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Archive for the ‘Charters’ Category

‘Gold Standard’ rules: You got the gold? You write the rules

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Ethics, Teague, Transparency, Vouchers on December 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a news flash: if you are Chas Roemer and you never inquire into the propriety of voting on issues that directly affect the financial well-being of your sister, you will most likely never be challenged for your obvious conflict of interest.

It’s all part of the regulations of the State Board of Ethics, regulations that Gov. Bobby Jindal holds up as the “gold standard” of ethics whenever he travels out of state for fund raisers or book promotions, which is quite often.

Roemer is a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) from District 6, which comprises all or parts of the parishes of East Baton Rouge, Ascension, Livingston, Tangipahoa and Washington.

His sister, Caroline Roemer Shirley, is executive director of the Louisiana Association of Louisiana Public Charter Schools.

The Board of Ethics, on April 21, 2010, issued a ruling on Docket No. 2010-222 concerning Ms. Shirley’s appearing before BESE on behalf of the association.

In that ruling, the board concluded that Ms. Shirley was prohibited from:

• appearing before BESE;

• representing the association in matters before BESE;

• discussing with individual BESE members matters or positions of the association, and

• interacting with the staff of the Department of Education on matters under the jurisdiction of BESE.

That opinion was a clarification of an earlier ruling issued on Feb. 15, 2008, in response to an inquiry from Chas Roemer. Because Roemer did not request an opinion on the legality of his voting on charter school issues, the one-page opinion did not address that issue.

Because his practice of voting on charter school matters has never been addressed, Roemer has continued to not only vote on those matters but has on occasion even made motions or offered seconds to motions concerning charter schools.

Louisiana Voice on Nov. 2 raised that question along with that of the legality of Jay Guillot’s serving on the board in light of state contracts worth nearly $17 million that his company, Hunt-Guillot & Associates, holds.

It turns out, apparently, that a Louisiana citizen/taxpayer/voter is unqualified to question the ethics of any state elected official. LouisianaVoice’s owner was deemed by the board to have “no legal standing” to seek an ethics ruling on either Guillot or Roemer.

Several attempts were made to contact ethics board staff attorney Stacy Barker, to whom the LouisianaVoice inquiry was assigned but she never returned phone calls. She took our call only after a fake name was given to the receptionist and thus confronted, said the board’s rules state that only someone who is directly affected by an action may seek an ethics determination.

Here are the verbatim procedures for requesting advisory opinions as contained on the Board of Ethics web page:

“Requests for advisory opinions must be in writing, signed and submitted by a person or governmental agency with a demonstrable and objective interest in the opinion requested (emphasis ours). The Board does not render advisory opinions with respect to past conduct, but can provide crucial advice on how to avoid problems in the future.”

The procedure for filing complaints is even more restrictive, requiring a vote of at least eight members to refer a complaint to investigation. A sworn complaint before a notary may be referred to investigation by a simple majority of the board.

The board is comprised of 11 members, seven of whom are appointed by the governor. Two each are elected by the House and Senate. On the surface, it would appear rather difficult to muster an investigation what with the governor holding a solid majority on the board.

If one of his appointees even acts like he is entertaining thoughts of independence, Jindal can pull a Donald Trump and fire them or at least apply sufficient pressure so as to force a resignation. That would not be an unprecedented move; he replaced four black members of the Board of Regents with white males a year ago. And one of his BESE appointees, Tammie McDaniel of Oak Ridge, resigned in February of 2010 after first resisting Jindal’s efforts to force her out.

Apparently one who resides in Roemer’s BESE district and who is concerned for the public schools that his grandchildren attend, is not qualified to seek an ethics ruling. It seems that only someone named Roemer or Shirley has a “legal standing” to request an opinion.

Don’t hold your breath for that request.

If this is an example of what Jindal calls a “gold standard” of state ethics, then the joke is on all of us.

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Hold on: Jindal gets another chance to lose federal money; this time it’s $390 million more in FEMA money–maybe

Posted in Broadband, Internet, Campaign Contributions, Charters, Contract, Contracts, Education, Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Privatization, Transparency on November 16, 2011| 1 Comment »

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu says Gov. Jindal “fumbled” on two grants that cost the state $140 million but in fairness to Jindal, he now has a chance to dwarf those losses by blowing an additional $390 million in FEMA money to mitigate damage caused by two major hurricanes in 2005.

