This California charter school paid millions to firms linked to its founder. It was shut down amid ‘fiscal integrity’ concerns.

Deborah Lee had loved teaching at her school.

For three years she taught for the home-schooling program at SCALE Leadership Academy – East, an independent-study charter school that was based in Riverside County and educated about 1,500 K-12 students across Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties.

Her team worked well together. She believed it was a solid school.

So Lee said she was blindsided when county school officials shut it down in June after revealing several concerns about the school, including business relationships it had with religious programs and corporations managed by the school’s founder.

She had never heard of any of those vendors before.

“We were in the dark. We had no idea,” Lee said.

The Riverside County Board of Education voted unanimously on June 24 to deny the renewal of SCALE’s charter, giving students just weeks to find a new school and forcing teachers to search for jobs after most public schools have finished hiring for the new academic year.

That left Lee suddenly jobless, without health insurance and eight months pregnant with twins.

In a report dated June 9, the Riverside County Office of Education said SCALE had failed to meet or make sufficient progress toward state academic standards, and that it was illegally operating at sites outside of its authorizing district.

Staff also had concerns about whether the school’s contracts were made in accordance with state law and in the students’ best interest.

One contract in question was forged between SCALE and a corporation called SCALE Education and Research Foundation, or SERF — a nonprofit started by the same man who founded SCALE, Lawrence Wynder II.

A licensing agreement between SCALE and SERF entitled Wynder’s nonprofit to the vast majority of SCALE’s student attendance funding.

SCALE has paid $14 million to the nonprofit since 2019, Riverside County education officials estimate, for SERF to control much of the school’s operations. How much of that has gone to Wynder is unclear.

Wynder did not respond to The San Diego Union-Tribune’s requests for comment but said during a June Riverside County Board of Education meeting that many of the county office’s allegations were false.

Wynder and his wife are also officers of other corporations that have gotten business from SCALE.

SCALE disclosed none of these connections when it applied for its charter renewal, county school officials said.

In addition to the contract concerns, officials said SCALE’s teacher rosters suggested it has been sharing teachers with private religious schools — leading to questions about whether SCALE public school students may have been receiving religious instruction through them.

SCALE has also paid at least one church to educate students, county school officials said.

Alexis Saenz, the president of SCALE’s board, said at the June board meeting that the school had terminated its contracts with “those vendors that may have a religious affiliation.”

Teachers and families described at the meeting how SCALE’s flexible independent-study model had been a lifeline for students whose schooling has been disrupted by bullying, long-term illness, violence and pregnancy.

But that was not enough to assuage the county school board’s concerns about how adults were running the school — and that students would be paying the price.

“I’m just so disappointed in the leaders that are failing these kids,” Riverside County school board Trustee Jennifer Mejares Pham said before voting to deny SCALE’s charter. “It’s all from the back end. These kids did nothing wrong, the staff did nothing wrong, the teachers did nothing wrong. And we’re in a situation that none of us want to be in, but the law is so incredibly clear on this.”

Charter schools are privately-run but publicly-funded schools that must follow rules about transparency, annual auditing and other accountability measures, similar to school districts.

SCALE is the latest example of a California charter school whose business dealings with private outside entities affiliated with its founder have raised questions of transparency, ethics and potential conflicts of interest.

Lee was embarrassed and angry after learning of Riverside’s findings, she said — partly because this is the second time a school she’s worked at has been shut down for such problems.

She used to work for Valiant, the precursor to the A3 charter school network, whose leaders orchestrated one of the state’s largest school fraud schemes.

“How in the world did I end up at a school where a similar thing was happening?” she said.

‘A transparency concern’

The events leading to SCALE’s closure began in March.

SCALE was due to apply for renewal of its charter from its authorizer, Palo Verde Unified, a district of 2,600 students in the small town of Blythe near the Arizona border.

The district refused to consider SCALE’s renewal petition because, it said, SCALE was operating a site facility in Corona, outside of Palo Verde’s boundaries. SCALE had not obtained permission from the Corona school district to do so, as state law requires.

