<p>Also click on links at the first article for graphics…</p>
<p>Unbelievable! School officials in Roslyn, Long Island embezzled 11.2 million dollars over an 8-year period. One woman used $935,831 to pay her mortgages, and $14,033 on pet supplies! Cash advances and credit card charges included payments for Tiffany jewelry, clothes from Nordstrom, etc. Payments were made to family members and family-member-owned companies.The Superintendent withdrew $700 A DAY for TWENTY MONTHS!!!
Taxpayers are livid.</p>
<p>How in God’s name did they think they could get away with this? What the HECK were they thinking???</p>
<p>PS Two of the top thieves have pleaded “not guilty!”</p>
<p>I heard this yesterday on NPR and almost spit whatever it was that I was drinking out… And I can’t wait to find out how the heck they got away with it for so long? How do we spell - nepotism? This trial should go on the TV.</p>
<p>It’s an amazing story - Newsday has been covering it for months. Around the same time that the Roslyn story originally came out, it was found that the superintendent of my school district had spent tens of thousands inappropriately, some of it at strip clubs (!).
Luckily we had nothing of this magnitude. It’s a shame, really. It’s a pretty good school district, too.</p>
<p>In Georgia, the former head of the State Department of Education has been indicted for embezzling funds (mostly from the Governor’s Honors Program and Pre-K programs), which she used to fund her unsuccessful governor’s campaign, and some was used for cosmetic surgery.</p>
<p>The only surprise is that it does not happen more often -not the embezzlement … the fact of being caught. To find the real culprits, one does not have to look further that the over-protected union members who run circles around ineffective boards. </p>
<p>“Federal investigators raided the homes and offices of three former officials of the Washington Teachers’ Union yesterday, searching for hundreds of luxury items allegedly purchased with more than $2 million in diverted union funds, including a $25,000 mink coat, a $13,000 flat-screen television and a $57,000 Tiffany sterling silver set with 288 pieces.”</p>
<p>"Bullock, whose fashionable clothes were her trademark during her tenure as union president, is alleged to have spent more than $1 million in union dues, including purchases of $507,692 at the Van Style clothing boutique in Baltimore; $11,000 at Friedman’s Shoes in Atlanta; $20,000 at the gallery of artist William Tolliver; more than $150,000 at Neiman Marcus and $6,800 for a Buccellati “silver ice bucket with swan heads on each side.”</p>
<p>I wonder the same thing as Voronwe - how did these people think they’d get away with this?</p>
<p>This is not a rhetorical question - I am truly interested. These are people in responsible positions, with college and grad school degrees. Note that I am NOT asking about their (non-existent) morals, which are indefensible, but their intelligence. Do they have the IQs of wolverines? Especially since ALL the thefts involved a paper trail!! Did they WANT to get caught?</p>
<p>This is truly brain-dead behavior, even without discussing the moral aspect!</p>
<p>I’ve followed the story since it was first reported. Previous posters have asked how they thought they could get away with it, and the fact is they DID get away with it long enough to buy real estate, take trips, etc. ($14,000 on PET SUPPLIES. PET SUPPLIES!) I’m guessing the money was intoxicating. Gluckin, the finance person in the district, was originally a bus driver in another school district, became some kind of financial clerk in that district and then was hired by Roslyn. Her salary in her last year was legitimately around $87,000. I don’t know what her highest level of education is, but if I started out as a bus driver and worked my way up to administration and a healthy salary, I would hope I’d be content. (I’m relying on my memory for these facts - if you look in the archives for Long Island Newsday newspaper you can probably read the whole thing). </p>
<p>The whole thing truly sickens me when I think that all public schools, even in affluent Roslyn, have some students who qualify for reduced lunch. The person in charge thinks its okay to bill the district for his dry cleaning, exhorbitant hotel bills, catering, etc. etc. to the tune of $11 million. That’s how I’d define ‘sin’.</p>
<p>Presumably they thought they’d get away with it because there must never have been an outside auditing firm reviewing the financial statements, and the school board obvioiusly didn’t have the time to do it. I have no idea what normal “safeguards” there are to oversee these things, but I will offer the observation that this isn’t the only place where this type of thing is happening.</p>
<p>There was an outside auditing firm. They were responsible for auditing a large number of Long Island schools and have recently gone out of business. (The people in that business are probably too busy working on their defenses to continue as auditors anywhere.) A couple of contributing factors came out in the news reports - due to budget cuts, the state was not auditing schools and these people seemed to have been fairly conscientious thieves, maybe thorough is a better word. They went to the trouble of disabling the fraud features on the district’s financial software. There were three main people who seemed to have covered for each other (the superintendent, the finance person for the district and her niece, an accounting clerk in the district).</p>