Drama at G-Star School of the Arts has moved from the classroom to the courtroom with the founder expelled and slapped with a court order barring him from the campus he established 20 years ago.
With elements of both a Greek tragedy and a B movie, the dispute playing out in Palm Beach County Circuit Court features allegations of fraud, deceit and disloyalty. It pits 78-year-old school founder and former CEO Greg Hauptner against a board he distrusts and that distrusts him.
The dialogue is often inflammatory:
“Hostile, false, fraudulent and harassing,” board attorney Levi Williams said in court papers, describing Hauptner’s actions.
Hauptner claims he was fired because he spoke out against a covert plan that would have destroyed the school. “An effort to further humiliate, intimidate and inflict emotional distress to Hauptner,” attorney Richard Sierra, who represents Hauptner, said of the board’s decisions.
The lawyers, Hauptner and board Chairman Piero Navarro declined to comment on the lawsuit. In an email, Williams lauded the school and said “we do not give any credence to claims made by a disgruntled former employee.”
The stage for the court fight was set last year when the board accused Hauptner of taking steps that it said could cripple operations of the 750-student Palm Springs charter school that was created to be a launch pad for aspiring actors and filmmakers in grades 6 to 12.
Then serving as a parental facilitator and emeritus founder, instead of CEO, Hauptner was placed on leave while the board investigated allegations that he was helping his wife set up two competing charter schools and had escorted her around the school’s campus to recruit faculty, according to the lawsuit the board filed.
Further, even though his diminished role gave him no authority to do so, Hauptner was soliciting philanthropists for donations to make films at the school, the board claims.
He began threatening to remove board members, blasting the school’s management company and spreading misinformation to the Palm Beach County School District, which provides oversight and all important tax money to G-Star, the suit said.
When Hauptner refused the board’s requests to stop, its attorney sent him two letters, warning of serious consequences.
“The board of directors for G-Star hereby demand that you cease and desist in all activities and actions by you, your agents, or any other persons or entities that are contrary to law, false and adverse to the interests and reputation of G-Star,” attorney Williams wrote.
Parking lot board meeting
Williams said the board wanted to settle its differences amicably, but emphasized that if Hauptner continued his rogue behavior a lawsuit would be filed against him. He gave Hauptner until April 4 to agree to the board’s demands.
Instead, on April 3, Hauptner taped a handwritten note on a door of the school, announcing a special board meeting with himself at the helm. During the meeting in the school parking lot, Hauptner announced his appointment of three new board members to replace the four he had fired via email five days earlier.
On a motion from Hauptner, the new board voted to fire the Fort Lauderdale-based Charter Schools USA, which had managed the school since 2019.
Formed in 1997 by Jon Hage, who helped former Gov. Jeb Bush draft Florida’s charter school legislation, Charter Schools USA is one of the largest education management companies in the nation. It manages 154 schools in four states with a combined enrollment of 81,000, according to its website. In addition to G-Star, it manages five Renaissance Charter Schools in Palm Beach County.
Hauptner’s newly minted board also approved his motion to make his wife, Dawn, the school’s CEO if he stepped down or was unable to serve.
Reaction was swift.
The board that Hauptner fired met the next day and terminated his contract and reiterated its support for Charter Schools USA and its own legitimacy. It asked the management company to take steps to protect G-Star and its board.
A week later, G-Star Principal Kim Collins sent a letter to Hauptner, warning him to stay away from the campus he founded in 2003.
“If you trespass or otherwise are physically present on said property, G-Star intends to have you arrested for trespass and authorize law enforcement to execute, arrest and pursue criminal charges through the State Attorney’s Office and the Palm Springs Police Department,” it read.
The board attorney also contacted the Florida Department of State asking it to remove the documents Hauptner posted online, naming himself as sole member and three handpicked men as board members.
The documents “are fraudulent and were filed with malicious intent by Mr. Gregory Hauptner to defraud the public and its sponsor (the school district),” wrote attorney Chad Marcus, who works with Williams.
Marcus said that Hauptner had not been a board member since 2020, had no authority to file G-Star’s corporate reports and asked state officials to ignore any he sent in the future.
Kicked off campus
On May 1, the board went to court, filing an emergency motion for a temporary injunction to prevent Hauptner and what it called his “fraudulent” board members from contacting the school district, banks or anyone else about school business. It also asked that Hauptner be ordered to stay 500 yards from campus.
Circuit Court Judge James Sherman partially approved the request a week later, but only after Hauptner voluntarily agreed not to contact the school district or financial institutions about G-Star or to go on campus.
Hauptner didn’t have an attorney then. Sherman said he could ask for the order to be reconsidered once he hired one.
Since then, Hauptner and Sierra have asked that the agreement be thrown out.
Hauptner has also asked that a receiver be appointed to sort out the dispute that turns on Hauptner’s belief that corporate documents give him the ongoing power to fire board members. When he established the school, he was made a special member of the board and continues to wield that power, he claims in court records.
He included a letter from former board member, attorney Philip DiComo, who said that about 10 years ago the board agreed to give Hauptner the ability to fire board members for cause. The move came after Hauptner discovered board members were trying to turn the school’s sound stage into a profit-making venture and take over the school, DiComo said.
The current board, which adopted a new set of bylaws at its meeting on April 4, disagrees.
As an employee, who earned as much as $200,000 annually, Hauptner couldn’t legally serve on the board, Williams said in court papers. “It would necessarily constitute a violation of (Florida charter school law that) prohibits any member of the governing board from receiving compensation and thereby placing not just the tax exemption of the School at risk, but also its actual charter from the (school district) to operate,” Williams wrote.
The board also objects to Hauptner’s request to put the school in the hands of a court-appointed receiver. Such an “extraordinary step” isn’t needed and could endanger the future of the school, Williams said.
Calls it a hostile takeover
Both sides insist they are trying to protect G-Star, which received a B grade from the Florida Department of Education during the last two years following three years of A grades. Although Hauptner urged the board in 2019 to hire Charter Schools USA to manage G-Star, last year he began peppering board members with claims that it was “ripping off the school.”
His interpretation of Charter USA’s actions was based largely on stories he read online about the downsides of hiring management companies. Later, when he unilaterally attempted to take over the board, he leveled unsubstantiated allegations against the company.
In a sworn affidavit, he claimed the board was colluding with Charter Schools to sell the school on 10 acres of “prime land directly in the middle of Palm Beach County” and create “for-profit movie studios.”
“I was targeted for termination because, as Sole Member of the Corporation, as stated in the Articles of Incorporation, that I would not allow a hostile and unlawful takeover of the school,” Hauptner wrote.
Williams called the allegations “salacious, false and fraudulent.”
He pointed out that Hauptner in 2019 recommended the board hire Charter Schools USA because he couldn’t operate the school “efficiently and in a financially responsible manner.”
The final act is likely months away. Sherman recessed a hearing this month that was called to help him decide the various competing requests from Hauptner and the board. No future hearing date has been set.
In the meantime, the one-time hairdresser to the stars turned school entrepreneur, fumes about his unfair fate.
More than once, in court documents, he mentions how 55 locks at the school were changed after he was forced to leave the school with his belongings in a cardboard box.
He and his attorney made it clear that the legal battle isn’t going to end quietly.
“What is undisputed is that Gregory Hauptner is the founder and the sole member of G-Star School of the Arts and has been a constant presence since its inception,” Sierra wrote. “The purported plaintiff’s ‘Board’ with the assistance of counsel, have perpetrated (a) scheme to, in essence, steal the organization from Hauptner, by committing fraud upon the court.”
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
