Last month, supporters of a would-be charter school made their case to the Montrose County School Board, hoping to receive an official charter which would allow it to open in the district. The meeting on May 20 was not the first time the leaders of Montrose Classical Academy sat before the county school board to discuss their charter application: this whole saga played out last year as well, and ended with the school board rejecting the classical school’s charter application.
The board has not made a public decision on round two of MCA’s charter application yet, which will determine whether the school is allowed to open in the district. By the end of last month’s meeting, though, it was clear that they still harbored some of the concerns which led to their rejection of last year’s application, including the nature of the school’s relationship and contract with a company named Minga Education Group.
But let’s back up a bit. Why am I talking about Montrose County? The pastoral Western Slope county is rarely a Front Range news-leader, and its school district is only the thirtieth-largest in the state. The situation it has found itself in, though – targeted by a network of education reformers who hope to use the district’s budget to fund an ideologically aligned school run by their allies, and make money in the process – is not unique to Montrose. Montrose is simply the latest place it has reared its head.
In Colorado, charter schools can open in one of two ways. They can either be authorized by the state Charter School Institute, or they can be authorized by the local school district in which they hope to operate, with the second pathway being by far the most common. That is what the leaders of Montrose Classical Academy are seeking from the county school board. Once authorized, charter schools are funded by the same taxpayer dollars which fund neighborhood public schools, but are often administered by nonprofits called education management organizations (EMOs) or education service providers (ESPs) – a distinction helpfully explained, along with greater context regarding the Montrose Classical situation, by Liz Wilson of the Pro-CO Education Project in a new paper on the subject.
In addition to non-public administration, Colorado charters are granted a great deal of leeway around curriculum, staffing, and admissions.
There are many high-performing charter schools in Colorado which appear to be serving their students well, but the charter system has also created opportunities for profit in the taxpayer-funded education system, and those opportunities are being taken advantage of. For the last few months, I have been investigating and writing about a network of Colorado organizations, consultants, activists, and attorneys who appear to be engaged in a concerted effort, whether out of sincere belief or the pursuit of pure profit, to seize those opportunities, turning public funds into private revenue. Minga Education Group – whose relationship with Montrose Classical Academy has raised red flags for the local school board – is one of those companies.
When the Montrose County school board rejected MCA’s first application last year, it was not entirely because of the school’s relationship with Minga. In fact, the official resolution denying the application listed several pages worth of concerns around low proposed teacher pay, an apparent misunderstanding of performance standards, and a lack of explanation for how the school would benefit the local community. The resolution also mentioned concerns about Minga – which is slated to manage the school, if it receives authorization – noting that the scope of the contract between the school and the management group is “not entirely clear” and that “without measurable goals, it may be difficult to assess whether the contractor’s performance meets expectations.”
When MCA found itself in front of the school board again last month, having submitted a new application, board members once again voiced concerns about Minga’s involvement.
“I’m still coming back to the lack of transparency about who Minga is, given what an important role they’re going to play,” school board member Sarah Fishering commented two-plus hours into the hearing. “It’s impossible for me to be able to tell if there’s a potential conflict of interest between their board and your board, or their board and our board.”
“I have no transparency into who they are at all,” Fishering went on, “and I can’t find that because they don’t seem to exist outside of providing presentations.”
Fishering’s point was well-taken: if the school board is going to be funding Montrose Classical Academy, and Montrose Classical Academy is going to be paying Minga, it’s reasonable that the board would want to know some basic information about the company which will be running the school funded by its money. But Minga Education Group, it turns out, does not even have a website.
So what is it? And who is it?
According to Secretary of State records, Minga Education Group was founded in 2018 by Andy Franko, a former teacher and administrator in Falcon District 49. A profile for the organization on the website of the Colorado League of Charter Schools (where Franko formerly served as a board member) describes Minga as a “small non-profit organization based in Colorado, passionate about helping charter schools succeed.” According to the records, Franko also incorporated a for-profit version of the company, named Minga Education, LLC.
