SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Watch all four episodes of this ABC10 Originals investigation here.
Directly across the street from Grant Union High School in north Sacramento stands a different kind of high school.
As students make their way to class, they’re unlike the teenagers right across the street at Grant. First, many already have a life of experience… they’re all adults. Some adorn hijabs. Different languages from throughout the globe are spoken.
“Good morning!” Doc Smith says as he walks into a full classroom. “Is anybody here from Afghanistan? Raise your hand! Raise them up! C’mon!”
Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools is no ordinary institution. And its leader, Murdock Smith – who goes by ‘Doc’ for short – is no ordinary “superintendent.”
“How about Russia? Ukraine? Mexico?” Smith says, as students raise their hands. “Wow. Where else?”
Uzbekistan, Laos and Mexico are among students’ answers.
Highlands is a charter school for adults. At our time of reporting, around 15,000 students are enrolled, both in person at “Highlands Community Charter School” and online in Highlands’ virtual branch called the “California Innovative Career Academy,” or CICA for short. Most of the school’s students are immigrants.
“Well, you’re doing really good,” Smith says to the class. “Your English sounds fantastic.”
Smith gave ABC10 an in-depth tour of Highlands’ main campus on Grand Avenue. Throughout it, he painted a happy picture.
"Highlands is a place where people come to make a better life for them and their family,” Smith said as he walked to the next classroom. “For many, it’s their first chance at something. For many, it’s maybe their third, fourth but last chance… these are the forgotten. This is the island of misfit toys.”
Staff echoed Smith’s sentiment of second chances.
“When the universe offers you something, always say yes,” a teacher said as we walked in.
“This is the big boss,” another teacher said as Smith and the ABC10 team walked in during our tour. “He believed in me. That’s why I am here.”
But these weren’t the first Highlands employees we’ve met. In fact, at this point, we’d been investigating the school for a year.
Both on and off camera, ABC10 spoke to more than 30 current and former Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools employees who tell us Highlands, sometimes, is not what it seems.
“I’m a fourth-generation teacher. My mom was a teacher, her mom and her dad,” said Lindsay Curtis, Highlands’ Homeless Services Coordinator. “So I always knew I wanted to be a teacher.”
“I just really saw how it can change people’s lives,” said Ali Diaz, a former Highlands teacher.
They went to work wanting to believe in Highlands.
“It was so fun… but it was a lot of work,” said Elke Dameson, a former Highlands teacher. “But I love to do this!”
“I just really wanted to be able to help students effect change in their lives, empower students, through education,” said Jeanette Rowe, a former Highlands counselor.
While also a charter, Highlands is a public school. It gets funding from tax dollars.
It’s within the Twin Rivers Unified School District. To attend, there’s only two criteria…
“Be 22 and over,” said Curtis. “And not already have your U.S. high school diploma.”
ABC10 agreed not to reveal the identities of some sources who were afraid of losing their jobs or retaliation. A current Highlands teacher explained how Highlands is publicly funded, but independently run.
“In the state of California, public charter schools are exempt from a large number of educational codes,” said the teacher.
Charter schools are lightly regulated and the curriculum is flexible. It’s meant to be tailored to students.
But some teachers and employees at Highlands tell us the flexibility has a dark side.
“We now have two polar opposite extremes,” said the teacher. “One – typical public education in some ways is overregulated and too rigid. And then, on the other end, we have charter schools that have very little regulation and too much freedom.”
Charter schools are controversial. Some argue they hurt traditional public schools by taking a share of education funding away.
In 2008, the idea of Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools was born out of concern.
“The great recession was going on, education was losing tons of funding,” said Jacob Walker.
Walker is one of the school’s three founding members.
“Adult education is so important,” said Walker. “If you think about how our system works, we have a preschool system… of course, we have K-12. And then we have college… What happens if they don’t graduate high school?”
He says adults can easily get left behind.
More than 10% of Californians don’t have a high school diploma, the California Community College Chancellor’s Office reported in 2021.
As the recession hit, funding was drastically cut for adult education, so Walker found another way – create a charter school for adults.
“To find a way to keep the service going for people,” Walker explained.
While charter schools receive funding the same way K-12 schools do, Walker argues Highlands’ adult students are not taking funds from K-12 because they would not attend a K-12 class.
“It takes away some additional funding from California,” said Walker.
No matter which way you put it though, it’s taxpayer dollars as the money comes from California’s education system.
To create Highlands, Walker and the other founders needed approval from the Twin Rivers Unified School District. That was no easy task.
“We had almost a full year of them not approving us after the adult-ed (funding) had pretty much been devastated,” said Walker. “I have to give credit, Linda Fowler was the one who was able to get it.”
Linda Fowler is a long-time Twin Rivers Unified School District board member.
“She was able to convince the new (TRUSD) superintendent that [Highlands] was a good idea,” said Walker.
As a school for adults, Highlands offers general education and English classes. It also offers work skill programs like welding, truck driving and cosmetology through their Career Technical Education (CTE) programs.
“If you’re in an area like Sacramento, where you have a long, large immigrant population – you’re probably going to have a lot of English as a second language,” said Walker.
With one of the most diverse populations of immigrants in the nation, Sacramento has a great need for this kind of education. Recruiting them as students was crucial for Highlands’ survival and expansion. That’s because the amount of money a school gets depends on how many students show up. It’s called “ADA.”
