First, They Were Taught to Lie and Cheat. Then They Were Kenneled
Part two of the Roosevelt Football Scandal series’ look at the on campus “hang out” for football players known as the Kennel
When the transfers arrived, they were taught how to lie on their registration in order to cheat state eligibility rules.
Roosevelt Principal Tami Brewer was on a mission to enroll and increase the academic achievement of ethnically diverse students. Particularly “brown and black males”.
And under her leadership, Roosevelt did locate and enroll an additional 18 “brown and black males”. That much is true. Roosevelt enrolled 18 transfer football players in 2024, all of whom were retroactively declared ineligible.
Brewer had a plan for the “brown and black males” Roosevelt acquired through improper recruiting methods: Kennel them during the day and let them loose when it was time to play football.
Given the nature of what actually occurred at Roosevelt, it’s hard to believe that leaders with the high-minded ideals espoused by Brewer didn’t see what they were actually doing, or maybe they did and they didn’t care.
Roosevelt identified 18 “brown and black” males enrolled in other high schools.
Lured them into mid-year transfers to Roosevelt with false promises of scholarship offers, recruiting visibility and access to a private on campus club.
And when the new students arrived, they were taught how to lie in a manner that would defraud a federal program.
Defrauding the federal program was their coach’s strategy for evading WIAA rules.
So Roosevelt shows the brown and black males how to lie and cheat.
And then they’re sent off to a Kennel, where they’re housed apart from the student body, racking up absences, tardies and failing grades, before they’re released for football practice.
One recruit failed 5 of 6 classes and had 63 absences and 47 tardies ; another recruit had 173 absences from six classes, resulting in 3 E's and 1 F.
It’s hard to see how any of this is designed to help “brown and black students”.
This system did help an assistant football coach though.
A Benefit Available to Some
As we reported yesterday, Saul Patu had wrangled a Roosevelt booster club into paying his Kennel Sports Group a cool eighty grand a year to provide the services known as the Kennel. Which was actually just public property cordoned off for football players.
And that’s how it came to be that Principal Tami Brewer signed off on the sole source approval that authorized paying an assistant football coach $80,000 a year to house improperly recruited “brown and black males” in a segregated location known as the Kennel.
To say the least, the optics aren’t great.
But to state the obvious, the methods and outcomes in the Roosevelt recruiting scandal are a good reminder why we decided a long time ago that it is a horrible idea to sort students by race, segregate certain groups apart from the student body as a whole, and apply different rule sets to groups of students based upon their characteristics.
Systemic Administrative Failure
Yesterday, J425 reported on the “Kennel” — an on campus “club” launched in 2023 under the guise of an academic learning center designed to assist “BIPOC” students (non-white students).
The concept came from new assistant coach Saul Patu, and through his corporation, he pitched Roosevelt boosters on his idea of an on campus resources that would help the targeted audience succeed.1 For $80,000 a year, Patu’s Kennel Sports Group LLC2 (KSG) would operate the Kennel.
The boosters liked his plan, and needing only sole-source approval from Principal Brewer to go forward, the program was launched and Patu’s business was cut an $80k check.
In justifying her sole-source approval, Brewer described the Kennel as “social emotional, academic, and college counseling support services for student athletes.”
Additional documentation shows that at inception, the Kennel was described as a “community-based organization” providing academic support services to “students”.
According to Principal Brewer, the “Kennel” Sports Group is “approved” by Seattle Public Schools as a community-based organization to provide service to students. Principal Brewer stated the “Kennel” Sports Group provides after-school tutoring, homework support and customized academic support. The “Kennel” began at Roosevelt in the Fall of 2023. - Roosevelt Fact Finder Report, p.12 - WIAA.
The term “students” was quickly narrowed to “athletes”, and by 2024, athletes was narrowed to “football players”. And despite Roosevelt leaders positioning the Kennel as a resource for all students (during previous investigations), a more thorough investigation found that even in the founding documents, the intended audience was much, much narrower than “all students”
Written documentation clearly shows the ““Kennel”” was a program exclusively for student football players during the 2023-2024 school year. - Fact-Finder Report, p. 13
It’s likely a problem to create a resource at a public school and then restrict access to all but a certain type of athlete.
Adding fuel to the fire of future criminal and civil exposure, the principal stated that student access to the Kennel would be decided by a different characteristic, and the ones she cited are immutable.
She wanted to Kennel the brown and black males. You know. The ones they made lie and cheat as soon as they enrolled. The ones who wouldn’t be monitored for attendance or availed of grade checks.
The ones she was helping.
The ““Kennel”” program was part of her strategy for achieving an overall school mission of improving the academic achievement of …“brown and black male students.”
