An Algiers elementary school coach accused last week of the statutory rape of a student is now facing a more serious allegation. Police suspect that Frank Norris, 23, began abusing the unidentified student in April 2010, when she was 11 and in the sixth grade
The man police are investigating for theft and fraud involving $31,000 in school funds has been accused of taking public education dollars before.
The man police are investigating for theft and fraud involving $31,000 in school funds has been accused of taking public education dollars before.
The New Orleans Police Department is working with federal investigators in an embezzlement case from 2011 at Lusher Charter School that so far has led to no charges against the admitted embezzler...Lauren Hightower, a former accountant at the Uptown school, was discovered by administrators to have forged signatures on checks adding up to $25,800. The investigation into her activities is focused on the forgeries...
[Benjamin Mays Preparatory School] is one of four charters in transition this year. The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted in December to strip the school of its charter because of low academic performance. Three other charters, Pride College Prep, Crocker Arts and Technology School and Intercultural Charter School, also were not renewed. But other operators agreed to run those schools, giving enrolled students priority. Though another school will be at the Mays site next year — Akili Academy — Akili is moving from its former location, not expanding, and it will enroll its own students first. That means Mays’ students will be dispersed to schools across the city...
The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana threatened Tuesday to sue a northeastern Louisiana charter school if it doesn't change rules that keep pregnant students out of the classroom and require girls under suspicion of being pregnant to be tested. The four-paragraph "Student Pregnancy Policy" in Delhi Charter School's policy manual says that if a suspected girl refuses to take a pregnancy test, she can be removed from class or the school.That violates the U.S. Constitution and federal laws against sexual discrimination, state ACLU executive director Marjorie R. Esman said...The pregnancy policy, on page 130 of the manual, says pregnant students who want to stay in the school must study at home.
Staff at the Robert Russa Moton Charter School, one of the highest-ranked open-enrollment schools in New Orleans, violated state testing policy to help fourth-grade students pass standardized exams last year, a district investigation found. The school denies any cheating took place.
Correspondence among school, district and state officials obtained through a public records request detail allegations brought by anonymous whistle-blowers, among them a charge -- apparently substantiated -- that fourth-graders were shown writing prompts for the state's LEAP exam ahead of time to give them a leg up.
When talk-show host Oprah Winfrey handed a $1 million check last September to the principal of New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, 200 students watched the broadcast from a church and celebrated with a brass band.Lawrence Melrose, a ninth-grader with learning and emotional disabilities, sat next door in a school office. The staff was concerned his fighting and cursing could be an embarrassment, said Shelton Joseph, his great uncle. Because he has trouble communicating, Lawrence needed intensive counseling and speech therapy, which the school didn’t provide, Joseph said. He was repeatedly suspended and told he couldn’t take the school bus with other kids, according to his lawyer.The education of 16-year-old Lawrence represents a common complaint about privately run, taxpayer-financed charter schools: They often exclude children with serious disabilities or deny them the help they need, violating federal laws.“They left me,” Joseph recalled the boy telling him on the day of the Winfrey celebration. “They left me out.”Along with the academy supported by Oprah’s Angel Network - - which the entertainer used to raise money from the public -- New Orleans charter schools accused of discrimination include those that are favored charities of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)’s Walton family and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees.Shunning special-education students helps school budgets since the average disabled child costs twice as much to serve as a nondisabled one, said Thomas Hehir, who oversaw federal special-education programs under President Bill Clinton. The practice also improves the reported academic results of schools because children with disabilities often have lower scores on standardized tests, he said...
There's a reason some schools in New Orleans require see-through or mesh backpacks, and this is it: At about 9 a.m. on Monday, a handgun that a 13-year-old at Gentilly Terrace Elementary School had stashed in his bag went off accidentally on school grounds.
No one was hurt. But police arrested the teenager and planned on booking him with weapons possession and illegal discharge of a firearm, said officer Shereese Harper, a police spokeswoman. The school is located at 4720 Painters St.
There's no evidence the case represents any new trend. Guns have long been a scourge among male teenagers in New Orleans. Yet it's at least the second gun-related incident on a city campus since the new school year opened just a few weeks ago. Police were called to Reed Elementary [a charter school operated by ReNEW] in eastern New Orleans last month after an eighth-grader brought a pistol to school.
Neither of the students appeared to have plans to shoot anyone. At Reed, the teenager turned over the gun voluntarily when a behavioral specialist sensed that something was wrong, and school officials said the weapon didn't appear to be functional.
The incident Monday at Gentilly Terrace seemed right out of a cautionary tale about the child who finds his dad's gun.
Vera Triplett, the chief operations officer for the Capital One-New Beginnings Charter School Network, which runs Gentilly Terrace, said the student was showing the pistol off to classmates in a corner of the school yard when it somehow went off.