SCALE denied it was operating the site and sued Palo Verde for not considering its renewal.

But in June, a Riverside County Superior Court judge denied SCALE’s request for a preliminary injunction, saying its renewal petition didn’t appear to comply with state law.

SCALE appealed the charter denial to the Riverside County Board of Education, which could grant its renewal in lieu of Palo Verde.

It was when county education officials researched SCALE’s operations to ponder granting a renewal that they said they discovered concerning issues beyond the allegations of a school operated outside district bounds.

Wynder founded SCALE in 2010. Two years before that, he had created SERF, whose mission is to “promote education opportunities with a view of improving the quality of living for students, families, educators and general public,” according to the foundation’s tax filings.

Wynder was the initial agent of service listed for SERF upon its founding, and he applied for the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status and state charity registration. He has been SERF’s CEO year after year, tax filings show.

For a time, Wynder was the listed CEO for both SCALE and SERF, according to tax filings.

He collected six-figure salaries from each job from 2016 through 2018, when tax filings stopped listing him as SCALE’s CEO. In 2018, he was paid $180,708 by SCALE and $147,500 by SERF.

The following year, SCALE signed a 10-year school with SERF — with Wynder signing for SERF as its CEO.

Under that contract, SCALE did not own its own school brand and educational model. Instead, SERF owned them and required SCALE to pay for their use.

The contract contained a non-compete clause that prohibited SCALE from engaging with any business rival of SERF.

The contract also required SCALE to pay SERF $52 per student per instructional day, or 85% of the student attendance funding the school received from the state — whichever is greater.

Per the contract, SERF handled student enrollment, collected SCALE student attendance paperwork, evaluated the school’s educational program annually and maintained “affiliated learning programs” for SCALE.

The contract also says that, in the event SCALE shut down, all its leftover assets were to be transferred to SERF.

Lawrence Wynder, Charlene Wynder and SCALE officials did not respond to questions about SERF and whether it were assuming SCALE’s leftover assets.

At the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year, SCALE had $3.1 million in net assets, while SERF had $3.9 million in net assets as of 2024, tax filings show.

Riverside County Office of Education staff concluded that although SERF presents itself as a vendor, in reality it is a de facto charter management organization that controls SCALE’s operations.

“Although the agreement is styled as a licensing and services contract, the substance of the relationship between SERF and SCALE is functionally indistinguishable from that of a charter management organization (‘CMO’) and the charter school it manages,” county office staff said in .

But because the arrangement was forged via a licensing agreement rather than a charter management contract, SERF was able to avoid state laws requiring open meetings and that records be made public, the report said.

The arrangement is a familiar one for some non-classroom-based California charter schools.

The entities that have run Inspire, Learn4Life and Elite Academic Academy similarly declined to identify themselves as charter management organizations — and thus avoided disclosing details of how they are spending public funding, the Union-Tribune has reported.

“The structuring of this relationship to avoid CMO classification, while retaining all the functional attributes of a CMO arrangement, is itself a transparency concern that bears on whether SCALE’s governance and fiscal operations can be meaningfully overseen by an authorizer,” Riverside County school officials said.

‘Other expenses’

SERF publishes limited details in its tax filings of how it spends SCALE’s public school dollars.

About $3 million of SERF’s $4 million in spending in its latest tax filing available was categorized as “other expenses,” including costs such as “program consulting,” “program development,” “program expenses,” “program outreach” and “program implementation.”

The organization also reported spending more than $67,000 on meals that year.

SERF said in the tax filing that it employed zero employees, but it also reported spending $846,000 on employee salaries and benefits. Wynder is listed as an officer, but the filing does not disclose his title or pay as it did in prior years.

In 2023, the nonprofit reported more than $1 million of investments in a for-profit subsidiary it owns called Mission Career College Inc. Wynder’s wife, Charlene Wynder, is named as Mission Career’s secretary in state filings.

That company is located at the same Riverside address as Santa Fe Depot Office LLC, which county school officials said leases real estate to SCALE. Lawrence Wynder is listed as Santa Fe Depot’s manager in state filings.

