Rose Garden Resident

News

SJUSD implements safeguards to protect, audit student funds

By Anne Gelhaus

The Santa Clara County civil grand jury found the San Jose Unified School District has satisfactorily cleaned up its accounting accountability after a Bret Harte Middle School employee embezzled almost half a million dollars in student funds.

Barbara Price, a former secretary at Bret Harte, was found guilty last December of embezzling $483,000 from the school's Associated Student Body. Price was sentenced to three years in state prison and ordered to pay $721,000 in restitution.

The incident led to a citizen's complaint and a grand jury investigation into whether the district had adequate safeguards in place to protect ASB funds from fraud. Prior to the embezzlement, the district's annual internal audit sampled ASB fundraising activities at its schools, but the process was not a comprehensive one.

To avoid a repeat of this incident, the district revised the audit checklist for its schools and administrative offices, and emphasized stricter adherence to safeguards already in place, such as requiring three signatures for expenditures. Under the revamped checklist, the minutes of ASB meetings must be recorded and their fundraisers and expenditures approved. Tickets to ASB fundraising events must be properly accounted for, and ASBs must document expected versus actual revenues from each event. Cash receipts should be documented and reconciled to accounts "in a timely manner."

In a report released last week, the grand jury concluded these revisions "address shortcomings that previously existed."