The word out of Baton Rouge this week is that the state will receive an additional $389.6 million from FEMA for flood prevention of homes, levees and public buildings.

But don’t hold your breath.

The state has received $1.4 billion in hazard mitigation money already after FEMA assessed damages from hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The state might yet receive the money, however, despite the loss of two earlier federal grants of $60 million and $80 million. That’s because this money was secured through the efforts of the state’s congressional delegation and was not hampered by the Jindal administration.

The additional hazard mitigation money can be used by property owners to elevate or retrofit homes with additions such as hurricane-proof windows and storm shutters and local governments may use the money to repair levees, improve drainage and strengthen school buildings and other public facilities.

Most of that money is expected to be used in the parishes of Cameron, St. Bernard and Orleans, areas especially hard-hit by Katrina and Rita in 2005.

“As we did after Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike, we are sending these dollars directly to parishes because local leaders know how to best protect our communities from future losses in the event of another natural disaster,” Jindal said.

That would represent something of a departure for the Jindal administration which has thus far fought, at least publicly, to resist federal funding but has never shied away from taking credit when he passes out checks during Sunday morning visits to north Louisiana protestant churches.

Jindal no doubt hopes the $390 million bonus will help him save face after his rumblin’, bumblin’, stumblin’ performances with two other grants.

The first, $60 million in early childhood education funding was lost when the administration simply decided not to apply for the money.

The second was an $80 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce to fund a project to install 900 miles of cable to bring broadband internet connection to 21 rural parishes.

The $60 million grant would have been the third round of Race to the Top dollars and was to have been used to improve the quality of early learning and closing the achievement gap for children with high needs resulting largely from poverty.

Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater called U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s criticism of Jindal “disappointing.” Rainwater once worked with Landrieu but now is the mouthpiece of the administration. He said the state punted on the $60 million because the state studied the grant and decided that it would not have expanded early childhood education but rather would have targeted programs the state has already been addressing. He neglected to say what those programs were.

Rainwater also said the money would have had strings attached that would have meant more federal control over the education system.

The state, of course, is far above that. No control over local school systems by the state with this administration. Just pull funding from the public school systems and divert it into charter schools. No control there. All the local systems have to do to compensate for the lost funds is layoff teachers. What control?

Landrieu disagreed. “All the federal government is doing is offering them money with virtually no strings attached except for basic accountability,” she said.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between the two positions, but so what? If you borrow money from the bank, there are usually strings attached, such as for what purpose the money will be used and how it will be repaid. That’s life.

Basic accountability is something the state has found lacking in some areas, most notably with payment for the $239 million Jindal sand berms built at the governor’s insistence as an effort to stem the flow of oil from the April 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent blowout. That failed effort was monumental in scope. Not only did the berms wash away but so too did the heavy dredging equipment brought in to construct the berms—all swallowed up in the Gulf waters.

That was bad enough but then along came the Legislative Auditor’s office that issued a report earlier this month that the state overpaid Shaw Environmental and Infrastructure, Inc. by nearly $495,000 to build the oh-so-temporary and oh-so-useless berms.

It’s not the first time Shaw’s name has surfaced in questionable costs.

Immediately after Katrina devastated New Orleans, Shaw was awarded a no-bid contract to cover storm-damaged roofs across New Orleans with those familiar blue tarps. Each tarp covered 100 square feet, meaning the average home would require 15 tarps to fully protect its roof. There were literally tens of thousands of those homes in and around New Orleans.

Shaw’s contract called for it to receive $175 per square (one tarp, or 100 square feet). That did not include the cost of the tarps because they were provided by FEMA. The $175 was just for labor. (That, by the way, comes to about $2,600 per house—not much below what it would cost to simply re-roof the home.)

Shaw promptly hired a subcontractor to install the tarps at $75 per square. That meant Shaw would net $100 per square for doing absolutely nothing. Multiply that by 15 per house ($1,500 net per house) times the thousands of houses getting the tarps and well, you get the picture.

