Five publicly funded Florida charter schools have paid more than $30 million over the last four years to two private companies run by Erika Donalds, the wife of U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, as he campaigns for governor on a platform that includes expanding the very kind of school-choice programs that fund her businesses.
The figure comes from a Herald/Times analysis of tax filings and audits, as reported by the Miami Herald in an article by reporter Claire Heddles. Florida law allows charter schools to be run only by nonprofit organizations or public entities, not for-profit companies, but those nonprofits and schools can and do contract with private firms for services — and that is the structure through which Erika Donalds' companies have been paid. Her companies are compensated through management contracts with the charter schools themselves, not directly by the state of Florida, according to the Herald's reporting.
Erika Donalds founded the nonprofit Optima Foundation in 2019 and used it to open six classical charter schools, according to a separate Miami Herald report. By 2023 she was running two for-profit successors, Optima Management Solutions and OptimaEd, and her companies held management contracts with five publicly funded Florida charter schools that year, per the Herald's analysis.
Where the Money Moves
OptimaEd is on track to charge Optima Classical Academy $15.7 million for the 2026 and 2027 school years, according to the Herald. That school draws $9.7 million from the state budget, roughly $4 million in local property taxes, and about $2 million from a Collier County school funding referendum, the Herald reported.
Naples Classical Academy was among the schools paying Donalds' two companies, according to the Herald. Two Jacksonville schools paid Optima Management Solutions and OptimaEd $2.6 million between 2022 and 2023 before switching to a different management team in mid-2023, the paper found.
Separate financial records reviewed by Florida Bulldog put related figures in a similar range: Optima-affiliated schools paid the Optima Foundation $4,303,822 from Treasure Coast Classical, $8,424,572 from Naples Classical and $2,398,221 from Jacksonville Classical through management contracts, and OptimaEd and Optima Management Solutions jointly pulled in $5,843,969 from the schools in 2023 for management, payroll and information-technology services. The foundation also reported paying Erika Donalds a salary of $183,326 in 2021, the outlet reported — a figure the Herald separately reported as roughly $183,000 for her role as Optima Foundation CEO in 2021.
A Pivot From Nonprofit to For-Profit
The shift from nonprofit to for-profit management didn't happen quietly. In 2023, Optima-affiliated schools began contracting with OptimaEd and Optima Management Solutions instead of routing payments solely through the Optima Foundation, the same outlet's reporting shows. Treasure Coast Classical terminated its management-services contract with the Optima Foundation on Dec. 31, 2023, and the Jacksonville Classical Academies disclosed that they, too, broke with the foundation that year.
Treasure Coast Classical has gone further, suing the nonprofit over service and IT agreements. That case is ongoing. A Florida District Court of Appeal panel reversed a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit and sent it back for further proceedings, according to the appellate opinion published via CourtListener, which also found the agreement's venue clause was permissive rather than mandatory. Erika Donalds has disputed a separate allegation that her nonprofit mismanaged an audit at the Jacksonville schools and said the schools' partnerships with her foundation were always intended to be temporary, per the Herald.
How Florida's Funding Formula Works
Florida's charter-school revenue worksheet calculates state and local Florida Education Finance Program funds based on the full-time-equivalent enrollment a school enters, according to the Florida Department of Education. Notably, that worksheet does not account for the deduction of administrative fees or services provided, and it excludes startup or capital-outlay funds — meaning the per-student dollars a school receives aren't automatically reduced by whatever it later pays a management company.
Educator Solutions, another firm that provides payroll and management services for charter schools, received $6,930,584 from Optima-affiliated schools between 2020 and 2022, while the Optima Foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216 over the same period, Florida Bulldog reported. Erika Donalds received more than half a million dollars in salary from Educator Solutions during 2020–22, Florida Bulldog reported.
Wealth, Disclosures and What's Not Public
Byron Donalds' federal financial disclosures show the majority of the couple's collective wealth comes from Erika Donalds' companies, the Herald reported. He valued his own personal assets between $141,000 and $805,000 in 2020 and has reported them at $510,000 or less in subsequent years, while the couple's collective wealth peaked between $2.1 million and $11 million in 2023 — the same year Erika Donalds' stake in Optima Management Solutions and OptimaEd was valued between $2 million and $10 million.
What isn't publicly disclosed is how much personal profit Erika Donalds draws from running the companies — the roughly $30 million already paid to her organizations and an expected $16 million more this school year represent overall revenue to those businesses, not a personal profit figure, the Herald noted. Her companies have not publicly reported how taxpayer money moving through them is used or how much executives are paid, according to the same reporting.
Disclosure questions have surfaced elsewhere too. For the first time, Byron Donalds entered “N/A” in the amount field on his financial disclosure form for all of his wife's income sources in 2023, Florida Bulldog reported. Separately, the Florida Bulldog reported that the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint in September 2024 alleging the couple failed to report 108 stock trades, valued at up to $1.6 million, made between 2022 and 2023.
Ethics Experts Weigh In
Ethics experts told the Herald that the Donalds family's reliance on state per-student funding could present an ethical conflict if Byron Donalds wins the governor's race. Florida's ethics code applies to the governor personally, not to a governor's spouse, but it could still require Byron Donalds to recuse himself from certain charter-school-related executive actions, according to the Herald's reporting.
Craig Holman told the paper that Erika Donalds appears committed to promoting charter schools and that her husband would face a real conflict-of-interest question as a result. Brian Tannebaum said recusal is not always a clear-cut solution for a sitting governor, pointing to how Donald Trump grew his wealth by billions during his second term in office as a comparison point for how officeholders' financial interests can keep expanding in parallel with their public roles. Rutgers professor Bruce Baker offered a different frame, telling the Herald that people connected to power who benefit from an absence of regulation present a broader problem — while also noting that the Donaldses are not the biggest profiteers from public education dollars flowing to private companies nationally.
The Candidates Respond
Byron Donalds' gubernatorial campaign declined to make Erika Donalds available for an interview, according to the Herald. In his own comments, Byron Donalds said he will follow all applicable ethics laws in office.
Erika Donalds, for her part, has said she has no plans to slow down her businesses if her husband wins statewide office and plans to continue in her business and foundation leadership roles. She has promised her husband would promote what she calls an economy of education where profit is not a bad word. The couple both advocate for expanding educational options for parents, including programs that direct public education dollars to private companies, and Byron Donalds' campaign has promised to bring real books back into classrooms instead of keeping young children in front of screens.
Erika Donalds was a Collier County school board member, earning $38,000 from the state in that role, when Byron Donalds entered the state Legislature in 2016 — the same year she also earned $160,000 as an accountant for a New York-based investment firm, according to the Herald's reporting. The Herald noted elsewhere that Florida's traditional public school enrollment has been shrinking, including a 14,000-student drop in Miami-Dade County alone in the year the paper examined, even as charter enrollment and the companies built around it continue to grow.
