KVIG Informative

Academica, a Florida-based for-profit company, manages roughly a third of Southern Nevada’s charter campuses through service contracts layered on top of nonprofit school boards. One of those contracts routes public per-pupil funding through a warehouse-district property owned by Academica’s own founder, at more than five times the going commercial rate. Nevada’s Legislature tried to ban the arrangement outright in 2025. The ban didn’t survive its own chamber.

A third of Clark County’s charter campuses, one management company

The Nevada State Public Charter School Authority’s own Southern Nevada school list, dated July 2026, shows Academica-affiliated networks — Doral Academy, Somerset Academy, Pinecrest Academy of Nevada, Mater Academy Las Vegas, CIVICA, and Sports Leadership and Management Academy — accounting for roughly a third of the 66 SPCSA-sponsored campuses operating in Clark County. As of 2022, Academica-contracted schools enrolled a majority of Nevada’s charter students statewide: 30,737 of the state’s roughly 55,000 charter students, per state enrollment figures cited in reporting used to identify that data.

Academica’s fee structure runs 10 to 15 percent of each school’s per-pupil state allocation for EMO services, per a public statement from then-SPCSA Executive Director Rebecca Feiden, who said the rate became publicly disclosed only after a 2021 legislative mandate requiring biennial publication of EMO payments. A separate, previously reported figure put Academica’s fee at a flat $450 per student annually, which would put the company’s aggregate Nevada revenue somewhere between $12 million and $13.8 million depending on which figure and enrollment base is used — the two figures have not been reconciled against each other or against Academica’s own disclosures, and the underlying SPCSA biennial EMO payment report is the document that would settle it.

The building on Surrey Street

Somerset Academy of Las Vegas’s own IRS Form 990 filings, available through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, show the nonprofit school’s revenue climbing from $31.49 million in fiscal 2015 to $111.56 million in fiscal 2024 and $110.98 million in fiscal 2025, while carrying negative net assets in every recent year on file: negative $6.46 million in fiscal 2023, negative $4.12 million in fiscal 2024, negative $7.10 million in fiscal 2025, with $230.16 million in assets against $237.26 million in liabilities. The filings list executive compensation at $0 in every year shown, and independent audits for fiscal 2023 and 2024 identified a material weakness in the school’s internal controls over financial reporting.

A specific related-party lease sits inside that larger financial picture. Stephanie Development, a company whose ownership traces to Academica founder Fernando Zulueta and an Academica Nevada manager named Robert Howell, owns a 1.21-acre property at 6630 Surrey St. in Las Vegas and leases it to Academica-affiliated schools. The property was purchased in 2016 for $2.2 million and was listed for sale above $5 million as of late 2024. The lease rate works out to roughly $6.15 per square foot monthly, against a market comparison of $0.95 to $1.15 per square foot for nearby warehouse space, and generated $1,432,330 in rent across 11 schools in fiscal 2024 alone, with cumulative rent since the 2017 contract start estimated at $8.6 million.

Facility financing for Nevada charter schools more broadly runs through several state-documented channels: the SPCSA’s own revolving loan fund, capped at $200,000 or $500 per pupil; a Clark County-focused revolving facilities loan fund administered by Building Hope on an Opportunity 180 grant; and tax-exempt conduit bond financing through the Nevada Department of Business and Industry, which requires three consecutive years of top-tier performance ratings and five years of operating history to qualify. The Nevada State Board of Finance approved a $62 million charter-school lease revenue bond in March 2018 covering Somerset’s Stephanie Street campus in Henderson and its Losee campus in North Las Vegas, per the board’s own meeting minutes.

Separately, Boyer Company, a Utah-based commercial real estate developer, is listed in its own portfolio materials as the developer of Somerset Academy’s Sky Pointe campus in Las Vegas, a three-phase, roughly 120,000-square-foot project on 12 acres, with Brian Gochnour named as the project lead. Boyer’s own materials do not disclose whether the company retained ownership of the completed facility or transferred it to the school; that question remains open and would require a Clark County Assessor property record check to resolve.

