An additional $18.8 million has been paid to San Diego County as restitution for the statewide A3 charter school scam in which the state was defrauded of hundreds of millions of school dollars, the San Diego County District Attorney announced Wednesday.

Sean McManus of Australia, along with Jason Schrock of Long Beach, led a statewide charter school scheme from 2016 to 2019 in which they used a network of mostly online charter schools to defraud the state of approximately $400 million and used $50 million of that amount for personal use. They did so by falsely enrolling students and manipulating enrollment and attendance reporting across their schools to get more money per student than schools are supposed to, prosecutors said.

McManus and Schrock were together ordered to pay $37.5 million in fines and restitution last September. That money will pay for programs for K-12 students in the county. The $18.8 million recently received completes those fines and restitution. An additional $14 million in restitution received will be distributed by the San Diego Foundation for services for K-12 students.

In total, about $240 million of the $400 million has been recovered. The District Attorney’s Office said it is not trying to get back all of the $400 million because some of the money ended up going to noncriminal actors, such as teachers, youth programs and others, who provided services for the A3 schools and who did not know the money was obtained illegally.

Of the $240 million that has been recovered, about $95 million has been returned to the state treasury, with an additional $90 million expected to be returned to the state within the next few months.

The money has been recovered with the cooperation of McManus and Schrock.

All defendants in the A3 case have pleaded guilty in a case that has now taken three years to prosecute, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

McManus was sentenced to four years in prison in September. Schrock will not go to prison because of a state law that gives him credit for the more than two years he spent under house arrest starting in May 2019, when he was arraigned.

Another one of the defendants is Steven Van Zant, former superintendent of Mountain Empire Unified School District, who provided back-office services for A3.

Van Zant pleaded guilty last month to felony conspiracy to commit grand theft, the District Attorney’s Office said.

He was sentenced to six months of home confinement. If he doesn’t pay, he faces four years in prison. Van Zant also has to complete three years of probation, during which he must cooperate with authorities in recovering additional stolen funds held by third parties.

The county is administering restitution money as grants to community organizations to use for mentorship, housing, food, anti-poverty, behavioral health and education equity programs.

Organizations have until Friday at 5 p.m. to apply for a grant of $50,000 to $250,000.

The A3 case is one of California’s largest cases of alleged charter school fraud and has highlighted how weaknesses in charter school oversight can allow such fraudulent schemes to occur.

“Due to the expertise and dedication of our public corruption team, led by Deputy District Attorney Leon Schorr, this massive fraud case that bilked millions in public funds on the backs of students and parents was stopped and the perpetrators held accountable,” District Attorney Summer Stephan said in a statement. “I am grateful to our team for successfully prosecuting this case and recovering millions of stolen funds that will go back to supporting students. Judge Fred Link, who oversaw this entire case, made sure that the children of San Diego County would see justice by returning the stolen funds to programs that will help students succeed.”

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