LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — The founder of a Little Rock charter school is withholding documents needed for a state audit and a judge should find her in contempt of court, Arkansas education officials said.
Valerie Tatum, the now retired school principal of Covenant Keepers Charter School, has said she doesn’t have access to the requested financial paperwork. Charter schools receive public funds but are generally privately managed.
Judge Mary McGowan ordered Tatum in November to present fiscal records for 2017-18 and 2018-19 and other paperwork related to the school’s charter withdrawal and expenditure of about $200,000.
Mary Claire Hyatt, an attorney for Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, said in a motion filed Dec. 12 that the nearly 295 pages Tatum submitted in response didn’t provide sufficient information. Hyatt noted that records show the school had accounts at two banks, but that Tatum provided no specific information on those accounts.
Hyatt asked McGowan to hold Tatum in contempt for preventing the audit by not handing over the needed documents, the Arkansas Gazette-Democrat reported Monday.
Tatum’s attorney has said she disclosed all the information to which she has access. The school was shuttered in June after the school’s other leaders declined to renew the charter.
“When the school closed, the records were there and not attended at all times,” John Wesley Hall wrote to McGowan. “Plenty of other people had access to them by then, and they could have removed the records for beneficent purposes or ill will,” Hall continued.
Hall insisted Tatum doesn’t have the requested records in storage, at her house or in the hands of a third party.
“She doesn’t have them and doesn’t have control over them. The (Arkansas Department of Education) obviously thinks so, but they have no evidence whatsoever that she does,” Hall said.
Covenant Keepers, which first opened in 2008, served 114 sixth through eighth grade students when it closed last school year following its struggles with academics and finances. The school had low retention rates for teachers and students, including pregnant girls and others who come and go from juvenile-detention centers and mental-health treatment programs.
