In a stunning financial implosion that rocked Oklahoma’s education sector, Epic Charter School, the state’s largest online learning institution, went from an apparently healthy multi-million dollar surplus to a catastrophic deficit in the span of just a few weeks during the spring of 2025. This abrupt collapse initiated a period of intense turmoil, leading to hundreds of layoffs, the sudden resignation of its entire executive leadership team, and the launch of a comprehensive forensic investigation by state authorities. The probe now seeks to unravel a complex web of accounting failures, questionable management decisions, and accusations of a toxic leadership culture to determine how millions of dollars in public funding were so profoundly mismanaged, leaving the future of thousands of students and employees hanging in the balance. The central mystery is not just how the error occurred, but how such a monumental miscalculation could go unnoticed until the school was on the brink of insolvency, raising critical questions about oversight and accountability.
A Discrepancy of Colossal Proportions
The crisis unfolded with a jarring disconnect between public presentation and private reality, a disparity that came to a head on April 9, 2025. On that day, Epic’s superintendent of finance, Jeanise Wynn, delivered a perfunctory, minute-long financial update to the school board, giving no indication of any impending disaster. Behind the scenes, however, a very different story was unfolding. Records revealed that on that exact same day, Wynn received an urgent text message from Superintendent Bart Banfield, who demanded a written explanation for an alarming discovery. He wanted to know how the school’s budget had inexplicably swung from a reported $3.1 million surplus to a projected $8.7 million deficit. This represented a staggering negative shift of $11.8 million in just two weeks, a financial black hole that threatened the school’s operational viability and set off a chain reaction of panic and recrimination within the highest levels of the organization.
In an email responding to the superintendent’s demand, Wynn attributed the massive budgetary discrepancy to a single, devastating accounting error. She explained that a significant figure representing teachers’ benefits had been mistakenly entered and counted twice in the school’s financial records, creating a false and dangerously misleading picture of fiscal health. In her communication, Wynn accepted ultimate responsibility for the oversight, expressing profound regret for the “turmoil and anxiety” the situation would inevitably cause for the school’s staff and community. She pointed to the school’s reliance on what she termed “error-prone shared spreadsheets” for its budgeting processes as a key factor in the mistake. This singular admission served as the catalyst for the school’s rapid unraveling, triggering a crisis of confidence that would soon lead to a complete overhaul of its leadership and force a painful reckoning with its deeply flawed financial controls and practices.
An Administration in Chaos
The fallout from the revealed deficit was swift, severe, and widespread, plunging the school into a period of deep uncertainty. The months leading into the summer were described as utterly chaotic by insiders, a time marked by frantic damage control and difficult decisions that culminated in the loss of hundreds of jobs. A significant portion of these positions belonged to teachers, cutting directly into the school’s core educational mission. The crisis also prompted a mass exodus from Epic’s leadership team, as trust and stability evaporated. Within a short period, Superintendent Bart Banfield, Finance Superintendent Jeanise Wynn, and another key member of the finance department, Carrie Truver, all submitted their resignations. This complete turnover at the executive level left the massive school system rudderless at its most vulnerable moment, compounding the sense of crisis and raising serious questions about the depth of the mismanagement that led to the collapse.
Adding a layer of accusation and intrigue to the unfolding drama, Carrie Truver’s resignation letter contained serious allegations against the school’s remaining leadership. She stated that she could no longer be associated with financial practices that she believed fundamentally compromised the organization’s integrity and long-term stability. More pointedly, Truver highlighted what she called a “recent trend of attributing responsibility for these decisions to employees, rather than engaging in honest leadership accountability.” This damning statement suggested that the officially cited accounting error, while significant, might have been a convenient explanation used to obscure deeper, more systemic cultural issues within the administration. Her words painted a picture of a leadership team unwilling to take responsibility for its failures, instead deflecting blame onto subordinates, a charge that would later fuel the call for an independent, external investigation into the school’s operations.
A Pattern of Financial Instability
The 2025 financial crisis did not occur in isolation; it was the latest chapter in Epic Charter School’s long and troubled financial history. The school’s founders are currently awaiting trial on serious criminal charges, including embezzlement and racketeering, for allegedly siphoning millions of dollars from the institution for personal gain. This backdrop of alleged corruption cast a long shadow over the school’s operations. Ironically, Jeanise Wynn had been hired in 2021, following a period of intense state scrutiny that nearly resulted in the school’s closure, with the explicit mandate to reform its finances and restore public trust. Furthermore, clear warning signs of the impending disaster had appeared in the fall of 2024, when the school laid off 144 employees and instituted pay cuts for remaining staff. This occurred despite a period of massive growth during the pandemic, when enrollment swelled to 60,000 students and the school received a combined $68 million in federal relief funds, suggesting spending had become unsustainable.
Even as the budget was secretly imploding in the spring of 2025, Wynn was publicly projecting an image of confidence and stability. She successfully pitched and secured a $4.5 million loan from a bank to purchase 17,000 new Chromebooks for students, an action that suggested the school was on solid financial footing. However, just one week later, her private communications revealed a starkly different reality. On April 16, she approached the very same bank for an emergency line of credit to cover essential summer expenses, admitting to the lender in a moment of candor that the immense stress of the situation meant she was “not sleeping at night.” The immense pressure had become untenable. The very next day, having laid bare the school’s dire financial state to its lender, she officially resigned from her position, leaving her successors to manage the ensuing catastrophe and face the scrutiny of regulators and the public.
The Investigation and Official Narrative
In the wake of the leadership collapse and a second, much larger round of layoffs that affected 357 employees in June, the Statewide Charter School Board took decisive action. It ordered a full forensic investigation to be conducted by the accounting firm Carr, Riggs, & Ingram. The investigation’s mandate was to conduct a deep dive into the school’s finances, operations, and performance to determine conclusively if fraud, embezzlement, financial misconduct, or gross mismanagement had occurred. Meanwhile, the school’s new interim superintendent, Justin Hunt, offered an official explanation in a letter to the charter board. He largely blamed external factors and the decisions of his predecessor, arguing that the massive influx of temporary COVID-19 relief funds had created a “false sense of security.” This, he claimed, led the former administration to over-hire and maintain programs that the school could no longer afford once the federal money ran out. He also placed direct blame on Wynn for leaving the school without a sufficient financial carryover into the next school year, which he asserted necessitated the emergency line of credit.
