Original Blog Entry: Two cafeteria workers charged with stealing students lunch money

truesee — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:49:56 GMT

Two Shelby County School Cafeteria Workers Charged With Theft

George Brown 4:30 PM CDT, October 22, 2010

WREG-TV

( Memphis 10/22/2010) Former cashiers at two Shelby County schools have been indicted for theft and official misconduct.

Courtney Dixon was a cashier at Bon Lin Elementary and is charged with stealing more than $15,000 from cafeteria funds at the school from August 2008 until May 2009.

An audit found Dixon would, ...record cash received from students in their cafeteria accounts as adjustments rather than collections in order to get around including those cash collections on her daily cash reports. Under this scheme, records of the students' accounts showed the money they turned over to Dixon, but the cash she collected was never deposited into the school's bank account.

There is also an allegation that at least 12 times, cash was removed from collections, recorded as being given back to the student and then, ... an equivalent amount was returned to the student's account by an adjustment.

Dixon allegedly credited money to the accounts of two of her daughters.

The audit also found some credits were put into an account of the son of the former lead cashier at Rivercrest Elementary School, Tammy Radford.

Radford apparently worked with Dixon in the past and was trained by Dixon.

The audit says, After auditors began to investigate the suspicious credits at Rivercrest Elementary, they discovered that Radford was taking cash from that cafeteria and using back office records adjustments to conceal the theft just as Dixon was doing at Bon Lin Elementary.

Money coming into the the cafeteria accounts at Bon Lin Elementary School have reportedly increased by more than $30,000 in the school year since Dixon left.

Mike Tebbe with Shelby County Schools told us, Due to our suspicion of wrongdoing, we turned this over the state comptrollers office to investigate.

... [ More ]