Abandon All Hope: Florida’s Charter Takeover Exposed

Abandon All Hope: Florida’s Charter Takeover Exposed

How a Web of Non-Profits, For-Profits, and Political Cronies Are Dismantling Public Education One Vulnerable School at a Time

Inside a 27-year empire built on self-dealing, opaque finances, and legislative sleight-of-hand — where taxpayer dollars meant for the neediest kids vanish into real estate deals, management fees, and the pockets of a connected few.

-Christy Chilton

Prologue: When Hope Becomes a Threat

The Florida sun hung low and merciless that September afternoon in Sarasota, turning the air into a thick, shimmering veil that clung to skin like regret. Parents edged their minivans into the pickup line at Oak Park School — Sarasota County’s only sanctuary for children with profound physical and intellectual disabilities. This is where roughly 225 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade navigate worlds measured in painstaking milestones: a syllable wrenched from silence, a first unassisted step, a seizure held at bay by a nurse’s vigilant hand.

Imagine the scene: Wide hallways engineered for the graceful arc of wheelchairs. Walls alive with the soft whir of communication devices that cost more than most cars. Sensory rooms bathed in calming blues, stocked with tens of thousands of dollars in adaptive equipment, where physical therapists guide spastic limbs through stretches that feel like battles. The air carries the faint antiseptic tang of feeding tubes and the triumphant giggle of a non-verbal teen finally voicing “mama.” The staff-to-student ratio hovers near one-to-three because some children need a grown-up’s steady grip just to swallow lunch without choking.

This isn’t just a school. It’s a fragile miracle stitched together with precision and devotion — a lifeline for kids with cerebral palsy, spina bifida, traumatic brain injuries, severe autism. Occupational therapists rig communication systems. Speech pathologists coax first words from teenagers who’ve spent years silent. This isn’t luxury. It’s survival.

Then, in October 2025, the notice arrived — like a thunderclap in paradise.

Mater Academy, a Miami-based charter giant managed by the for-profit Academica Corporation, had filed to “co-locate” inside Oak Park, Emma E. Booker Elementary, and Brookside Middle — three schools serving predominantly low-income, minority, and disabled students. Mater wasn’t coming to help. It was coming to claim “underutilized” space, rent-free, with the district forced to subsidize everything from buses to janitors to cafeterias.

Jennifer Ortiz stood in the pickup line clutching the notice, her face crumpling in the humid glare. “They’re not just taking space,” she told reporters, her voice cracking. “They’re taking my daughter Sofia’s future.” Sofia, 11, cerebral palsy tightening her limbs like wires, wheeled out that day beaming — unaware that her adaptive playground might soon host a charter’s recess chaos.

What unfolded in Sarasota wasn’t random bureaucratic chaos. It was the predictable endpoint of a 27-year scheme — one that began in Miami strip malls and now stretches across Florida like a shadow.

At its center: brothers Fernando and Ignacio Zulueta, the architects of Academica, a for-profit management company that has turned public education into a private ATM. Their protector? Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., a man who spent years on their payroll before overseeing the very system that now hands them the keys to public buildings.

This is the anatomy of a predatory takeover — not of failing schools, but of functioning ones targeted for their vulnerabilities. And thanks to a radical 2025 law, it’s just getting started.

I. The Context: Manufacturing Crisis, Harvesting Profit

Florida’s public schools aren’t drowning by chance. They’re being held underwater.
Picture classrooms where teachers — paid a national disgrace of $51,000 annually — dig into their own threadbare wallets for crayons and pencils while roofs leak and AC units wheeze like dying accordions. In 2024, the Network for Public Education ranked Florida dead last — 51st out of 51 jurisdictions — in adequate school funding. Support staff scraped by on $33,324. Per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, had fallen $400 since 2019 even as costs skyrocketed and Florida’s economy hummed along with flush tax revenues and bulging reserves.

The starvation wasn’t accidental. It was strategic.

Lawmakers distracted from the manufactured crisis with culture-war red meat. In 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1069, expanding book bans and “Protect Our Children” while over 54% of Florida’s children currently live in poverty and over 60% read below grade level.

“This is not about improving schools,” says Dr. Noreen Alvarez, a former state education official, her voice trembling with controlled fury. “This is about destroying public education and profiting from the wreckage.”

Meanwhile, this starvation funds a shadow system.

