The story behind the story: Reporters talk 'Cashing in on Charter Schools' investigation

Elyse Toribio
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Read the investigation:Millions of your tax dollars have disappeared into NJ's flawed charter school experiment

On Friday, reporters Jean Rimbach and Abbott Koloff answered  questions about this investigation in a Reddit AMA. Read their answers here. 

In 2017, and The Record published an investigation that found some New Jersey charter school leaders and founders had close connections to Fethullah Gulen, a controversial Islamic cleric accused of planning a coup in his native Turkey in the summer of 2016. While researching, the investigative team, comprised of reporters Jean Rimbach, Hannan Adely and Jeff Pillets, discovered one charter school project in Paterson that revealed a curious pattern.

Jean Rimbach, investigative reporter: We came across a couple of buildings in Paterson that were being rented by one charter school, and we noticed they were being rented from a nonprofit group. And one of those buildings, as it turned out, had been owned by a different nonprofit group. We looked at the leases, and there was nothing in them that showed the charter school would ever own the building. We looked at the borrowing situation for the properties, and noticed that they had been supported with state-issued bonds, and noticed that the state hadn't looked at all at who would ultimately own these properties. And that's how we got kicked off into this. 

Abbott Koloff, investigative reporter: Jean had already been working on it for some months before I came on. I was initially asked to look into the bond issues of one of the larger charter operators.

The pair worked for more than a year, gathering information, identifying connections and asking questions. They moved into a small office in the newsroom, stacks of documents piling up on desks and in shelves.  

AK: We started looking through all of these bonds, that are basically documents of 1,500 pages each. We looked through more than a dozen of these documents. I can't say how many hours [we spent working], it's almost countless.

I would spend weeks and weeks trying to figure out where the money was going, and trying to match numbers to see how they were related and to catch the flow of the money. And then we noticed that there was something unusual in some of the bonds, in that the charter school support groups themselves were buying the bonds with bank loans instead of investors, as is normally the case. That kicked off a debate between us, as to the advantage. We were looking at how they were getting an advantage in some of these deals, they're so complex. We would debate for sometimes hours, over a single issue, and then find a document that would back up some of our conclusions. 

JR: We spent a fair amount of time when we didn't understand things talking to experts who did. Having them help us parse through an issue, through a funding schedule, through just how things operate. We didn't stop at just talking to one person, we kept reaching out, trying to get the clearest picture we could for things that sometimes, people had never heard of [funding scenarios)themselves, even the experts

AK: I think we both have an obsessive personality. We don't like to let go of something when we find something, we'll take a long time to get to the root of an issue, especially when we think there's something that needs to come out to the public.

The Open Public Records Act (OPRA) is a state law that gives the public access to government records held by public agencies. Any New Jersey resident has the right to request and obtain documents, and many journalists use OPRA requests as a resource in their reporting. 

JR: We sent out probably dozens and dozens, hundreds really, of OPRA requests, because we had to keep going back to people asking for more. Sometimes things would be left out. Like getting a lease with no rent amount in it, or getting a master lease which would be the first person that rents the building that doesn't have rent schedule in it. You wonder sometimes how a document could be provided like that, and then you realize that's the document that the school has. So we would have to keep going back and asking for more. And often you didn't realize until you read one document that you see within there that there's another document that would be helpful to you. 

AK: There was one case where they didn't realize that a private company was actually acting in a public manner, and so therefore it had to answer an OPRA request. They later realized, the attorney said we have to supply this, because that company was acting on behalf of another government agency. But their deals are so complicated, that they didn't even realize what they were supposed to give and what they were able to withhold. 

JR: And we also had an attorney intervene on our behalf too, not very often because we didn't want this to be tied up in legal action constantly, but we did use an attorney to get some documents.

AK: Part of this was, a lot of these are private companies, so you can't submit an OPRA request to them, but we would submit an OPRA  requests to the schools asking for documents that would seem they should've had related to the private companies, such as master leases, showing rents indicating how much is being paid for a building on debt and what they have to pay. Or, appraisals that were done on buildings that they are paying rent on, and they said they had none of those. Some schools did not provide OPRA in a timely fashion. Others provided OPRAs that left out things; schedules, attachments, exhibitions.

JR: A couple of reasons why [the investigation] took so long, some of these deals are so complex and it's difficult to get paperwork on a lot of them. A lot of the documents are held by private companies, and you can't get access to them. Also, groups are not always responsive to OPRA requests and frankly, we didn't really anticipate that as lot of charter operators would not be willing to speak with us, and we ended up communicating with people through email or not at all.

I had actually believed that people would be more open to discussing the facilities issue, and the way that they end up funding buildings because it was and is a hardship for many charter schools. And, because the law does put them at a disadvantage. So, I have to say that both of us were caught a little off-guard about how people put the brakes on in terms of speaking with us, and in many cases even providing documents that they're required to provide by law. 

The five-part series, "Cashing in on Charter Schools," launched March 27 on and across the USA TODAY Network New Jersey. After months of reporting, Rimbach and Koloff can only guess what may come out of their findings. 

AK: We're hoping the state will look at the policy issue of putting so much public money into private buildings. I think that we would like to see more transparency. In other states, they've told private companies that "You have to open your books to us." We were told here, well, "We don't have to open our books." One spokesperson actually compared it to a coffee shop and said, "Well, they don't have to open their books." And we would point out that the coffee shop probably doesn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars of public money. And also, they might open their books.

JR: The best outcome of this would be if people would just look closely at where the public money is going, how it's being spent, and what the ultimate ownership of the buildings are when they get into these arrangements. In the end, it's our money, and it's going to educate New Jersey's kids. And they should have good facilities. And we should be looking at where all the money goes. 



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