This is a story of how the Calgary Board of Education opposed the Alberta government over their underfunding of public education and had the government close their board down in an unprecidented political attack on democracy.
Sharon Hester was a nice middle of the road CBE Public Trustee who survived that anti-democratic debacle and was re-elected. Until it was discovered that she and her husband were also profiting off the new market in public education set up by the Alberta government.
With market driven education now fully embraced by the CBE this is a story of how one trustee and her husband tried to profit off all of this. Amidst all the chaos of introducing the Free Market into education, they decided to engage in a bit of classic free marketing of their own.
One has to ask why it took the organized crime/fraud squad three years to lay charges. And one has to ask why this ponzi scheme was allowed to bilk people for so long. It's an apocryphal story of Alberta Greed.
Former trustee charged in scam
Alleged scheme raised $1.36M
Former school trustee Sharon Hester faces a charge of using the proceeds of crime.Photograph by : Calgary Herald Archive
Sherri Zickefoose, Calgary Herald
Published: Friday, January 13, 2006Police have laid 40 charges of fraud against a 65-year-old Calgarian alleged to be at the centre of a $1.36-million Ponzi scheme following a two-and-half-year investigation.
Jim Hester is accused of operating an alleged investment scam that ran for years and brought in millions of dollars under the name Team Education Inc.
From Sept. 26, 2003: School trustee Hester resigns
Team Education controversy rolls into Stettler
Calgary-based company currently under investigation by commercial crime
TOM MacDOUGALL
Independent Editor
September 24, 2003
The fog settling over a Calgary-based company that raised funds for educational purposes now extends to Stettler.
Jean Schell joins a growing list of investors in Team Education who say the company, operated by Jim Hester, hasn’t come through on the promised interest payments on their investments.
Hester’s business has been facing increasing scrutiny over the past few weeks, scrutiny which only heightened last week when his wife, Sharon, temporarily stepped down from her position as trustee on the Calgary Board of Education. She cited the controversy as part of her reasoning for her absence.
Team Education promotional material commits to use funds raised from investors to assist high needs children pay for food, clothing, school fees, sports equipment and the like.
Schell got involved with Team Education in February 2002, on the advice of her financial agent, Primerica representative Tamara Traub. The investment seemed to be a good way to save for the future, promising a rate of return of seven per cent per month.
As security, Schell was provided with a post-dated cheque for her principal and another for her interest.
“It was good on paper,” said Schell.
Believing it a sound investment, Schell re-invested her principal and interest at the end of the first term. She didn’t think anything more of it until her daughter, Tammy Duncan — also a Team Education investor — tried to cash her own cheque in February of this year. It bounced.
Schell started to get concerned about her money, with a term set to mature in May, and called Hester. She says he told her to hold off cashing her cheques and promised to send out new ones. He did, but when Schell tried to cash one of the new ones, it bounced too.
Duncan, who says she has been trying to get her money back since that first cheque bounced, hasn’t had any more luck than her mother.
“He always promised to give me money,” said Duncan. “But he never has.”
Peter Boys, a Stettler financial agent, is helping Schell file a formal complaint with the Alberta Securities Commission.
“From what I see, this was probably a fairly legitimate investment at one time, but somewhere along the line it just derailed,” said Boys. “You can’t support seven per cent a month with any kind of investment.”
Both Boys and Schell hope other Stettler residents with their money tied up in Team Education will come forward to divulge their experiences, and lodge a complaint.The 1998 Calgary Awards were handed out to 18 citizens and
organizations today for their outstanding commitment to our
community.
Recipients of Community Achievement Awards Jim Hester
(Community Service),January 30, 2003
Is this legal? Supposedly they want you to loan money so they can do charitable fundraising for schools, not keep a cent, give all the profits to schools but still give you a minimum of 15% per annum return on your loan? They provide a legitimate volunteer community reference,Jim Hester, in the Calgary (Canada) Community (1,2). Yet he's no where to be found on the contact pages. He's mentioned in Better Business Bureau entry which surprisingly lists the company as a "FOR PROFIT" organization. It all just seems so strange. Does this trick investors into feeling they are investing for charity? Why does the website call themselves "Team Capital" while they advertise the volunteer efforts of "Team Education"? Why don't they list any of the schools they have helped or the projects they were involved with? Is this legitimate or a scam?
posted by abez at 8:13 PM PST - 7 commentsHaving learnt the valuable lesson that it is better to go along with the Klein Reich than oppose it the CBE has become the very model of P3 education in Alberta, which is descibed below in the article by Andrew Nikiforuk. But here are a couple of examples of public money going to pay for private profit;MetaBlog of Bloggers » Blog Archive » Calgary Board of Education ...