The subcontractor then found his own subcontractor and paid him $35 per square, leaving the first subcontractor with a neat profit of $40 per square, or roughly $600 per house for doing zilch.

The second subcontractor then found laborers who actually installed the tarps—at $2 per square. Is this what they meant by trickle-down economics?

But back to the grants.

When the Public Service Commission demanded answers it got the typical bureaucratic shuffle from Rainwater and Board of Regents President Jim Purcell.

The blame, they said, lay alternatively with the legislature which took too long to approve spending, a contractor whom they said was late with his work (the contractor denies that) and the Obama administration, which Rainwater said “wants to run the car companies, the banks, our entire health care system, and now they want to take over the broadband business.

“We won’t stand for that in Louisiana,” he sniffed.

That little bit of defiance resurrected echoes of Leander Perez in his efforts to defy the federal government’s insistence on school desegregation more than a half-century ago. At the time, Gov. Earl K. Long reminded Perez in not-so-gentle terms of the realities of the day when he bellowed to the arch-segregationist, “What you gonna do now, Leander? The feds have the A-bomb!”

Probably Jindal’s frittering away the $80 million has more to do with campaign contributors than any philosophical differences over federal influence.

The broadband project would have connected to the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), a 1,600-mile fiber-optic network that connects Louisiana and Mississippi research universities to National LambdaRail and Internet2, which would connect 100,00 households, 15,000 businesses and 150 schools, libraries and hospitals.

A Jindal campaign contributor whom the governor appointed to the Board of Regents, Ed Antie of Carencro, was forced to resign earlier this year amid revelations during Senate confirmation hearings that he had a $531,000 contract with the Regents through one of his companies to provide fiber-optic cables to LONI, which is overseen by the Regents.

“Straight baloney,” said Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell of Rainwater’s contention that the broadband internet project would result in unfair competition with private providers.

“We’ve been begging the private providers to build broadband infrastructure in the rural areas of the Delta and they won’t do it,” Campbell said. “I don’t give a damn if the companies object. If they won’t do it on their own, then does that mean we should just sacrifice these poor parishes’ and people’s chance to be connected?”

Campbell said he wants the state’s major telecoms, Rainwater and Purcell to attend the next PSC meeting. “I want to know the providers who objected,” he said.

At one point in the hearings, Campbell, whose position is not appointive but elective, found it necessary to remind Rainwater, “I don’t work for you.”

That must have come as quite a shock to both Jindal and Rainwater who, without Timmy Teepell to hold their hand, were probably unable to locate a copy of the State Constitution that would verify Campbell’s unexpected revelation.

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Jindal’s privatization roadmap pockmarked with potholes

Posted in Charters, Education, Ethics, Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Legislature, Legislators, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, ORM, Office of Risk Management, Privatization, Transparency on August 24, 2011| 1 Comment »

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s efforts towards privatization of state government can best be summed up in a single word: disastrous.

If a movie were to be made of the manner in which this administration has carried out its perceived mandate to privatize state prisons, education, health care, risk management and the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, it would almost certainly feature Larry, Moe and Curly playing the parts of Jindal, Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater and former Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek.

Take, for example, the $340 million, 10-year contract awarded by the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) to Maryland-based CNSI Corp. It’s difficult to imagine that anything could be botched any worse than the manner in which the contract winner was announced.

The awarding of the contract just happened to coincide with the confirmation hearings on DHH Secretary Bruce Greenstein. Smelling blood in the water, members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee asked Greenstein point-blank to name the company awarded the contract.

He refused.

And with good reason, it turned out. It turned out that Greenstein had once worked for CNSI. But, he assured the committee members after finally identifying the CNSI as the winning bidder for the contract to process Medicaid claims for the state he had taken himself out of the selection process and even erected a “firewall” between him and the contract selection.

But wait. There’s more. Turns out that Greenstein did indeed have some contact with his old employer and in fact, implemented changes in the request for bids that allowed CNSI to submit a proposal. That proposal actually ranked third among four bidders on the technical merits of its proposal but won the contract based on the lowest price which is still one of the largest contracts ever awarded by the state.

