The Bench and the Board: Two Wayne County Judges’ Governance Ties to Brian Banks’s Charter Schools

Judge Cylenthia Miller chairs the board of one Brian Banks charter school. Judge Tenisha Yancey chairs the board of the other. Both are now named in Judicial Tenure Commission complaints. Here is what the public record shows.

The Founder

Brian Banks was elected to Michigan’s 1st House District in 2012 and reelected twice, eventually chairing the Detroit Caucus. He resigned on February 6, 2017, twenty six days into his third term, after being charged with using fabricated pay stubs to obtain a $7,500 loan from a Detroit area credit union. He pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor, three felony counts were dropped, and he served one day in jail, time already served. Before that plea deal, Banks had already been convicted of eight felonies between 1998 and 2004 for writing bad checks and credit card fraud, a record he disclosed when he first ran for office in 2012.

In 2016, Banks was named among eighteen target subjects in an FBI wiretap affidavit tied to a public corruption investigation into Detroit towing magnate Gasper Fiore. FBI Special Agent Robert Beeckman wrote that Banks was involved in bid rigging with Fiore over a Michigan Department of Transportation towing contract. Fiore later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. Banks was never charged in connection with the wiretap investigation. The same set of wiretaps resurfaced in February 2026 in an unrelated civil lawsuit over a Taylor, Michigan towing contract, keeping the underlying record active nearly a decade later.

Banks went on to found Purpose Charter Academy School for Law and Public Service, authorized by Detroit Public Schools Community District in September 2025, and separately serves as Superintendent and Chief Academic Officer of MacDowell Preparatory Academy, a K through 8 charter school on Detroit’s northwest side. His official biography lists a Juris Doctor from Michigan State University College of Law and a PhD from Walden University. He does not appear in the State Bar of Michigan’s member directory, the same directory that confirms Yancey’s own 2014 bar admission. He holds a law degree. He is not a licensed attorney. Michigan’s bar admission process includes a character and fitness review that specifically examines an applicant’s criminal history. Whether Banks ever went through that review, and with what outcome, is not publicly documented and was not confirmed for this piece.

Three companies, one address

Michigan’s business registry confirms three active entities tied to Banks, all registered to the same address, his home at 1968 Severn Road in Grosse Pointe Woods.

All three carry active, good standing status with the state as of this writing. What role each entity actually plays, whether either LLC holds a management or consulting contract with either school, was not independently confirmed for this piece and would require the underlying contracts themselves.

Judge Miller: Three Incidents, One Board Seat

Cylenthia LaToye Miller has served on the bench since 2006, first at the 36th District Court and, since 2019, on the 3rd Circuit Court’s Criminal Division following her appointment by Governor Whitmer. She is on the ballot for re-election November 3, 2026, running unopposed in a canceled primary. Her own campaign website, keepjudgemiller.com, lists her as Chairperson of the Board of Directors for Purpose Charter Academy, a role distinct from the “development team” membership that education outlet Chalkbeat reported when the school was first approved in 2025.

A bench she could return to

The conflict this piece opened with, a sitting judge chairing the board of a school whose founder has his own record, does not currently touch Miller’s docket. For more than five years, from her 2019 appointment through January 2025, she sat in the Third Circuit’s Family Division, Juvenile Section, hearing abuse and neglect cases, guardianship and adoption matters, and custody disputes, and she led that section as its Presiding Judge from January 2023 to May 2024. She rotated into the Criminal Division in January 2025, eight months before Purpose Charter Academy was even authorized. There is no point in the record where she simultaneously heard family court matters and chaired the board of a school any of those families’ children could have attended.

