By Bob Braun/Star-Ledger Columnist
Robert Sciarrino/The Star-LedgerActing Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf, right, listens as Gov. Chris Christie speaks in this April file photo.
The idea has been promoted to school superintendents by one of their own, Mount Olive schools chief Larrie Reynolds. He says it could bring extra income both to cash-strapped school districts and to a private, Dubai-based company for which he works as a consultant.
Reynolds is a friend and former employee and business associate of acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf. Reynolds, who calls Cerf a “magnificent man,” recently appeared with Cerf and Gov. Chris Christie on a panel to discuss school reform.
Cerf has known Reynolds for years — hired him twice — and the relationship provides a glimpse not just into the growing political brawl over privatization, but also into the network of entrepreneurs who use longstanding contacts in both government and the private sector to try to make money on what had been a public monopoly.
Cerf says he knows Reynolds was “in the early stages of thinking about a program that would serve alternative education students drawn from multiple districts.” He says he is unaware “of the specifics of his ideas.”
Under Reynolds’s plan, a company he says that he represents as a consultant — GEMS Education — would help a school district apply to the commissioner to become a “district of choice” under a newly expanded inter-district choice law, allowing it to admit students from other communities. The law gives the commissioner the power of approval.
GEMS Education, a company owned and funded by Dubai entrepreneur Sunny Varkey, would recruit outside students for the program, hire teachers privately for lower-than-contract salaries and provide supplies for a “pathways” program run independently of, but under contract to the district. The private company would split the additional state aid coming into the district as a result of its status as a choice district.
Reynolds says the company would have to make a “sizable” capital investment in the program and “take on a lot of risk.” Only a private entrepreneur could do that, he says.
The Mount Olive schools chief, who has distributed materials on the program at meetings of school administrators, has not yet filed an application. He says his own district might apply. Reynolds says he works as a consultant for GEMS Education and is not being paid for bringing in customers.
He also is president of Sangari Active Science, a subsidiary of Sangari Global Education, a company once run by Cerf. Reynolds also headed Newton Learning, a division of Edison Schools, a private education management company Cerf served as chief operating officer.
The current president of Sangari Global, Rajeev Bajaj, headed Global Education Advisers, a consulting company started by Cerf out of his Montclair home. It received a $500,000 contract from the Newark public schools. Cerf said he left Global Education Advisers before it received the contract and never received money from the company. Randy Cerf, Cerf’s brother, is chief financial officer of Sangari Global.
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