Billions cascade to charters and vouchers — startup grants, facilities aid, per-pupil supplements — while public schools shoulder the hungry (54% in poverty), the trailing (60%+ below reading level), the traumatized.

When a student flees a public school for a charter, funding follows immediately — but the roof stays behind. The lights stay on. The fixed costs remain. Classes balloon; programs vanish; test scores dip under the mounting pressure. Then charters swoop in, branded as saviors of a crisis they helped create.
“It’s gaslighting on a statewide scale,” says Marianne Foster, a Title I teacher in Tampa, her voice raw from years of doing more with less.

The grift is old news to anyone who’s followed Academica. State audits reveal commingled funds, safety lapses at Somerset Academy schools, and management fees gorging 10–15% of operating budgets — some topping $9 million annually per school, dwarfing industry norms. Yet the network expands year after year, shielded by lax oversight and protected by strategically placed political donors.

Behind the numbers are children. Real children.

At Oak Park — Sarasota’s only public K–12 school dedicated to children with disabilities — parents know all too well that a shortened therapy session can erase months of painstaking progress.

At Emma E. Booker Elementary — 94% economically disadvantaged, 87% students of color — teachers arrive each morning to kids who slept in cars, stomachs hollow, yet somehow grind out math gains that shatter low expectations.

These schools clawed from D to B grades through sheer resilience, with reading and math improvements beating projections.

At Brookside Middle — 65% economically disadvantaged, 56% students of color, steady A/B grades — teachers already buy supplies out of pocket. Resources stretched thinner mean progress measured in inches, not miles, gets quietly erased.

Florida’s manufactured crisis poses a question no politician will answer: If the goal were truly better outcomes for children, why systematically underfund public schools serving the neediest students while enriching operators who cream high-performers and exclude the rest?

II. The Corporate Veil: A Russian Nesting Doll of Self-Dealing

To trace Mater Academy’s money is to descend into a deliberately constructed hall of mirrors — endlessly recursive, meticulously opaque, designed to confuse auditors and obscure accountability.

The Innermost Doll: Non-Profit Vessels

Public-facing entities like Mater Academy, Inc., Mater Academy Central, and Mater Foundation collect $390 million annually in taxpayer funds — state FEFP allocations, federal Title I grants, local property tax levies. Same interlocking board of directors. Same administrative offices. No real independence. These non-profits exist primarily as collection vehicles, funneling public dollars into the next layer.

The Middle Doll: For-Profit Management

Academica Corporation, owned and controlled by the Zulueta brothers, “manages” virtually everything for the charter schools — curriculum, hiring, facilities, vendor contracts — in exchange for management fees of 10–15% of operating budgets. These percentages dwarf industry standards and can exceed $9 million per school annually.

But it gets worse. Properties housing these publicly funded schools? They’re often leased from separate Zulueta-controlled LLCs at above-market rates determined through sweetheart deals with no competitive bidding. The brothers negotiate with themselves, set their own prices, and invoice their own schools.

The Outermost Doll: Real Estate Empire

By 2010, the Zulueta brothers controlled an estimated $115 million in tax-exempt Florida real estate, generating approximately $19 million in annual rent. The scheme is elegantly simple: Buildings are purchased using tax-exempt public bonds issued on behalf of charter schools. Those same buildings are then leased back to the publicly funded schools at inflated rates. When properties appreciate or are sold, the capital gains flow to private LLCs — public financing, private profit.

The Smoking Gun: Doral College

The Doral College scandal remains the clearest proof of the system’s corruption. In 2011, Doral Academy Preparatory — a publicly funded charter school — extended a $400,000 “loan” to Doral College, a Zulueta-controlled for-profit institution where Manny Diaz Jr. served as Chief Operating Officer. The loan was never repaid. The fake dual-enrollment arrangement allowed Doral College to siphon additional state funds by claiming students were simultaneously enrolled. When investigators finally circled, the college lost its accreditation in 2017.

No one went to jail. No one was barred from receiving public funds. The empire simply reorganized and continued expanding.

“This is self-dealing at an almost incomprehensible scale,” says Jordan Mitchell, a forensic accountant who has analyzed charter financial structures for two decades. “They negotiate with themselves, set their own prices, and siphon public funds with absolute impunity. The oversight mechanisms that are supposed to prevent this simply don’t function.”

III. The Academica Fixer: Manny Diaz Jr. and the Inside Game

The Zulueta network’s expansion into vulnerable public schools is alarming on its own. But with Manny Diaz Jr. at the helm of Florida’s Department of Education, the stakes become existential: the very system meant to regulate charter operators is now overseen by a former insider.

