts, which are usually done by a third party. Some instead have minutes, presumably provided by a charter board staff member. It is not noted why some are treated this way. In 2019, I pointed out to the charter board that both the June 2017 and July 2017 charter board meeting links had no transcripts available—only minutes, though they are labelled as transcripts. As of August 2023, these meetings still don’t have transcripts on the charter board website. It remains unclear to me whether transcripts of these (and any other meetings without transcripts linked on the website) exist at all.

–Charter contract reporting by the charter board is disaggregated by month—not reported by school or in an annual total by school. (See the charter board website page here.) While charter school 990s provide some of this information, they lag by years, which means there is no way for anyone outside the schools or the charter board to know what contracts each school has at any given moment. There is consequentially no obvious or easy way to identify patterns of spending or hiring.

–No elected or appointed DC official has specific knowledge of individual charter donors, use of reserves, teacher pay, per pupil expenditures, facilities expenditures, contracts, and use of at risk funds, so oversight of DC charters by officials directly accountable to the public is necessarily limited. The charter board may have some of this information, but if so it is not publicly accessible via its website (and also may not be accessible by FOIA request).

–In the last few years, charter board staff have gone to great lengths to obscure public reporting of DC charter schools’ philanthropic revenue—despite collecting this data directly from schools. Charter board staff have also repeatedly violated DC FOIA law around this reporting, which is not mandated by law.

–In debating revoking National Collegiate Prep’s charter, the charter board discussed the school at two meetings in January 2019: January 16 and January 22, 2019. Although both meetings are listed on the events page of the charter board website, there is no transcript available of the January 16, 2019 meeting (although there is a video).

But early on in the January 22 meeting, charter board member Saba Bireda referenced a meeting about National Collegiate Prep on January 17, which is not on the charter board website. It is unclear whether Bireda actually meant January 16–or the December 17, 2018 board meeting, when the board discussed the school and recommended charter revocation. While board members at the January 22, 2019 meeting voted to revoke the school’s charter, they also agreed to an amended charter agreement for closure. I was also unable to find that on the charter board website.

Among other things, fiscal constraints factored in the school’s continuance—but the next year (2020) National Collegiate Prep was among dozens of DC charter schools granted PPP loans, even as the school ended operations after the 2019-2020 school year. The charter board’s financial information on DC charters does not include any accounting of PPP loans to DC charters. I was also unable to find a final accounting for National Collegiate Prep on the charter board website.

–A charter board meeting noticed for May 15, 2019, had no public record for years running; here is what it looked like in June 2021. Possibly because I complained about this in 2021 to OOG, here is what it looks like now.

–The original staff report on Washington Latin’s expansion, created for the June 25, 2019 charter board meeting, was removed from the public domain and never reinstated when the board decided to table consideration of the expansion. The next month, the charter board created and posted a different staff report ahead of voting on Latin’s expansion at the July 15, 2019 charter board meeting. I obtained the June 25, 2019 staff report by FOIA request, and it showed substantive differences, mainly relating to new conditions for the expansion. (I had initially been told that once removed, the June 25, 2019 report became a “deliberative” document, which would have prevented it being released via FOIA. But DC law provides that documents once in the public domain cannot be exempt from FOIA.)

–In early 2020, the DC school lottery listed Lee Montessori East End being at 2345 R SE for the 2020-21 school year—without the charter board having approved it being at that address. The only public mention by the charter board at that time of Lee being at that address was in a charter board report on Eagle’s application to not be at that property. That charter board report was dated January 27, 2020 and had been posted on the charter board website until it was substituted for another with the same date that was identical except for not mentioning Lee explicitly. There has never been public acknowledgement of this switch, which presumably was done to get around acknowledging a school’s proposed location ahead of its approval by the charter board. 