Calgary Board of Education contracts TELUS Sourcing Solutions to provide human resource management. The Calgary Board of Education has signed a 10-year approximately $65 million.In all this political manuvering based upon the Alberta government adopting a Republican education program, the CBE has been the favorite strawdog of the rightwing in Calgary including of course the Reform/Alliance/Conservatives and their backers in the NCC which is headquartered in Calgary. The CBE was forced to adapt to their demands as more and more students dropped out and went to Charter and Private schools. With voucher funding in Alberta, the money follows the student, the CBE faced a continuing crisis of what to do about closing schools, due to reduced enrollment. Schools that the right wing wanted to use for Charter Schools.
CALGARY EDUCATION CRISIS 1999
FFWD Weekly - December 2nd, 1999Voters choose new school trustees
Calgary voters elected six rookie trustees and one incumbent Monday, and showed strong support for increased government spending on education.
Danielle Smith :: daniellesmith.ca
Calgary Herald
Tuesday, November 30, 1999Board must act to stop exodus
Characterizing the educational divide in school board politics as a partisan split or a battle between conservatives and liberals is a messy shorthand.
While it's true that many tenured trustees go on to seek higher office, it is seldom partisan politics that determines their ideological positions while a member of the local school board.
If the division between political parties was a crevice, the educational divide would be the Grand Canyon.
Public education is littered with educational fads that have demonstrated little in the way of enhanced student achievement. Whether it be integrated classrooms, multi-aging, whole language, or no-fail policies, the system has created numerous education casualties. Graduates become the walking wounded, ill-prepared to face the rigours of post-secondary studies or enter the workforce with superior competence.
It's the predictable outcome of a system that coddles kids in elementary school, warehouses them in junior high, then plays catch-up in high school in a belated attempt to make up for lost time.
The past experience of those who sought educational reform in other jurisdictions and failed -- failed miserably, too -- is a sorry history lesson that we are about to witness in Calgary. Particularly after Monday night's election.
For the past five years trustees, the administration and the teachers' union have been in lock step arguing that chronic under-funding is what ails the CBE. The pitch heightened in recent years with the claims that the system was on the brink of financial collapse.
What the education establishment didn't count on was parents taking it at its word -- and taking their kids promptly out of public schools.
In the past this was no big deal. When fed-up parents pulled their kids to put them in private schools, their tax dollars continued to go to the public board. The CBE didn't complain about any loss of enrolment. It got to keep the money, but didn't have to educate the children.
All that changed in 1994 when funding began to follow the student. Innovations such as charter and home schooling and partially-funded private schooling gave parents educational options they never had. Students left the system by the thousands and took their basis student grants with them.
It's no wonder school boards have been whipping up public sentiment to return things to the way they were. The CBE monopoly is in its death throes, collapsing under the weight of its inability to compete with more traditional approaches to education. Rather than change, the education establishment has gone into denial. No one has even followed up with parents to find out why they left or what would bring them back.
And yet the solution to the CBE's funding woes lies in attracting more students.
However, it's not that simple.
The board needs to build new schools where the kids are. In the 1960s a ring of schools were built in the established communities outside the inner-city ring. The Baby Boom resulted in a building boom and 30 years later, with average family size a fraction of what it once was, school populations have dwindled. To get money to build new schools the board has to shut down some of the old ones, not an easy task.
TRUSTEE SLAMS CHARTER SCHOOL'S SPECIAL TREATMENT
Allowing ABC Charter School to only have to report to the minister of education means public funds are being used to support an independent school, a public school trustee has warned. "This is the use of public funds for an independent purpose, not a community purpose," trustee Jennifer Pollock said Tuesday. "Public accountability isn't in the (charter school) legislation. . . I'm disappointed they're not wanting to be publicly involved with the greater community."
