- Goldy | The Stranger
- Seattle Ethics and Elections executive director Wayne Barnett explains everything he doesn’t know about the $30,000 that may or may not have been misappropriated at Van Asselt Elementary School.
I don’t really have much to add to the missing money scandal at Van Asselt Elementary School, but I was already at the district administration building and they were about to hold a press conference, so I figured what the hell. The Seattle Times has the details, so go read that.
In a nutshell, following a tip to a whistleblower hotline, investigators could not account for $30,000 that had been withdrawn from a school bank account. There’s no actual evidence that the money was misappropriated, but there’s no evidence that it wasn’t. “The record keeping was that poor,” explained Seattle Ethics and Elections executive director Wayne Barnett.
In fact, they don’t even know where most of the money came from. It appears to have come from school fundraisers, and maybe families paying for field trips and the like, but they can’t be sure. They don’t think it involved any taxpayer money, but they also can’t rule it out at the moment. The seventy-some thousand dollars that reportedly flowed through account strikes me as way too much money to come from fundraisers in a Southeast Seattle School without a functional PTSA. But really… who knows?
Seattle school board member Sherry Carr, the chair of the Finance and Audit committee, describes the scandal as an “outrageous breach of trust,” but she also emphasized that the district’s recently revised oversight policies are working. A tip came in, it was looked into by the district, and then handed over to Seattle Ethics and Elections for further investigation. Now the police are investigating to see if there was any criminal conduct.
Not a huge scandal as these things go, but also not exactly what the district wants to be talking about at the same time it is parading its three superintendent finalists before the press.