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This morning, the Texas Observer published new allegations of fraud by HISD Mike Miles’ Third Future Schools Charter network in Mike Miles moves Texas school funds to Colorado through a possible shell corporation without a paper trail. An excerpt is below.

“Houston Independent School District (HISD) Superintendent Mike Miles claims to be a financial wizard. But controversy has followed the former military man-turned-school administrator to nearly every Texas school district he’s served. In 2012, he was hired by the Dallas Independent School District (DISD), only to be ousted by a majority of the school board three years later after an investigation showed Miles violated district policies.

“In addition, even though Texas school districts signed agreements with the entity called Third Future Schools-Texas, the Observer found that the Texas entity never established a real administrative office—instead it rented a mailbox in an Austin shared workspace, which it no longer uses.

“Third Future Schools-Texas does not have its own website. Three board members are listed in its filing with the Texas Secretary of State: Conrad Coleman, a retired pharmaceutical company sales representative; Michael Williams, a former TEA commissioner under former Texas Governor Rick Perry; and Dorothy Reyes, a healthcare administrator, who are all residents of Midland. Coleman declined and Williams and Reyes did not respond to the Observer’s requests for comment. (A spokesman for the Colorado company later told the Observer that two others have joined and that Williams is now a member of Third Future Schools’ corporate board.)

“The entity’s 990 forms do not disclose its symbiotic relationship with the Colorado charter school nonprofit , which has a separate board. That could be problematic, said Jesus Jimenez-Andrade, a former auditor and assistant professor of forensic accounting and finance at Texas A&M University. “If there is a shell organization, or an organization in the middle that was only created for the purpose of bringing in public dollars, and was not executing specific operations, then that has to be well documented” in tax filings, said Jimenez. “They need to answer: Why was money sent to another organization; what were the possible conflicts of interest?” 

“The transfers of millions of Texas public school dollars to Third Future Schools in Colorado occurred during a period when the charter school nonprofit was in debt; in June 2023 it was forced to close one of its three Colorado schools because of declining enrollment, according to meeting records first reported in May by Spectrum as part of its investigation, “Disappearing Dollars.”  

“In an email, U.S. Representative Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat, told the Observer that she believes the state probe into Miles’ charter school nonprofit is insufficient and she has called on the federal Department of Education to investigate. “The TEA is responsible for this undemocratic takeover and implanting Mike Miles in our district. TEA investigating Mike Miles is like the fox guarding the hen house.”

You’d think a former TEA Commissioner Michael Williams and Houston ISD’s current CFO James Terry would know they did NOT have the legal authority to control Third Future School Texas’s money. Will TEA Commissioner Morath defend this or investigate it?

Read the entire article here.


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