Miami Dade College on Tuesday approved a handful of charter schools for the first time since gaining the same power as the local school board to greenlight or shut down charter schools seeking to operate in the district.
Historically, charter schools apply to the school board. But a state law from 2021 allowed public colleges to share that power. In 2022, Miami Dade College became a charter school authorizer in the county, home to the nation’s third-largest school district.
The two entities have the authority to exercise the same power in the same district, but a key difference differentiates them: When approved through the college, the school board loses the ability to oversee charter schools.
This system hands the authorizing power to unelected members of the Miami Dade College Board of Trustees, stripping that exclusive authority from directly elected local school board members at the school district. All members of the Miami Dade College Board of Trustees were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The board unanimously approved six charter school applications on Tuesday.
READ MORE: 'A parallel system': Miami-Dade school district to be cut out of decisions about charter schools
Charter schools, which are taxpayer funded, are considered public schools, leading education experts to question the legality of this setup — Florida’s Constitution says only the school board can operate public schools.
“ I believe it's a violation of our Florida Constitution,” Crystal Etienne, president of EduVoter, an organization that hopes to protect traditional public education in Florida, told WLRN last year. “ It's a parallel system and they're taking away the authority of the district to make [decisions], so that's clearly overreach.”
The part of Miami Dade College approving charter schools is the Florida Charter Institute, which functions as both a research institute and charter school authorizer. The Institute was created in 2022 by a bill sponsored by then-Republican state Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., shortly before he became the Florida Commissioner of Education.
“The funding from the state will all flow through the college. All of the evaluations, the monitoring, everything that typically happens with a school district will be happening with the college,” said Chris Fuller, chief operating officer at the Florida Charter Institute, in a presentation in November to prospective charter schools.
Potential conflicts of interest surround the system, too.
The chairman of the Miami Dade College Board of Trustees is Michael Bileca, who owns the charter school company True North Classical Academy.
Bileca would likely have to recuse himself from any vote connected to his company or connected to schools that could be considered direct competition to his business, Todd Ziebarth, an executive at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told WLRN last year.
Also sitting on the college Board of Trustees is Roberto Alonso, who is also elected to the school board of Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
The Miami-Dade school district could find itself limited under this setup, since key decisions and oversight could be taken over by Miami Dade College. Further, the Florida Charter Institute at Miami Dade College issued a research paper in October arguing that charter schools should be able to take over the space of traditional public schools.
