How A Local Basketball Trainer Charged Kids $22K in Tuition to Attend (Free) Seattle Public School — and Got Away.
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 quietly resign. The whistleblower wasn’t so lucky
Forgery, impersonation, fraud. Abuse of homeless student programs. Six figure hush-money payouts. 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.
SEATTLE, 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
