Parent Suspected Of Taking Money Balboa Elementary Fund-Raising Group Says Savings Missing

The treasurer of a parent fund-raising group at Balboa Elementary School is suspected of emptying the group’s savings into her own account.

Mindee K. Allison, 30, issued herself at least nine checks totaling nearly $3,000, including money the parents earned at raffles and yard sales, authorities said.

Jan Boal, past president of Balboa’s Montessori group, said the north Spokane parents are disillusioned and disappointed about the loss of hard-earned money.

“We’ve done cookie sales at truck stops in 10-degree snowy weather,” Boal said of the parents group. “They’re all very angry. So many of us have worked so hard to raise this money and we all trusted each other.”

Last week, a police detective asked prosecutors to file a charge of first-degree theft, alleging Allison wrote herself checks worth $2,843.

Allison, who has a child in the Montessori program, refused to comment when contacted at her north Spokane home Friday.

Allison has been charged with theft involving mishandled checks twice before.

She pleaded guilty to first-degree theft in 1988 when she was an apartment manager accused of depositing rent checks into her own account.

Between $1,600 and $2,800 was missing from Regency Apartments’ accounts, court records show.

Her sentence included work release and community service.

As part of a plea agreement in the apartment case, first-degree theft charges were dismissed in another case that was pending.

In that case, court records say Allison was a teller at Fairchild Federal Credit Union in 1986 when she and a companion attempted to pay off Allison’s loan with a $54,000 check from a customer’s account.

The pair asked Camp Chevrolet employees to cash the check, pay the $15,000 loan and give them the balance in cash, records show.

Other Montessori parents approached Allison after the bank alerted them to their empty account.

“She said there’s just been a little mistake, and then she quit returning calls,” Boal said. The group’s president reported the loss to police April 1.

“This is a group that had very limited funds and now they have none,” Spokane Police detective Terry Boardman said. “It’s not a cheap lesson.”

Harold Clarke, a Spokane attorney who has a child in Balboa’s Montessori program, said parents were shocked to learn the money was slowly being filtered from their account.

“It’s like every other small group in the world. You tend to trust everyone,” said Clarke. “The group felt betrayed.”

Now they’re trying to safeguard against future losses.

They may ask one member to handle the bank reports and balance accounts while another signs checks, Clarke said.

“They should have somebody looking over their shoulder,” advised Jeff Snyder, the state auditor’s Spokane office manager. One person should collect and receipt money, while another records it. He recommends two people sign checks.

Otherwise, he said, “You’re asking for it. You’re tempting even honest people to run off with the money.”

School District 81 isn’t responsible for the loss because the Balboa parents, raising money for their children’s Montessori program, were operating independently.

But a state audit last year showed the district left itself wide open for similar abuse of student body money.

Access to cash boxes wasn’t restricted, the audit report said. Students didn’t always give required approval for how their money was spent.

Checks weren’t endorsed in a timely manner and invoices weren’t kept properly.

Sometimes, student funds were used to buy gymnasium equipment and supplies for routine classroom activities - items that should have been bought with general funds, Snyder said.

Since then, people who handle student-raised money have attended training sessions on how the money should be handled and spent, said Associate Superintendent Walt Rulffes.

Sloppy record-keeping leaves the schools and students wide open to theft and fraud, Snyder said. “You can’t establish responsibility when that happens.”

But the most common mistake is “blind trust,” Snyder said. “In all the (cases) we work on, 99 percent of the time people say, ‘It’s the last person I would have expected.”’

, DataTimes