Home charter schools rein in spending of taxpayer money on ‘enrichment’ amid scrutiny

As public scrutiny of home school charters grows, one of California’s largest home school charter networks is putting more restrictions on what families can buy with the enrichment funds that it gives them.

Inspire charter schools — two of which are authorized in San Diego County — told families on Tuesday that they can no longer use school-provided enrichment funds to buy dinner theater tickets, out-of-state field trips, parent tickets or passes for non-teacher-led field trips.

Also prohibited now: season passes or annual memberships, except for YMCA student-family memberships.

“Please note that these changes are not for legal reasons, but for political and/or public perception and are consistent with the common practices of independent study charter schools throughout the state,” said Jonathan Jose, Inspire’s chief customer service officer, in a letter to families on Tuesday.

Jose said the “good news” is that the changes won’t go into effect until Aug. 1, allowing a transition period for families to continue placing orders for those items in the next couple weeks.

Jose said in a statement to The San Diego Union-Tribune on Friday, “We have always operated within the boundaries of what is allowed under state laws and regulations but we wanted to take the extra step of being intentional in asking whether we should take an even more conservative approach when it came to allowable expenditures.”

The policy change comes less than a month after the Union-Tribune published a story describing how a few home school charters such as Inspire have been operating.

Inspire gives families $2,600 to $2,800 a year per student to spend on curriculum and other educational resources, as well as field trip tickets and recreational activities. Inspire provides families with a list of thousands of vendors that they can choose.

Inspire does not make students sit in class or study any particular curriculum; rather, Inspire leaves it up to parents to decide how to educate their children from home in what is a little-known form of school choice.

Inspire’s approach has generated a large following of parents. Parents say the flexible approach allows their children to enjoy learning more than they would in a regular public school, where schoolwork is often mundane and where students deal with bullying and other school pressures.

“Every family has to find the right fit for them, and the right fit for me was that I wanted to not only have a lot of control over how my kids learned and what they learned, but the environment that they learned in,” said Nadine Utz, an Inspire parent.

Inspire is one of several home school charter networks across California that use a vendor-based model, although other schools differ in the types of vendors they offer and the rules they set for families in spending funds.

Inspire vendors have offered Pirates Dinner Adventure tickets, San Diego Zoo annual passes, private lessons for horseback riding, ice skating, music and more, as well as field trips to places such as Catalina Island.

There are virtually no state rules about how home school charter families are allowed to use enrichment funds, partly because home school charters are not well-known outside of home school circles.

In a recent online info session for parents, an Inspire administrator told families that they cannot use funds for religious curriculum. Inspire families are also told to return non-consumable items, such as laptops, to Inspire once they leave the school so that the items do not become gifts of public funds, which is illegal.

Inspire says that teachers must approve any use of the funds.

Inspire families have justified their enrichment opportunities by saying they are educational, often offered by traditional public schools and beneficial for their children’s social well-being.

That’s the case for Nicole Hansen, who has a visually impaired daughter with cognitive and detachment issues. A typical classroom would not have worked for her daughter, Hansen said.

Inspire has allowed her daughter to learn in a less overwhelming environment and with more hands-on experiences, Hansen said. At the same time, Inspire provides a speech teacher, a mobility teacher and a Braille teacher as part of her daughter’s special education plan.

Hansen has used enrichment funds to take her daughter on field trips to places such as a camel ranch and the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library & Birthplace. She also used funds to get a San Diego Zoo annual pass and violin lessons for her daughter.

“I think any kid would benefit by getting out more and experiencing and touching the whole subject instead of reading a book,” Hansen said. “My daughter wouldn’t be able to understand what a camel is by reading about it.”

Charter schools like Inspire are funded with taxpayer dollars. Unlike traditional district schools, charters are independently-run and given more flexibility in how they serve students.

Inspire’s founder and executive director, Nick Nichols, oversaw nine schools, with at least 23,300 students statewide this past school year.

Two of those schools — Inspire Charter School South, which was recently renamed Cabrillo Point Academy, and Pacific Coast Academy — are authorized by Dehesa School District in San Diego County. Dehesa has come under scrutiny for its authorization of several non-classroom-based charter schools, including three A3 schools that were involved in a recent federal indictment involving charter schools that allegedly billed the state for fake students.

Nichols has averaged an annual salary of $380,000 in the five years he has been CEO, according to Inspire’s board president, exceeding salaries made by leaders of other local charter schools and by local school district superintendents.

Tuesday was not the first time Inspire has reined in its enrichment fund policy for fear of provoking political backlash against charter schools.

Until last year, Inspire allowed families to use enrichment funds for amusement park tickets, including Disneyland tickets. Several home school charter parents have said it is rare for a home school charter to allow enrichment funds to be spent on theme park tickets. Valiant, an A3 school authorized by Dehesa that has now closed, was one known to allow them.

One of Inspire’s vendors, Celebration Education, used to offer a special enrichment program in which students attended a class at Disneyland every week to study topics such as “Cars Land” and “May the Fourth be With You,” according to an Inspire Facebook post in 2015.

That program came with a free Disneyland annual pass, paid for with enrichment funds.

Inspire changed its policy to no longer allow amusement park tickets in August of last year.

Like it did with Tuesday’s policy change, Inspire did not tell families it believed the amusement park ticket expenditures were wrong or illegal, according to a letter that Nichols wrote to families. Inspire said it made the change because it does not want to politically endanger charter schools.

“Simply put, there are many political forces in the state of California, that seek to limit or stop the flexibility that California charter schools offer to families,” Nichols wrote in the letter about amusement park tickets. “We feel that the best way in the big picture to protect your personalized homeschool learning approach is to make this change at this time.”

Still, Inspire’s most recent enrichment policy change has not deterred parents like Hansen, who said she has not used funds for theme park tickets.

“Honestly, the whole program is worth so much to me that even with the changes, I’m not gonna go anywhere,” Hansen said.