$250 PER KID, PER SPORT: Seattle Public Schools' ‘Pay-to-Play’ Athletics Plan Raids Parents' Pockets to Cover $2.6M Shortfall
J425 Exclusive: Before taxing families, board must appoint external investigator to probe millions of dollars lost to abuse, graft, mismanagement and nepotism running rampant in SPS athletics.
SEATTLE — A January 28, 2026 Seattle Public Schools (SPS) memo (full memo included at bottom of post) written by SPS athletics accountability czar Ted Howard, addressed to SPS board members, cites a $2.6 million budget shortfall as the reason why parents must foot the bill for student athletics going forward. Howard’s memo lays out a “pay-to-play” policy proposal that calls for families to pay up to $250 per student, per sport.1
A deeper look into the district’s “pay-to-play” architecture reveals a systemic culture that’s more like “you pay-we-stay”—where well-connected “grifters” and family dynasties are rewarded with taxpayer-funded parachutes — while students and parents are increasingly left with both the penalties, and the tab. A J425 Exclusive.
A January 28 memo from the Office of Accountability pitches athletic fees as a necessity for “fiscal sustainability.” Ironically, the document’s author, former Garfield Principal and Assistant Superintendent and current accountability administrator Theodore (Ted) Howard, has himself presided over several chapters of athletic administration defined by staggering ethical lapses, multimillion-dollar abuse settlements, and a sprawling web of nepotism that funnels public resources into private family “fiefdoms.”
The policy proposal was likely presented to the SPS board at a January 28 closed-to-the-public special meeting.
What Does the Memo Say?
This administrative memo (included as a downloadable PDF at the bottom of this post) outlines a proposal for Seattle Public Schools to reinstate “pay-to-play” participation fees to address budget constraints while sustaining its extensive K-12 athletics program.
The document argues that sports are essential for whole child development, citing data that links athletic participation to higher GPAs and better attendance compared to non-athletes. To balance financial needs with fairness, the district suggests a tiered fee structure with multi-sport discounts and a commitment to equity waivers for low-income families.
Ultimately, the text frames athletics as a vital tool for teaching life readiness skills, such as resilience and collaboration, which prepare students to solve future societal problems.
The recent history of Seattle Public Schools athletics reveals a different story.
This exclusive lays out an aggregation of recently-reported scandals that depict a landscape of waste, fraud and abuse: Issues that must be subjected to the sunlight of transparency… and the restorative powers of justice, before families are asked to foot the bill for mistakes that the district has failed to address.
True sustainability doesn’t start with parent fees—it starts with cleaning house and adopting a commitment to integrity and honesty. Before asking parents to “pay-to-play”, the district must at least take initial steps in cleaning up their own sordid history of pay-to-play, corruption, nepotism and dishonesty rampant in the SPS athletics system.
Wait for It: Ted Howard’s Brother-in-Law…. Given $200k Tax-Payer Funded Golden Parachute… After Pay-to-Play Athletic Scandal at Sugiyama High
The credibility of the district’s request for more parent capital is somewhat undermined by the history of its leadership. Case in point: a specific high-profile case of pay-to-play in athletics, where the money runs the opposite direction from the plan laid out in the memo.
Accordingly, the Alan Sugiyama High School / Great Futures Prep pay-to-play scandal is the first of five recent episodes of athletic corruption that we’ll walk you through in this J425 exclusive.
The Scheme: A Private, $22k-per-year Basketball Prep School INSIDE a Public High
Let’s widen out for a moment.
Accountability czar Ted Howard oversees athletics on the SPS org chart.
He’s also the author of the Pay to Play policy memo on which this story is based, a proposal in which SPS parents pay around $250 per student, per sport for participation in athletics.
According to Ted Howard’s ethics disclosure, his brother-in-law is Joe Powell.
As in, Joe Powell, former Principal at Sugiyama high school. The administrator who oversaw the Great Futures Prep pay-to-play scheme at Sugiyama high school, and was rewarded with a $200k golden parachute for this episode of fraud and likely criminality.
Per KUOW’s initial exclusive, Powell and a well-connected Nike street agent/travel team figure schemed up the idea for a basketball skill-mill inside of the public high school, where prospects from across the world could pay for acceptance and tutelage from Rainier Valley’s storied basketball culture.
KUOW broke the story of how Powell, as principal of Alan T. Sugiyama High School, installed Nike agent Dom Brooks to run a school-within-a-school basketball prep program at the district’s Rainier Valley alternative high school.