"He didn't bring it to school to harm anyone," Triplett said.
NEW ORLEANS – An eighth-grade student at Reed Elementary School in New Orleans East was arrested Monday afternoon after a teacher discovered an unloaded gun in his bag, school officials said.
Bill Murphy, the chief academic officer at Reed, confirmed to Eyewitness News that the gun was discovered shortly after 1 p.m., when a teacher noticed the student, whom he would not identify, was acting out of character.
The teacher noticed other students seemed to sense some sort of trouble, Murphy said, which led the teacher to approach the student, and ask him to search his bookbag. The teacher noticed the student was holding the bag close to his body, Murphy said.
The teacher asked if the student would allow the bag to be searched, to which the student agreed, Murphy said. When the bag was opened, the teacher found the unloaded gun inside. He was asked if it was his, and he said it was, according to school officials.
The student was taken to meet with school administrators and his parents and police were notified, Murphy said.
Murphy said the incident was handled exactly the way school policy dictates, and “90 percent of the students” probably had no idea what had happened. Classes resumed as normal.
Reed Elementary is a charter school operated by the Renew Charter Management Organization.
Last year, several teachers at Miller-McCoy Academy in eastern New Orleans told Recovery School District officials they feared someone on the school's staff had opened high-stakes exams in advance so students could be prepped on a few actual test questions.
An RSD investigation concluded some kind of cheating had likely occurred at the all-boys middle and high school. Then, Miller-McCoy's board of directors conducted its own investigation, which found no evidence of wrongdoing. In the end, the conflicting findings of the two probes were never fully reconciled.
The handling of the matter raises important questions about how cheating allegations are investigated. In most Louisiana school districts, central office personnel handle the task and report the results to state officials, often with a recommendation about whether to void scores.
There's a natural conflict there, experts say, in that most school districts are less than eager to announce they've found corruption in their midst.
At charter schools, the conflict might be more acute, some say, because charter boards play a role in investigations. Board members can be recruited by a school's administrators, which might make it even more difficult for them to take a hard look at allegations.
"If you are committed to finding out the truth, you need individuals who are not connected in any way to the individuals involved," said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing.
In Louisiana's current setup, there is "a conflict of interest all the way up the line," and not just as it relates to charter schools, said Gregory Cizek, a professor of educational measurement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "No one has a really strong interest in investigating in a really searching manner," he said.
That's why some states have started putting such investigations under the jurisdiction of the state attorney general's office or another independent entity, he said...
The Miller-McCoy investigation began in the spring of 2010 when several staff members alleged that, just days before students were to take high-stakes tests, school administrators had given teachers math questions or essay topics that were uncannily similar to those that appeared on the state exam days later. Three staff members came in to meet with RSD personnel, while two others provided interviews; all told, nearly 20 percent of the school's teachers raised concerns. The administrators asked teachers to use the questions to prepare students for the exam, according to the RSD report on the matter and interviews with three of the teachers...
BATON ROUGE- Two lawsuits single-out a charter school in Baton Rouge, and the company that runs it, for abuse and mistreatment.
Teachers allege discrimination, and at least one parent says her child was assaulted and treated unfairly.
Kenilworth Science and Technology is run by the Pelican Educational Foundation, which also runs Abramson Charter in New Orleans. Abramson was closed two weeks ago to investigate allegations of a similar nature. The state expanded its investigation less than a week later to include Pelican and Kenilworth.
At the end of the 2009-2010 school year, three teachers told a court they were wrongfully terminated from Kenilworth Charter School. They say they were discriminated against because of their gender and their religion and they were harassed until they were fired.
This month, a mother filed a lawsuit detailing, what she calls, neglect and mistreatment of her Kenilworth student. The neglect included one teacher ignoring the child's weak bladder condition, forcing her to urinate on herself, and sit in the urine until class was over.
The mistreatment involved the child being punished for hitting another student just to stop him from touching her inappropriately.
In both instances, and in several others like them, Dr. Shirl Gilbert, who was in charge of charter schools in the Baton Rouge area at the time, tried to help.
He said, "While I think there might be hints of discrimination with relation to some of the actions that Kenilworth administrators took, in every instance, they were able to point to some substantive performance inadequacy that they said was the reason."
Gilbert says after concerns were not addressed, by the school or managers at the charter group, and finding questionable religious practices on campus, exclusively for Turkish staff members, he went to then State Superintendent Paul Pastorek...
State Department of Education officials said Wednesday night they will launch an investigation of Kenilworth Science and Technology Charter School.
The Baton Rouge school is operated by the Pelican Educational Foundation.
The foundation also runs Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans, which was closed last week amid allegations of sexual abuse and other problems.
