The former leader of the Urban Prep charter schools in Chicago has been charged in federal court with embezzling more than $100,000 in school funding.
WTTW-TV reports that Tim King, who resigned from the charter network in 2022 amid sexual misconduct allegations, has been accused in a three-count indictment of misusing Urban Prep funds to cover his own personal credit card expenses and then trying to cover up that theft through falsified documents.
In all, King, 59, is accused of stealing $103,833, the indictment says. King allegedly used about $54,000 from an Urban Prep-affiliated bank account to pay for his own personal credit expenses between May 1 and December 31, 2021.
The following year, he allegedly used another $49,000 from that account to once again cover his own expenses, the indictment states.
After receiving a grand jury subpoena and learning of the criminal investigation in 2022, King allegedly deleted online records of three purported cash donations he had made to Urban Prep in an attempt to conceal the embezzlement, the indictment states.
Urban Prep Academies, which runs two all-Black, all-male schools in the Englewood and Bronzeville neighborhoods on the city's South Side, has struggled to maintain its charter in the years following King’s departure.
He left in 2022 after the school district's inspector general found he had “an inappropriate relationship” with a 16-year-old student. King has denied those allegations.