But Wayne County circuit judges rotate between divisions as a matter of course, and Miller has already done it once. If she rotates back to Family-Juvenile, whether after this election or as part of the court’s ordinary reassignment cycle, she would be hearing exactly the category of case, custody, guardianship, abuse and neglect, where her board chair role at Purpose Charter Academy could put a student’s family, a custody dispute, or the school itself in front of her. Michigan Court Rule 2.003(C) requires a judge to disqualify herself where she serves as a director or officer of an entity that is a party to a proceeding, or where she holds an interest that could be substantially affected by its outcome. Neither Purpose Charter Academy’s materials nor Miller’s own campaign site describe any process for screening that scenario before it happens.

Weighed against the pattern already documented above, an affirmative false statement to police in the gun case, an undisclosed conflict of interest in the Evans dismissal, and a mischaracterization of her own capacity in the East Lansing courtroom, two of those three within the past year, the absence of any disclosed safeguard for a future rotation is its own finding. It does not depend on whether that rotation happens next year or in five.

Judge Yancey: The Money Trail

Tenisha Yancey won the November 2017 special election to fill the House seat Banks vacated after his resignation. Banks was, by her own account, a friend who volunteered in that campaign, and Wikipedia’s account of the race describes him actively campaigning in the district on her behalf. Yancey earned her Juris Doctor in 2012 and was admitted to the Michigan Bar in May 2014, but not before the State Bar’s character and fitness examiners raised her teenage criminal record directly. In a 2020 Marie Claire interview, Yancey said examiners questioned why they should allow her to pass given her background, and that she was cleared on character and fitness before narrowly failing the written exam on her first attempt and passing on a retake. Unlike Banks, whose own path to a law license has no public record at all, Yancey’s is documented and came with disclosure built in. She joined the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office after admission, and in 2022 ran successfully for the 36th District Court, where she now sits.

Michigan campaign finance filings itemized on TransparencyUSA show that Yancey’s judicial campaign committee paid Banks Strategy and Consultants, the LLC detailed above, $15,366.18. It is by far the largest single payee on the committee’s expenditure list, well ahead of the $5,000 paid to the Michigan House Democratic Fund and the $3,500 paid to Campaign Finance Solutions LLC, the next largest entries. Weighed against the committee’s total spending for the cycle, that single payment accounts for roughly 45 percent of everything Yancey’s campaign spent to get her onto the 36th District Court bench.

Separately, MacDowell Preparatory Academy’s own board of directors page lists Yancey as Board Chair, alongside Nicole Wells Stallworth, who holds the same title. Both are listed as active directors as of the site’s most recent update. A residency question was also raised during Yancey’s 2022 campaign for 36th District Court: in Reed-Pratt v. Yancey, Michigan Court of Claims Case No. 22-000060-MM, plaintiff Leigh Reed-Pratt argued that the Detroit address on Yancey’s Affidavit of Identity was inaccurate, pointing to a principal residence exemption Yancey had claimed on a home in Harper Woods. The Court of Claims declined to grant the requested relief, finding the record was not “uncontroverted” as to Yancey’s true residence and that plaintiff had not shown Yancey was disqualified as a registered elector of the district. The court resolved the case on the limits of the evidence before it, not on a finding of where Yancey actually lives.

Yancey’s own record includes a stalking guilty plea and two retail fraud convictions from 1995, when she was a teenager, along with other charges from that period. These were disclosed publicly during her 2017 campaign and are not new. They are included here only because they are part of the same public biography that makes her connection to Banks, her predecessor and the only source of six figures worth of consulting income his firm has publicly disclosed, worth examining on its own terms.

What the Checkbook Shows

MacDowell’s check detail register for the fiscal year running July 2024 through June 2025, reviewed in full for this piece, documents Banks receiving payments directly from the school on top of his superintendent salary. On August 1, 2024, a $182.85 check went to Banks personally, memo’d as a hotel reimbursement tied to a staff member’s training, though the check itself was issued in Banks’ name rather than the staff member’s. Five days later, a separate $1,595 check to Banks is memo’d “Staff Gift Cards for SBL 2024.” That is the same category, gift cards purchased and disbursed through a check written to the superintendent personally, that an earlier register covering fiscal year 2023 to 2024 showed as a recurring, multi-installment pattern. This year’s register shows only the single entry.

