Remaining Epic teachers left in dark after layoffs, question morality, ethics behind charter model

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — After Epic Charter Schools laid off hundreds of employees Tuesday, the teachers left behind say they’ve been given no answers, and some are now questioning whether the charter system that they work for truly puts students first.

Those teachers say they don’t know who is in charge, how the school plans to move forward, or whether their jobs are truly safe. At least one teacher says the chaos has her rethinking the charter-school model entirely—and what it means for students.

News 4 reported that more than 350 Epic Charter Schools employees were blindsided on Tuesday with an email informing them that they were being let go.

News 4 obtained a copy of the email.

The subject line read: “2025-2026 Non-Renewal.”

“We just had our graduation ceremonies last weekend,” one now-former Epic employee said. “There was no word then about anything like this.”

The message got straight to the point.

“That my contract would not be renewed for the 2025-2026 school year, and that as an at-will employer, they don’t need to have a designee provide a reason for why I was let go,” he said.

The state-funded online charter school laid off 357 employees Tuesday, including 83 teachers and nearly 300 administrators.

“We know that there are guidance counselors affected, transition coordinators,” a current Epic teacher said.

The teacher told News 4 that Epic did not inform teachers that the district layoff included eliminating the roles of every principal, leaving teachers unclear about who they now answer to.

“We would love to know. We are very interested in what that looks like,” she said. “And we have not been told any information on how do you have a school without a principal?”

While this teacher still has her job—that has come at a price.

“They cut our pay again two weeks ago,” she said.

She said the new pay scale dropped teachers’ base salaries to $40,000 a year.

“I was hired with the agreement that $60,000 a year would be base pay,” she said. “That’s quite a significant pay cut.”

She said the pay cut announcement came in an email with a form attached, including an ultimatum.

“You have 48 hours to sign it or get lost,” she said. “We thought honestly that maybe they were kind of playing chicken with staff and waiting for people to quit.”

She said she had the same feeling last fall, when Epic also cut pay and laid off teachers during a budget crisis blamed on faulty enrollment predictions.

“In October, they came back and said, ‘Hey, we’re restructuring a little bit. We don’t have the enrollment numbers that we thought we did,’” she said.

But clearly, that didn’t solve all the money problems.

Now, she said, that’s left her questioning the choice she made when she left a traditional public school to join the virtual charter model.

“My specific team [feels] much more corporate than school,” she said.

She said, during the nearly one decade that she spent in a traditional public school district, never once did the district resort to layoffs, let alone numerous rounds of them, even in the face of declining funding.

“Everything [at Epic] feels like maybe a little bit disingenuous, because it feels more like we are a machine than we are a public school system.”

In light of Epic’s decisions to cut staff anyway, she says there will be a trickle-down effect on the students.

“I think anything that is affecting teacher morale and teacher security is going to affect students,” she said. “It’s not as easy, I think, to be at the top of your game when you are constantly checking over your shoulder to make sure you’re not going to be fired.”