Charter School Queen: How Our Tax Collector Cashes In

Diane Hutchings' Side Hustle Earns a 'Mind-Boggling' Pile of Public Money

“A management fee of $100,000 a month is mind-boggling. I don’t see any world where any type of consultant for a single public school can receive this. It is an abuse of taxpayer funds.”—Ben Wilcox, Integrity Florida.

This story first appeared in the Florida Trident on September 12, 2025. It is reprinted here with permission. Updated at 1:28 p.m. on September 15, 2025 to include a statement from Hillsdale College.

Clay County’s public schools have eliminated teaching positions and cut student busing services due to a budget deficit. School officials are now asking homeowners to shoulder higher property taxes to make up the difference.

Yet, while the system struggles, one of the county’s elected leaders has quietly turned one public charter school into a private windfall.

Clay County Tax Collector Diane Hutchings, a career politician with only a high-school education, helped to found St. Johns Classical Academy outside Jacksonville in Fleming Island in 2017. Five years later, she co-founded a two-person firm called Ancora Management, resigned from the St. John’s board, and was handed a very lucrative contract to serve as the school’s “management consultant.”

The deal is a goldmine.

Ancora was guaranteed a whopping 10 percent of all the school’s revenues for 15 years, with an option of an additional five years. In 2023–24, that meant Hutchings’ firm made $1.25 million from a $12.5 million budget—all of it public money. With nearly 1,500 students enrolled this year, Ancora’s cut is expected to top $1.3 million. And Hutchings has done it all while still drawing a $198,200 salary as tax collector.

The contrast could not be starker: while students face stripped-down bus routes and teaching positions are being eliminated, Hutchings’ side business is rolling in millions of the very tax dollars the school district says it lacks.

For context, the superintendent of Clay County Schools, David Broskie, makes $196,200 a year while overseeing a school district of nearly 51,000 students. When contacted by the Florida Trident, Broskie said he was unaware of Hutchings’ contract. “Because it is a charter school, we have no oversight regarding the school or how they spend their money,” he said.

While such consulting contracts can vary widely, one veteran charter school management consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his business, told the Trident there was “nothing” Ancora could do for St. Johns to justify $100,000 a month in fees. The consultant, who counts multiple Florida schools among his clients, said his own fee is about $20,000 a year per school.

“A management fee of $100,000 a month is mind-boggling,” said Ben Wilcox, president of Integrity Florida, a watchdog agency that has done extensive research into ways charter schools are used for private profit. “I don’t see any world where any type of consultant for a single public school can receive this. It is an abuse of taxpayer funds.”

Ancora’s largesse is nowhere to be found on the financial disclosure forms Hutchings, as a public official, is required to file with the Florida Commission on Ethics. During the life of the St. Johns’ contract, which began in July 2022, Ancora has hauled in more than $2.5 million, but she’s reported only $10,000 in salary related to Ancora. Last year, she reported no income from the company at all.

What the company is doing with its profits isn’t known; failure by a public official to fully disclose income can be a felony.

Hutchings, whose daughter, Ashley Hutchings Gilhousen, is a member of the Clay County School Board, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the St. Johns deal, which raises serious questions.

According to current St. Johns board members and other sources, Hutchings has said she was moved by God to start St. Johns Classical Academy and that she and Miller stepped up to assist in management when asked to do so.

The original founder of the school, however, shared a very different version of events.

That founder, retired Navy pilot Alan Stevenson, described a hostile takeover of the school by Hutchings that involved his own ouster – followed by what can only be described as a massive money grab.

Gains Control

Stevenson, a father of two, said he knew even before he created St. Johns that charter schools were often used as “bait” for those involved to collect hefty fees as management consultants—and he was determined not to let that happen.

The politically conservative Stevenson was drawn to the K-12 classical charter school model propagated by Hillsdale College’s model, which donates curriculum, education materials, consulting and training to its charter school campuses across the country. Public school dollars are used to pay for lease space, construction costs, salaries and operating expenses.

Alan Stevenson delivering the application to the school board in 2016.

After this story was first published, Hillsdale asked that this statement be included, which said:

Decisions regarding consultants or Charter Management Organizations are the responsibility of each school’s board. Hillsdale College does not own, operate or govern Hillsdale-affiliated schools. We affirm the authority of each school’s board and recommend that, if a board chooses to hire a CMO, it selects one that respects and preserves the board’s role as the school’s governing authority.

Back in 2014, Stevenson began visiting Hillsdale schools and trained at Hillsdale’s main office in Michigan. He said it was in late 2015 or early 2016 that Hutchings, then a county commissioner, heard about his efforts and phoned him about a joint venture.

Miller secured the tax-exempt status for the school, while Stevenson spent a year writing the 400-page application for public funding from the Clay County School Board. “Hillsdale was always my dream, but I might as well fly to Mars, I thought, than be able to do that application,” he said. “But no one was willing to do it, so I volunteered.”

