Oregon charter school founders accused in $20 million racketeering lawsuit | OregonLive.com:
by Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian
In this 2002 photo, Tim King is shown with students in a program he pioneered at North Clackamas's Putnam High to try to bring lagging students up to grade level. He charismatically claimed he wanted to help marginalized students through a network of 10 or more online charter schools he started in small-town Oregon.Bob Ellis
Tim King and Norm Donohoe, who ran a chain of taxpayer-funded charter schools across small-town Oregonfrom their headquarters in Clackamas, scammed the state out of $17 million and must repay that plus $2.7 million more, the state said in a court filing this week.
The legal claim, brought Thursday by the Oregon Department of Justice in Marion County Circuit Court, accuses the pair of racketeering, money laundering and other fraud from 2007 to 2010.
King and Donohoe, who were the director and president, respectively, of a nonprofit they named EdChoices, submitted false, incomplete and misleading records about how many students were enrolled in the schools and how they were spending the state's money, state prosecutors say in the complaint.
"It's not true," Donohoe said when reached after 5 p.m. Friday. He said EdChoices' attorney would need to speak for him but was not available after hours. King could not
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CHARTER SCHOOL SCANDALS
A compilation of news articles about charter schools which have been charged with, or are highly suspected of, tampering with admissions, grades, attendance and testing; misuse of funds and embezzlement; engaging in nepotism and conflicts of interest; engaging in complicated and shady real estate deals; and/or have been engaging in other questionable, unethical, borderline-legal, or illegal activities. This is also a record of charter school instability and other unsavory tidbits.
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