While it might not be privatization in the truest sense of the word, let’s go back to the 2010 legislative session when Rep. John Schroeder introduced a slew of bills aimed at dismantling state civil service and the Civil Service Board. Had his bills been successful (they weren’t), what would Jindal have replaced civil service with, contract workers? That’s already being done to some extent as we shall see presently.

Schroeder backed off at this year’s legislative session. It is, after all, an election year. But if he and Jindal are re-elected, don’t be surprised to see the civil service bills resurface. Even if Schroeder is not re-elected, Jindal will likely find a friendly legislator to introduce some version of the bills next year.

Then there were the privatization battles fought on two fronts during the 2011 session: prisons and the Office of Group Benefits (OGB). Both were shelved at least until next year but that doesn’t mean either issue is dead. Far from it. In fact, the OGB privatization effort is still simmering and the proposed prison sales will most likely be back on the legislative agenda next year.

But neither Jindal nor Rainwater appear particularly eager to defend the OGB privatization in a public forum. Both managed to be elsewhere recently when the Baton Rouge League of Women Voters held a luncheon to discuss the OGB issue. It would have been the perfect opportunity for Jindal or Rainwater to come clean with the public and explain exactly what the administration’s intent is for the agency and its $500 million surplus. Both men were invited to take part in the forum but Jindal was at yet another Baptist church somewhere in north Louisiana and Rainwater was speaking at a Rotary meeting in Alexandria.

It was the best opportunity yet for the administration to demonstrate its openness, accountability and transparency that Jindal hypes at all his fundraising appearances—in other states, that is.

Could there be a reason for their reluctance to discuss the merits of OGB privatization openly and to accept questions about their motives?

Well, let’s just look at the sequence of events thus far.

First there was the request for proposals (RFP—a term appearing with ever-greater frequency in this administration) that Goldman Sachs was recruited to help draft and then Goldman Sachs was the lone bidder—at a cool $6 million. That was not to take over OGB; that was just to evaluate the agency’s assets and to go out into the marketplace and find a buyer.

In the interim, Jindal had contracted Chaffe and Associates of New Orleans to conduct a quickie evaluation so that he could include the sale of the agency in his proposed executive budget. Chaffe was contracted for $49,999.99—one cent below the amounted that would have required approval of the Office of Contractual Review.

But then, Jindal did not include the OGB sale proposal in his executive budget after all, leading observers to speculate that perhaps Chaffe’s report did not reflect what the governor had anticipated. Requests were made for copies of the report but the governor was not forthcoming, choosing instead to disavow his own edict of openness and accountability.

Meanwhile, word got out that the report specifically said the only advantage to selling OGB would be if the buyer got the $500 million surplus.

When legislators began clamoring for copies of the Chaffe report, it was subsequently “leaked” to the Baton Rouge Advocate. Trouble is, the part about the only advantage of selling OGB was not in that report. Nor were any of the pages of the “leaked” report date stamped. Every document received by the Division of Administration (DOA) is routinely date stamped. Finally, there was a major discrepancy in the purported date that the report was received by DOA.

DOA attorney Paul Holmes, in a May 27 email to LouisianaVoice, claimed that the Chaffe report was received at DOA on May 25 but that it was part of the “deliberative process,” and unavailable for public inspection. Rainwater likewise, on May 31, told legislators that he had received the report on May 25 but again invoked the “deliberative process” excuse for not releasing it.

But when the report was “leaked,” it was noted that Chaffe officials did not sign off on the report’s signature page until June 3.

Is it possible that there were two separate versions of the report? One which didn’t say what the governor wanted to hear that is still being withheld from the public and another, more generic version that was “leaked” to the Advocate? Perhaps we will never know.

One thing we do know, however, is that the administration is determined to privatize OGB, even to the point of dealing with Wall Street bankers with problems of their own.

In rebidding its RFP for a broker, Morgan Keegan was named the contractor to shop around for a buyer for OGB. Morgan Keegan bid only $900,000, considerably less than Goldman Sach’s bid of $6 million on the original RFP.

It turns out, however, that Morgan Keegan has been placed on the auction block by its parent company, Regions Financial Corp., after MK agreed to pay $210 million to settle charges of fraud in the marketing of mutual funds filled with subprime mortgages that artificially inflated the funds’ prices.

