I have friends whose children have achieved mightily at John W. I do not mean to cast aspersions on all charter schools. In May 2019, 11 people were indicted in San Diego for opening 19 charter schools and then funneling the state funds into real estate investments. Similar cases took place in California and Ohio, according to Washington Post. 20 and informing teachers they would not be paid for July and August. 30, but both schools beat them to the punch, telling students to stop their coursework Aug. 26 to begin a shutdown process that would conclude Sept. Last summer in Daleville, a suburb of Muncie, Indiana, two affiliated online charter schools, Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, came under close scrutiny from federal investigators after the state examiner determined that the schools reported having twice the number of students that actually attended and collected at least $40 million more than it would if it reported the numbers accurately.ĭaleville Community Schools Board voted Aug. They are so similar, it is easy to imagine hundreds of people pouring into a generic hotel ballroom filled with straight-back chairs to learn how to soak a state’s public education monies for fun and profit. The documents lent credence to the 2019 warrants’ allegations that Epic Charter Schools founders Ben Harris and David Chaney pocketed $10 million by enrolling so-called “ghost students.” These were students who were enrolled in either private schools or were being homeschooled but were counted as part of Epic’s online student body.Īs is depressingly common, the allegations against Epic Charter Schools are nearly identical to those facing online charter schools in other states. It was only after the newspaper began working with its own attorney that it was able to acquire documents showing the millions that were shifted from the Learning Fund to the school’s for-profit management company, Epic Youth Services. Epic’s attorney repeatedly argued that once the funds were moved to the management company, they were “no longer public funds” and were not subject to the Oklahoma Open Records Act. In the Sunday edition of Tulsa World, Andrea Eger reported that Epic Charter Schools, which was the subject of search warrants executed in 2019 by Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI), “is paying its for-profit management company millions more in taxpayer dollars every year for school expenditures that are never audited and which Epic claims are shielded from public scrutiny.”įor a year, Epic Charter Schools denied Tulsa World’s open records requests for information on the organization’s so-called “Learning Fund,” in which funds were collected and then issued to each Epic student in $1,000 disbursements. Opinion From George Lang, our lead opinion columnist Epic schools exposureĪn extensive investigation by the Tulsa World revealed that a similar scenario is allegedly playing out with Oklahoma’s Epic Charter Schools. In several states throughout the U.S., online charter schools closed after officials determined they inflated attendance or created “ghost students,” then squirreled away millions of dollars in public money based on those inflated numbers. Stories about online charter schools rarely seem to end happily, but with a frightening consistency, they do end.
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