Haas Hall Academy, Arkansas’ “Number One” high school, is an open-enrollment charter school. Each year, Haas Hall receives almost $7000 funding per pupil from the state each year, nearly $100,000 in additional government bonus money, and a lot of money from their main fundraiser.

During the 2016-17 school year, Haas Hall applied to the Charter Authorizing Panel (CAP) and the State Board of Education (SBoE) to expand their Fayetteville campus into Springdale and Rogers. To support this effort, the Walton Family Foundation donated over $4 million to the expansion project. Both new campuses were approved, despite the formal, written objections of Dr. Robert Maranto, Dr. Gary Compton, Dr. Jim Rollins, Dr. Matthew Wendt, and a whistleblower from within the faculty of Haas Hall.

The Rogers campus of Haas Hall is now in its third year of operations. They are extraordinarily well funded. Why, then, are parents reporting financial mismanagement and lack of resources to Oliver Dillingham, Public School Program Manager at the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE?)

Reportedly, Haas Hall students are sitting on the floor because they don’t have desks. Haas Hall has found a Missouri public school willing to donate free, secondhand desks, but Dr. Schoppmeyer refuses to pay for the U-Haul from Haas Hall’s budget. Instead, he is requiring the Parent/Faculty Council (PFC) to pay for transportation.

Haas Hall students are sharing textbooks because the school doesn’t have enough for everybody. Teachers are forced to photocopy textbook pages in order to assign homework.

Additionally, the Parent/Faculty Council (PFC) has been unable to access the $3,547.70 they have raised at Barnes & Noble book fair fundraisers since the school opened.

Barnes & Noble issues fundraiser earnings as gift cards. The PFC has no control over how Haas Hall spends the gift cards, nor have the parents received any accounting for the money.

Now, to add insult to injury, Haas Hall Academy wants its parents to pay for hauling free, secondhand school desks from Missouri, even though PFC money is supposed to fund “extras” for teachers and classrooms.

Lobbyists for the “school choice” movement tout the need for increased parental involvement in their children’s education. As a concept, parental involvement sounds like a good thing. In practice, however, charter schools like Haas Hall rely on parents to pay for basic necessities (like furniture and books) while refusing to account for how they spend the money they receive from taxpayers and philanthropists.

Here is one way to figure out where Haas Hall’s money really goes:

When Haas Hall was applying to expand into Springdale and Rogers, they were required to send representatives to several meetings of the Charter Authorizing Panel (CAP) and the State Board of Education (SBoE) in Little Rock.

Each time Haas Hall’s representatives went to Little Rock, they rented Junior Suites at Little Rock’s historic Capital Hotel.

At $360 per night, these suites are $266 more expensive than allowed for public employees staying in Little Rock. If you add drinks (which the Schoppmeyers of Haas Hall always do) and breakfast, that’s another $30-50 apiece, minimum.

If Haas Hall had spent only what the government allows for its traveling employees, they could have attended all their required meetings in Little Rock for only about $2,000. In other words, Haas Hall spent an extra $7,000 on a luxury hotel for the Schoppmeyers and their Rose Law Firm lawyer in order to open its Springdale and Rogers campuses for the 2017-18 school year.

If Haas Hall (Rogers) had saved this $7,000 — or kept track of the $3,500 on bookstore gift cards that the PFC earned with its fundraising efforts — Haas Hall could have bought 100 more textbooks and paid for a U-Haul to transport its secondhand desks from Missouri.


Even the “best” charter school is ripping us off. “School choice” doesn’t fix financial problems, nor get a higher percentage of money to teachers and students than traditional public schools. Charterization just creates more ways for profiteers to siphon money away for themselves, leaving parents with a stack of unpaid bills.

You’ll pay, though, if you want your kids to have a desk.