The register’s largest Banks related line is not a check to Banks at all. On April 24, 2025, MacDowell issued a $25,174.74 payment to Bank of America. The register itemizes that payment internally by cardholder, and lines labeled “Banks Credit Card” (one instance is entered as “Bankd Credit Card” in the school’s own bookkeeping, an apparent typo for the same line) account for roughly $25,665 of the charges being settled, offset by a net credit of about $386 on lines labeled “Wells” and “Well” Credit Card and a further $104.71 adjustment, a set of figures that reconciles exactly to the check total. What the underlying charges on the Banks labeled card were actually for is not broken out anywhere in the register. That is a question for a public records request, not a conclusion this register can support by itself.

The same register documents one payment moving in the other direction. On April 24, 2025, the same day as the Bank of America payment, MacDowell issued Judge Yancey a $67 check memo’d “Fingerprint Reimbursement,” consistent with the routine background check fee Michigan law requires of charter school board members. It is a small, unremarkable transaction on its own. It is included here because it is now part of the same documentary record as everything else in this piece: a sitting district court judge’s name, in the checkbook of the school whose board she chairs.

The Institutional Gap

Every piece of this story ran through a governance process that is supposed to catch exactly this kind of conflict, and did not. Detroit Public Schools Community District authorized Purpose Charter Academy knowing Banks’ record; his convictions were disclosed on his school administrator certification application, and the Michigan Department of Education has said it could only have denied that application if Banks had misrepresented himself, which he did not. An administrative law judge separately ruled in Banks’ favor on his certificate, finding he had turned his life around. None of that process asked, or was designed to ask, whether a sitting Criminal Division judge chairing that same school’s board created a separate and distinct oversight problem.

That is the gap. Certification law evaluates whether Banks personally should be allowed to run a school. It does not evaluate whether the judges who agreed to govern his schools disclosed those roles adequately, recused appropriately in matters touching his associates, or created the appearance of a closed loop between the bench and the institutions it is supposed to hold accountable from a distance.

Who’s Exposed, and Under What Standard

Not everyone named in this piece answers to the same rules. Judges answer to the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct. Lawyers answer to the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct. Nonprofit officers answer to fiduciary duty under state law. Authorizing bodies answer to their own oversight obligations, not to a personal ethics code at all. Collapsing those categories into one another overstates what any single fact actually shows, so here is each party’s exposure, kept separate.

The distinction matters for what happens next. A JTC complaint against a judge can lead to public discipline through a defined process. A bar complaint against a lawyer runs through an entirely different one. A governance concern about a nonprofit’s officer structure has no complaint process at all, it either gets fixed by the board or it doesn’t. Reading all six rows as the same kind of problem would be a mistake. Reading them as unrelated would be a bigger one.

What’s Filed, What’s Pending

A JTC complaint is a request for investigation, not a finding. Michigan Court Rules and the Commission’s own process require a preliminary review before any public action is taken, and the Commission does not confirm or deny the existence of a pending inquiry unless and until it results in formal proceedings. Nothing in this piece should be read as asserting that either judge has been found to have violated the Code of Judicial Conduct.

Why This Matters Beyond These Two Judges

Charter school authorization, judicial ethics review, and campaign finance disclosure are three separate Michigan oversight systems, run by three separate institutions, none of which is designed to talk to the other two. That is not a conspiracy. It is a structural gap, and structural gaps are how conflicts like this survive in plain sight for years without anyone in a position to act on all three pieces at once actually seeing the whole picture. The record here was never hidden. Miller’s board role is on her own campaign website. Yancey’s financial relationship with Banks is in a public campaign finance database. Banks’ criminal history has been public since his first run for office in 2012. What was missing was not the information. What was missing was an institution positioned to connect it before an election, before a trial, before public money changed hands.