Incito Schools, execs face fraud, theft charges

Attorney General Mark Brnovich on Wednesday announced that a state grand jury had indicted Incito Schools and co-founders April Black and Amanda Jelleson for an alleged half-milliondollar fraud scheme from 2016 to 2017 at the charter school.

The defendants run K-8 schools in Goodyear and Phoenix. They are alleged to have provided falsified information, including paystubs, to the Maricopa County Superintendent’s Office in order to obtain grant funding, which they then failed to provide to the appropriate teachers, according to a media release from Brnovich’s office.

Efforts to reach the defendants were unsuccessful. The Attorney General’s Office declined to elaborate on the statement. The charges against Incito and its leaders are at least the third major case by the Attorney General’s Office since 2018 against members of Arizona’s lightly regulated charter school industry.

Brnovich, a Republican who has been highly critical of Arizona’s lax charter school laws, obtained convictions of three executives at the now-shuttered Discovery Creemos Academy in Goodyear who defrauded taxpayers of at least $2.5 million in an enrollment scheme. Two of those executives have been sentenced to time behind bars, while a third is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday.

His office reached a $180,000 civil settlement with a married couple who run San Tan Montessori School Inc., which operates two Gilbert charterschool campuses.

The couple agreed to repay the state after using public funds on tickets to professional sporting events and other personal expenses.

Private businesses operate Arizona’s more than 500 charter schools, which run on state and federal tax dollars.

In the case against Incito, Black (also known as April Castillo) and Jelleson were charged with five felonies including fraudulent schemes and artifices, two counts of theft over $25,000, conspiracy and one count of forgery. The total loss was $567,802, according to the Attorney General’s office.

Incito’s Goodyear campus does not meet the minimum academic standards for the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, the governing body, records show.

Incito in July obtained a $318,975 forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loan even though the school lost no state or federal funding during the past academic year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Incito ended the fiscal year June 30, 2020, with $346,833 in “cash or cash equivalents,” and then obtained the PPP loan, according to its audit.

The school noted in its most recent Charter Board audit report that it has “met the requirement for loan forgiveness and expects to be applying for forgiveness.”

An Arizona Republic review of more than 100 charter school financial records, audits and federal Small Business Administration documents found the overwhelming majority of the Arizona charter schools that obtained PPP loans added to their cash balances or paid money to their shareholders and didn’t significantly increase teacher pay.