The SPS Principal Given $200K Payoff After Billing Parents $22k in Illicit Tuition is District Accountability Czar's Brother-in-Law
The $22k in tuition collected from puzzled parents is missing. The whistle-blower who stopped the scandal? Let go. And the paid-off principal? Turned out to be accountability czar's brother in law.
The Scheme: A Private, $22k-per-year Basketball Prep School INSIDE a Public High
Accountability czar Ted Howard oversees athletics on the SPS org chart.
According to Ted Howard’s ethics disclosure, his brother-in-law is Joe Powell.
As in, Joe Powell, former Principal at Sugiyama high, the administrator who oversaw the Great Futures Prep scandal at Sugiyama high school.
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.
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.”
Before asking district taxpayers to shell out hundreds and even thousands of dollars for their kid to play sports, shouldn’t the district at least chase down that $22,000-a-year in fraudulent tuition collected by the Great Futures Prep management?
Shouldn’t the district show enough respect for their tax base to report the crime to authorities, and actually assist the authorities in locating the funds and wrongdoing?
And what of the six-figure golden parachutes, the reward given to those overseeing the bilking of tax payers?
How can SPS shell out taxpayer cash to reward administrators who actively bilked students and parents and – at the same time – look to parents, shrug, and say “ya gotta pay if you wanna play?”
Takeaway: Board Should Appoint an External Investigator to Probe Corruption and Nepotism in SPS
In summary, it’s incumbent on district administration to first confront the crises of integrity plaguing SPS athletics. 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.
The board should appoint an external fact-finder to get to the bottom of the aforementioned scandals, identify the sum total of lost, misplaced and wasted funds and root out any and all instances of continued corruption and lack of fiscal, academic and athletic stewardship present in the Seattle Public Schools system.