–A “special” charter board meeting on February 12, 2020, once on the charter board website, no longer exists officially. (See the link here: https://dcpcsb.org/special-board-meeting-february-2020) I was unable to find it listed anywhere on the official DC government calendar or on the charter board website. In an email to me in response to my noting this, charter board spokesperson Tomeika Bowden said the meeting never took place–but offered no explanation for the removal of the notice; what the meeting was about; nor why it never took place.

–The application of Digital Pioneers to expand its grades was slated to be voted on by the charter board in December 2020, as reported at the November 2020 charter board meeting (see pages 44-98 of the meeting transcript). The board memo presented at that November 2020 hearing explicitly said the vote was slated for December 14, at the board’s regularly scheduled monthly meeting. 

But the charter board voted for Digital Pioneers in a “special” meeting on December 10—NOT at its regularly scheduled December meeting on December 14. In the emailed reminder I received from the charter board on December 11, 2020, Digital Pioneers was not on the December 14 meeting agenda.

In addition, there was no notice of that “special” meeting on December 10 through that monthly email reminder nor on the OOG calendar–despite the fact that all regular charter board meetings are on the latter. When I emailed charter board spokesperson Tomeika Bowden about this, she noted the 5 pm December 10 meeting was announced at 11 am that same day on twitter–without any mention of what the meeting was for. (That twitter announcement now links to the charter board website for that meeting.)

Because the DC school lottery started on December 14 that year, urgency was clearly an issue in ensuring the vote happened before December 14. But neither that urgency nor the reason for it was ever publicly revealed.

–Several people told me that they were unable as members of the public to testify before the charter board at its April 19, 2021 meeting. One person said she signed up by noon that day, but was skipped. Another person said that the president of the River Terrace Association also was overlooked despite signing up. And yet another person noted that there was an announcement that there would be a second opportunity for public comment—but the meeting was adjourned before that happened.

–Shortly thereafter, in 2022, the charter board changed its public comment policy, such that the public has more limited chances to weigh in.

–In August 2021, on this website, the charter board memo dated August 16, 2021 said no public comment was received on a proposal from Maya Angelou charter school to provide educational services to jailed youth.

The lack of public comment was likely because there was no publicly available proposal for the public to comment on before the charter board’s August 16 meeting.

Specifically, the public comment page on the charter board website for this proposal still looks like it did back in August 2021 (when I took this screenshot). It makes clear that at the time of posting, the proposal was not yet in hand. In fact, adobe acrobat says the notice for this proposal at that public comment page was created on August 4, 2021—two days after the public comment website indicates it was posted. As a result, even if someone in the public wanted to request the proposal by FOIA, they never would have had time to get it before the charter board voted on it.

The notice says the proposal was being considered on an expedited basis, despite the fact that the contract for education services for jailed youth had ended months earlier.

I observed that sometime during the weekend before the August 16, 2021 charter board meeting (i.e., 48 or fewer hours before the meeting), the proposal was posted on the charter board website here. That website now functions as the record of that August 16, 2021 meeting.

–In March 2022, the GAO reported that the charter board left off 3 out of 15 legally required elements from its 2021 annual report (the annual summary of reasons for denying charter applications; description of charters issued annually; number of schools with late financial statements). As far as I could see, the charter board included the first two in its latest (2023) annual report, but not schools with late financial statements. I could find no reason given.

–The first posted application of Community College Prep to the charter board for a new location (October 2022) was made publicly inaccessible by the charter board, without notice. (It is here.) A revised application is in the materials for the December 2022 charter board meeting, without any explanation about the earlier version.

–The charter board held a closed session on April 24, 2023 to discuss KIPP DC’s finances. The meeting was publicly noticed only 72 hours before, on a Friday, in the DC Register, and took place 3 years after the embezzlement of $2 million started and about 2 years after KIPP DC had underreported $5 million. It is unknown whether the charter board has ever discussed the underreported $5 million.

Some Sources

Lack of meaningful financial information for DC charters:

Charter finances

FOIA blocking

Missing information for DC charters:

Regulatory capture

Earlier examples

Latin’s missing staff report