The consulting firm, Education Board Partners, recommended that new board members have at least some “understanding of the education landscape,” with prior experience on a school board preferable. Recommendations from an outside consulting firm Epic hired to review its policies and procedures sparked the board shakeup. The remaining board voted to increase its size and accepted four new members. In May, two members of the Epic school board who state auditors had criticized for their close relationships to Harris and Chaney stepped down. “Over that seven to nine-month our position obviously changed from the first 24 hours.” “The more (the board) began to ask questions about what was in the audit it begot more questions,” Hickman said. “We witnessed pure politics on display,” said Shelly Hickman, assistant superintendent for Epic, hours after the audit’s release.īut inside the school, the audit raised questions among staff and board members that led to an internal review and resulted in the school not only ending its contract with Harris and Chaney and adopting the recommendations of the auditor’s office. Last year, the state auditor's office released a scathing report that accused Epic of financial mismanagement, inflated enrollment counts and other improper methods that led to increases in state funding.Īt the time, both the school and management company criticized the audit. “It’s permanent, they are done,” said Paul Campbell, Epic’s recently appointed board chairman, who spoke with The Frontier about Harris and Chaney’s involvement in the school moving forward. The school continues to await a second report from state auditors, possible fallout from a multicounty grand jury investigation that has already accused Harris and Chaney of using the school for personal profit, and the state Department of Education has de-manded that Epic repay $11.2 million in tax dollars.īut school officials and new board members hope that ending their contract with the school’s two founders will signal a new direction. Over the past three months, The Frontier inter-viewed 12 current and former Epic administrators and senior staff members, along with dozens of teachers – many of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal internal discussions – to learn how the school decided to distance itself from Chaney and Harris and terminate the pair’s multimillion-dollar management contract. In May, the school’s board voted to end its contract and partnership with Chaney and Harris. While the school and management company often put on a unified front in public in response to growing criticism from lawmakers, law enforcement and state education officials, multiple high-ranking school staff members told The Frontier they believed the profit goals of Chaney and Harris were at odds with the school’s mission to serve kids. But when school officials wanted to hire more instructional staff, Harris and Chaney rejected the request, according to three sources. Internal disagreement also arose over how much money the school should spend on advertising, with some school officials questioning the nearly $2.6 million spent on an advertising blitz in 2019, including commercials, billboards, article placement in the state’s two largest newspapers and a promotional playground inside a mall. Over the past six years, the company funneled $125 million of Epic’s state funding to itself, including nearly $46 million in management fees. The situation was one of a growing number of disagreements between school officials and the management company’s owners – Ben Harris and David Chaney, who founded Epic before starting Epic Youth Services to manage the school’s operations. Epic grew to become Oklahoma's largest school district during the pandemic. The management company told the school to take every student it could, bringing enrollment close to 60,000, up from about 38,000 students in July 2020. Some doubted the school could train enough new teachers and that an enrollment cap was necessary to avoid “growing beyond capacity,” worried one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicize internal conversations.īut more students meant more money to the owners of Epic Youth Services, the private company owned by the school’s founders that served as the school’s management organization and the recipient of 10 percent of all state funding that went to the school. Projections showed the potential to add as many as 25,000 new students.īut three senior staff members at the school told The Frontier they believed the prospect of nearly doubling the student count would be disastrous. When the pandemic began sending thousands of parents in search of virtual learning options last year, the enrollment at Epic Charter Schools, already one of the state’s largest school systems, began to explode.
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