School For Sale: Last Remnants of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow Auctioned Off to Highest Bidders
This is the way ECOT ends
Not with a bang but an auction
The now-shuttered Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) was a for-profit online charter school that wasted at least $80 million in taxpayer dollars over the past two years. Since the state Department of Education finally decided to crack down on ECOT, the failed e-charter has been fighting in the courts to avoid having to pay back one dime of their ill-gotten gains. The Ohio Supreme Court will be ruling in the ECOT case soon, but in the meantime, a court-appointed firm put all of the school’s assets up for auction.
The online auction, which closed last week, offered Ohioans the unique opportunity to see exactly what their tax dollars were paying for.
(WARNING: Be prepared to be appalled.)
The biggest item? ECOT’s headquarters, which went to Columbus school district for a bid of $3,155,500.
That may sound like a lot, but the property is valued at $6.7 million by the county auditor. In 2016, the “retail design blog” highlighted ECOT’s posh digs, which were designed by Nvironment, a creative design and architecture firm:
Schools are looking different these days, and at the forefront of this new trend in education is the aptly named Electronic Classroom Of Tomorrow (ECOT). What would be better fitting, then, than to have their offices look straight out of tomorrow?
Raise your hand if your kid’s school was designed by “a creative design and architecture firm.” Anybody?
In the past few weeks, Ohioans have learned that local school districts lost nearly $600 million to ECOT since 2012. We’ve also learned that ECOT paid out $588,000 in hush money to 201 former employees who signed non-disclosure agreements.
What we don’t know yet — how much the ECOT auction will eventually get back for taxpayers. According to Cleveland.com:
Furnishings and other equipment in the headquarters were also sold at online auction this week, split into more than 3,500 lots of items. Those sold for as little as $1 for old test guides and trash baskets to more than $7,000 for calculators, more than $6,000 for a truck and several thousand each for lots of office chairs.
Also sold were old televisions, tables, desks, lawn mowers, coat racks, microscopes, basketballs, a tent and hundreds of ECOT T-shirts.
The total value was not available.
The online auction started May 11 and ended Tuesday, said Richard Kruse, the court-appointed deputy interim master for ECOT. Winning bidders can pick up their items at the building starting Thursday through June 30.
Although he’s still mired in paperwork, Kruse listed some of the items that went for the highest bids, as well as some things that are just plain weird, including a box of bones.
“I’ve been doing this kind of thing for 21 years, and I’ve never sold a box of animal fragments before,” Kruse said.
There were plenty of pencils, white boards and old projectors, too. And there were games, soundboards and even pint glasses.
Here are a few more items that were on the ECOT auction block:
It’s easy to make fun of ECOT’s ridiculous spending habits. What’s hard is holding those who were responsible accountable.
The ECOT scandal (what we’ve been calling “Chartergate”) cost Ohio taxpayers at least $80 million — it could be hundreds of millions of dollars more. Now the investigation into ECOT is criminal. There’s no telling where the investigation could lead. As the Cincinnati Enquirer pointed out, “ECOT has donated more than $2 million to state lawmakers and politicians over the years, nearly all of them Republicans.”
This weekend the Youngstown Vindicator opined on the issue:
The charter-school industry has operated in Ohio for more than two decades with comparatively limited oversight because Republicans in state government have been held hostage by the campaign contributions and other largess from the charter operators.
As a result, billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on this experiment in education that has largely proven to be a failure.
The ECOT auction is no joke. Ohio may never get back all of the money that ECOT wasted. However, if you want to fix the Columbus culture of corruption and stop the pay-to-play politics that enabled ECOT — elect Democrats in 2018.
