‘Money in the pockets of administrators’: California charter school network steers millions in taxpayer money to opaque firm tied to execs

‘Money in the pockets of administrators’: California charter school network steers millions in taxpayer money to opaque firm tied to execs

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 serv…