Epic Charter School’s superintendent of finance presented an update to the school’s board on April 9 in just over one minute, without a hint at the chaos brewing behind the scenes.  Earlier that day, Jeanise Wynn received a text message from the school’s superintendent, Bart Banfield. H e demanded an explanation — in writing —detailing how Epic’s budget dropped from a $3.1 million surplus to a projected $8.7 million deficit in the span of two weeks. The next day, in an email, Wynn appears to explain, blaming a dollar figure for teachers’ benefits that was mistakenly counted twice.  “Ultimately, it is my responsibility to make sure that our calculations and analysis are accurate,” Wynn wrote. “I am SICK over the turmoil and anxiety this entire situation has caused…I look forward to next year, when error-prone shared spreadsheets will no longer be the method for budgeting.”  Records obtained through an Oklahoma Open Records Act request, including emails and text messages, offer a window into the chaotic months before June, when the state’s biggest online school shed hundreds of jobs, many of them teachers, and saw top administrators resign, including Banfield and Wynn and other finance staff.  A forensic investigation into the school’s finances, ordered by the Statewide Charter School Board, is expected to be released Jan. 12. Epic officials declined to be interviewed until the report is released. Epic enrolled just over 28,500 students last year, making it the state’s third-largest school system, after only Tulsa and Oklahoma City Public Schools. Eighty percent of Epic’s $300 million budget comes from state funds because, as a charter school, Epic doesn’t receive property taxes.  The school’s founders are accused of siphoning tens of millions of dollars into a private company between 2017 and 2021. They are awaiting trial on charges of embezzlement and racketeering; after nearly two years of delays, a preliminary hearing is expected to continue next month.  In the aftermath, the school’s authorizer threatened to close the school, but ultimately, Epic agreed to a series of reforms. Wynn left her job in Edmond Public Schools and joined Epic’s staff in 2021. She once said she relished the challenge of helping the school right its finances.  Warning Signs One early public warning sign came in 2024, two months after the school year began, when the school laid off 144 employees, including 42 teachers. Teachers and administrators took a pay cut.  Student enrollment at Epic had swelled to 60,000 students in 2020-21, the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, and the school employed more than 1,600 teachers that year. Student counts leveled off at fewer than 30,000 in subsequent years. The number of teachers on the payroll dipped, too, by about 17% in 2022 and 2023 before creeping back up in 2024 and 2025, according to data provided by Epic. Like schools across the country, Epic received federal relief funds to operate during the pandemic. The school collected a combined $68 million from the federal government’s three rounds of pandemic relief aid.  By the spring of 2025, Wynn was pitching school leaders on a plan to borrow $5 million to buy Chromebooks. On April 10, the board approved a loan from Regent Bank for $4.5 million to buy 17,000 computers.  Wynn explained that the loan was necessary because the computers needed to be purchased months in advance of the next school year to get them ready, but paid with the next year’s funding. “It’s pretty straightforward, but we haven’t done this in a really long time,” Wynn said.  On April 16, a week after that panicked text message from Banfield, Wynn floated another proposal to the bank, this time asking if the school could get a line of credit to cover expenses through the summer. They might not need it, she said, but that seemed unlikely.  “This situation is causing the leadership team significant stress,” Wynn wrote. “Enrollment is going very well for next year. But I’m not sleeping at night with all of this hanging over my head. And I just wanted to explore this possibility to get us through June/July with some breathing room.”  The next day, Wynn resigned. In a letter to school leaders, she didn’t mention the school’s financial situation. She said she was leaving to prepare for the next chapter in her professional journey. Days later, another member of the finance team, Carrie Truver, resigned. In her resignation letter, she said she couldn’t stay at Epic and remain committed to ethical financial stewardship and transparency.  “I can no longer, in good conscience, support or be associated with financial decisions and practices that I believe compromise the integrity and stability of the organization,” she wrote. “Even more concerning is the recent trend of attributing responsibility for these decisions to employees, rather than engaging in honest leadership accountability.”  The resignation letter didn’t elaborate, and although Truver initially agreed to an interview, subsequent attempts to contact her were unsuccessful.  Wynn, contacted at home, declined to be interviewed for this story. She said she’s cooperating with the firm hired to conduct the financial investigation.  Unanswered Questions Superintendent Banfield stepped down June 9 in the wake of a major announcement: on June 4, the school laid off twice as many staff as in the fall — 357 teachers and administrators, plus made programmatic cuts. The size and scope of the layoffs alarmed Sen. Carri Hicks, D-Oklahoma City, a former teacher who advocates for increasing accountability for charter schools.  “It really points to a lot of important questions that have gone unanswered from a lot of entities, the government included,” she said.  The auditing firm’s report, authorized by the Statewide Charter School Board in July, could provide some answers.  It’s not an investigative audit, like the report released in 2020 that fueled the criminal case against Epic’s founders. It’s an independent, forensic investigation to include an analysis of the school’s performance, operations and finances and to determine whether fraud, embezzlement, financial misconduct or mismanagement occurred, according to the contract with Carr, Riggs, Ingram.    “It’s important that we, as a board, know what went on. It’s important that the Epic charter school board know,” said Brian Shellem, chairman of the Statewide Charter School Board. “And it’s important the public know what’s going on with their tax dollars.”  Skyler Lusnia, the Statewide Charter School Board’s director of school performance, had already outlined three major concerns and asked Epic officials to respond. Their concerns included the staff layoffs, the near budget shortfall in 2025, and changes to school operations.  In a letter, interim superintendent Justin Hunt blamed, in part, the influx of COVID-19 relief funds for giving the school a false sense of security. When the money ran out, they had more programs and staff than they could afford, he wrote.  He also said the teacher bonus program created financial unpredictability and an emphasis on having teachers meet students face-to-face came with hefty travel reimbursement costs. The school eliminated the bonuses and capped travel, he said. He also blamed Wynn for leaving the school without a meaningful carryover into the 2025-26 school year, necessitating the line of credit, which the school needed to avoid a budget shortfall.  “Epic acknowledges the missteps, and we are taking deliberate action to realign with our mission,” Hunt wrote. Jennifer Palmer has been a reporter with Oklahoma Watch since 2016 and covers education. Contact her at (405) 761-0093 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jpalmerOKC. The post From Surplus to Crisis: Epic Charter’s Budget Collapse Prompts Forensic Investigation appeared first on Oklahoma Watch. ...read more read less