For five years, Eric Shirley taught home-school students for a small California charter school network called Elite Academic Academy. He left in 2023, he said, because of several things he found fishy about Elite’s administration.

Among them: Elite’s CEO Meghan Freeman lives in a mountain resort town in Montana and gets paid more than $380,000 in salary and benefits each year to serve 1,800 students. And when Elite first started in 2018 and served a few hundred students, its founder and then-CEO Brent Woodard made more than $400,000.

But Shirley’s biggest concern was that Elite was paying millions of dollars a year to an obscure third-party corporation — one created by Woodard. This corporation not only employs family members of Elite administrators in high-level jobs but also has paid h

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