There’s really no reason for anyone to know that Holsteiner Agricultural School, a charter school in Maricopa, exists, except for the families it serves. It’s a tiny school, 50 to 60 students max, and it appeared from the outside to be completely unexceptional until Diane Douglas added it to her erase-and-replace AIMS cheating list—possible cheating list, I should say, though the evidence against this and the other seven schools is pretty damning. I began hunting around the web to see what I could find out about Holsteiner charter, and what I found led me to look for more, then more, all of which led me to ask a number of questions I can’t answer.
First the [possible] cheating story. Holsteiner Agricultural School’s state grade made an almost unbelievable jump from a “D” in 2013 to an “A” in 2014. It turns out, the jump very likely shouldn’t be believed. On the 2014 tests, an unlikely number of wrong answers were changed to right answers.
“(S)tudents in the fourth grade corrected their responses to the right answer 83 percent of the time in reading and 85 percent of the time in mathematics,” a letter from the Education Department states.
The school superintendent’s answer to the cheating allegation raised a huge red flag for me.
Holsteiner Superintendent Tanya Graysmark, however, told The Arizona Republic in an e-mail Friday that her school has done nothing wrong.
“We worked with our students all year on best test practices (to go back and check their answers and make any necessary changes to their test — to do the best they can) prior to turning it in,” she said. “This may have caused a lot of erasure marks,” she wrote.
Graysmark should have said, “I’ll look into it,” instead of denying there was any wrongdoing and suggesting that the school’s eagle-eyed fourth graders made mistakes on their first pass through the test, then went back, found the mistakes and came up with the right answer over 80 percent of the time.
I decided, if Graysmark would make a comment that questionable and self serving, she and the school deserved a closer look. Here’s what I found.
Let’s begin with the school building. Here it is on Google Maps.
Holsteiner Agricultural School is in the Maricopa Business Center, a garden variety strip mall. And the sign isn’t for Holsteiner Agricultural School. It says Graysmark Academy. The reason is, Graysmark Academy is a private, for-profit preschool owned by the same Tanya Graysmark who is the director of Holsteiner charter. Both schools operate out of the same building.
So, the storefront in the Maricopa Business Center houses both a private, for-profit preschool, which charges from $3,860 to $4,720 per year for a child who comes five days a week, and a publicly funded K-6, nonprofit charter school. Tanya Graysmark is both director and teacher of the preschool as well as the director of the charter.
The charter school has three board members, Tanya Graysmark, Charles Graysmark and Anita Romero. Romero is one of the three teachers at the Graysmark Academy preschool.
Along with being both director and teacher at Graysmark Academy preschool, Tanya Graysmark makes a $118,000 salary at Holsteiner charter where she works an average of 50 hours a week, according to the school’s tax form. It may be possible that Graysmark can put in 50 hours each week at the charter school and still be director and teacher at the for-profit preschool, but it’s also possible that’s stretching things a bit.
Holsteiner charter school is a nonprofit paid for with taxpayer money, which makes it a separate entity from the private, for-profit preschool. Holsteiner charter pays rent for its portion of the facility housing them both, of course. According to the tax form, that comes to $123,000 a year. I admit I don’t know what a storefront rents for, so it may be that $10,255 a month is a reasonable price for a portion of the space it shares with the preschool. On top of rent , the charter school’s office expenses are listed as $100,000.
The charter received $590,000 in combined state and federal funds for its 2013-2014 school year. That comes to almost $10,000 for each of its 60 students. The state portion is about $430,000, which would give the school a more standard $7,200 per student. The added $160,000 is from the federal government.
In its first school year, 2011-2012, when it had a total of 43 students, the charter received $285,000 from the state and $226,000 from the federal government. Adding in a few extra dollars here and there, the school had a total budget of $528,000, or $12,300 per student. During the 2012-2013 school year, it received about $200,000 from the federal government .
It looks like some teachers may work at both the private preschool and the publicly funded charter, though that’s not entirely clear from their websites. Graysmark lists three teachers on its website: Director Tanya Graysmark, Anita Romero (who is the on the Holsteiner charter board) and someone referred to simply as Miss Bernie. The Holsteiner charter teacher page is blank. Anita Romero says about herself, “I am the assistant director and an elementary teacher here at Graysmark Academy.” Since Graysmark only goes up to pre-K, the only way she could be an elementary school teacher is by also teaching at the K-6 charter. Miss Bernie says about herself, “I have had the opportunity to work in the classrooms with our preschool students and work one on one with our preschoolers and our elementary students.”
All this information confirms for me the length and depth of my ignorance when it comes to charter school matters, especially the confounding issue of charter finances, leaving me with a list of unanswered questions. So let me add my questions to the one Diane Douglas asked, which was: Did Holsteiner charter come by its amazing jump in AIMS scores legitimately, or was there some kind of cheating involved?
Here are my questions.
1. Does Tonya Graysmark keep the finances of her two schools housed in the same building, the private, for-profit preschool and the publicly funded, nonprofit charter school, scrupulously separate?
2. Does Tanya Graysmark put in a 50 hour week, as is stated on the tax form, to earn her $118,000 salary at Holsteiner charter, on top of her jobs as director and teacher at Graysmark preschool?
3. Is $123,000 a legitimate yearly rent for part of a storefront in the Maricopa Business Center?
4. How does Holsteiner charter, with under 60 students, spend $100,000 on office expenses?
5. Why did a school with 43 students its first year, 2011-2012, get $226,000 from the federal government on top of its normal $285,000 allocation from the state?
6. Why did Holsteiner charter continue to receive extra federal funding its next two years—approximately $200,000 and $160,000?
Maybe the State Board of Charter Schools has good, reasonable answers to my questions. Or maybe not, in which case the state should be looking at more than the test scores at Holsteiner Agricultural Charter School.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2015.
While reading this article my first thought was who was providing the oversight for the US gov’t. We obviously are getting close oversight at the state level but is that all? People are constantly on the rampage about how we need to spend more money on this that or the other yet here is another example of why we DON’T need to spend more money. As a fiscal conservative I am constantly berated for my position yet here comes a story supporting my position.
What is the answer? Maybe we SHOULD shutter the Dept of Ed and use that money in a better way though as I type this I realize the nonsense of my suggestion; expecting the gov’t to be responsible with my/our money.
Good article, David. I have been following your posts with not much time to be of torment ;-}
Look how easily David audited them. Could TUSD be in your future?
Harold, are you kidding? “We obviously are getting close to oversight at the state level…”??!! What part of this story leads you to believe that? Do you think the State is doing anything about the finances at this school? When you suggest shuttering the Dept. of Ed., are you talking about the fed or state? While the feds give some support to charter schools, this beast is entirely a creature of the State of Arizona and it’s “conservative” legislature. And this story suggests to you that government needs to spend less money across the board? This story suggests that once $$ goes into charter schools, there should be public accountability and charter schools’ discretion should be more limited.
It is just constantly amazing to me how quickly so-called conservatives who don’t believe in spending money on public education even WITH massive amounts of accountability become wild-eyed blind spenders when it comes to charters paid for with public monies. The fact that they don’t have to answer questions about enrollment, about teacher credentials or about financial transactions is staggering. Accountability for one should be accountability for all. And that goes not just from the state and feds to the schools, but within the schools as well. When a school employee has to fill out in triplicate exactly HOW that $20.00 was spent while an administrator from central is able to perform a “sweep”of federal monies from family engagement to a smaller class size initiative without oversight, there should be big trouble in river city……
rat t, was that a compliment? Do you think I should apply for the internal auditor job?
More seriously, when you have a single school like this one that has to submit financial reports and student counts to the state and has its tax forms online, which is mandatory for nonprofits, it’s possible to do some citizen oversight like this, though the information isn’t granular enough to really know what’s going on — and if there’s a for-profit component, it’s impossible to look inside. TUSD is huge and its budget is as complex as a corporation’s. So far as I know, the financial information on TUSD is available in far more detail on than I found here, but regular human beings like me can’t fathom it.
