In two unrelated incidents in Barrington and most recently Grayslake, two women have been charged with stealing money from school accounts, according to reports in the Chicago Tribune.
Elizabeth Bako, 41, of Grayslake was charged with and pleaded not guilty yesterday to stealing between $10,000 and $100,000 from the fund set aside for the Parent Teacher Organization at Frederick Elementary School between April 2011 and May 2012.
She is charged with actual theft as well as the unlawful use of a debit card, a card that PTO president Katherine Rasmussen said the board didn’t authorize.
And Julie Salk, former chair of fine arts at Barrington High School, was accused of stealing cash receipts that came into the school from admission and raffle tickets for last spring’s performance of “Hello, Dolly!”
In November after her arrest, Salk disputed the findings of the audit that formed the basis of her arrest, telling Lake County officials she would sometimes take the money home to count it and sometimes use it for personal reasons but she would replenish any money she used with a personal check to the school. She is accused of stealing $5,022 in school funds.
Barrington Unit District 220 reportedly released a statement saying accounting and money-tracking procedures had been updated to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen at the school. I for one hope the new policy starts with something like, “People who work at the school or volunteers shouldn’t take any money that belongs in the school out of the school.”
I find it hard to believe that a policy like that wasn’t already in place and the district had to implement “new” procedures for “handling money,” as reported in the Tribune. The old procedures, in place before March 2012, allowed this sort of thing?!
In the Grayslake case, some details don’t add up, either. How does a bank, under regulation of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, issue an unauthorized debit card on an account? Rassmussen, the PTO president, told the Tribune that a debit card “was never authorized by my board.”
How many other people have debit cards that her board never authorized? And who at the bank ordered them? Making a statement that a bank issued an unauthorized debit card is like charging the bank with a federal crime, and it happened yesterday in a newspaper with a very high circulation (the ninth-highest in America). In other words, it seems we’re likely to find more than one naughty person in this case.
I have a suggested change here as well—for both PTO’s and banks: Make sure you don’t issue debit cards that aren’t authorized by the account holder. That ought to do it, except that’s already in our law. Somebody just broke the law, and our schools gave them the opportunity.
Need + Target + Location = Crime
In these times, it’s safe to say that more people are likely to be in need of help with money than at other times in our country’s non-recession past. This increased likelihood of need has been created by the economic downturn, the recession, and the sluggish recovery—if we can call it that. This explains, to a certain degree, the “need” in our equation, and the “target” is obviously money.
The “location” in the crime equation is created by organizations like schools that don’t provide a careful accounting of money. In the Grayslake case, it was reported that the theft occurred over the course of 13 months. These withdrawals and use of a debit card must have been printed on statements beginning in the second month, right? Am I supposed to believe that nobody noticed them?
In the Barrington case, the suspicious accounting practices were noticed and reported to school officials, who promptly began an investigation. And that’s how it should be. We aren’t perfect, and when we find something we’re doing wrong, we correct it. But in Grayslake, this sort of thing was allegedly going on for more than a year. You know, banks can stop debit cards so they get declined at every transaction!
Anyway, when you have people who need financial help and our institutions give them the opportunity to get some money, they’re more likely to steal the money.
Research out of Northeastern University and the University of Maryland suggests that “an opportunity theory approach is useful in addressing … theft and that this framework provides explicit implications for local law enforcement and polcymakers” (Chad Posick, Michael Rocque, Kevin Whiteacre, and David Mazeika, Examining Metal Theft in Context: An Opportunity Theory Approach, Justice Research and Policy (2012), 14:2, pp. 79-102).
We know, for example, that crime opportunities depend on routines or predictability within certain boundaries. A good example of this is a 2006 study, referenced in the discussion, which showed that the mere presence of closed circuit TV at a location where opportunities for theft existed caused criminals to relocate rather than forego the crime.
The other elements of crime seem to be a motivated perpetrator and the simple presence of the target. In these cases, the target appears to be school money. And perpetrators are more likely today to be motivated than in years past when certain policies may have been implemented. Those policies have created predictable, prevailing conditions at school ticket gates or in the PTO, for example, that favor crime.
So, what we need to do in our schools is ensure that we provide the equivalent of closed circuit TV in all our money-handling moments. This could be the requirement that at least two people from the school handle all money or sign on an account at the bank. This could be the actual use of closed circuit TV in the school box office, where thousands of dollars flow on a regular basis.
In any case, we need to force any motivated perpetrators to relocate their crime to a place where the target of money is also available. One possibility is a local convenience store or gas station. Many of these sites, like our schools, don’t have very sophisticated surveillance equipment in place, and several are staffed during night-time hours with very few people who make minimum wage.
This way, the money that’s supposed to be in our schools will stay in our schools. Our schools should not be in the business of law enforcement, so if one of our employees or volunteers is motivated enough that they will actually commit a crime given the presence of a target and opportunities afforded them by the location, there’s not much schools can do. But schools do need to be in the business of protecting what’s rightfully theirs.
We can’t stop people from committing crimes, nor should our schools even try. But we have to safeguard the money that’s entrusted to us by the public to be used for educational purposes, not for charity. Careless management is a betrayal of the public trust in our schools.
In terms of our equation, need and target are beyond the school’s control. People will be needy, and schools take in thousands of dollars regularly. We therefore need to focus our energy as policymakers on the location itself: procedures, including possible equipment, need to be in place so that locations in our schools don’t favor the commission of theft.
I might also suggest that people who work in schools tend to at least like kids. It’s possible to change the prevailing conditions at the money-exchange points so that people working there have a strong sense of responsibility or pride in the use of money for educational purposes. They may still be motivated by need, and the target’s going to be right in front of them. But changing their mindset might be enough to force them to relocate their crime to a place other than the school.