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,