After leaving D49, where he appears to have met and worked alongside conservative education attorney Brad Miller, Franko joined the staff of another Miller-affiliated organization: Education ReEnvisioned BOCES, or ERBOCES, an often-controversial board of cooperative educational services with the power to authorize contract schools, online schools, and homeschool enrichment programs. Since its founding as Colorado Digital BOCES in 2014, ERBOCES has effectively been the mothership for conservative education reform efforts in Colorado. Helmed by executive director Ken Witt – who was famously recalled from the Jefferson County school board in 2015 and until recently also served as the controversial superintendent of Woodland Park school district – with Miller as legal counsel, ERBOCES staffers and board members have a penchant for being involved in education drama statewide. With his tenure at the helm of Minga, which has overlapped with his time at ERBOCES, Franko has demonstrated that he’s no exception to that trend (according to his LinkedIn profile, Franko, departed ERBOCES late last year; the ERBOCES website, however, still shows him as staff).
Despite keeping as low of a profile as possible, Franko has not succeeded in keeping Minga out of the local news. In late 2023, a conservative turf war over who would manage the Ascent Classical family of charter schools thrust Minga into the pages of the Colorado Sun.
Ascent Classical Academy Charter Schools, to use its full legal name, operates four classical charters on the Front Range. Sporting substantial funding from Ready Colorado and the Daniels Fund, the organization is plugged-in, replete with connections to Colorado Republican politicians and ed-reformers. From its founding until 2023, the Ascent schools were run by an affiliated education management organization confusingly named Ascent Classical Academies. By 2023, the relationship between the management org and the affiliated schools had deteriorated, and members of the Ascent board moved to replace ACA with Minga.
The fact that Ascent changed management organizations was not newsworthy in itself, but the manner in which the schools carried out the shift to Minga – by mass-firing more than 300 employees and then attempting to rehire them as Minga employees – raised eyebrows, triggered a lawsuit, and attracted the notice of the Sun. Among other details in the Sun’s excellent coverage of the saga is the finding that Minga was given the contract to manage the four Ascent schools without Ascent ever issuing a request-for-proposal.
After the Ascent drama, Minga returned to status quo ante: making no waves, having no website, and quietly raking in as many taxpayer dollars as possible. In its latest application to the Montrose County school district, MCA noted that Minga currently manages 14 charter schools in Colorado (including the four Ascent schools). In Minga’s latest tax filing, those 14 schools appear to somehow have turned into more than $5 million in revenue.
There is no evidence of criminality here. The ongoing heist is perfectly legal – but it’s still a heist. If there were no Minga, if there were not a concerted effort to privatize the profits from the public education system, the five-plus million dollars Minga saw as revenue would otherwise have been seen by students. Those evaporating funds are particularly noticed in places like Montrose County, where the school district is hoping to rebuild its 80-year-old high school building.
Like I said above, and say as often as I can in these contexts – even though I would prefer to see every dollar possible go into the public school system – there are good charter schools in Colorado. Schools run by people with a passion for education, often utilizing the charter model as a way to fill gaps in the existing school system and bring innovative techniques to the fore. But there are also bad charter schools: schools which exist only to serve as holes in the bucket of education funding. Schools where children receive a substandard education in service to skimming off the top, or are subjected to backwards curricula for ideological reasons. The Montrose County school board still has a decision to make: they have to decide which one of those types of charter schools they think Montrose Classical Academy will be. If it’s the former, why wouldn’t they want it in their district? If it’s the latter, why would they? Minga can make its money elsewhere.
Ultimately, though, the choice might not be in their hands. Not too long ago, another charter school with ties to ERBOCES, Merit Academy, had its application rejected by a local school board – and soon thereafter, with the help of ERBOCES, its leaders, and their allies, a new majority took control of that school board. They won as a slate, in Woodland Park, in 2021, and their first order of business was to award a charter to Merit academy, the charter the previous board had rejected.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Editor’s Note: an earlier version of this story indicated that Ascent Classical is represented by the Miller Farmer Carlson law firm. The firm does not represent the organization at this time.