Regions retained (who else?) Goldman Sachs to market MK. But Goldman Sachs was fined $587 million a year ago on charges that it misled investors in collateralized debt obligations linked to subprime mortgages.

John Maginnis, in his Louisiana Political Weekly column, more recently has called attention to the mismanagement of the $756 million program for hurricane victims to elevate their homes which was approved near the end of the Kathleen Blanco administration and reluctantly inherited by Jindal’s administration.

The program, administered under a $66 million contract with The Shaw Group has been bogged down with delays, shoddy work, payment disputes and more recently, charges of graft and corruption in the form of a whistleblower lawsuit by two employees of the program who claim that a state official accepted jewelry and meals in exchange for providing confidential information that enabled a contractor to pursue eligible homeowners.

Rainwater, embarrassed into finally acting, announced an investigation in conjunction with the federal Homeland Security inspector general and the state attorney general’s offices. The state official has been placed on leave.

Assuming “full responsibility,” Rainwater said, “I obviously wish we had acted quicker.”

Taking a break from his out-of-state fundraisers and visits to Baptist churches, Jindal paused long enough to issue an executive order to crack down on “incompetent, unscrupulous or predatory contractors and subcontractors.”

Maginnis, however, said Jindal should also be taking a “hard look” at the performance of Shaw, one of the largest of the state’s privatization contractors. He said the administration does not need to repeat its mistakes thus far with the monumental $2.2 billion Medicaid program it is contracting out to five insurance companies next year or with the ever-increasing number of charter schools.

Charter schools represent another blot on the privatization performance record. Abramson in New Orleans and Kenilworth in Baton Rouge, both run by Pelican Education Foundation, have come under intense scrutiny of late.

Operated by Cosmos Foundation out of Pennsylvania, Pelican has already had its Abramson charter revoked by the state. Its sister organization in Texas, Harmony Science academies, as well as similar Cosmos schools in other states, are subject of an FBI investigation into charges that teachers, imported from Turkey to teach, are required to kick back up to 60 percent of their salaries to Cosmos founder Fethullah Gulen.

In New Orleans, a Pelican official is alleged to have offered a state education department investigator a $20,000 bribe to “make problems go away.”

Thos problems included no supervision of students for weeks after a teacher left, sexual activity between students, teachers doing science projects for students, cheating on exams, and other deficiencies.

Perhaps someone should ask how Harmony could justify $7 million in travel expenses over a three-year period in Texas or how it could justify overall payments of nearly $250 million for 38 schools in that state.

More importantly, perhaps someone should ask why teachers are being imported from Turkey when teachers who live here are being laid off because of budgetary cutbacks–cutbacks imposed in order that charter schools might flourish.

More will be forthcoming on this issue in days ahead.

Now for the Office of Risk Management (ORM), the one agency that Jindal has successfully privatized. Or has he?

A year ago, the operations of ORM were taken over by F.A. Richard and Associates (FARA) of Mandeville under a contract that called for the state to pay FARA “not to exceed” $68.2 million to take over ORM over five years.

That was last July. Eight months later, FARA requested and received a $6.8 million amendment to its contract, which now said it would be paid “a maximum amount” of $74.9 million. In a matter of days following approval of the amendment, it was learned that FARA was sold to Avizent, a firm out of Columbus, Ohio. Avizent promptly laid off the only person working in its Baton Rouge office.

Now comes word that Avizent may be selling out to Sedgwick Claims Management Services of Memphis, which had earlier purchased Cambridge Integrated Services Group, Nationwide Better Health’s productivity solutions, Selective Settlements International, and Specialty Risk Services.

Catherine Bennett, communications manager for Sedgwick, said she had not heard reports of the Avizent acquisition and could not comment on the matter.

FARA/Avizent, meanwhile, has informed ORM that because of the backlog of documents to be scanned into its system, it would not be able to take over the Property Section of ORM by Jan. 1 as originally scheduled. That date has been pushed back to April 1.

Because of the delay, two ORM claims adjusters will be out of work as of Jan. 1. ORM has chosen to release the two employees, presently paid in the area of $25 per hour, in favor of retaining contract adjusters who are not state employees. They work for private adjusting firms and the state pays their firms $60 per hour to provide temporary adjusters for ORM.