I spent nearly half of my professional career as a consulting civil engineer specializing in large transportation projects. When, as a consultant, I provided professional services to any government agency, I expected an audit. After all, we were using taxpayer dollars. Our salaries, our expenses, the time we worked, our overhead were all public information, all in the interest of transparency and accountability to the taxpayer. So how come the private, for profit, taxpayer funded charter schools don’t have to follow the same rules?
Michael, charters have to have someone do some kind of audit, but it’s pretty much just seeing if the numbers add up. It doesn’t have to look into inefficiencies, who’s getting the money, etc. However, we have a state board of charter schools that should be paying more attention to this kind of thing, to weed out some of the truly bad apples out there. But the board has 6 or 7 employees total, so even if they were vigilant, which they’re not, they could barely make a dent. The number of the employees was purposeful, by the way, to keep government hands off the schools and let the “invisible hand of the marketplace” work its magic. But for a lot of reasons, education doesn’t work so well with that “invisible hand” stuff.
I know what you mean David. And it shouldn’t be that complex. They are not subject to tax laws like corporations. It leads one to believe they are hiding something. Just the pension plans alone, when you look at municipalities, are staggering. With growing life expectancies we are adding layer upon layer of retirees to those plans.
It will collapse. That is without some major adjustments.
And BP-H is wrong above. Too broad a statement that all conservatives turn a blind eye to spending. Waste is waste regardless of who is wasting.
PLEASE keep up this line of investigation and reporting, and keep it all fair and above the belt, just like you have been. There’s a lot of vitriol out there, and the more you cut through that fog, the more people will listen.
Her’s some simple math – $120K annually for rent for 60 students, $118K annually for the principal’s salary for 60 students. Those are both administrative costs. That means each student is contributing $4,000 of their state per pupil expenditure to administration. That’s well over 50 percent of state funding going to administration. Great scoop by David Safier, this seems on its face to be either fraud or gross mismanagement.
Okay, maybe I misunderstand “oversight” which, in my feeble mind is what Ms. Douglas is doing with her “cheater’s” list. Please help me out, Jana because you obviously have a better grasp of the term than I do.
If you prefer a federal beauracracy, or ANY beauracracy for that matter which doles out public money with no concern for it’s use then I’ll continue to be the despised conservative I am. AND I will also vote in that direction until someone comes up with that “better mousetrap”.
As for charters, I am in general opposition because they do more to make money than to teach students. That being said, there is a charter school running on D~M because TUSD refused to reopen THAT building several years ago.
There is plenty of blame to go around and the problem is NOT about how I personally feel about education but how my, and your moiney is spent on that education.
Thank you David. When I saw the amount of students and the money they receive,I was truly speechless. And yes, this is not fed’s job to oversee but the state’s job. However our state doesn’t believe in interfering in schools for profit…. just public education. David is bringing it to the light and I thank you especially now that Ducey has promised not to raise taxes a bit for education even if voters voted for it. I would wonder if anyone would vote for it anyway because of the 1.2 billion the state took from education and it appears there aren’t or weren’t any consequences. No guarantee education would see it. Ducey even promised in his campaign to never pay it back. Yes I know he shuffled paper so it looks like he did pay what was due this year for the court but education did not see it because of the massive cuts. So why would voters trust any vote for education? What boggles my mind more is they elected someone who said that.
This charter has absolutely zero scruples. From their website:
“Holsteiner Agricultural School is a 501(c)(3). Our school is always accepting of donations for our program of instruction. We keep a ‘Wish List’ that allows community members, teachers and parents to be aware of our most current needs. If you come across any of the items listed below please keep us in mind. Your generosity is greatly appreciated!
Holsteiner Agricultural School Wish List(updated 3/11)
Planter boxes (all sizes)
Ceramic planters/pots (all sizes)
Healthy indoor plants (small size)
Potting soil
Gardening hand tools
Gardening gloves (kids and adult sizes)
Student microscope(s)
Copy paper”
Looks like they should increase those Administrative fees……………………………
David, I know for a fact that Tanya Graysmark doesn’t work at the school she doesn’t even live in AZ. The front office lady is one of my neighbors and in conversation a year or so a go she mentioned that Tanya is never their and she doesn’t even live in AZ. Just a little FYI