The entire Roosevelt transfer scandal takes on different meaning when viewed through the mission statement provided by Roosevelt’s lead administrator.
With a stated goal of enrolling and increasing the academic achievement of “ethnically diverse students” and “brown and black males”, Roosevelt officials then made contact with “brown and black males” (and some white kids too) up and down the I-5 corridor.
Seven recruits admitted they were actually commuting from their actual residences, some as far as 40 miles from Roosevelt. - Fact Finder Report
And where Adams, Patu or Ford located a “brown or black male” with football talent, attempts were made to pluck them from their current situation and port them into Roosevelt, where they’d be availed of Brewer’s plan to increase their success.
But there wasn’t a plan.
One recruit J425 spoke with said no effort was even made to evaluate his transcripts and enroll him in classes that would allow him to graduate.
And because all of the recruits were being falsely processed as McKinney Vento Act students, there would be no grade or attendance checks either.
In short, Brewer had a plan for brown and black males Roosevelt acquired through improper recruiting methods: Kennel them during the day and let them loose when it was time to play football.
And if that sounds harsh, how else do you explain the following.
A Track Record of Academic Failure
The fact-finder's report provides stark evidence of academic and attendance issues among recruits: one student (Student 2) failed 5 of 6 classes and had 63 absences and 47 tardies; another (Student 7) had 173 absences from six classes, resulting in 3 E's and 1 F.
Many students confirmed commuting to Roosevelt despite listing false addresses within the school boundary, which contributed to their high tardy and absence rates.
The perception that "recruited athletes were academically inferior" to other Roosevelt students also existed among staff, according to the fact-finder report, who directly referenced interviews with teachers.
And that perception was probably accurate. But not because the kids were lacking. They’d been failed by those in power. As the fact finder out it, Brewer administered with a "blatant disregard for WIAA rules and district policies and procedures".
One player, who was eligible for every game, was absent from classes 63 times and tardy forty-seven times by the end of the first semester. Another had twenty class absences and twenty-five class tardies by the end of the first semester.
It’s hard to fathom that the irony and intrinsic … wrongness of what Brewer and Adams were doing wasn’t self apparent. It was apparent to other adults present at the time. Three teachers contacted J425 and described the obvious problems. All said they’d approached Brewer but had been shut down.
The evidence points to a systemic breakdown.
Lack of Institutional Control
The fact-finder surmises that Roosevelt administrators and coaches "failed to intervene, carefully investigate, and properly respond to WIAA violations", an understatement that was born out when Principal Tami Brewer responded one day after J425 broke the story of improper recruiting and abuse of McKinney Vento Act provisions at Roosevelt.
Brewer, among other things, said no improper recruiting had occurred at Roosevelt, in her October 4 all staff email.
J425 responded to Principal Brewer with screen shots of Roosevelt football assistant Dom Skene contacting players on social media via direct messages in which he recruited the players to Roosevelt and asked them to call Sam Adams.
J425 reported at the time that there was plenty additional evidence like that. If Brewer had listened to the outside reports, if she’d taken the complaints forwarded by her staff seriously, a lot of the damage could’ve been headed off with strong leadership beginning on October 4. Instead we got a ham-fisted cover up.
To be honest, maybe Brewer thought she could smother out a few embers of dissent with a strong denial. But she didn’t know that embers had turned into brush fires up and down the I-5 corridor at the schools Adams and company had either poached — or tried to poach players. For each successful attempt at poaching a player, many players turned the offer down. And in each case, evidence was created.
In many cases, players who did not transfer to Roosevelt simply turned the text messages they received over to their football coach. Or administration, or media.
J425 has over a dozen examples, including evidence provided by 2024 KingCo Offensive Player of the Year Peyton Cunnigham and evidence provided from a source a 425-area school that shows their quarterback getting recruited to Roosevelt via text messages. The corruption was out of control by Octobe.
By turning a blind eye towards the rampant poaching of players from area schools, Brewer was doing the exact opposite of her stated goal: helping “black and brown males”.
The fact-finder found Brewer did "not taken steps necessary to protect students," instead "shutting down" staff who attempted to report concerns.
And as we’ll show below, the real harm to the recruits came when they arrived at Roosevelt. Because, if you’re hearing a principal talk about facilitating the success of “brown and black males”, you might imagine that a transfer students receives custom counseling, staff obtains their transcripts and develops an individual plan and registers the student in the appropriate classes, and then follows up with grade and attendance checks, offering increased attention and resources where necessary. That’s not what occurred.
Upon arrival at Roosevelt, the recruits found no cohesive attempt had been made to transfer their existing credits and set up an academic plan tailored for their success.
