What's Actually Best for Our Kids, All the Way Down

We started with the school board. A message from a charter school principal, and a question about voucher and Title I money I could not answer, sent us down a rabbit hole. It ended at a charter operation that has paid more than $10 million to its founder's private companies, and at a Lee County school that took families' enrollment and never opened. Underneath all of it is one question. Our fact-check rides at the bottom.

By Amber Cebull · July 25, 2026

I need to start with how I got here, because the how is the whole point. I did not go looking into charter schools. I was doing what this site has always done, researching and synthesizing public information regarding the school board. Then, in one week, two things landed. A woman who had spent years working inside schools, first a charter and then a private one, wrote to me. She had watched both change hands from the inside, and she asked me questions about where voucher and Title I money actually goes that I could not answer off the top of my head. I am keeping her name out of this, because her story is hers to tell and because none of what follows depends on it. What follows rests on what I found when I went looking for the answers myself, in the public record. So I pulled the thread. Holy Alice in Wonderland. It went further down than I expected, and it landed here.

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about what this is and is not. This is not an argument against charter schools, or private schools, or school choice. Plenty of families in this county choose them and love them, and that is their right. This is one question, the same one I ask about the school board, asked all the way down. When public money is spent in our children's name, where does it actually go, and does it reach the kids? That is the whole thing. What is best for our kids, comprehensively. Not for a party. Not for a management company. For the kids.

Where the thread led

The clearest documented example I found sits in our own backyard. Erika Donalds founded a network of charter schools in Florida under the Optima name. She is also, and I am offering this only as context, married to Byron Donalds, the congressman for our district, who is now running for governor. I am not raising that to score a point against anyone. I am raising it because I believe it is why national reporters spent months digging into these schools, and because that reporting is now on the public record for anyone to read for themselves.

How the money is set up

Here is the structure, and none of it is hidden. It sits in tax filings and financial disclosures. There is a nonprofit, the Optima Foundation, which holds the charter schools. Charter schools are quasi-public schools. They are funded in large part by our tax dollars. Then there are two for-profit companies Erika Donalds is affiliated with, OptimaEd and Optima Management Services. The nonprofit schools pay those for-profit companies for management and services. Public education money comes in on one side, and a share of it leaves to privately owned companies on the other. Those two for-profit companies are held through a single Delaware company called Onesto, whose ownership is not listed anywhere public.

The amounts are documented. The investigative outlet Florida Bulldog reported, from the schools' own records, that the nonprofit and its schools paid more than $10 million to the two for-profit companies Erika Donalds is affiliated with. At one school, both the foundation and the for-profit companies were entitled to 12 percent of the school's revenue. At the virtual school, payments to her company OptimaEd came to nearly 89 percent of the government funding that school received across two years. A CBS News investigation in December of 2025 put the broader figure at roughly $35 million, about 30 percent of the schools' government funding from 2020 to 2023, flowing to firms tied to Erika Donalds.

The buildings add a second layer, and this one takes a beat to see, so stay with me. Every business pays for the space it works out of. Rent is a cost, and any cost a business avoids is money that flows through to the bottom line. A separate nonprofit, Quest Educational Foundation, owns the Naples property that Erika Donalds' two for-profit companies use as their business address, and Quest reports no rental income on its filings, which Florida Bulldog reported indicates the companies are using the space without paying rent.

Now set that beside the fees. On one side, public school dollars move to the for-profit companies as management payments. On the other, a tax-exempt charity, this one led by a former state Board of Education chairman, appears to carry a cost those same companies would otherwise pay for themselves. Two separate nonprofits, both tax-exempt, and in both cases the value moves the same direction, toward the private side of the operation. What that adds up to is yours to weigh. It is not mine to declare.

There is one more thread, and it is still unsettled. One of the schools sued the Optima Foundation, alleging it had been steered toward a specific construction firm whose connections were not disclosed. A judge dismissed that suit in 2025 because of improper venue, not on the substance of the case, and the school is appealing. Those are allegations, not proven facts, and I want them read as exactly that. None of what I have described is a crime. It is a set of arrangements, each of them disclosed somewhere in the paperwork, that is worth understanding before it becomes the model for the next charter school.

The part that happened to our neighbors

Here is where it stops being abstract. One of these schools was built right here, off Gladiolus Drive in Fort Myers, in Lee County. Families enrolled their children. Teachers were hired. And then, on the last day of the school year, at 4:11 in the afternoon, the school emailed those families to say it would not open. One parent, Nathan Williamson, told WINK News they learned that Friday their child had nowhere to go in the fall. The opening was pushed a year, then pushed again. The building is now being handed to a different operator under a new name for 2026. The building is real. The families are real. The school never opened.