“A-D-A means average daily attendance,” said Walker. “No attendance, no funds.”
In Highlands’ first year, a few hundred adults signed up to be students, Walker said.
“By the third year, we were in the thousands,” said Walker. “Very fast growth.”
And Highlands kept growing; As of September 2023, the school has over 14,700 students – the school said — and 50 locations across the state.
As it’s grown, Highlands has been a source of income for Linda Fowler – the Twin Rivers board member who pushed to create the school.
In addition to serving on the TRUSD board, she joined the Highlands board as a district representative in 2014.
“Just a few months after approval, she went to a board meeting of Highlands and basically, in my perspective… (issued) an ultimatum,” said Walker. “Like, ‘Here – I have this consulting contract. You’re going to pay me this much money each month, and it doesn’t matter if I do anything or not… I still get paid.’”
ABC10 obtained the September 2014 contract. It required Highlands pay her a consulting fee of $390,000 over five years, in the sum of $6,500 each month. The contract said this fee must be paid “regardless of the number of consulting hours provided.”
“I was very concerned about how the school district would view us with this corruption happening with their board member,” said Walker.
He wasn’t alone in his concern. In a memo to the Highlands board two months after Fowler was awarded the contract, Highlands Principal Kirk Williams wrote he felt “bullied” by Fowler.
Williams said Fowler made “threats like, ‘It’s because of me that the school got its charter. I can cause the school to lose it.’”
“I did my best to try to stop it at first,” said Walker. “That didn’t work.”
Highlands cancelled Fowler’s contract in November 2014 but Fowler kept the $13,000 the school paid her.
Months later – while still serving on both the Highlands Board and Twin Rivers Unified School District Board – she voiced frustration at being asked to help the school. In an email she wrote, “I have no interest of giving away my work for nothing.”
Walker complained to California’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).
“It’s basically the commission in California that investigates political corruption,” Walker explained.
It was a conflict of interest, according to the FPPC.
To win the consulting contract, the FPPC found Fowler used “her official positions to influence the board decision in her favor.”
In so many words, the FPPC said she should’ve known better because she has a law degree and spent 25 years as an auditor in state government, including in the California Attorney General’s office.
“I just couldn’t stay in the organization,” said Walker. “They continued to let corruption happen and just paid it off as a corruption tax.”
Walker resigned in 2017. Even so, he still believes in the mission of Highlands.
“I really just hope that… people still see why overall what we started to do has value,” said Walker.
It’s a sentiment ABC10 heard over and over throughout our investigation.
“That’s the thing with Highlands… it’s so incredible. The mission and vision are like no other,” said Curtis.
But employees we spoke with are worried. Fowler is no longer on the board at Highlands, but voters have repeatedly re-elected her to the board at Twin Rivers Unified – the school district that holds Highlands’ charter. And now, Fowler gets paid a salary from Highlands as a school employee.
“She still gets paid as a site administrator,” said Curtis.
Nearly every employee ABC10 spoke with said they’re not sure what Fowler does as a Highlands employee.
“What it is she does for us, no one knows,” said the teacher. “How much money she’s earning for whatever she does, no one knows.”
As of November 2023, for her half-time position, Fowler gets paid over $53,392.20 annually in salary and benefits, according to Highlands records.
And a government audit found more money flowing to Fowler from Highlands – $14,979.03 to pay for her attorney’s fees.
The 2018 audit flagged it as another “potential conflict of interest,” and said without board approval it was a “gift of public funds, which are not allowed.”
ABC10 wanted to know how much work Fowler is doing at Highlands. So, we filed a public records request for her emails. Those records showed she sent only seven emails in five months from her work account. None have anything to do with site administration.
In one email about a student at the school, a Highlands administrator referred to Fowler as a "board member" - not a site administrator or colleague - and said that made Fowler's request an "ASAP need."
Beyond her emails, it’s unclear what other work she’s doing for Highlands.
We reached out to Fowler eight times by email, text and phone to ask for an interview. She declined to speak with us. So, we sent her a detailed list of our findings with questions.
She responded, in-part, saying she hopes we will “conform to journalistic ethics” and not report on bias or accusations – and that we made several false statements, but she would not explain further or answer our questions.
She referred us to the California Education Code that explains how the school district and Highlands are “different entities” and neither can “dictate” how each runs or who they hire — employees like her.
But that’s why sources we spoke with say charter schools, like Highlands, are the wild west of education — there’s little oversight — and that Fowler is just one example of the massive lack of oversight.
“There’s a lot of waste happening,” said Curtis. “There’s a lot of toxicity happening.”
Present and past Highlands employees came forward for this investigation to warn of alleged corruption, questionable spending and a toxic work environment.
“Just constant fear… you lived in constant fear,” a former Highlands administrator said.
All funded by hundreds of millions of tax dollars.
“People should know how their money is being spent,” said Diaz.
And so… we needed to talk to Doc.
“I’m a superintendent that should never be one,” Smith described himself.
He’s the man who runs Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools today. That’s in chapter two of our investigation, “The Wild West of Education.”
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to reflect that Linda Fowler is a half-time employee and makes an annual salary of $53,392.20.