So why would the state terminate employees making $25 per hour in favor of paying $60 per hour for contractors? Benefits. The state does not provide health coverage, retirement, sick leave, or annual leave for contract adjusters. Nor does it provide job security through civil service protection.

Can you say privatization?

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Notable Quotables, Transparency, Vouchers on August 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

“Every method and path is acceptable, including lying to people. You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers.”

—Fethullah Gülen, founder of a widespread charter school system in the U.S., in a 1999 sermon that aired on Turkish television, shortly before being forced to flee the country after being charged with attempting to overthrow the secular Turkish government.

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FBI probe of Gülen may include Abramson, Kenilworth

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Transparency on August 12, 2011| 9 Comments »

There is a common thread that links the Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD), former RSD Superintendent Paul Vallas, RSD-North Superintendent LaVonne Sheffield, Ph.D., and the Fethullah Gülen network of 155 charter schools scattered throughout 28 states, including at least two in Louisiana.

That common thread is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Sheffield, who headed the RSD-North from June 2009 to July 2010, was brought to Baton Rouge by Vallas at a salary of $200,000. She previously worked under Vallas as Chief Accountability Officer for the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) from June of 2004 to July 2008.

She was an unsuccessful candidate for the position of superintendent of East Baton Rouge Parish schools in January of 2009 and was hired as superintendent of the Rockford, Illinois, Public School District later in 2009. She resigned in April of this year halfway through her contract.

While working for Vallas in Philadelphia, an audit by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) determined that nearly $138.4 million in grant funds were either unallowable or inadequately documented. The audit also determined that SDP should return almost $17.7 million in unallowable costs to DOE.

Before that, Sheffield was employed as Chief Academic Officer for the Detroit Public School System from February 2002 to July 2003. While there, she ran up thousands of dollars of charges to her district-issued charge card while on her wedding trip to Las Vegas, records show.

She also worked from December 1993 to May 2000 as Chief of Staff to Cleveland Mayor Michael White and also served as Director of the Department of Port Control and as manager of the $1.4 billion Cleveland Hopkins International Airport expansion project. While there, both she and White were implicated but never charged in an FBI investigation into widespread bribery in the city administration, including the port and airport project.

Both she and Vallas have departed the Louisiana RSD, but the presence of the FBI lingers.

Reports indicate the agency is conducting another investigation, this one into recent revelations about the Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans and the Kenilworth Science and Technology Charter School in Baton Rouge.

Both schools were operated by Pelican Education Foundation in New Orleans until Abramson’s charter was revoked last month. Pelican is affiliated with Atlas Texas Construction and Trading of Houston. Atlas also operates 38 charter schools in several Texas cities through Cosmos Foundation under the auspices of Harmony Public Schools.

Atlas and Cosmos are all linked to Fethullah Gülen and his network of schools that operate under such innocuous names as Magnolia, Sweetwater, Pioneer, Horizon, Noble, Dove, Bluebonnet, Beehive, Truebright, and, of course, Pelican and Harmony.

The federal investigation, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, does not involve links to terrorism, but centers on charges that the organization uses taxpayer money to bring teachers to this country from Turkey and other countries who are members of the religious group and then requires the teachers to kick back up to 60 percent of their salaries to Gülen’s Hizmet movement.

The Gülen-run schools receive taxpayer funding and also receive private financial support, much of it from the Walton Family, owners of Wal-Mart. The Walton Family Foundation, for example, provided $230,000 in funding for Abramson as recently as 2007.

Gülen, who was forced to flee his native Turkey in 1998 after being charged with attempting to overthrow the secular Turkish government, now resides in a mountain fortress in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

He was granted a permanent residency visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability” and as “a leader of award-winning schools for underserved children around the world,” according to his attorneys, even though he does not hold a high school diploma. Now, however, in an effort to ward off investigations, he claims that neither he nor his movement have an affiliation with the charter schools.

The investigations of Gülen and his organization, which federal officials have refused to confirm or deny, are being coordinated by prosecutors in Pennsylvania’s Middle district in Scranton, and involve hundreds of Gülen charter school members nationwide.

Ostensibly, that would include the two Pelican-run schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

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