Pollock made the comments after the ABC school made its final report to the Calgary Board of Education before coming under the direct control of Education Minister Gary Mar.
Principal Jo-Anne Koch said the Grades 1 to 3 school for gifted children will still have to answer to educational criteria when it reports to the minister. Although its program is designed for gifted students, the school will accept any who wish to challenge that program, Koch said. The only reason for turning away children has been lack of sufficient space, she added.
--From The Calgary Herald, June 10, 1998
Mar announces team to review Calgary Board of Education
LEARNING MINISTER FIRES THE CALGARY BOARD OF EDUCATION
LEARNING MINISTER FIRES THE CALGARY BOARD OF EDUCATION. OVER 7-IN-10 CALGARIANS SIDE WITH LEARNING MINISTER LYLE OBERG'S DECISION
Presentation to ACL by Fred Latreille , CUPE Local 40
In the 1992-93 Calgary Board of Education budget, a total of sixty-five caretaker
... Calgary Board of Education was not chosen to be among the Boards ...School of Hard Knocks
As the Calgary Board of Education prepares to issue its annual school closure list next month, a dedicated group of parents is fighting to save inner-city schools, and to ask for a urban renewal and a 10-year plan.
By ANDREW NIKIFORUKSchool’s Out Forever
School closures are ferociously contested, often to no avail. Now, a group of concerned parents is asking some simple questions—what’s wrong with small schools, and why can’t public schools have multi-uses? Parent lobbying has resulted in two changes: Next month, public school trustees might not issue the usual school closure list, and they must provide the province with a 10-year plan
Inflexible provincial funding formulas also play a role in this game. Alberta’s centralized calculation stipulates that boards will get no funding for new schools unless the existing ones are 85 per cent full. In most cases, sharing space with community groups or daycare does not affect this calculation. In other words, if that remarkable community asset known as a school isn’t full of CBE kids, it is not full.
This rigid thinking has a history at the CBE. In 1978, the board proposed closing 31 schools in order to save $1 million. It argued then that “the continuous shift in the student population from the older more established areas to the new subdivisions” was thinning out schools in the city centre and crowding those in the suburbs.
The proposal met with overwhelming resistance from citizens and even editorial writers. “The board really underestimated how people saw schools as critical to their community,” notes former Calgary city planner Frank Palermo, now a professor at Dalhousie University. “We actually managed to get rid of the idea, but it keeps on resurfacing.” The problem, then as now, is that school boards and city planners don’t talk. “There is not much co-operation or communication between the two,” Palermo says. “The system just doesn’t work that way.” The uproar taught the CBE that the best way to kill schools was one at a time. Since then, the board has closed nearly 30 schools—13 in the last 10 years.
But while the board was closing doors, the province was making things more difficult for the CBE by opening up the school marketplace by granting money to private and charter schools. Parents alienated by public school closures had a choice, and the CBE started to lose students in the mid 1990s. According to civic census data, between 1990 and 2002 the percentage of public school supporters fell from 75 per cent to 61 per cent, while private school supporters climbed from three to 14 per cent.
Ken Low, a former CBE consultant, estimates that approximately half the schools closed by the board became private or charter schools because “the best use for a school is still a school.” In other words, the board’s determination to close schools has become “a willful act of self-destruction,” adds Low. Much to the surprise of the ICSC, the CBE actually understood all these facts. After careful analysis of its problems in 1999, the board even adopted a new process to govern the building and closing of schools.
Low was hired to develop that new deal. His solution, called Learning Environmental Action Plan (LEAP), emphasized shared decision-making among parents, community and the board. LEAP also included options to school closure, including using the school for an alternative program, or sharing space with seniors or the health authority. It was pretty visionary stuff, and in the first year of LEAP one community, Acadia, voluntarily agreed to close two schools. Such a thing had never happened in Canada before.
But in the spring of 2001 the CBE undermined the whole process by recommending the closure of 19 schools or seven more than agreed to by local communities in the LEAP process. As a result, the trustees fired Superintendent Donna Michaels, while trustee Jane Cawthorne resigned in disgust at the board’s open contempt for democracy. Next, LEAP consultants got the axe. Trustees then silently “disengaged” LEAP and purged the system of all reports on the million-dollar reform effort.
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