This just in from federal officials:
Department of Justice
U.S. Attorney’s Office
Central District of California
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, July 17, 2020
Former Head of Community Preparatory Academy Admits Stealing Over $3 Million and Spending $220,000 on Disney Expenses
LOS ANGELES – Federal prosecutors today filed criminal theft and tax fraud charges against the former executive director of a charter school outfit who stole more than $3.1 million that should have been spent on school operations, but instead financed a lifestyle that included extravagant spending on Disney cruises and theme park admissions.
Janis Bucknor, 52, a resident of Baldwin Hills, who ran the for-profit Community Preparatory Academy (CPA) charter school and controlled several related entities, agreed to plead guilty to two felony offenses in a plea agreement also filed today in United States District Court. CPA operated two schools, one in Carson and one in South Los Angeles.
The case charges Bucknor with one count of theft, embezzlement and intentional misapplication of funds from an organization receiving federal funds, and one count of tax evasion for the tax year 2016. The court has yet to schedule any hearings in this matter.
Over the course of approximately 5½ years – from early 2014 through November 2019 – Bucknor stole a total of $3,168,346 from CPA, according to the most recent estimate of losses in the case. The amount of stolen funds is nearly one-third of all federal and state funding that went to CPA during the time.
In her plea agreement, Bucknor admitted using the stolen funds to pay for, among other things, personal travel, restaurants, Amazon and Etsy purchases, and private school tuition for her children. She also admitted spending about $220,614 on Disney cruise line vacations, theme park admissions and other Disney-related expenses.
The scheme began to unravel in February 2018, when “LAUSD-Charter School Division’s routine audit of CPA revealed that defendant used the CPA accounts for personal expenses, including unauthorized payments directly from some of the CPA accounts to Disney, Louis Vuitton, Girl Scouts, Ticketmaster, Uber, Baby Teeth Children’s Dentistry, Williams Sonoma, National American Miss pageants, and Forest Lawn Mortuaries, all of which were for defendant’s own personal and unauthorized use and benefit,” according to the plea agreement.
In relation to the tax evasion offense, Bucknor agreed to plead guilty to her 2016 taxes, but she admitted failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service $299,639 in taxes when she failed to report $1,322,254 in income for the tax years 2015 through 2018.
When she pleads guilty, Bucknor will face a statutory maximum sentence of 15 years in federal prison.
As part of the plea agreement, Bucknor has agreed to forfeit to the government her interest in three residential properties in South Los Angeles that were paid for with funds stolen from the charter school.
This case was investigated by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of the Inspector General, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General, IRS Criminal Investigation, the United States Secret Service, and the United States Postal Inspection Service.
The criminal case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Katherine A. Rykken and Alexander C.K. Wyman of the Major Frauds Section. Assistant United States Attorneys Jonathan Galatzan and Katharine Schonbachler are handling the asset forfeiture part of the matter.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It seems that a week doesn’t go by that we do not hear about another charter owner/CEO being caught with his/her hands in the public cookie jar stealing as many cookies that they can get away with. Is anyone keeping score? How many of these crooks have been caught in the last couple of decades?
and how little difference it seems to make when opportunists are ‘outed’ again and again and again
How many of them serve no time in prison and move on to another city or state to repeat the same fraud?
“Dr. Steve Perry
Jul 19
Even if it does reopen, you should be able to take your educational dollar elsewhere. If your college doesn’t reopen, you can send your financial aid to another school. It works for our world class post secondary systems, why not our bottom 3rd k-12 system?”
You see this argument a lot in ed reform and it amazes me. 35% of people completed 4 years of college in this country. It’s also unaffordable for millions more unless they want to saddle themselves with tens of thousands in debt.
This is how they envision their privatized systems playing out? Serving 35% of people and only available if you have tens of thousands of dollars to pay for it?
They’re going to take that incredibly bad model from higher ed and make it to the model for K-12? This is what we have to look forward to? Students loans for people to attend 2nd grade?
20,000 full time paid ed reformers and these are the “arguments” they come up with- and they all parrot the same ones.
Tell ordinary people you’re going to take their free and universal K-12 public education and turn it into the unaffordable and inaccessible higher ed system. You will NEVER get elected. Ask 19 year olds who are saddled with lifetime college debt if our higher ed system is “world class”- you’ll have to ask quite a few, since only 40% can access it at all.
“Over the course of approximately 5½ years – from early 2014 through November 2019 – Bucknor stole a total of $3,168,346 from CPA, according to the most recent estimate of losses in the case. The amount of stolen funds is nearly one-third of all federal and state funding that went to CPA during the time.”
They are saying they found this due to a “routine audit”. It went on for almost 6 years. No one was overseeing this school for 5 1/2 years? Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence as to basic safety in the building, let alone the financials.
Look at the number of people and offices involved in this case.
“This case was investigated by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of the Inspector General, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General, IRS Criminal Investigation, the United States Secret Service, and the United States Postal Inspection Service.
The criminal case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Katherine A. Rykken and Alexander C.K. Wyman of the Major Frauds Section. Assistant United States Attorneys Jonathan Galatzan and Katharine Schonbachler are handling the asset forfeiture part of the matter.”
Remember this. All of these investigative positions are under threat by Attorney General William Barr, Donald J. Trump’s Republican friends and Betsy Devos. In just six weeks inspector generals have been fired from major positions in the Trump administration. https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/may/19/trump-has-pushed-out-5-inspectors-general-april-he/
In addition charter school laws and regulations are written to protect them from rapid and decisive action for engaging in thefts and other varieties of frauds.
Is anyone else amazed that the US Department of Education are actually going to do NOTHING in this time of unprecedented crisis for US public schools?
Completely and utterly irrelevant to 90% of students and families in this country. They return zero value.
Ed reform leadership has always meant public school students are an afterthought- now they have just completely checked out on doing any work at all on behalf of the 90% of students and families in the unfashionable “government schools”.
Shut it down. It’s wholly captured by the ed reform “movement”, so much so that no one does any work.
No, no surprise!! DeVos will not, dare not say a word. Trump will not because he could really care less about any school whether it be public or charter. The same thing has happened in state after state across the United States. The leadership of the states and at the federal level turn a blind eyes to the situation.
One thing left out of the article was that Bucknor operated another charter authorized by LAUSD. It was called “CLAS” for short. It also failed and closed to avoid revocation. While LAUSD can consider the past record of an operator when approving a new charter, Bucknor left her name off the Community Prep application. Therefore, there was no way that connection could be made. However, once the charter was approved, Bucknor’s name suddenly appeared and she quickly took over all operations of the school. This information was included in the reasons for denial.
Please understand that LAUSD has the most charters in the country and their Charter School Division is large. The amount of evidence they provide to support any denial is massive. So, just imagine if Community Prep had been authorized by a smaller district without the same resources available within LAUSD!!!!
I think there is an answer to that question……the massive $50 million dollar A3 charter scam!!!!!!
Nearly a quarter of a million dollars on Disney related expenses. I truly cannot wrap my head around spending that amount to see someone wear a Mickey Mouse costume. That’s a lot of money. She must’ve spent every day at Disneyland for years. How many rides on the Matterhorn can one person take? How much cotton candy is that? How many mouse ears?
And she stole a third of state and federal funding. How did the charter school even operate with a hole that size in its budget? And no one at the charter noticed? No one complained about scarce funds, a lack of necessary materials? This is an amazing story, not too far out of the ordinary for charter scandals, but intriguing in the details.
Disney expenses, $220,614. Evaded taxes, $299,639. Stolen from children, $3,168,346. Minimum 15 years in federal prison, priceless.
15 years maximum doesn’t mean she will serve the full sentence. She will probably be out in a year or two and serve her time in a minimum-security prison that is like a country club compared to the prisons the working class gets sent to for the smallest crimes like a pregnant woman taking pain killers that is against the law in some Red states.
LCT,
The crazy thing is that the charter lobby doesn’t care how many scandals there are. They shrug and move on, seeking more charters and more money. Eli Broad and Reed Hastings won’t care.
Education reform is not their goal.
The fact that education reform has never been their goal has been obvious to me for years, but most were not paying attention and kept treating it like it was education reform but gone wrong.
It all started with President Ray-Gun’s misleading “A Nation at Risk”.
That was the first shot to destroy a public education system that is transparent and guided by rules that came about through the democratic process in the best interests of the country and its children and replace it with an autocratic, cruel, secretive system that bullies and crushes children, one that is designed to control what goes into a kids’ heads and turn them into obedient little drones that will do what their overlords tell them to do while the few that resist are culled from the herd and exterminated.