Former tennis champion Andre Agassi and Canyon Capital Realty Advisors, a real estate investment firm headquartered in Los Angeles, have teamed up to establish an investment fund that will support the creation of up to seventy-five charter schools in low-income, urban communities across the country, the Associated Press reports.
Intel Capital, Citigroup, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation are among the investors in the $750 million Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund, the first for-profit venture fund created to finance the construction of charter schools. The fund hopes to develop the schools, lease them to charter school operators for four to six years, and then give operators the option to purchase the buildings through low-interest, tax-exempt loans.
One of the most significant challenges facing charter schools, which operate independently of local school districts, is securing funding for the construction of facilities. "Unlike the school district, charter schools don't have facility financing provided to them by the state," Canyon Capital Realty Advisors chairman Bobby Turner told Bloomberg News. "If you're a charter school, what you're relegated to doing is cobbling together philanthropy every time you want to build a school. As you can imagine, that's very difficult."
Agassi, who founded the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas in 2001, told Bloomberg that for-profit investment vehicles are the best way to get charter schools built quickly and that schools built by the new fund could provide space for some forty thousand students within four years.
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