Parents Allege Prestonwood Academy Covered Up Athlete Misconduct, Lawsuit Looming

Scholarship athletes at Prestonwood Academy stole from Scheels and walked away without a single police call from school administrators, parents allege. A reported sexual assault in the school's own parking lot has since pushed those same families toward legal action against the Plano institution run by Prestonwood Baptist Church.

Parents say both incidents were handled the same way: quietly and internally. Administrators neither notified law enforcement following the Scheels theft nor took what critics describe as adequate corrective action after the parking lot assault. The pattern, families contend, amounts to a deliberate effort to shield scholarship athletes from consequences that could jeopardize their standing at the academy.

Prestonwood Academy, formally known as Prestonwood Christian Academy, operates under Prestonwood Baptist Church and serves more than 1,600 students at campuses in Plano and Prosper. The school competes in the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools 6A classification and has reported more than $222 million in college scholarship offers to graduates since its first graduating class in 2002, a figure that speaks to the institution's deep investment in athletics and competitive recruiting.

Parents allege that investment is what drove the alleged cover-up. The theft from Scheels, a sporting goods retailer, was never escalated to Plano police, the families say. The sexual assault, which allegedly took place on school grounds, was similarly managed without law enforcement involvement.

No lawsuit had been formally filed as of Tuesday, but families say legal action is imminent. The case poses a serious test of whether a school operating under the banner of one of North Texas's most prominent megachurches will face public accountability for how its administration handled two of its gravest student conduct failures.