The fact that both schools are run by Pelican means that operations at Kenilworth need to be reviewed, said Ollie Tyler, acting state superintendent of education...
The state board of education voted to revoke its contract with Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in eastern New Orleans on Wednesday, a step that could mean new management for the school and a potential legal battle with the nonprofit group that has run the campus until now.
The Pelican Educational Foundation, which founded the charter school in 2007, lost its right to operate the school by a vote of six to one at the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE...
...BESE decided to vote with the recommendation of acting State Superintendent Ollie Tyler, who told the board that early findings of a state investigation launched last month showed "a threat to the safety, health and welfare of students at Abramson."
False College Admittances:
"Near the end of the year many students who had not previously been accepted into any college began announcing they had been accepted into North American College. Surprisingly, students who were failing their English and Math classes and who would not graduate from Abramson on time were still being accepted to North American College. The principal used these acceptances as proof that Abramson was successful. The school that accepted these seniors who did not graduate from high school, North American College, is where Mr. Dokmen will be working this fall."
Inci Akpinar, the vice president of a company called Atlas Texas Construction & Trading, sat down with an official from the Louisiana Department of Education a little more than a year ago and made him an offer.
..."I have twenty-five thousand dollars to fix this problem: twenty thousand for you and five for me."
At the time, Dunbar was investigating numerous complaints against Abramson Science & Technology Charter School in eastern New Orleans...
Dunbar -- having declined to take money from Akpinar -- recommended more than a year ago that the state board of education yank Abramson's charter...
But after questioning by the The Times-Picayune, acting State Superintendent of Education Ollie Tyler late Friday wrote to the state board asking it to prevent the school from opening in the fall, citing problems discovered during the original investigation and a new information about an incident between two young students that was possibly sexual in nature...
That an executive from Atlas Texas, a Houston-based contractor, would speak on the school's behalf points to the somewhat opaque connections that link Abramson with other schools and businesses founded by Turkish expatriates. Atlas has won numerous contracts in the past from a Texas-based school operator called the Cosmos Foundation...
Similar allegations have cropped up in other states where the Cosmos Foundation operates. The group runs a charter network called the Harmony Schools in Texas, where they've encountered unfounded accusations that they somehow promote Islamic extremism, largely because of an interest by some of the group's leaders in the movement begun by a Turkish religious scholar named Fethullah Gulen.
Both Cosmos and Pelican have disavowed any official religious links, though Abramson teachers on a school-sponsored trip to Turkey received pamphlets on the Gulen movement...
In an email dated Feb. 2, 2010, and signed by [four teachers] to head of the state's charter office: "Though we are fully aware of the significant amount of autonomy given to charter schools, we are now concerned that this autonomy is being abused to the point that students are being forced to engage in unethical acts."
They also reported a "general feeling of fear" among the school's staff because of what appeared to be retaliation against teachers, parents and students who had spoken up about the school's practices in the past...
But the state investigation appeared to back up much of what the teachers had written in their note...
...several students confirmed they had done little or none of the work that went into their science projects...
...[students] described practice on items that were very close to the items on the test."...
The state audit also turned up a significant lack of resources for special-needs students...
There were also complaints from teachers and students about the difficulty of communicating with some of the foreign staff...
Still, Dunbar, the state's academic advisor for charter schools, described a series of bizarre encounters as he and others carried out the audit that suggest a network of associations at Abramson extending beyond Louisiana...
Dunbar concluded in the same memo that the state board of education should revoke school's the charter...
Ultimately, the state decided to renew Abramson's charter for one year, contingent on the school carrying out a detailed corrective action plan...
The state's sudden shutdown of Abramson Science and Technology Charter School over revelations of a potential bribery attempt and other incidents came in part because of inquiries made by The Times-Picayune over the past few weeks.
Penny Dastugue, president of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, wrote to the head of the nonprofit that runs Abramson on Friday evening to say the board will close the school until the state can complete an investigation. The move came just a few hours after acting State Superintendent Ollie Tyler contacted board members to recommend that they shutter the school in eastern New Orleans while the state looks into the allegations...
Both incidents have come to light as a result of interviews and public information requests made by newspaper.
Several board members expressed alarm on Friday that information about the state's audit last year did not come before BESE ahead of a vote the board took last summer to renew Abramson's charter. The state education department recommended that BESE give the school a one-year renewal with a "corrective action plan" to address deficiencies in special education services. But the board had not seen [a] memo about the offer of money. And they hadn't seen records that provide accounts of classrooms going unstaffed for weeks at a time and potential cheating in science fair competitions...
[BESE member Louella Givens] and Linda Johnson, a BESE member from Plaquemine, also traveled to Turkey this spring at the invitation of the Pelican Foundation before the full findings of the state audit came to light.
