Three former managers of Washington, D.C.’s oldest charter school were charged in a lawsuit with using a contracting scam to line their pockets with at least $3 million in taxpayer funds meant for the school.

The trio, who headed the Options Public Charter School, created transportation and management companies that they then hired to provide services to the school, D.C. officials allege. The managers left Options last summer to run the two for-profit businesses — but not before paying themselves “exorbitant” bonuses on their way out.

The charter was founded in 1996 to serve some 400 troubled teens and students with disabilities.

Donna Montgomery, the school’s former chief executive and president of the two companies, denied the elaborate ripoff that D.C. officials called a “pattern of self-dealing.” The civil case alleges that the managers also received help from a senior official at the D.C. Public Charter School Board.

J.C. Hayward, a longtime news anchor on D.C. television station WUSA and a former chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees, is among the defendants in the suit filed by D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan. Hayward told Channel 9 that she did nothing wrong, but she has been relieved of her duties pending further investigation, the station said.

Washington Post, Oct. 1

Philanthropy Today, Oct. 2