The entire school board for a Sacramento school that teaches English to adult migrants resigned after a state audit revealed mismanagement, fraud, and illegal use of education funding.
The entire board of directors for Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools (HCCTS) resigned on Monday after a 171-page audit alleging massive fraud was released by the California State Auditor’s office.
The report found that the school took some $180 million in state education funding that it either never qualified for, or qualified for but misspent.
The school opened in 2014 to help adult migrants, especially Afghans, return to school to earn equivalent high school diplomas to allow better employment opportunities in the U.S., the Sacrament Bee reported
During Monday’s board meeting, the trustees first voted to remove board member Sonja Cameron for hiring her unqualified daughter to serve as Highlands’ Director of Attendance and Admissions, a position that pays a $145,860 annual salary, according to KXTV-TV.
However, on the tail of that vote, the remaining six board members immediately tendered their own resignations, with three of the six vowing to stay on until replacements can be arranged.
The auditor’s report alleged that the school board engaged in nepotism in hiring Cameron’s daughter, inflated the number of students to get more funding, purposefully avoided providing financial transparency reports to the state, spent money on repair bills for cars owned by board members, paid for luxury items such as food and travel, approved consulting contracts to friends and family members, modified test results, and committed a slew of other violations.
Some of the fraud concerned admissions to the school. The state charter only allows the school to admit migrants aged 22 and up and who don’t already have high school diplomas. However, the audit found that it was admitting students younger than the target age and also students who already had high school diplomas.
State officials allege these violations occurred to grow the school’s attendance numbers to boost the school’s state funding which was based on average daily attendance and the total number of students enrolled, the Sacrament Bee reported.
Some state officials are demanding that the school repay the $180 million in misused funding, but local activists say that forcing repayment would cause the school to shut down, leaving the hundreds of migrants currently enrolled and many thousands of future enrollees without a means to learn English in the area.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, X at WTHuston, or Truth Social at @WarnerToddHuston.