On the surface, Diaz is polished, media-savvy, a former state senator and chair of the Republican Party of Florida. But the sheen hides nepotism — his father, Manny Diaz Sr., was a respected Miami mayor, opening doors that helped accelerate his son’s rise.

A closer look reveals a troubling history. In the 1990s, while teaching social studies at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High, multiple students accused Diaz of inappropriate conduct. They described comments about female students’ appearances, casual discussions of drugs and clubbing, and flirtatious behavior that blurred professional lines. Alumni corroborated these claims, and the Miami Herald documented the accounts. One former student tweeted Diaz was a “pervert and inappropriate teacher,” recalling open discussions of ecstasy use at Miami clubs. Another said, “He was always flirting with the girls and trying to be the popular teacher. Everything she said about him is true, all the partying.” Neyda Borges, a 1999 graduate, described him as a “cool” teacher in a culture of “really weird behavior,” joking with male students about clubs while making suggestive comments about girls — normalizing inappropriate conduct.

From 2009 to 2013, Diaz stepped into the corporate side of education, serving as Chief Operating Officer of Doral College, a for-profit institution controlled by the Zulueta brothers’ Academica network. During his tenure, Doral College accepted a $400,000 loan from Doral Academy Preparatory — a publicly funded charter school managed by Academica. The arrangement, investigators later concluded, was a glaring conflict of interest and misuse of taxpayer funds. By 2017, Doral College had lost accreditation and shuttered, leaving students with degrees of questionable value. Diaz had already moved on, first to legislative roles, then to statewide office — continuing to champion policies that enriched his former colleagues.

Public records show that as a legislator, Diaz repeatedly sponsored bills expanding charter access, reducing district oversight, and loosening financial reporting requirements. Campaign contributions flowed from charter-affiliated entities, including Academica itself.

In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Diaz Commissioner of Education, granting him authority over the very programs and facilities that once lined his pockets. He now approves charter applications, greenlights co-locations, and oversees billions in education funding — including the Schools of Hope program that enabled the Zulueta network’s co-location raids in Sarasota.

Ethics experts are blunt.

“You have the state’s top education official, the referee, who used to work for one of the players,” says Alicia Summers, former federal prosecutor and government ethics professor. “Even if he recuses himself, the structure itself undermines public trust.”

Diaz’s office declined comment. The Department of Education insists he “has no financial interest in any charter operator” and that decisions are guided by law and student outcomes. But families whose children attend targeted schools see a different picture. The man entrusted with safeguarding Florida’s public education system is the very insider who helped build the empire now threatening their schools.

By 2025, Diaz had added yet another title — interim president of the University of West Florida — drawing a second six-figure salary while steering statewide education policy. When Sarasota parents rallied against the co-location of Oak Park, Diaz’s response was measured and clinical: co-location “expands opportunity” and “increases parental choice.”

Parents heard something else entirely: hostage-taking dressed as reform.

IV. The Legal Cudgel: SB 2510 and the Gutting of Safeguards

The weapon that enabled Sarasota’s crisis didn’t exist two years ago.

In spring 2025, the Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 2510 — a sprawling 387-page omnibus bill that revived and radicalized the 2017 “Schools of Hope” program. Originally conceived as a targeted intervention for chronically failing schools in deeply distressed communities, SB 2510 broadened eligibility thresholds, loosened performance criteria, and handed charter operators a statutory right to co-locate inside “underutilized” public facilities.

The law’s requirements are brutally one-sided. School districts must provide space, transportation, food service, and custodial support to co-locating charters. Districts get just 20 days to prove “material impracticability” — an almost impossible evidentiary burden requiring documentation that the charter’s presence would cause immediate physical danger or render the building structurally unsound.

No local referendum. No meaningful public input process. No real avenue for appeal.

“This isn’t collaboration,” says Rebecca Beltran, former general counsel for a large Florida school district, her voice like gravel. “This is a legal hammer disguised as policy. It turns what should be negotiation into mandate, transforming co-location from partnership into forced occupation.”

The financial mathematics are devastating. Per-pupil funding flees with students who transfer to the co-located charter, but the district continues eating maintenance costs, utilities, insurance, and infrastructure expenses for the entire building. Charters get subsidized palaces while the host district bleeds resources.