And it was not only here. Every one of the four Optima schools that did open has since cut ties with the company. The virtual school, built around students spending hours of the day in virtual-reality headsets, was marketed for as many as fifteen hundred students and enrolled closer to one hundred and seventy, with math scores well below the state average. This is not a company that got unlucky one time. It is a pattern, and I believe families across Florida paid for it in the currency that matters most, which is their children's time and stability.

And the schools did not just drift away. Three of them formally ended their management contracts with the Optima Foundation in 2023. Outside auditors, in reports filed with the Florida Auditor General, flagged deficiencies in the foundation's accounting for debts, textbooks, revenues, vendor invoices, and county funds. In one school's own audit, its management wrote that the Optima Foundation had failed. When the people running the schools, the ones closest to the children, move to cut the cord and say so in a state filing, that tells you something the brochures do not.

There is another cost here, and the Fort Myers families felt it directly. A public school district carries a legal duty to educate every child within its boundaries, every year, no matter what. These private and charter arrangements do not carry that same duty. When the model stops working, the district is still standing and the company can walk away, and the people left holding the risk are the children and the parents who trusted it. That asymmetry is not an argument against choice. It is the reason a family deserves to know who is actually on the hook before they hand over a year of their child's life.

What the founder says

To be fair, Erika Donalds does not hide the business side of this. On her own website she points to her business acumen and says she has raised and deployed more than $100 million in school startup investments. At a campaign event this year she said, and this is a direct quote reported by the Miami Herald, that profit is not going to be a bad word when it comes to the education industry. She has defended earning a profit when parents freely choose the school. When CBS asked her for an interview, she declined, and a spokesperson pointed to her record of starting successful charter schools. CBS also reported the other side of the arrangement, and it belongs here. A source familiar with the contracts told them the outside firms landed the schools a good price on payroll, information technology, and other back office services. A source close to her said the plan all along was to help each school start up and then step away once it reached full stability. Those are unnamed sources rather than documents, and I am putting them in front of you anyway, because you should get to weigh the defense along with everything else. She is entitled to that view. I am simply setting it next to the Fort Myers families and letting you hold both at once.

The other half of the question

I owe you the piece I opened with. The principal also asked about Title I, the federal money for low-income students, and I could not answer that one either. So I read up on it. Title I is not a check anyone hands a school to spend however it likes. It flows to the public school district based on how many low-income children it serves, and the district decides how it reaches those kids. It is the money behind reading and math interventionists, after-school tutoring, and the meals and staff that come with programs like it. For a child who has no help at home, because a parent works two jobs or does not speak English, it is often the thing that keeps them from falling behind.

Here is the part that surprised me, and it surprises most people. When a low-income child attends a private school, the law still owes that child a share of Title I, but through something called equitable services. The district keeps control of the money and arranges the services. The private school never receives the funds to run itself. A staffer at the district office administers it precisely so that a public dollar stays public and stays tracked. That is not a loophole. It is the safeguard.

Now hold the two systems next to each other, because that is the whole point of asking where the money goes. Title I is built so the dollar reaches the student and can be followed at every step. I believe the charter school money was arranged so that most of a school's public funding could leave for a private company its founder owns. Same source, our taxes. Two very different answers to the question of who it is really for.

Why this belongs on a school board site

You might reasonably ask what a congressman's wife's charter company has to do with a Lee County school board election. The answer is the thread itself. It is the same public dollars, the same arrangements that are disclosed but complicated, the same question about whether money spent in our kids' name actually reaches our kids. That question runs through the school board's construction contracts. It runs through the $23 million charter school campus a reader wrote to ask me about. And it runs through this. I did not check anyone's party before I followed the money, and I am not asking you to either. A registered Republican wrote this. The truth does not care which box you checked.

So here is where I landed, after the whole rabbit hole. I do not think the problem is charter schools, or public schools, or any single person. I think the problem is that we stopped asking the simplest question out loud. What is best for our kids. Not what is best for a district's message to families, or a management company's margin, or a candidate's campaign. Comprehensively, all the way down, what is best for the kids? When you make that the only question, most of the noise falls away, and what is left is the money and where it went. Follow that honestly, and you will usually find your answer.

Read the companion piece: What Would It Actually Take to Break the Chain?

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