Blackwell Aide Close to Charter (School corruption scandal)

Blackwell aide close to charter
Chief of staff receives income, gifts from school even as it overcharges state millions of dollars
By Dennis J. Willard and Doug Oplinger
Beacon Journal staff writers

COLUMBUS - Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's chief of staff has had an ongoing relationship with the state's largest charter school, receiving income and gifts from the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow while the school at times overcharged the state millions of dollars.

Sherri Dembinski is third in charge in Blackwell's office, which oversees the chartering of nonprofit organizations. ECOT is a nonprofit organization.

Blackwell also oversees reporting of campaign contributions. Managers of ECOT -- including Dembinski -- collectively have contributed about $330,000 to Ohio Republicans since the founding of the school.

ECOT has been embroiled in controversy since the fall of 2000 as it attempted to start a publicly funded online school that would educate children in their homes on computers. In 2002, the school was found by Department of Education auditors to have overcharged the state as much as$7 million for children it could not verify as on the rolls.

More: http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/14211684.htm

I hope she's "indisposable" to him.

As a sidenote, I worked in State telecom. If you don't have your crap together vendors will grab your cash and run for the hills. I watched another agency as several million dollars got leached from the government udder and the private industry partner then went belly-up with barely any product at all delivered. Oh but they did manage to produce a bunch of monogrammed pens, T-shirts, rubber balls that light up when you bounce them, and such. Worst of both worlds there -- public officials that shirked their homework, and the supposedly-lean-and-mean corporate machine doing what they usually do when it comes to state contracts -- treating them like a handout they are somehow entitled to.

This, however, given the campaign contributions, seems like something a wee bit more sinister than corporate greed and bumbling by some less-than-savvy government patronage-job holders.

it's a disastarous ripoff. The site goes down all the time, most of the curriculum is linked to another company's site, and teachers are often unresponsive and unclear in their assignments & expectations. I still think an online school is a good idea for some students (most of my kids have disabilities), but not this program.

I've alrady talked two clients into getting back into the public school system. Not exactly good for business, but what they're doing is criminal - literally and figuratively.

I do hope Ohio voters are getting fed up and decide to turn out the GOP, who have been treating state tax dollars as entitled gifts to friends who then give nice gifts back to the Ohio GOP, come November.

ahead!

Would be less surprised in the latter given rival Petro's close ties to the Noe and Noe-esque scandals of the current Taft regime. Also wouldn't be surprised if all of these details of ethics problems related to Blackwell aren't coming from the Petro folks - given that as Atty Gen he would likely be privvy to a lot of knowledge per ethickal challenges of Blackwell. All in all very interesting political drama.

However, if Blackwell is 12 pts ahead in general (over a dem candidate), then I am puzzled - very puzzled.

The last poll I saw had him 10-12 points down to Strickland in the general.

where there HASN'T been a scandal. Education of children is and should be a public trust. To introduce the profit motive is to break that trust.

Is it still illegal to "overcharged the state millions of dollars," because it sure looks like they do a lot of that. Pretty soon those taxpayers are going to be broke and not even have bureaucracy and bureaucrats to blame it on. Everything will be being run by nonprofit fronts and contractors. There won't be enough of the public sector left to even give it a decent burial.