In Sarasota, Mater Academy’s October 2025 filings strategically targeted schools operating at 43–58% capacity — a figure that ignored crucial context. Oak Park’s “empty” rooms aren’t vacant classrooms waiting to be filled.

They’re specialized therapy suites, sensory integration spaces, medical treatment areas, and equipment storage for devices that keep children alive. Booker Elementary’s “underutilization” reflected smaller class sizes necessary for students living in profound poverty and trauma. Brookside’s numbers ignored the reality that middle schoolers need science labs, art rooms, and band practice spaces that sit empty during certain periods.

By November 8, 2025, Sarasota’s school board voted in emergency session to frantically reorganize school assignments and redraw attendance boundaries, artificially hiking capacity numbers in a desperate bid to barricade the doors against Mater’s invasion. They were partially successful — but only through bureaucratic contortions that disrupted educational continuity for thousands of students.

Too late for some districts. Orange County, Hillsborough County, and others brace for similar raids. In Polk County, eight public schools were put on notice by Mater Academy just last month, watching Sarasota’s playbook unfold as charter operators sharpen their legal briefs.

V. The Targets: Vulnerability, Not Failure

Mater Academy didn’t pick failing schools. It didn’t target institutions collapsing under mismanagement or academic disaster. It picked the powerless — schools serving communities with the least political clout, the fewest resources to fight back, and the most profound needs.

Emma E. Booker Elementary

Emma E. Booker Elementary sits on Sarasota’s north side, a neighborhood school where 94% of students are economically disadvantaged and 87% are students of color. Named for a pioneering Black educator who taught during segregation, the school stands as a symbol of resilience in its community.

By the Florida Department of Education’s own metrics, it is a success story: consistent A and B grades, math and reading gains that exceed expectations, and a faculty that, despite chronic under-resourcing, meets profound challenges with unwavering dedication. Teachers arrive before dawn and stay past dusk, running food pantries and clothing closets out of their own classrooms, knowing which children slept in cars, went hungry, or fled domestic violence the night before. This is the school Mater Academy now deems ripe for takeover.

Brookside Middle School

Brookside Middle is a cornerstone of its community, 65% economically disadvantaged and 56% students of color, yet it maintains steady A and B grades year after year. Teachers coach basketball in donated shoes, and the band director pays out of pocket for instrument repairs. Students arrive with backpacks heavy with challenges — poverty, trauma, language barriers — but the school’s staff stretch themselves to meet every need. Despite this success, Brookside is now in the crosshairs of a predatory charter network, targeted not for failure but for its vulnerable community.

No crisis here — except the one about to be manufactured.

Oak Park School

Oak Park School is Sarasota County’s only public K–12 school for children with profound, complex disabilities. 64% of students are economically disadvantaged, 45% are students of color, yet here, progress doesn’t show up on standardized tests. It sounds like a child’s first laugh through a speaking valve. It looks like three unassisted steps after two years of daily physical therapy. It feels like a mother weeping with joy because her son with traumatic brain injury finally recognized her face.

The spaces Mater coveted are far from empty: a hydrotherapy pool where children with spina bifida build strength without gravity crushing their spines; sensory integration rooms where children with severe autism learn to tolerate clothing textures; medical treatment areas where nurses suction tracheostomy tubes and monitor feeding pumps; and storage for Hoyer lifts, adapted bicycles, communication devices, and the unglamorous apparatus that makes life possible. These rooms are lifelines, not luxuries, yet Mater Academy has marked them as “underutilized,” threatening to disrupt the fragile miracle these children rely on.

“These schools demonstrate extraordinary resilience in the face of systemic neglect,” says Maria Torres, a longtime education advocate, her eyes blazing. “Targeting schools that serve predominantly Black, brown, and disabled children isn’t a bug in this system. It’s the feature. It’s the entire point.”

VI. The Playbook: A National Template

What’s unfolding in Florida isn’t unique. It’s a refined playbook that’s been tested, iterated, and exported to vulnerable districts across America:

1. Starve public schools. through legislative budget cuts and funding diversions, creating the appearance of failure.
2. Label schools as failing. using manipulated metrics that ignore poverty, disability, and trauma while rewarding schools that exclude challenging students.
3. Rewrite laws. through lobbying and campaign contributions, lowering barriers for charter takeovers and co-location mandates (see: SB 2510).
4. Build opaque corporate nests. using interlocking non-profits, for-profit management companies, and real estate LLCs that obscure money flows and accountability.
5. Install political protectors. in oversight positions — ideally people who previously worked for the charter operators and owe their careers to the network.
6. Target vulnerable districts. serving poor, minority, and disabled students with the least political power to resist.
7. Cream students. by selectively enrolling higher-performers and pushing out expensive, challenging cases, then tout superior test scores as proof of excellence.
8. Rinse and repeat. — Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and now Florida. The lab rat today becomes America’s blueprint tomorrow.

