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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