Church-run charter school may be booted out of Texas program

Church & State, Sep 2002

Education officials in Texas have pull ed the plug on a church-run charter school that has been embroiled in scandal and financial mismanagement.

In mid July the Texas Education Agency (TEA) held a three-day hearing on the fate of the Prepared Table Charter School, an institution run by the Rev. Harold Wayne Wilcox of the Greater Progressive Tabernacle Baptist Church in Humble. The school, which has been in existence since 1998, has allegedly squandered millions in tax dollars.

On Aug. 16, TEA officials revoked the controversial school's state charter and its lucrative public funding.

Texas lawmakers approved a charter school law in 1997 but officials have been lax in overseeing the program. Nearly any group or individual who applied for a charter got one - along with public funding.

The Kingwood Observer reported that Wilcox appointed himself and church board members as school administrators. Classes were held in the church sanctuary, and the "school" began paying the church $68,000 per month in rent, courtesy of the taxpayers.

Within a few years, the church had purchased or rented several other properties to expand, even though these new charters had not been approved by the TEA. By the fall of 2000, reported the Observer, Prepared Table was receiving nearly $8 million per year from the state of Texas.

TEA officials eventually became suspicious over a series of cozy arrangements between the school and church members. A church member who owned a cleaning service that cleaned the schools received $140,000 per month. When Wilcox resigned from the school, he received a "buyout package" worth $235,000 from the board - which consisted of Wilcox, his wife and his wife's sister.

Wilcox, who does not have a college degree, paid himself $210,000 annually to run the school. He paid his wife $50,000 to act as his secretary. This year, only 23 percent of Prepared Table students at the main campus passed Texas' proficiency exam. The figure was even lower at another Prepared Table school -- 18 percent.

State officials also accused the school of inflating the number of students attending. The school claimed 2,500 students, but TEA officials said they could never confirm that more than 1,500 were enrolled.

Meanwhile, reports are circulating that the U.S. Attorney's Office is investigating Wilcox.

The Observer, which has covered the problems at Prepared Table in depth, editorialized in July, "[A]fter months and months and millions and millions of local, state and federal dollars being poured into the `school,' it turns out that the children are still failing, they can't pass TAAS [Texas' state proficiency exam], the police are regularly called to the campuses, and the superintendent has paid himself nearly $800,000 and his wife another $200,000 since the school opened in 1998. Your tax dollars have made millions of dollars worth of improvements to the church/school buildings (what we would call a real church/state separation issue) and the TEA won't or can't control the situation."

The scandal, along with other problems, has prompted Texas legislators to take a second look at charter schools. In heavily populated Harris County, the Houston Chronicle reported in June, only 13 of the county's 61 charter schools saw 85 percent of their students pass the state's proficiency exam, putting them far behind public schools in performance.

Americans United Board of Trustees member Charlotte Coffelt, a resident of Houston and a former principal of a public elementary school, commented on the scandal in the July 23 Houston Chronicle.

"Prepared Table Charter School should be a textbook case of what happens when individuals and organizations with no background in either managing a business or having successfully provided effective educational programs are given access to public monies," Coffelt warned. "Many millions were invested in this 'innovative' educational program, with dismal academic results and evidence of massive misuse of public money and falsification of public documents."