SCALE has also steered business to other third-party entities where the Wynders are officers.

In addition to Mission Career College and Santa Fe Depot Office, those entities also include Almega Education Group, where Lawrence is CEO, and Academy of Sports Science, where a Journey Wynder is listed as chief financial officer. Charlene Wynder, a licensed attorney, is the registered agent for all of them, as well as for SERF and SCALE.

Riverside county school officials estimate SCALE has paid $2.3 million to those entities since 2019.

‘I was not the CEO’

SCALE officials did not answer questions about who made these contracting decisions, whether the contracts were competitively bid or whether or where they were publicly disclosed.

The SERF contract — particularly its guaranteed payment of 85% of student attendance funding — raises questions about the school’s autonomy, said Davina Hurt, director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

“These facts … together they describe an organization that had handed away its money, its brand and arguably its independence, in a way that would make the community pause as to whether state funds are being used in the most impactful and optimal way for students,” she said.

Public school leaders must practice good governance to protect the trust of student families, the state and the public, Hurt said.

That includes disclosing related-party transactions, recusing oneself from a contracting decisions as an interested party, putting contracts out to competitive bids and having a board “that can actually say no,” she said.

“You want to make sure the money’s going to the most qualified service provider, and that there is not this perception of cronyism or inappropriate contracts,” said Sean McMorris, transparency, ethics and accountability program manager at California Common Cause.

State law changes made in July — after the San Diego County fraud prosecution of A3 and after Union-Tribune reporting on charter management organizations — are meant to boost transparency about charters’ relationships with private third-party entities.

The new state law says that auditors must find out if a charter school has a management organization or has connections with outside entities and must list the school’s 25 largest payments or transfers to outside entities. Also, any charter school contracts exceeding $100,000 must be approved by the school’s board.

During the Riverside County school board meeting, Lawrence Wynder said he was not the CEO of the organizations the county mentioned, even though tax filings for SERF and SCALE have listed him as the CEO in various years.

“Those organizations were not related. I was not the CEO of SCALE Education. I’m a consultant for SCALE and those other organizations,” he said.

‘Serious concerns’

Riverside county school officials also raised questions about whether students may have been getting religious instruction through SCALE.

County officials identified four full-time teachers at the school who are also listed as teachers at CORE, a private school in Anaheim whose website says its guiding principles are “drawn from the Qu’ran and Sunnah.”

One of those teachers is CORE’s executive director and founder, Shaista Javeed, and the other three are CORE lead teachers, according to CORE’s website.

Javeed told the Union-Tribune in an email that the four teachers were employed and paid by SCALE for tutoring SCALE students “at a location of their parents’ choice.” When the Union-Tribune asked for clarification, Javeed said the four were full-time SCALE teachers.

SCALE’s tax filings show it has paid CORE at least $1.1 million since 2022.

County school officials said they found one more SCALE teacher who is listed as a teacher at Orange Crescent School, a private school in Garden Grove whose website says it provides students “a robust Islamic education.”

Those five teachers had scores of SCALE students assigned to them, county school officials said, and they were enrolled at SCALE within different calendar tracks.

Officials also noted that in 2022, SCALE had published a teacher coordinator job posting that said, “This site is Muslim based so someone with this background/experience is preferred but not mandatory.” The site address listed matched that of Orange Crescent School.

SCALE also contracted with a church to provide educational services, the Riverside county office said.

The county office said it found a contract in which SCALE pledged to make daily payments of $19.44 per student to Cathedral of Praise International Ministries, a church in the city of San Bernardino, in exchange for educational services.

SCALE paid $188,517 to Cathedral of Praise in 2021, according to its tax filing.

These connections with religious programs raised “serious concerns” about whether state law and the state constitution were violated, county office staff said.

The California constitution prohibits public funds from supporting any private school or religious school, and it prohibits religious instruction from being taught directly or indirectly at public schools, which include charters.

Officials at Orange Crescent School and Cathedral of Praise did not respond to requests for comment.