The move comes after the school’s financial crisis forced mass layoffs and program changes.
At its Monday meeting, the board unanimously approved a motion to hire a firm for a financial, operational and performance review of Epic, the third-largest school district in the state.
Board financial compliance officer Skyler Lusnia said Epic’s two rounds of layoffs over the last school year were due to over projections of enrollment and federal revenue.
“You can’t keep doing that,” Lusnia said. “You’re going to have staff that are worried about their futures and things like that. So they have to be able to get to stability, or their whole financial future is going to be unstable.”
In the 2024-25 school year, Epic cut more than 500 positions.
The district called its June round of layoffs, which saw the exodus of about 6% of teachers and more than a third of administrators, a “significant streamlining measure.”
Epic also closed in-person learning centers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City and discontinued breakfast and lunch services.
In a staff email obtained at the time by StateImpact, Epic said it was discontinuing Chinese and Latin course offerings and outsourcing and charging students $275 for German and French courses.
The district also announced students would no longer have access to one free concurrent college course, AP courses will be outsourced and students’ Learning Fund, which is a $1,000 allocation Epic provides for each student, will be charged $100 for “specialty” courses.
Epic’s ELA+ will be discontinued, and Math+ will only be offered to students in grades 6-12 rather than 3-12. The courses provide live, virtual instruction to students two to three times a week.
Epic ultimately replaced superintendent Bart Banfield after the spring layoffs.
Because of the layoffs, Lusnia said the school was able to finish the fiscal year in the positive but will have to tap into a $30 million credit line to cover the first several months of the 2025-26 school year.
Board Chair Brian Shellem said despite the findings so far of no fraud, “there’s some negligence.”
“Timing is a critical importance in many things in life,” Shellem said. “... I think we need to look, if we’re looking at auditors, is when the information was available, and then when the decisions were made and why they weren’t made earlier.”
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