He delivered the application to the school board on July 28, 2016. St. Johns, he claimed, would emphasize “the principles of virtuous living, traditional learning, scholarship, and civic responsibility,” according to school board records.

Things looked bleak, however, when a school board review panel recommended funding be rejected based in part on the application’s failure to address the needs of potential high school students. Prior to the school board vote, Hutchings resigned from the St. Johns board citing a conflict of interest based on her daughter Gilhousen’s position on the school board.

After a heated debate, the final vote on Sept. 15, 2016, was 3-2 in favor of approving the charter school. Gilhousen, who was able to vote after her mother’s resignation from the St. Johns board, cast the deciding “yea” vote.

It was the following January that Stevenson said Hutchings unexpectedly appeared at his home and asked him to resign from the board.

“I just can’t work with you,” he recalled her telling him.

He said he was stunned.

“Actually, she’d never done any work except to put her friends on the board,” Stevenson said. “So, I said, ‘Come on Diane, just level with me and tell me what I did. If I’m in a deficiency somewhere, I’m happy to fix myself.’”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” he recalled her telling him before leaving.

On Feb. 3, the board called a special meeting during which Stevenson was asked by the other two board members at the time—Hutchings’s church friends, Miller and Johnson—to step down. He said he asked Miller and Johnson for the reason he was being removed. “They just sat there,” he said. “Neither had the guts to do it.”

Stevenson said he now believes Hutchings, who served as board president, always had plans to financially benefit from St. Johns and simply saw him as an obstacle to doing so.

With public school money flowing, the school opened on August 17, 2017 in rented space in Fleming Island at Hibernia Baptist Church, where Hutchings, Miller and Johnson all attended. Johnson was installed as headmaster. A prominent sign was placed in a thoroughfare leading into the school that featured the “Founding Board Members.” While Hutchings, Miller and Johnson’s names appear prominently, Stevenson’s name was nowhere to be seen.

“Diane was not on the founding board and the minutes would prove it,” Stevenson said. “I was, but my name was not there. If I said my pride was not hurt, that would be a lie.”

Three years later, St. Johns moved into its current suburban campus in Fleming Island, featuring elegant stucco architecture and a secure, imposing perimeter fence. The school now has an enrollment of nearly 1,500 students and a second campus in Orange Park.

Cashes In

While Hutchings remained as president and Miller served as treasurer of the St. Johns board, they formed Ancora Management LLC on Jan 6, 2022. At a board meeting a few months later they went for the money.

The pair, at the beginning of a St. Johns meeting later in the year on May 26, resigned from the board. Shortly thereafter, board member Jim Horne, a former state senator whom former board members said was also recruited by Hutchings, made the motion to enter into negotiations with Ancora. Horne is no stranger to charter school controversies.

In 2001, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush appointed him to be the first head of Florida’s Board of Education. He served three years before resigning and becoming a lobbyist for charter schools. Then-Florida Senate President Jim King called Horne’s school vouchers program “one of the worst scams to rip off taxpayer dollars,” and he was criticized after it was learned Horne’s own accounting firm represented a pair of Duval County charter schools that were shut down for financial mismanagement, according to published reports in Folio Weekly and the Palm Beach Post. Horne didn’t return multiple calls from the Trident.

The Ancora contract was unanimously approved—and soon the checks started flowing, with St. Johns paying the company $118,884.44 that July. While records are incomplete, it appears more than $2.5 million was paid to Ancora through May 2025, with many millions more in the offing. The question: What has Hutchings done to earn that much money?

A Ghost Office

Ancora’s contract stipulates that St. Johns must provide a dedicated workspace for the company at the school, but Ancora currently rents an office in an Orange Park business complex. The Trident visited the Ancora office on three separate occasions during regular business hours and found the space unoccupied each time. Neighbors in the complex said the space is rarely used.

St. Johns board member Martin didn’t expound on any work Hutchings has done for the school, but said Amy Miller, who continues to work at the asphalt company, has been responsive to the needs of the school and offered that Ancora was doing “a fine job.”

According to the sources in the tax collectors office, Hutchings rarely shows up for work there and travels often to the Florida Keys. Still, her charter school consulting business appears to be growing. In her most recent financial disclosure, Hutchings listed another charter school, Treasure Coast Classical Academy in Stuart, as a new client. Records show Ancora received $305,417 from Treasure Coast Classical in 2024, but again, Hutchings reported no salary.

Stevenson, meanwhile, now works as a certified Biblical counselor and volunteers for various local organizations. He said he’s still proud of helping to start St. Johns but alarmed at Ancora’s apparent profiteering.

“My goal was to give children here in Clay County a better, more classical education,” he said. “I did that, but I never meant for it to be a payday for a politician.”