A charter school may not have been the solution and it sounds like some cronyism going on but it looks like the schools have been a mess there for a long time.
'At this point, the elementary school had not earned a passing grade — a C or higher — since 2009. The combined middle/high school had racked up low grades since 2003. Because of the chronically poor performance, the Florida Board of Education could have pushed to close the schools altogether — a fate the Jefferson County leaders couldn’t live with."
https://chartered.wlrn.org/how-district ... c-schools/