A ban that didn’t survive its own chamber

The facility-financing structures above collide with Nevada’s prevailing-wage law because charter operators have argued that privately financed, privately owned buildings leased to a charter school aren’t “public works” subject to prevailing wage, even when the tenant is a public charter school funded entirely by state per-pupil dollars. State Sen. Skip Daly, a Democrat and retired building trades union member, has described the arrangement on the Legislature’s own floor record as a real estate operation using public dollars to build a portfolio, arguing EMOs have moved beyond vendor status into functionally owning schools’ brands and decisions through affiliated real estate companies not operating at arm’s length. Pinecrest Academies Nevada Executive Director Carrie Buck disputed that characterization directly and on the record. Assembly Minority Leader Robin Titus also publicly questioned the framing.

Senate Bill 226, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro and signed by Gov. Joe Lombardo in 2023, expanded the legal definition of “public work” to cover projects where a public body retains an ownership interest, provides direct payment, forgives fees or rent above $100,000, or transfers property below market value. The bill does not name charter schools specifically, leaving the leasing-arrangement question a matter of interpretation rather than settled statute.

Sen. Daly went further two years later. Senate Bill 318, introduced March 11, 2025, would have barred charter schools from entering new or renewed contracts with for-profit EMOs entirely, with a narrow grandfather clause limited to one renewal of up to two years for schools that had signed EMO contracts after July 1, 2023. That version of the bill also would have repealed the state’s statutory definition of an EMO and its associated reporting requirements. The ban didn’t make it to a floor vote. A second amendment adopted May 29, 2025 stripped the EMO ban entirely; the bill that actually passed the Senate the next day, 13-8, addressed only oversight of charter-school construction and repair projects over $100,000 — written notice to the school’s sponsor, competitive-bidding documentation, and monthly prevailing-wage payment records, backed by fines of up to $5,000 per violation. That narrowed bill crossed over to the Assembly Education Committee and died there without further action on June 3, 2025.

Not a one-state pattern

Academica’s Nevada arrangement echoes a structure the company has faced scrutiny for in Florida, its home state, for more than a decade. A Miami-Dade auditor was asked in 2007 to investigate a multimillion-dollar construction contract awarded to a company whose principal sat on the receiving school’s board. A 2013-2014 federal Office of Inspector General inquiry examined related-party transactions involving Academica-linked real estate and security companies leasing to Academica-managed schools. By 2010, Academica’s owners were reported to control more than twenty companies doing business with Academica-managed schools. The company now manages more than 200 charter schools nationally, primarily across Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona, with a presence in Spain, under Zulueta.

A different Nevada charter school fought its EMO and won its independence

Academica isn’t the only for-profit management arrangement Southern Nevada charter schools have tested. American Preparatory Academy Las Vegas terminated its management contract with Utah-based, for-profit American Preparatory Schools on a June 11, 2020 board vote. Board chair Lee Igbody said publicly the school had paid $1.6 million annually — a fee of $997 per student across 1,639 students — for what he characterized as essentially nothing, with the fee projected to rise to $2.3 million had a planned second campus opened. American Preparatory Schools, led by executive director Carolyn Sharette, sued over the termination in federal court in Nevada. A judge denied the school’s request for a temporary restraining order and denied American Preparatory Schools’ anti-SLAPP motions in an October 2020 order, while granting the company’s motion to dismiss in part with leave to amend; no public record shows how the case ultimately resolved beyond that point. The Las Vegas school has continued operating independently since, rebranding as Amplus, which today runs two Southern Nevada SPCSA-sponsored campuses.

A national pattern that stops at the state line, for now

One well-documented national vehicle for institutional capital in charter-school real estate is EPR Properties, a publicly traded REIT that built a charter-school investment strategy starting around 2007 under then-CEO David Brain, signing long-term, 20-to-25-year leases on purpose-built or rehabbed school buildings, typically $7 million to $9 million per property, concentrated by the company’s own public statements in Florida and Arizona. EPR exited the business entirely, announcing the sale of its whole charter-school real estate portfolio for approximately $454 million in a November 2019 SEC filing. No Nevada or Las Vegas property appears in EPR’s own historical materials, and the company has been out of the charter-school real estate business for more than six years.

Every dollar in this structure still traces back to the same source: state per-pupil funding, paid to nonprofit school boards, a share of which flows out through management fees and, on Surrey Street, a lease to the company founder’s own real estate holding. The 2025 attempt to ban that arrangement outright made it through committee and an amendment process before the ban itself was cut, and what survived died in the other chamber anyway — leaving Nevada’s charter-EMO relationship governed by the same disclosure rules that made the Surrey Street numbers visible in the first place, and nothing stronger.