Kindle Edition Amazon The Gite Project Category:  Sociology Publisher: The Gite Project, LLC ISBN-10:  099094560X Pages: 202 Copyright: March 16, 2015 ISBN-13: 9780990945604 Price: $8.99 (eBook) A businessman leaves his job to teach inner-city children at a charter school. Jacoby White gives up his successful business career with all the perks and income to teach students at an inner-city charter school. What he finds turns his stomach. Instead of quitting, he digs deeper into how the school is run, how the children are handled, and how the tax dollars are being spent. What he finds out is shocking to say the least! Excerpt I left her office with the box of the meal records. The records were a mess. I had to go through several binders of tally sheets that showed the daily tallies of meals eaten by over 300 students. Then I had to compare that to payment receipts that had been issued. Unfortunately, I didn’t have many receipts to go through. There wasn’t any accounting of what had been paid last year, so I couldn’t possibly know what was owed. In the end I decided to send statements for this year. Instead of recording tallies by hand, I created an electronic database so I could pull up any information I needed instantly. Yet, I was at a loss to know how I was going to recover monies owed to the school from parents who generally have grievances at the forefront of their minds – not payment of lunch money. So, once I had entered all the data in the spreadsheet, I asked for Mrs. Robinson’s assistance. She was smart and very creative. “Do you have any ideas on how we can collect the past due lunch money?” I asked her. “I sure do. Let’s schedule a field trip and stipulate that all balances have to be paid in order to go. Parents are going to line up out the door so their children can go.” Gite, Dikombi (2015-03-16). Sex, Lies, And A Charter School: The Misappropriation of Your Tax Dollars (Kindle Locations 790-800). . Kindle Edition.

Dikombi Gite “Sex, Lies, and a Charter School”
The author of Sex, Lies, and a Charter School, Dikombi Gite, has a mission to his writing. He presents his work as a novel, although he alludes to changing the names of characters “to protect the innocent ad the guilty.” Once we gain entry to his world there are no punches pulled and there is no failure to communicate. The charter school highlighted is fraught with restless, uninspired students, teachers and parents. The administration’s financial accounting (used to justify tax dollars spent) is shoddy at best, criminal at worst, and the protagonist, Jacoby White, watches his dream of teaching and helping the children of his community spiral out of control in less than one year.

Gite is educated and articulate as he provides a narrative through is his character, Jacoby White. We are introduced to the frustrations and fear presented to first year teachers and the confusion and mismanagement presented to students who attend one specific charter school in the Houston, Texas area. Are the issues presented a scathing indictment of our charter school system, our government’s management of the schools, or our society as a whole? Probably all three, unfortunately.

Sex, Lies and a Charter School is worth reading if you believe our school system is fine, your tax dollars are being used wisely, and our children have every chance of gaining the American dream we all want our children to achieve. If you don’t believe those things, well, you are a realist or you’ve already read this book.

Four Stars