Wallis: That sounds great, what happened? So they could take that money and pay for karate classes or a football team, something like that. It could be used in a number of different ways, but it really was to pay for extracurricular activities that they might have had in a school or a traditional school environment that they wouldn’t have in virtual school. Epic used the Learning Fund to pay for students’ extracurricular activities, to cover any supplemental curricula that they wanted to use to supplement their learning. And that was when they first laid out to the public what their investigation really was.Īnd one of the through lines of this whole scandal has been the Learning Fund. But that was the reason that this was filed in court publicly in the first place. Which, the teacher, you know, was only a small part of the actual court document. Martinez-Keel: Where do I begin? I would say the first time the public really got any insight into what law enforcement was looking at was in July 2019, and that’s when they released a search warrant of a teacher’s house. Wallis: Well, so there were a few different schemes that Ben Harris, David Chaney and Josh Brock were alleged to have been part of. But for a school district to exist solely in a virtual format - or, Epic would say not solely, but mostly in a virtual format - that was something pretty new in our state. Obviously, there were methods of delivering online school in the state that existed before then. I mean, you can see their rapid, rapid growth, obviously, that what went into supercharged mode during the pandemic when a lot of folks were fearful of sending their children to a school building.Īnd so, you know, they came in and they shook things up because they were delivering school in a new way. I think, you know, Epic for a long time would make the argument that part of why they were so under scrutiny is because they were delivering something entirely new to our state’s education landscape, and that there were people who didn’t like how they disrupted the status quo - which, one can say they definitely did. They started in 2011, and it wasn’t until 2013 that they came under criminal investigation. Martinez-Keel: Epic Charter Schools was our state’s first virtual charter school, which is obviously a charter school handled mostly in a virtual format. How did Epic start and what was it supposed to be? So let’s start the saga at the beginning. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to remind listeners of how we got here. And now the new state attorney general announced his office was going to take back control of prosecuting the Epic founders and CFO. The state auditor indicated last week there were millions more dollars involved in the scandal than what we thought. Wallis: So Epic Charter School, back in the news. Nuria Martinez-Keel: Thanks for having me. Martinez-Keel covers education at The Oklahoman and has been with the publication for four years.īeth Wallis: Well, Nuria, thank you for coming and talking with me today. That’s why StateImpact’s Beth Wallis asked Oklahoman newspaper reporter Nuria Martinez-Keel to get us up-to-speed on the last decade of Epic’s scandals. As more news emerges about embezzlement schemes at Epic Charter Schools, it might be difficult to keep up with the saga.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |