A Local Basketball Trainer Charged Families $22K in Tuition to Attend a (Free) Seattle Public School. He Got Away. The Money is Missing.
A NIKE EYBL coach ran rampant inside a SPS high school, charging illicit tuition & assuming the ID of SPS staff. SPS paid the principal $200k to resign. A counselor who pushed back? Not as lucky.
Editor’s Note: Abuse of homeless student programs. Six figure hush-money payouts. Rampant dishonesty in the face of external inquiry. And local fraudsters feasting on schools and walking away scot-free. The Alan Sugiyama High School/Great Futures Prep scandal is the prototypical Seattle Public Schools scandal, complete with the unsatisfying conclusion. J425 initially reported this story five months ago. This story covers a shockingly underreported episode of forgery, fraud dishonesty and corruption inside an alternative high school adjacent to Rainier Beach. The idea here? A Nike travel ball coach launches a private prep school inside the public Alan Sugiyama campus and recruits players from across the country, capitalizing on Rainier Beach bball cachet and promising specialized training and a daily focus on basketball development. Without district office knowledge, the trainer & the principal fired up GREAT FUTURES PREP and began billing families up to $22k in tuition. The money that came in? Kept out of SPS coffers and routed to the Boys and Girls Club of King County, which serves as a clearinghouse for non-profits and volunteers with whom SPS affiliates. When this program crumbled, the tuition money was gone — which is why SPS had a very public moratorium on payments/contracts with the Boys and Girls Club. This relates to our last story on the contracts Annie Patu approved for her sister Marty: not only were those deals in apparent violation of SPS ethics policy barring administrators from issuing payments to relatives, the contracts came after the very-public orders from district office for all business with the Boys and Girls Club to stop (Marty Jackson billed the district through the Boys and Girls Club). Since our initial report, we’ve spent more time on the “why?” behind this episode in corruption. And as time goes by, we’re seeing more and more links to another power center in the SPS universe. Who would benefit from a pool of international talent arriving at a Rainier Beach area alternative school? What made these people think they could walk into a public school, takeover facilities, and teach kids to lie in order to defraud federal homeless programs? Pattern recognition sensors: activated.
ALAN T. SUGIYAMA HIGH SCHOOL, RAINIER BEACH, WA 2024 — It started with a strange and uncomfortable request. Soon after starting her job as a guidance counselor at Alan T. Sugiyama High School, Karen Byeman was asked by her principal and basketball coaches to find a way to prevent some seniors from graduating.
Byeman found the request troubling, as the students in question were on track to graduate on time. She told the coach and principal she didn’t think she could help. Her colleagues said they’d check back later.
The students were part of “Great Futures Prep,” a new and supposedly innovative elite basketball program created as a partnership between Seattle Public Schools (SPS) and the Boys & Girls Clubs of King County (BGCKC).
The Great Futures program was housed within Sugiyama,
an alternative high school designed to help at-risk students find career paths in fields like music production and horticulture—a mission starkly at odds with the elite, high-stakes basketball program operating under its roof.
This contrast was evidenced by the request to shift grad dates: a prep school tactic known as reclassification, in which grad dates are moved forward or backward as necessary due to external recruiting conditions. It’s not something done in public schools and it set Byeman on edge.
One evening at home, Byeman was browsing the Great Futures program website when she discovered the family handbook. What she read shocked her: families in this public school program were being charged tuition. Tens of thousands of dollars of tuition. Her discovery set the stage for the unraveling of a major scandal built on fraud and a stunning failure of oversight.
“I felt like I was in the middle of a really weird – I think, illegal – situation. How can these parents pay all this money, but the kids go to school here for free?” Byeman told KUOW.
The Tuition Scam Inside a Public School
The district investigation that later followed Byeman’s whistleblowing uncovered a clear pay-to-play model operating within a public school. The Great Futures Prep coach quoted families a tuition of $22,000 for the Great Futures Prep program.
The Boys and Girls Club provided records showing that after “scholarships”, families paid between $5,000 and $14,000 in annual tuition collected by the coach and routed through the nonprofit (as opposed to the district).
Boys and Girls Club officials stated that the money was used to cover travel expenses for the team’s national game schedule, but this wasn’t verified and it doesn’t explain the impermissible collection of tuition funds for attending a public school.
While the coach and the nonprofit partner collected thousands from families via a system that the district says it wasn’t aware of and hadn’t approved, the admittance of each international student into Sugiyama High School via Great Futures Prep was creating a deficit in public accounting. SPS has a program that allows foreign nationals to attend, at a cost of $19,000 per year for each students. As Great Futures Prep charged a false tuition of $22,000 routed through external sources, the public school district simultaneously failed to collect its own required fees, creating a second layer of financial impropriety. In effect, both the individual families and the district as a whole were getting bilked by the scheme.
The district investigation found that Principal Joe Powell facilitated the Great Futures Prep project with an external Nike-associated basketball trainer named Dominique Brooks serving as head coach inside Sugiyama. Powell was reportedly aware that several players had been recruited internationally from countries like New Zealand, Canada, and Senegal. When asked if the district had tried to recoup either the improper fees charged to parents or the tuition money due to the district, a district spokesperson did not respond to KUOW reporter Ann Dornfield.
Exploiting a Law Meant to Protect Homeless Students
In a story familiar to those who’ve followed recruiting scandals at Roosevelt and Garfield High Schools, the Great Futures Prep architects exploited a federal law designed to protect the most vulnerable students, turning a safeguard for the homeless into a tool for illicit enrollment.
An investigation found that nearly all the student-athletes had been enrolled in the district as homeless under the McKinney-Vento law. This was done, the investigator noted, “as a means of subverting the deadline for nonresident student enrollment.”
Crucially, the investigation concluded that none of the students were actually homeless. The investigator’s report pointed out an obvious inconsistency:
“Claiming McKinney-Vento status would be inconsistent with what is known about the Great Futures Prep players’ situations, given that their families were each paying a substantial fee to Boys & Girls Clubs of King County in order for them to participate.”
The report also stated that Dominique Brooks, the local basketball trainer who managed the program and served as head coach instructed families to claim homeless status. While Principal Joe Powell denied any involvement, the investigation found that he directed his secretary to give the McKinney-Vento questionnaires to the new students as they enrolled.
Until the McKinney-Vento fraud mechanism was laid bare by the Roosevelt scandal, this illicit technique had been used for years throughout SPS by coaches seeking to circumvent state athletic eligibility standards by the brute force provided by a federal law that - with respect to homeless students - removed all barriers to participation. The scheme was effective in transforming mandatory one year sit-outs into immediate eligibility, with the side benefits of removing pesky grade and attendance checks. Great for underhanded coaches, not great for students or parents. The district was aware of the ploy’s existence, as investigations as early as 2017 had turned up the fraud. In each case, however, from Garfield to Roosevelt through Sugiyama, the district claims to be unaware of the fraud, pleads ignorance, and vows to do better. Given the fact that the actual homeless status of the student athletes had to be later rectified by adjustments by the district office (to avoid fraudulent reports) it seems improbable that the details of the widespread use of McKinney-Vento fraud was secret to the district.
Forgery, Impersonation, and Fraud
The investigation further claimed that Dominique Brooks’s fraudulent activities extended far beyond the enrollment scheme to include outright forgery and impersonation. And the extent of the fraud also paints a picture to the level of penetration inside public schools that unvetted, non-staff actors are allowed. Like Sam Adams at Roosevelt, it appears Brooks was never formally subjected to a hiring or background process. And yet he was inside a public high school, representing himself as an agent of the district entitled to collect $22k a year in fees.
After counselor Karen Byeman resigned, Brooks “doctored Ms. Byeman’s resignation email to include false information” in an attempt to obtain payments and assist in registrations.
The investigation also found that Brooks posed as the guidance counselor in numerous other recruitment emails sent to the families of prospective players.
In one incident, using Byeman’s identity, Brooks allegedly tried to obtain a $14,000 payment from an international student’s college savings plan, by falsely claiming that Great Futures Prep was a post-secondary institution and that he was a registrar. When the payment could not be secured, the investigation said the student “was kicked out.”
The fraud in question was only uncovered when an email reply to Byeman included the doctored original. And to date, the district has shown little interest in getting to the bottom of the matter, or in reporting the apparent felonious activity to the police or state investigators.
J425 had forwarded the details of this story to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction seeking comment on whether state oversight has a role in this matter.
A Six-Figure Payout for the Principal
Instead of facing discipline for his role in the scheme, Principal Joe Powell received a six-figure settlement from the district.
After being placed on administrative leave, Powell signed an agreement with Seattle Public Schools in exchange for his resignation. A key term of the settlement was that “Seattle Public Schools made no policy findings against Mr. Powell.”
Under the agreement, Powell was allowed to return to paid administrative leave until January 31, 2025. This arrangement allowed him to continue receiving his approximately $199,000 salary and benefits for nearly eight months after he had already agreed to resign.
This is a standard tactic used by districts who are typically uninterested in pursuing justice and more interested in limiting perceived “risk”. As in limiting the risk of liability that an external criminal probe might uncover. The repeated use of such payouts not only rewards those who fail the public, it also prevents future employers from finding out about improper activities that would likely render a prospective applicant unemployable. Instead, districts continually recycle each other’s bad actors in a practice administrators bitingly refer to as “the dance of the lemons”.
A Systemic Failure of Oversight and Accountability
The scandal was not the result of one rogue employee, but a systemic breakdown enabled by parallel failures of oversight at both Seattle Public Schools and the Boys & Girls Clubs of King County—each organization providing the other with the institutional cover to avoid accountability.
This breakdown created an accountability vacuum that Dominique Brooks and Joe Powell exploited, allowing fraud to flourish without scrutiny. Consequently, the scandal was never externally investigated, and as a non employee, Brooks basically walked away with little more than reputational damage and no repercussions for the alleged widespread fraud and misuse of public resources. Furthermore, the district delayed reporting the crimes to law enforcement, and when they finally did, the report was made in such a manner to render any investigation impossible. While a district spokesperson told KUOW news they reported findings to police in December of 2024, a police spokesperson confirmed the report was only filed on the evening before the story’s publication in January of 2025 — more than six months after the district’s internal investigation had concluded.
Seattle Police Department told KUOW that when they responded to a 9pm Sunday night call, the district employee who filed the report told police he didn’t know any details, “had not been part of any of the investigation” and had simply been instructed to phone in a police report by supervisors.
The Boys & Girls Clubs’ leadership, meanwhile, downplayed the program’s fraudulent nature. A release issued through a public relations firm stated that the Great Futures Prep program “achieved its goal,” with the non-profit’s CEO at the time of the scandal stating that she considered the Great Futures Prep initiative a “successful experiment” in institutional flexibility, (assumedly despite the forgery and fraudulent enrollments).
A Scandal with Lingering Questions
The Great Futures Prep program was ultimately a pay-to-play scheme built on forgery, impersonation, and the exploitation of laws meant to protect homeless children. It was enabled by a systemic failure of accountability within both a major public school district and a prominent nonprofit organization. It took funds out of the pockets of families and into the hands of bad actors. The fraud besmirched the districts’ reputation and defrauded the families of a constitutionally guaranteed right to a free public education.
And the district failed to protect the victimized families or the employee who ultimately lost her job in order to report the ongoing fraud. Unlike the principal, Byeman did not receive a $200,000 payout.
Today, several of the student-athletes involved have moved on to play college basketball.
Dominique Brooks, the coach at the center of the fraud allegations, is now associated with Seattle Rotary Boys & Girls Club and was also associated with a program in Issaquah called Elite Futures Prep. Brooks’ LinkedIn page identifies him as a NIKE EYBL Head Coach and the owner of Brooks Scouting Report. His X tagline states that he is “Developing Better Youth for a Better World.”
KUOW was first to break this story.
Roosevelt Football Scandal: Coaches Falsely Labeled Athletes as Homeless to Get Around Transfer Rules
“What sickens me is the adults playing victim, saying they just did it to give these kids an opportunity. No, they gave themselves an opportunity.”