Heroin Distributor Once Set Up Fake WV Prep School in Apartment
Reality television has nothing on modern day school scams.
In 2011, Daniel Hicks created a fake school, ostensibly a boarding school, West Virginia Prep, which somehow “enrolled” over 20 athletes who were actually living in an unfurnished apartment.
The April 05, 2017, Charleston Gazette reported that Hicks “lured students …from around the world to attend a school that didn’t exist.” Hicks told prospective recruits that the school would provide opportunities not only to play basketball and football but also to vie for postsecondary basketball and football scholarships.
The players never saw the inside of a classroom. When student-athletes began arriving from France, Great Britain and several U.S. states, 17 of them were housed in a three-bedroom apartment with meager food and troublesome air conditioning, according to city officials, players and police.
Also, according to the Gazette, “West Virginia law allows anyone to organize a prep school, with minimal oversight or regulation by state authorities.”
The 2011 USA Today article confirms this:
West Virginia Department of Education spokeswoman Liza Cordeiro said as a exemption K school, West Virginia Prep Academy did the required paperwork and no background checks were performed on Hicks or on any possible teachers at the school.“Under the law, all they have to do is send us a letter-of-intent, which has an explanation of who they are, where the school is to be located and contact information,” Cordeiro said. “On the back end, the schools have to send us their testing data and there has to be a certain level of proficiency on the tests. If not, the school has to write up a plan of improvement. But, since they are exemption K schools, we have no oversight on them at all.”
Student safety takes a complete back seat to self-regulation. Good test scores “on Heroin Distributor Once Set Up Fake WV Prep School in Apartment | deutsch29:
