By Will Bredderman, FloridaBulldog.org
For years, Erika Donalds has used her perch atop the nonprofit Optima Foundation—not to mention her marriage to U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Naples), now a top contender for governor—to make herself a force in Florida’s charter school movement. But materials filed with Florida’s Auditor General show how in recent years the foundation lost multiple contracts with its signature “classical academies” over what the schools allege were faulty accounting practices, and still more contracts that switched over to for-profit companies Donalds owns herself.
Further, state and federal financial disclosures reveal a long-running, yet previously unreported, financial relationship between the congressman’s wife and State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), an aggressive advocate of charter schools and the owner of a firm that provided payroll services to Optima-affiliated academies and an extra salary to Erika Donalds.
Neither Erika Donalds, her husband’s office, Snyder, nor Optima responded to calls, texts, or emailed queries from Florida Bulldog regarding this story.
Incorporation filings show Erika Donalds formed the Optima Foundation in late 2017 with GOP operatives Shawn Frost and Louise Penta, both of whom had been active in local school board politics and would subsequently become entangled in her husband’s electoral ambitions. Donalds herself was a veteran of the school board in Collier County, where in 2014 she had midwifed the Mason Classical Academy charter school, whose leadership she and her husband fell out with not long before she established Optima.
In April 2018, Donalds and her newfound foundation won approval from the Martin County School Board to create their first publicly funded, privately run charter: Treasure Coast Classical Academy in Stuart, which like Mason launched as an affiliate of conservative Hillsdale College, and boasts a curriculum centered on “the Western tradition.”
“It uses methods and resources that are proven and time-tested,” she told the Naples Daily News. “It doesn’t follow fads.”
At the time, Donalds’s husband was prepping for his second term in the statehouse, where then-Speaker Richard Corcoran had appointed her to the state’s Constitution Revision Commission. The Naples Daily News quoted her as saying she had no “concrete” plans to open another school, and even attesting that she’d receive no compensation for her services as the foundation’s CEO.
Neither proved true, and the Donaldses’ fortunes rose in tandem. Jacksonville Classical Academy, launched with the help of former Bahamas Ambassador and Republican real estate developer John Rood, opened its doors in August 2020 — just two days after Byron Donalds won the Republican primary for his current congressional seat with President Donald Trump’s backing. The Naples Classical Academy opened in 2021, and Jacksonville Classical East in 2022, the same year Gov. Ron DeSantis named Erika Donalds to the Florida Gulf Coast University board of trustees.
Each of these schools, which collectively have received tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, inked management contracts with the Optima Foundation, tax filings and reports to the auditor general’s office show: $4,303,822 total from Treasure Coast Classical, $8,424,572 from Naples Classical, and $2,398,221 from Jacksonville Classical.
ERIKA DONALDS AND STATE REP. SNYDER
In 2021, for the first and only time in all records to date, the Optima Foundation reported paying Erika Donalds a salary of $183,326. However, her husband did not report this income in his disclosures to the U.S. House Ethics Committee in either 2021 or 2022, despite filing an amended report the latter year.
But the congressman did report his wife earned more than half a million dollars in total salary between 2020 and 2022 from a firm called “Educator Solutions.” The Optima Foundation-run charter schools’ reports to the Internal Revenue Service show that they paid Educator Solutions $6,930,584 during those same years, while the foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216, all for “payroll services.”
State filings reveal that “Educator Solutions” is in fact a fictitious business name registered to ESI Technical Inc., a company founded by State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), whose father William Snyder was the longtime Martin County sheriff until earlier this year. Snyder’s financial disclosures show he has earned nearly $700,000 from ESI Technical since 2020, the year he was elected, and he has consistently identified the Optima-linked charter schools as ESI’s biggest customers. Snyder has come under fire for promoting policies favorable to charter schools while profiting from their operations, but no outlet has previously reported his company’s financial relationship with Erika Donalds.
Florida Bulldog sent questions to Rep. Snyder regarding Erika Donalds’s title and responsibilities at his company, as well as what kind of competitive candidate search-and-interview process his firm conducted before hiring her, and followed up with messages left on both his cellphone and his state and ESI offices. He did not reply.
Similar efforts to get Optima to answer how it selected his firm as its vendor were also unsuccessful.
But in 2023, a pivot occurred—both in the model for managing the Optima academies and, subsequently, the foundation’s relationship with several of them. Tax filings show that year each of them began contracting with one or both of two for-profit companies that Erika Donalds controls: OptimaEd and Optima Management Solutions. Jointly, the two Donalds companies pulled in $5,843,969 that year for services ranging from management to payroll to IT.
Likewise, the Optima Foundation paid $143,415 to Optima Management Services for payroll for 2023, even though it also footed some $1.76 million to Educator Solutions/ESI for the same purpose. Minutes from a January 2023 memo for one Optima school assert that “Optim [sic]has completed the conversion of HR/Payroll from ESI to Optima Management Services.”