Defrauding a Federal Program
Instead, they were coached up on how to lie to defraud a federal program, and then sorted into an on campus Kennel, where they wiled away the day instead of attending class.
The responses provided on the registration packets would be funny if the issue wasn’t so serious. All of the student registration packets go something like this, but just for illustrative purposes let’s look at how one recruit answered questions about his living situation. The fact-finder wrote:
The phrase McKinney-Vento appears five times in response to questions like, “Adults with whom the student currently resides and “Adult/Adults relation to the student” instead of answering the question. “McKinney Vinto” (spelled incorrectly) was entered in response to those questions.
These responses are not responsive to the questions asked. The responses made a conclusion about status, rather than provide the requested information.
It is also questionable that a 16-year-old high school student is knowledgeable enough about McKinney Vento to conclude that he is qualified to receive benefits under the federal law.
Counselor: How many family members reside in the household? Football Player, prepped by coaches for this section: “McKinney Vento.”
The students were also instructed to lie about their address. That’s how four players ended up providing the same address, for what turned out top be an abandoned home. Two other provided an address linked to Patu. In the end, it turned out that the majority of the transfers werre simply driving to Roosevelt from their previous residences. They didn’t move. They just stopped going to their high school and started driving to the Kennel.
I mean, it’s absurd. But that’s what occurred for most of the 18 transfer students. And in each case, later review revealed that the recruits were never eligible for homeless benefits.
They, of course, weren’t immediatly eligible for football. They should’ve been availed of grade checks, Attendance checks. And typical academic planning and assistance. Instead, they were treaded like commodities, sorted by characteristics, housed apart from the rest of the student body, and thrust into a timeline that inevitably saw them facing insurmountable academic barriers.
And while the report emphasizes that "students were pawns and victims, not co-conspirators," it strongly condemns the adults who, through "deliberate acts or acts of inertia," allowed these violations to occur.
Because the violations weren’t limited to WIAA rules. The student athletes and their families were violated. Civil rights may have been violated (We don’t collect, sort and store students by race anymore in this country, supposedly.) Regardless, the students and families did not receive what they were promised by public educators. To say the least, the athletes whose lives were interrupted by mid-year transfers to Roosevelt did not find academic success at their new school.
Ethical and Civil Implications of the Kennel
The foundational appropriateness of something like the "The Kennel" existing at a public school is severely undermined by the fact-finder's conclusion that it was "a privilege not offered to other students during the 2023-2024 school year" and by the fact that its presence "was offered to the parent... as an incentive" for student attendance at Roosevelt .
This directly violates WIAA rules prohibiting "any privilege not afforded to non-athletes" as a special inducement.
And lays a foundation for further questions about why the Kennel was created, and why an assistant coach was issued lump sum payments (supposedly for academic support services) while presiding over the complete and abject academic failure of the transfer players.
Beyond the ethical and/or civil rights implications, the program's stated goal of promoting academic success, particularly for "brown and black male students," was unfulfilled, potentially harming the very students it aimed to help.
In other words, just because you think you aren’t racist, if you are in charge…and your actions show that you improperly rounded up a bunch of students, whom are referred to en masse by immutable characteristics (“brown and black males”)…and if you then segregated these students into a seperate area that the student body as a whole was kept out of…and if the “brown and black males” then failed academically at a stunning rate….well.
That’s bad, isn’t it? Civil rights violation bad? Maybe.
In closing, published reports state that "none of the senior transfers received a scholarship because of Adams or Patu," (some already possessed offers) and "many didn’t even come close to reaching the credit requirements to graduate," partly due to "inadequate academic counseling" and a complete lack of academic administration.
In short, complete systemic failure.
Up next, we speak with a former U.S. Attorney to look at the growing criminal and civil exposure that Seattle Schools, Roosevelt and its involved administrators and coaches could face in the coming days, weeks and months.
UP NEXT: How Much Trouble is Roosevelt in for Defrauding a Federal Homeless Program? Could Kennel Payments to Patu Raise Federal Concerns?
The “Kennel” Program (“Kennel”) is a program operated by the “Kennel” Sports Group. Mr. Saul Patu is the owner, operator, and chief executive officer of the “Kennel” Sports Group. Mr. Patu was also an assistant coach for the football program under head coach Sam Adams during the 2024-2025 football season. Roosevelt Fact-Finder Report, p.12 WIAA.
Documents Mr. Patu filed with the Washington State Department of Revenue describe the “Kennel” Sports Group as a Limited Liability Corporation (LCC) that has as its primary purpose acting as “agents and managers for artists, athletes, entertainers, and other public figures.”
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