VII. The Accountability Gap and the Performance Paradox

The fundamental asymmetry in Florida’s education system isn’t about quality. It’s about accountability.

Public schools operate in crystal-clear fishbowls. Budgets are published line by line. Teacher certifications are verified. School board meetings are public, recorded, and archived. Elected board members can be voted out. Principals answer to superintendents who answer to communities. Every decision is subject to sunshine laws, open records requests, and public scrutiny.

Charter schools operate in shadows. Management contracts are proprietary. Vendor relationships are opaque. Board members are hand-picked by management companies, not elected by communities. Financial statements are filed months late, often missing crucial details about related-party transactions.

When scandals break, charters simply close and reopen under new names with the same operators. Teachers aren’t required to hold state certifications. Discipline data goes unreported. Special education students are counseled out or never enrolled in the first place.

The performance paradox is simple: Charter schools can only appear superior if they don’t serve everyone. Cream the highest performers. Avoid students with expensive disabilities. Push out behavioral challenges. Counsel struggling learners back to public schools. Then compare your test scores to institutions serving all comers and declare victory.

“Your model only looks successful if mine is forced to take every child you reject,” says Akil Bello, a nationally recognized testing and accountability expert. “That’s not competition. It’s a rigged game.”

When public schools are forced to accept every student — every child in a wheelchair, every teenager fleeing gang violence, every immigrant who arrived last week speaking no English, every kid with a $90,000-per-year medical care plan — and then punished for not matching the test scores of schools that avoid those same students, the system isn’t measuring quality. It’s manufacturing justification for privatization.

Epilogue: The Ironic Coda of “Hope”

Florida ranks 50th in teacher pay and dead last in school funding adequacy.

Yet DeSantis and Diaz Jr.’s “Schools of Hope” promises salvation through operators who’ve profited from exclusion and self-dealing for 27 years.

In Sarasota, parents continue to rally outside school board meetings, voices hoarse from chanting. Lawyers circle, preparing civil rights complaints and facilities challenges. Districts frantically redraw boundaries and reorganize schools in bureaucratic guerrilla warfare against state mandates. The veil trembles, catching light, threatening to tear.

But the Russian nesting dolls keep spinning. The $400,000 ghost loan. The $9 million annual management fees. The $115 million real estate empire built on tax-exempt bonds. The brother architects counting money in Miami while children in Sarasota wonder if their therapy rooms will survive.

The veil can be torn. It requires courage, but the tools exist:

Follow the money. Demand line-item accounting for every management fee, every lease payment, every related-party transaction. Force charter operators to publish financials with the same transparency required of public schools.

Expose the protectors. Name the politicians who take charter PAC money and then vote to gut public school funding. Trace the career paths of commissioners who worked for the very operators they now regulate. Conflict of interest isn’t a technicality — it’s corruption with a bureaucratic mask.

Amplify the vulnerable. Center the voices of parents like Jennifer Ortiz, teachers like Marianne Foster, students like Sofia. These aren’t abstract policy debates. They’re children whose futures hang in the balance.

Organize relentlessly. Sarasota’s parents forced their school board to act through sheer sustained pressure. That model works. Pack meetings. Flood inboxes. Make opposition louder than compliance.

Demand legislative accountability. SB 2510 can be amended or repealed. Politicians respond to pressure, especially in election years. Make charter profiteering a campaign liability.

Return public education to its purpose: Serving all children, especially the most vulnerable, not generating returns for connected insiders and real estate moguls.

Because for kids like Sofia Ortiz — who wheeled out of Oak Park that September afternoon beaming with the innocent joy of a child unaware that adults are fighting over her future — hope isn’t a slogan.

Hope isn’t a brand. Hope isn’t a legislative gimmick designed to transfer wealth.
Hope is a hallway wide enough for a wheelchair and dreams big enough to imagine a future where every child, regardless of disability, race, or zip code, gets the education they deserve.

That’s a future worth fighting for.

And the first step is tearing down the veil.
-Christy Chilton