BYRON DONALDS DID NOT DISCLOSE WIFE’S INCOMES
That year, for the first time, Byron Donalds entered “N/A” in the amount field on his financial disclosure form for all his wife’s income sources, which that year included salaries from Educator Solutions and Optima Management Services, and 1099 arrangements with OptimaEd and the Foundation. He has not filed a full personal financial disclosure since.
The lawmaker’s office did not respond to Florida Bulldog questions about his wife’s earnings that year, or any subsequent year.
But 2023 also marked the end of the Optima Foundation’s relationship with three of its signature charter schools. In an annual audit submitted to the state Auditor General, Treasure Coast Classical revealed that on Dec. 31 of that year, it “terminated” its management services contract with the Optima Foundation. The filing provides no further details on what precipitated the severing of their three-year affair. Neither Optima nor Treasure Coast replied to emails or phone messages about what precipitated the break.
The Jacksonville Classical Academies disclosed that they, too, broke with the Optima Foundation. In a statement to Mother Jones magazine that year, Erika Donalds maintained that the nonprofit had simply switched to working with the schools on an “as-needed basis.”
But the auditor for the two Jacksonville schools found “deficiencies” in their accounting for debts, textbooks, revenues, vendor invoices and county funds — and the school leadership blamed Optima.
“The Optima Foundation, Inc. failed,” recurs in the management team’s responses to the auditor’s findings.
Ambassador Rood did not respond to repeated emails and phone messages left at his firm The Vestcor Companies, the phone number for which is listed as the contact point for the Jacksonville Academies on their tax filings.
Erika Donalds, who has both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting, also did not respond to calls, texts, or emails about the audit’s findings and the schools’ accusations.
ERIKA DONALDS GOES FOR PROFIT
Naples Classical also dropped the foundation as its manager—but inked new one-year contracts first with Erika Donalds: for-profit OptimaEd, then with her Optima Management Services. Though entitled to the same 12 percent of the school revenues as the foundation, the for-profit companies have raked in considerably more cash than the nonprofit thanks to the school’s swelling budget. For the 2021-2022 term, Naples Classical paid $1.24 million to the Optima Foundation; in the 2023-2024 term — the most recent for which records are available — it paid $1.56 million to Optima Management Services, a bump of more than 25 percent.
June 2023 also marked the end of the first school year of Optima Classical Academy, a “virtual reality public charter school” that allows students to absorb the wisdom of the ancients from home via VR headsets. The school’s audits report no relationship with the foundation, but do show $1,085,266 in service fees paid to OptimaEd in 2023, and $2.1 million in 2024. This represents nearly 89 percent of the $3,588,660 in government funds the school received over those two years.
The congressman has consistently reported his wife owns 81 percent of OptimaEd, a stake that in 2023 he estimated to be worth more than a million dollars. However, he has never disclosed the size or value of her share of Optima Management Services, even though state incorporation records show she is its founder and sole listed manager, and that it uses an OptimaEd email account for its contact information. Questions about this apparent omission, like all others sent to Donalds’s office, went unanswered.
Notably, both OptimaEd and Optima Management Services have long used an address on South Horseshoe Drive in Naples that belongs to the Quest Educational Foundation, a nonprofit led by former State Education Chairman Tom Grady and by Ed Morton, chairman emeritus of the Florida Gulf Coast University Foundation. The Quest Educational Foundation uses this same address to operate its Freedom Institute of Collier County, a private high school marketed to home-school parents. Tax returns show the organization reports no rental property income, indicating the Optima companies do not pay for the use of this space.
In December 2023, Erika Donalds tweeted an endorsement of the Freedom Institute’s “customized homeschool hybrid experience for high school students on a path to economic freedom,” and touted it to her followers as a “great option” for their state-funded education savings accounts. She did not disclose any ties between her for-profit companies and the Quest Educational Foundation or the Institute, and there is no publicly visible information about the exact relationship between her companies, Quest Educational, and the Institute.
The Freedom Institute did not respond to repeated Florida Bulldog requests for comment, and neither Optima nor Erika Donalds answered questions about their relationship with the organization.
Meanwhile, the Optima Foundation’s revenues have withered. Its most recent tax filings show just $635,543 in revenues, compared with $3,488,835 the previous year. In March, it rebranded as the “Education Freedom Foundation,” still with Erika Donalds at the helm.
A new Optima Classical Academy at Gladiolus, to be administered by Optima Management Services, is scheduled to open in Lee County this August.
Will Bredderman is an investigative reporter focused on abuses of the public treasury and public trust. His work on political corruption has earned awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing and the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists.
Leave a Reply