The Center Square had a story yesterday afternoon about Chakesha Scott, who is the proprietor of Impact Charter School in Baker. and an audit by the Legislative Auditor’s office which found some not-so-great things about how the school was managed.

Our take on this is going to be a little different than you’ll see elsewhere.

Anyway, here are the basics…

A recent audit accused the CEO of the charter school Education Explosion for the misuse of over $2 million in funds for personal expenses.

The Louisiana Legislative Auditor reported that Education Explosion’s CEO, Chakesha Scott, diverted more than $1.5 million of the charter school funds to an account she controlled under the name of Friends of Impact Charter School.

The audit states that an additional $171,659 was diverted to a third party by the FICS account and other funds were used for personal expenses. The auditors also found that $221,506 of funds paid by students and parents were diverted to the FICS account and other accounts not in control of the charter school. Cash payments totaling $71,487 collected by the school were reported to have not been deposited.

Scott did not notify the Education Explosion Board of Directors about these transactions and misused these funds without their knowledge, according to the auditors.

Credit card records obtained by the auditors show Scott used her Education Explosion credit card for at least $130,494 on trips taken by the Scott family to places like Egypt, Disneyland Paris and others. The report also says $166,520 in charter school funds were for the lease and/or purchase of a 2017 Acura MDX and a 2021 Land Rover Velar from August 2017 to April 2024 in the report.

Other personal expenses noted in the report accuse Scott of withdrawing $42,371 from the FICS bank account on May 27, 2023, to buy a cashier’s check payable to NOLA Motorcars.

Records found by the auditors indicate Scott and her daughter purchased a pre-owned 2018 Tesla Model S from NOLA Motorcars on May 27, 2020, for $42,371. Evidence that Scott purchased Louis Vuitton bags was also present.

“By improperly diverting funds to FICS’ bank account and using those funds for their personal benefit, Ms. Scott and her family may have violated the Louisiana Constitution and state and federal law,” the audit summary states.

Scott and her people at Education Explosion aren’t really battening down the hatches like you’d expect. In fact, they’re threatening to sue the Legislative Auditor. What for? Who knows? Defamation? Punitive damages?

What we’ve heard is that Hillar Moore, the district attorney in Baton Rouge, has rejected the idea of prosecuting her for embezzlement or any of the other potential charges. Moore has this game he plays, which is that he won’t prosecute corruption in East Baton Rouge Parish and especially not against anybody who’s black – because if he does, then it’s inevitable that some Soros-funded hardcore leftist will run against him with millions of dollars in tow and then Baton Rouge will become Philadelphia or Chicago.

To which the question then becomes, what’s the difference if you won’t do your job?

But in Scott’s case, maybe he’s right.

Here’s the really fun part about this. Impact Charter School in Baker is a B-rated school.

It’s not an F school. It isn’t failing. It’s actually a pretty good school whose students are mostly lower-income kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, and yet they’re learning at that place.

So she’s raking a whole lot of money off in a fairly grotesque skim the Legislative Auditor blew a gasket over, and yet what she’s not stealing she’s figured out how to fund a pretty good school with.

In other words, you can write all this swag off to “executive compensation.”

Should you be angry that this involves your tax dollars going to Louis Vitton bags and used Teslas? We don’t know. The school costs what it costs whether she’s raking off the money or not. And it’s a B-school.

Maybe if Scott’s tastes weren’t quite so luxurious, the resources for an A-school might be present.

But an awful lot of kids in Louisiana would love to go to a B-rated school. The kids at Impact Charter have it pretty good, at the end of the day.

Thought not as good as Chakesha Scott has it, obviously.

What we’re hoping comes out of this audit isn’t just all the boodle being hoovered up into her personal stash but rather, what Charkesha Scott’s secret is to running such a low-cost operation that she can steal a couple of million from the till and still run a B-school for kids from the slums.

Because it seems like she’s on to something. And maybe those might be lessons others can learn from.

So we’re not even mad at her. And she probably doesn’t need to be prosecuted. But if you can run a B-rated charter school with that kind of shrinkage, maybe the real waste the Legislative Auditor ought to look into is in some of the more “traditional” schools that do worse with even more funding.