Tevfik Eski, Pelican's CEO, denied inviting BESE members on the trip. But a copy of the invitation obtained by The Times-Picayune shows that it was signed by Eski...
Johnson said that she paid for her own flight but that some of her hotel expenses were picked up by the Texas Turkish American Chamber of Commerce...
| STATE | # ACTIVE | # PENDING | # INACTIVE* | TOTAL |
| LA | 1 | 0 | 7 | 8 |
| KENILWORTH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CHARTER SCHOOL | |
| Status | ACTIVE, opened 2008-2009; Kenilworth Middle School conversion |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Authorizer | Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (under the Recovery School District) |
| Location/District | 7600 Boone Drive, Baton Rouge / East Baton Rouge Parish School System |
| Website | |
| Enrollment | Grades 6-8; 2010-11 enrollment = 447 |
| Site leader | Hasan Sazci |
| ABRAMSON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CHARTER SCHOOL | |
| Status | CHARTER REVOKED in August 2011; operations transferred to non-Pelican Educational Foundation management; originally opened 2007-2008. |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Authorizer | Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (under the Recovery School District) |
| Location/District | 5552 Read Blvd., New Orleans / New Orleans Public Schools |
| Website | |
| Enrollment | Grades K-12; 2010-11 enrollment = 591 |
| Notes | Cuneyt Dokmen (principal in February 2011); Originally called Pelican Math & Science School; Learn more about Abramson Science and Technology School scandal HERE. |
| LINEAR MIDDLE SCHOOL CONVERSION | |
| Status | INACTIVE: Proposal submitted to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in January 2009. |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Location | Shreveport |
| BANKS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CONVERSION | |
| Status | INACTIVE: Proposal submitted to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in January 2009. |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Location | Baton Rouge |
| CRESTWORTH MIDDLE SCHOOL CONVERSION | |
| Status | INACTIVE: Proposal submitted to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in January 2009. |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Location | Baton Rouge |
| KENILWORTH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHOOL EXPANSION | |
| Status | INACTIVE: The National Association of Charter School Authorizers’ recommended for denial of the application to the State Authorized School Oversight Committee of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary in December 2010. |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Authorizer | Louisiana Department of Education |
| Notes | This was a proposed expansion of a middle school in Baton Rouge (Kenilworth Science & Technology Charter School) |
| PELICAN EXCELLENCE ORLEANS K-12 | |
| Status | INACTIVE: The National Association of Charter School Authorizers’ recommended for denial of the application to the State Authorized School Oversight Committee of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary in December 2010. |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Authorizer | Louisiana Department of Education |
| Location | This school was proposed for New Orleans. |
| PELICAN EXCELLENCE ACADEMY | |
| Status | UNKNOWN: Application submitted in February 2010. |
| Management | Pelican Educational Foundation, Inc. |
| Authorizer | Jefferson Parish School Board |
| Location | This school was proposed for Metairie. |
| PELICAN EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION | |
| Federal Tax ID | EIN 203801713 |
| Website | |
| History | Started by Tevfik Kosar, an assistant professor of Computer Science at LSU. “The school was developed in 2006 as the brainchild of University math, science and technology professors who felt the need to contribute more to elementary education.” |
| Individuals involved | Names appearing on IRS Form 990s (2005 to 2009) & website: Abdullah Zorba, Adem Ozel, Amanniyaz Niyazmuradov (AKA Aman Niyaz), Bicer Hasan, Cuneyt Dokemen, Cynthia Bryant, Elif Ulupinar, Eugene Kennedy, Hasan Sazci, Karen Fontenot, Mehmet F. Cihan, Mustafa Guvercin, Nihat Bayhan, Orhan Kizilkaya, Richard Webb, Tevfik Kosar, and Yunus Bicici. |
| COSMOS FOUNDATION / HARMONY PUBLIC SCHOOLS | |
| Federal Tax ID | EIN 76-0615245 |
| Website | |
| Services | Cosmos gets 5% of Pelican's annual state funding because of their "Support Service Agreement." |
| Individuals involved | Names appearing on IRS Form 990s (2002 to 2009): Ali Tekin, Bilal Akin, Burhanettin Kuruscu, Cengizhan Keskin, Cocksun Cetinkaya, Ellen A. MacDonald, Fatih Yigit, Gokturk Tunc, Ibrahim Sel, Iker Gure, Ismet S. Isik, Kadir Almus, Kudbettin Aksoy, Levent Bulut, Lynn Mitchell, Mehmet Okumus, Mustafa Atik, Mustafa Guvercin, Mustafa Ozen, Nihat Guvercin, Oner Ulvi Celepicikay, Ozgur Ozer, Selahattin Aydin, Soner Tarim, Tevik Eski, Umit Pecin, Yetkin Yildirim |