Together, Powell and Brooks oversaw “Great Futures Prep”—described in marketing material as an elite basketball program that bascially functioned as a private, $22,000-a-year “pay-for-play” scheme within a public school, promising athletic coaching, skill development, visibility and college scholarships. For these services, marketed quite literally to basketball players around the world, Powell and Brooks managed to charge parents tens of thousands of dollars to send their kids to free public school. Until wrongdoing was reported by a counselor (who basically lost her career for it) all of this was occurring without the district’s (or accountability czar/brother-in-law Ted Howard’s) knowledge.
Prospects from as far as New Zealand and Senegal were recruited and reportedly instructed to enroll as “homeless” under the McKinney-Vento Act, in order to classify as homeless and skirt WIAA eligibility regulations and pesky rules like grade and attendance requirements.
From KUOW:
Principal Joe Powell told the investigator that he was unaware that students had falsely claimed homelessness, and was not involved in recruiting or enrolling teens for the program. However, the investigation found that Powell had his secretary give new Great Futures students McKinney-Vento questionnaires to fill out.
“We’ll be offering our young people another pathway,” said Joe Powell, principal of Sugiyama High School, in a promotional video for Great Futures Prep. “In today’s day and age, in order to complete high school, you have to have had some form of pathway that you committed to while you’re within school.”
KUOW reports that none of the recruits actually attended classes.
Further, the program didn’t just bypass athletic rules; as Dom Brooks grew bolder (forging documents and signatures, routing payments to the Boys and Girls Club, “expelling” students for non-payment of funds) the program likely broke federal and state law, according to a 2025 KUOW report.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW INSET.
The scheme collapsed when Moore and Brooks began pressuring a guidance counselor to stop players from graduations, so they could return for a fifth year. Ultimately, the counselor noticed that Brooks had been stealing her letterhead and email account in order to pose as her, certifying the enrollment of players and even soliciting funds.
When the scheme collapsed, the district accountability was non-existent. Instead of calling the police, the district delayed and obfuscated. Instead of tracking down the stolen taxpayuer funds, the district quietly paid off those involved to keep quiet. Instead of termination, the district handed Powell a “golden parachute,” allowing him to resign via a settlement that placed him on paid leave to collect a $199,000 salary plus benefits for eight months. The “tuition” stolen from parents was never recovered. And when KUOW asked the district whether they reported the crimes to police, the district pulled off this charade (per KUOW):
…a Seattle Public Schools spokesperson said that the district reported the findings to police last December, six months after the investigation concluded.
However, a Seattle Police Department spokesperson said the police report was made several days ago, at 9 p.m. on Sunday, as this story neared publication.
When police arrived at Seattle Public Schools headquarters, the district employee “stated he had not been part of any of the investigation and had simply been told by the district’s legal advisors to call Seattle Police to file a police report.”
Today, Ted Howard, the man who watched his brother-in-law profit from this pay-to-play grift… from an accountability perch in the district office… is the same man authoring the memo asking Seattle families for $2.6 million in funding.
More Family Business: the Patu-Jackson Dynasty
The Howard-Powell connection is only one thread in a larger tapestry of SPS nepotism and problematic stewardship of responsibilities and athletics.
Case in point, the Patu-Jackson family, headed by legendary retired board member Betty Patu, a group that has collectively exerted an iron grip on city and district South End interests for decades.
The family’s influence is literal: at least six family members served on the citizen design committee (of 20) for the $297 million Rainier Beach High School rebuild, successfully naming two buildings after themselves.
The family web includes Betty Patu (school board), Annie Patu (Rainier Beach Principal), Virginia Bethea (Patu) Rainier Beach external communications professional, Virginia’s husband Mike Bethea (Rainier Beach Head Basketball Coach), Betty’s son Saul Patu (former Roosevelt coach, fined in the Roosevelt matter), and Miracle Jackson-Patu (RBHS design committee member). Betty’s other son Paul Patu manages a prominent King County social non-profit, as did Betty’s daughter Marty Jackson, more on her momentarily.
The stakes of this familial reach turned dark in October 2024,
Continue past jump to read about the Patu-Jackson web of scandals running from Roosevelt to Rainier Beach to a Federal drug indictment featuring three generations of the family; the Garfield $16 million abuse settlement that occurred under Ted Howard’s watch, and the shocking abandonment of 18 students in a segregated Roosevelt “Kennel”, where the district stopped performing grade checks and athletes stopped attending class….all this plus the full 2026 pay-for-pay policy memo and a summary calling for an external investigation into fraud and mismanagement in athletics.
