The Executive Education Academy Charter School of Allentown, PA, has just broken ground on plans for a $25 million stadium. The massive athletic complex will connect to the school and sit on top of a 300-stall parking garage and offer 4000 seats, a press box, and concessions. The field will be turf, be supported by concrete columns and sheer walls, and span 126,713 square feet.
The complex will be near Coca-Cola Field, home of the minor league baseball team the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, with whom the charter will apparently share parking, the result of some protracted negotiations. The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission approved this thing.
You are thinking, perhaps, that EEACS must be one hell of a school, and well, no, not really. According to Niche, the school rates a B-. Its test results are not great-- 36% proficiency for reading and 16% for math. Graduation rate is 95% (which tells us nothing about cohort attrition). There are 1,431 students K-12, and 100% of them are Free of Reduced Lunch students. According to School Digger, the student body is 5.4% White, 17.1 % Black, and 75.3% Hispanic. Allentown's population is 26% White, 8% Black and 60% Hispanic.
Ironically, Niche says that girls and boys athletic participation is very low. Their football team plays AA ball and had a record of 6-5-1 this season. The Raptors also play AA basketball.
In short, a pretty run of the mill charter school. Why do they need a $25 million stadium? That's not really clear.
Some coverage notes that there are even more expensive and expansive stadiums out there at public schools, particularly in Texas and Georgia. Buford High School in Georgia just played its first games in the $62 million Phillip Beard Stadium.
But the Buford stadium came with controversy, with lots of observations about district priorities. But Buford's football team is ranked #9 nationally, and the stadium was actually paid for by the city.
However, what we really want to notice about the Buford stadium is that the whole business involves decisions by locally-elected officials, both from the city and the school district. If people object to having their tax dollars spent this way, they can make their displeasure felt at the ballot box.
Not so for the EEACS stadium, because like any other charter school, EEACS is a privately owned and operated business-- it just happens to be funded by the local taxpayers, and if they don't like the idea of tax dollars funding a big beautiful stadium, well, too bad.
EEACS started operation in the fall of 2014, and lists four founders. Jennifer Mann, former Democratic state rep, now operating a consulting firm. She appears to have no current office with the school. Carol Trench, who appears to have worked with Philadelphia charter group ASPIRA and is now a Philly principal.
Steve Flavell is a co-founder and currently serves as Chief Operations Officer. Flavell has some actual background in education, but has worked mostly in behavioral health and as an administrator with Success Schools. He's paid around $150K. Robert Lysek is a co-founder who serves as CEO. Lysek appears to have started out with a career in law enforcement in mind (University of Florida), and was even a deputy sheriff in Pinellas County, FL. But he shifted to Camelot Education, founded Success Schools, and has been busy with PA charter schools for a while.
Lysek was tagged for Pennsylvania's Superintendent's Academy in 2018, and he seems generally to be the public face of EEACS. He's paid just under $200K for his work.
How exactly is EEACS paying for this $25 million project? Currently they have an operating budget, according to their website, of $20 million.
But this is not their first big athletic project. In March, 2023, they announced that they would be building a 28,000 square foot fieldhouse for around $7 million. For that project, they partnered with the Lehigh Valley Health Network. Announced Lysek:
Our partnership with LVHN is a game-changer for Executive. Besides collaborating, the partnership will bring internship opportunities to our students with a career pathway program, scholarship opportunities — along with in-house expertise that will provide us with athletic trainers, strength and conditioning professionals and medical and mental health programs that will benefit all our students.
No such partnership has been announced for the football stadium.
We can debate all day the wisdom of dropping huge piles of money on school athletic facilities. But at least with a real public school, that discussion can be held by representatives elected by the taxpayers. EEASC gets to throw all these taxpayer dollars around without having to answer to taxpayers at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment