Michael Bileca, chairman of the Board of Trustees at Miami Dade College, at the board’s meeting at the Kendall campus on Feb. 17, 2026. Bileca owns the charter-school company True North Classical Academy.
Courtesy of Giorgio Viera
Miami Dade College
Miami Dade College on Tuesday approved a handful of charter schools for the first time since gaining the same power as the School Board to greenlight or shut down charter schools in the district.
Historically, charter schools apply to a school board. But a state law from 2021 allowed public colleges to share that power. In 2022, Miami Dade College became a charter-school authorizer in the county, home to the nation’s third-largest school district.
The two entities have the authority to exercise the same power in the same district, but there is a key difference: When approved through a college, a School Board loses the ability to oversee charter schools.
In Miami-Dade, this system hands the authorizing power to unelected members of the Miami Dade College Board of Trustees, stripping that exclusive authority from directly elected School Board members. All MDC trustees were appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The MDC board unanimously approved six charter-school applications on Tuesday.
Charter schools, which are taxpayer-funded, are considered public schools, leading education experts to question the legality of this setup — Florida’s Constitution says only a school board can operate public schools.
“ I believe it’s a violation of our Florida Constitution,” Crystal Etienne, president of EduVoter, an organization that hopes to protect traditional public education in Florida, told WLRN last year. “ It’s a parallel system, and they’re taking away the authority of the district to make [decisions], so that’s clearly overreach.”
The part of Miami Dade College approving charter schools is the Florida Charter Institute, which functions as both a research institute and charter-school authorizer. The institute was created in 2022 by a bill sponsored by then-state Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., shortly before the Republican became Florida’s commissioner of education.
“The funding from the state will all flow through the college. All of the evaluations, the monitoring, everything that typically happens with a school district will be happening with the college,” said Chris Fuller, chief operating officer at the Florida Charter Institute, in a presentation in November to prospective charter schools.
Potential conflicts of interest surround the system, too.
The chairman of the Miami Dade College Board of Trustees is Michael Bileca, who owns the charter-school company True North Classical Academy.
Bileca would likely have to recuse himself from any vote connected to his company or connected to schools that could be considered direct competition to his business, Todd Ziebarth, an executive at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told WLRN last year.
Also sitting on the college’s Board of Trustees is Roberto Alonso. He is also an elected member of the School Board, which oversees Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
The Miami-Dade school district could find itself limited under this setup, because key decisions and oversight could be taken over by Miami Dade College. Further, the Florida Charter Institute at Miami Dade College issued a research paper in October arguing that charter schools should be able to take over the space of traditional public schools.
This report was produced by Miami Herald news partner WLRN Public Media.