Six years after a state audit found that a pair of virtual schools inflated enrollment by thousands of students — improperly collecting more than $68 million in public funds — two of the people behind the alleged scheme are expected to go to trial on federal wire fraud charges in July.
As charter schools, Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy were free to families and publicly funded. The schools, which were forced to close in 2019, claimed to serve more than 7,000 students at their peak. But state and federal investigations found that many of them were ghost students who did not take classes or earn credits.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana arrested three men in connection with the fraud trial in 2024, after a federal investigation into the virtual schools’ operations. One of those men pleaded guilty. The other two are expected to go to trial…