It's not unethical if an elected School Board member does it with a charter school?
Lake Wales Charter's general counsel is turning Lori Cunningham's very narrow personal Ethics issue into a massive charter loophole for generalized elected school board member corruption.
For almost all of 2017 and 2018, Polk County School Board members, including Lori Cunningham and me, faced a high pressure, very public, big money policy issue involving Lake Wales Charter Schools.
LWCS wanted the elected Polk County School Board to give it control of the district’s McLaughlin Middle School in Lake Wales. As you can see from the letter above, they pressed us formally and informally, repeatedly, to consider it. I have formal correspondence from at least April 3, 2017 all the way to at least July 10, 2018.
Lori Cunningham was also, at the time we were considering this issue, owner of “the official uniform shop for Lake Wales High School” — or at least she was publicly named that on June 6, 2017. Lake Wales High is a LWCS high school.
At no point in those months of high pressure, high stakes interaction over McLaughlin did Lori Cunningham ever recuse herself from debate. At no time did she recuse herself from other School Board issues or votes concerning Lake Wales Charter. She never even publicly disclosed her business relationship to LWCS schools or her status as “official uniform shop” for Lake Wales High.
Florida Ethics Commission investigators, spurred by a formal complaint I filed in early 2023, have since documented clearly that LWC schools, including Lake Wales High, paid Lori Cunningham’s Applied Images store directly from LWCS school accounts at various times over the years for bulk purchases of mandatory school uniforms.
The Ethics Commission investigators and advocate consider that a clear ethical violation and conflict. The Ethics Commission itself recently agreed unanimously with its investigators and advocate that probable cause exists to consider Cunningham’s uniform business an ongoing, unethical conflict.
The Ethics Commission and 2012 Robin Gibson disagree with 2021 and 2024 Robin Gibson
The Ethics Commission finding tracks perfectly with an ethical warning that Robin Gibson, general counsel for Lake Wales Charter, issued Lori Cunningham and Lake Wales Charter way back in 2012, when a reporter asked about Cunningham’s uniform business with LWCS. (Robin Gibson is also my beloved cousin, a fact I always disclosed publicly in addressing the McLaughlin full-court press.)
Gibson told Cunningham in writing:
The bottom line is that [LWCS] schools should not use school money to purchase anything from a company in which a school board member has an interest. This applies to the Polk School Board as well as our own Board of Trustees.
This is an unambiguous statement. I’ll post the entire letter at the bottom the article so you can judge for yourself. Lori Cunningham and LWCS went on to unambiguously do what Gibson said not to do.
But here’s where it gets really weird and sort of surreal.
In April 2021, Lori Cunningham approached Robin Gibson for another/updated legal opinion about her uniform business with Lake Wales Charter schools.
In his response, Gibson himself became the first person to clearly document that LWCS used school money to purchase something from a company in which a school board member has an interest. Here’s a screenshot from his 2021 letter. I’ll post all of it at the bottom, too.
Instead of admonishing and reporting Cunningham for violating his direction in 2012, Gibson said nevermind. It was fine that LWCS did business directly with Cunningham. This time, Gibson’s bottom line was:
In my opinion, you would have a conflict of interest if you did business with the agency that you serve as a public officer. You do not have a conflict of interest while doing business with an agency you do not serve as a public officer.
Let me repeat: Robin advised Lori that she does not have a conflict because elected school board members do not legally serve charter schools.
That’s a breathtaking assertion — and not just because of how diametrically contradictory it is to his 2012 advice.
Gibson’s theory, which he repeated at the 2024 Ethics Commission probable cause hearing, suggests charter schools can openly compensate elected school board members, without disclosure or recusal, for any business activity, despite the fact that elected board members regularly take votes on issues related to charter oversight and/or interests.
Read that again.
If it sounds to you like Robin is arguing for a charter school license to bribe elected school board members with preferred “business,” well, I don’t how exactly I could argue with you.
I don’t think he means that. I want not to believe that, certainly. And I am not saying that is what happened here, although Lori was always publicly supportive of the LWC takeover of McLaughlin (which never happened) and rather indifferent to the specific terms of any deal, in my opinion.
But I know Robin knows school board members regularly take votes concerning charter schools. I know he knows because he actively, aggressively, personally lobbied me and the rest of the board member to vote and use our authority to benefit LWCS interests — on McLaughlin and other issues.
The loophole Robin has now invoked to protect Lori from what did definitely happen — what Gibson warned her against doing in 2012 — is absolutely enormous. It’s a massive statewide issue for school boards and charter schools if he succeeds in convincing an administrative judge of its validity.
Much bigger than I ever intended or expected
The oddity of this entire process is I just wanted the state to take a position on whether either the Polk School District or Lake Wales Charter could name a sitting, elected board member’s business as an official vendor for a mandatory product without creating a conflict for the board member.
