A fourth New Jersey state senator has joined a growing bipartisan drumbeat calling for a state investigation into an embattled public charter school network found to be paying its officials “shockingly high” salaries.
State Sen. Declan O’Scanlon, R-Monmouth, on Thursday, became the latest lawmaker to demand a formal inquiry into the College Achieve Public Schools network, saying “Clearly this situation is an outlier that needs to be investigated further.”
The development comes three weeks after an NJ Advance Media report found that CAPS founder and CEO Michael Piscal earned $697,528 in total compensation, according to tax forms filed by the organization in 2023, making him by far the highest-paid charter school official in New Jersey.
“This salary, $697,528, is a real shock,” O’Scanlon said in a press release issued by his office. “It’s extremely confusing in this instance why there is such an inflated salary here. It’s clear that some real digging needs to be done.”
In addition to Piscal, Gemar Mills, the executive director of College Achieve Paterson, earned $433,734 in total compensation, and Jodi McInerney, the executive director of College Achieve Asbury Park, earned $323,245 in total compensation, according to tax forms.
Three other CAPS officials earned more than $209,000 in total compensation, tax forms show. Like some charter networks, CAPS operates as a Charter Management Organization, or CMO, collecting taxpayer-funded fees from the individual schools it oversees, and in turn, using that money to pay its executives.
“If you take CAPS out of the equation, the average salary for a chief executive officer for a charter management organization is $257,000 in total compensation,” O’Scanlon said in the press release. “For school-based chief school administrators, it’s lower, around $161,000. Both in line or lower than executive salaries you’d expect to see in education.”
O’Scanlon said he’s met with officials from the New Jersey Public Charter Schools Association, the state’s leading charter school advocacy group, and that the organization is “genuinely concerned about the spending of public money and the conduct of their schools.”
O’Scanlon also said he’s “actively working with NJPCSA on potential legislation to make the operation salaries paid to these organizations more accessible and transparent. That ought to prevent anything such as this from happening again.”
State Sen. Vin Gopal, D-Monmouth, who serves as chairman of the Senate Education Committee, also called for an investigation into CAPS in a letter sent May 8 to acting state Education Commissioner Kevin Dehmer.
State Sen. Paul Sarlo, D-Bergen, and state Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz, D-Essex, said the charter network should be required to answer questions about how its revenue, which originates through taxpayer dollars, is being spent, among other inquiries.
The state Department of Education declined to comment Thursday when asked about the calls for an investigation.
In addition to the revelations about the salaries, CAPS Asbury Park also was accused of nepotism and ethics violations by hiring McInerney’s husband and mother as principal and interventionist at the school. The school denied those allegations.
And last week, the Asbury Park Board of Education alleged CAPS is bilking it out of more than a million dollars for potentially enrolling dozens of non-residents and charging the district for them, putting local taxpayers on the hook for kids from other towns, court documents obtained by NJ Advance Media show.
CAPS disputed the allegations in a motion for emergent relief filed with the state Department of Education, calling Asbury Park’s conduct “patently unlawful” and describing the district’s claims as “unproven allegations of non-residency.”