Former CPS principal gets more than a year in prison for decade-long invoice fraud scheme

A former CPS principal has been sentenced to a little more than a year in federal prison on wire fraud charges for a nearly decade-long scheme to defraud multiple school networks and nonprofits out of more than $1 million.

U.S. District Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins sentenced Brian Metcalf, a former CPS network chief and previous principal of Gage Park High School and Field Elementary, to a year and one day in federal prison Wednesday, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.

Former CPS vendor Kimberly Maddox was sentenced to two years in prison last month and consultant James Campbell, who also participated in scheme after it had begun in Indiana, was also sentenced to a year and a day.

They’re all on the hook for $1,099,200 in restitution payments to the various institutions they defrauded. A CPS inspector general report earlier this year uncovered more on the trio’s fraud plots.

“Administrators who use their position to enrich themselves and deprive CPS families of critical resources will not be tolerated, and neither will vendors who steal from CPS,” Inspector General Philip Wagenknecht said in a statement Thursday.

From 2012 to 2017, Metcalf worked with former CPS vendor Kimberly Maddox to generate false invoices for goods and services — such as grant-writing training and student financial aid counseling — that were never provided. They split the proceeds after receiving payment from the district, the office said.

Metcalf and Maddox later admitted to the scheme as part of a plea deal in a federal case against them involving a similar plot to defraud a charter school network across the Indiana border after he left CPS in 2018.

In 2025, Metcalf and Maddox admitted they used the same false invoice strategy at Tindley Accelerated Schools in Indiana, where Metcalf was chief executive officer from 2019 to 2022. The scheme netted them nearly $1 million before they confessed to doing the same at CPS, which garnered $88,500.