That’s a very specific and narrow issue. And I wanted Lori to account for never having addressed her uniform business with the public. To put it in Robin’s terms, I wanted the state to say if granting preferred, promoted vendor status for a school board member means “doing business with an agency.”
For instance, here is what parents/the public saw on the uniform information part of Dundee Elementary Academy (DEA) website before I filed my complaint. DEA is a district-run magnet school. I wanted to know if the following image meant “doing business” with your own agency.
Unfortunately, the Ethics Commission didn’t actually address that issue directly.
But someone with Dundee Elementary Academy or the Polk School district did. Here’s what parents and/or the public saw after I filed my complaint, but before investigators filed their report.
And the Ethics Commission dismissed the DEA part of my complaint. That’s the kind of tangible, but not earth-shattering, impact I hoped and/or expected to have.
It absolutely never occurred to me that Robin Gibson, the LWCS general counsel, would argue that it’s impossible for an elected school board member to have an unethical business conflict with a charter school because they have no oversight responsibility or input on charter school interests.
Gibson even said clearly in his 2021 advice that if Lori Cunningham had done exactly the same thing with Dundee Elementary Academy that she did with LWCS it would be a conflict. He just created a specific carve-out for charters, using the fiction that they have no official business with elected school boards.
That is, frankly, bonkers.
Who does Robin Gibson represent?
I had no idea when I filed this complaint that Robin Gibson had opined on Lori Cunningham’s conflicts in 2012 and then again — differently — in 2021. I had no idea he would divulge in 2021 that Lori did business directly with LWCS. I had no idea he would represent Lori Cunningham against my complaint. I had no idea this would become a titanic struggle over charter school rights to do undisclosed business with elected school board members with impunity.
That’s why I didn’t include any correspondence between LWCS and the elected School Board. I did not ever imagine I might need to prove the self-evident fact that school board members have authorities that require taking important votes and/or having important debates concerning charter schools oversight and interests.
I was totally befuddled when the Ethics Commission informed me Robin was representing Lori. It wasn’t until the hearing itself that I started to understand why.
And honestly, I missed the 2021 letter the first couple of times I poured through the record. Having now read it, I suspect Robin feels responsible for giving Lori bad advice that detonated in her face with the Ethics staff and commission. But he may be just as interested in representing and vindicating Lake Wales Charter.
Indeed, if I were Lori, I’d be clarifying who exactly Robin Gibson considers his prime client in this matter because she’s personally on the hook for punishments, not Robin Gibson or Lake Wales Charter.
Robin Gibson is not a judge or an official commission member sitting with quasi-judicial authority in this matter. He’s just a lawyer with an opinion that has changed radically over time and carries no greater official weight than mine as a non-lawyer.
Lori should have known better than to treat his words as gospel. Her choices are her own. She rolled the dice; and the investigators and Ethics Commission rejected the opinion of 2021 and 2024 Robin Gibson. They sided with 2012 Robin Gibson, to which 2024 Robin Gibson said, we want a rematch.
“Charter schools are not well understood by a lot of folks and I believe the Order finding probable cause is an unintentional mistake.”
Yikes.
Maybe that argument — which is more condescension than argument — will work for an individual administrative judge and Lori will get of this without a punishment beyond what she’s already endured. Maybe the judge will create a charter school ethical free-for-all out of whole legal cloth.
But would you bet on that — again — if you were Lori?
This is the 2012 conflict advice.
Here is the 2021 advice:
Here is a formal proposal from 2018 that then Lake Wales Charter Chair Jimmy Nelson sent to the entire Polk County School Board, including Lori Cunningham, on July 10, 2018, referring to the “The Lake Wales Option.”
Ironically, Jimmy Nelson would go on to torment the best human asset the Lake Wales Charter system ever had — the very talented and dedicated principal of Lake Wales High School, Donna Dunson.
In my view, in his role as a self-promoting CCDFer (later cast out even by them) Nelson did more to tear LWC and Lake Wales as a community apart than anyone I observed. He seems to be a pox on that community.
That said, I doubt very much that Jimmy Nelson actually wrote that letter I posted above. The actual author is almost certainly Robin Gibson. Nelson probably just signed it as the chair of the unelected LWC board at the time.
The “McLaughlin Opportunity Slipping Away” (April 3, 2017) letter I opened this article with and the “Lake Wales Option” (July 10, 2018) letter make easy bookends for the LWCS pressure campaign on McLaughlin, with the “official uniform shop” declaration sitting elegantly in the middle.
As I said, through our many public discussions, I always perceived Lori as a solid yes vote for the LWC takeover of McLaughlin, no matter the terms of the deal. I never got to yes because no one on either side seemed really willing to negotiate good faith terms that I considered fair. No formal vote on a deal ever occurred.