from Masscops
Former bookkeeper to plead guilty to theft
A former bookkeeper plans to plead guilty to skimming more than $400,000 in lunch money from the Concord School District.
Edith Kelley of Loudon is accused of taking between $300 and $400 from the lunch program every day for seven years. By the time she was indicted in late 2006, investigators say, she’d stolen $418,876.
Kelley agreed to serve 18 months in jail and to pay restitution as part of a negotiated plea arrangement on file in Merrimack County Superior Court. Her case was scheduled to go to trial this week. She’ll be formally sentenced in November.
During Kelley’s nine years with the school lunch program, she was responsible for counting the roughly $5,000 students spent each day in the district’s cafeterias. Kelley was also the only district employee who handled deposit slips for the money, investigators say.
Shortly before the theft was discovered, district officials noticed that the school lunch program wasn’t making as much money as it once had. A pair of audits revealed the missing money. Kelley was placed on administrative leave in the fall of 2006. She soon resigned and was indicted that December.
Neither investigators nor school district officials will say what Kelley did with the money.
Financial records indicate that Kelley and her husband, Michael, struggled to pay their bills. The couple almost lost their home to foreclosure in October 2006, and, in 1998, their car was repossessed.
In early 2007, the attorney Kelley had hired withdrew from the case, telling the judge in his motion that he believed she was “indigent” and unable to pay for private counsel. On an application for a public defender, Kelley said she and her husband had no checking accounts. They each had $25 in cash on hand and about $200 in a savings account.
At the time, Kelley listed her employer as a Laconia doctor’s office. The woman who answered the phone there yesterday didn’t recognize Kelley’s name.
Attempts to contact Kelley and her court-appointed attorney were not successful.
District officials say they’re installing a new computer system that, among other things, makes it easier to monitor cash flow. Superintendent Chris Rath says part of the system will be in place by the beginning of next year. The rest will go online in mid-2010.
“The goal is to get all accounts, including food service and transportation, into the general ledger,” she said. “Rather than looking at things in isolation we’ll be looking at them as a whole.”