Worker accused of stealing $37,000 in school lunch money
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Aliamanu Elementary School
An Oahu grand jury indicted a school assistant at Aliamanu Elementary School for allegedly stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the school’s lunch program.
Ada T. Martin, 51, is charged with first-degree theft for taking $37,156.31 between 2012 and 2014 by “manipulating the meal tracker computer program,” the Attorney General’s office said in a news release. She also is charged with using a computer in the commission of a separate crime.
The theft charge is a Class B felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine. The computer offense is a class A felony, because the underlying crime is a class B felony, and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.
Martin was convicted of first-degree theft in 1993 and was sentenced to five years probation and 100 hours of community service. She also was ordered to pay $27,382 in restitution.
“This convicted felon was hired by the Department of Education 20 years ago, and for the past eight years was in charge of the lunch program at Aliamanu,” Attorney General Douglas Chin said in a statement. “Kids paid for these school lunches. According to the State, she then pocketed that money.”
Bail is set at $11,000 and a bench warrant will be issued for Martin’s arrest.
A DOE spokeswoman said Martin was first hired in 1995-96 as an emergency hire as a pre-audit clerk II. She had that job for two years.
Martin’s been at Aliamanu Elementary School since the 2006-07 school year as a part-time clerk I. That position was renamed to office assistant I in 2011-12.
“The Department of Education brought this case to the Attorney General based on our own concerns that possible criminal activity was taking place,” said DOE spokeswoman Donalyn Dela Cruz.
76 responses to “Worker accused of stealing $37,000 in school lunch money”
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Something is terribly wrong with the DOE besides lack of oversight.
notin wrong as it’s usual fair for Liberals. It’s like Hawaii’s system of criminals entering the revolving door
agree. There isa growing frustration of voters toward the monopoly party and its inability to deliver public services and to demonstrate minimal competence.
I laughed in sadness while reading the entire article. The public should be asking for the head of Martin’s supervisor. I wish the SA would name and shame him or her,
How did she even get hired editor the first conviction?
Agree. The odd thing is that the out of touch BOE continues to give the Superintendent and her staff A grades.
SENTENCE – Probation, with no restitution.
Why would the DOE hire a felon in the first place. Did they not do a back ground check. If found guilty she should serve jail time,pay a fine,and give the money back. None of this probation and community service stuff.
She probably was related by blood or marriage to the DOE official who hired her.
As someone who has worked for DOE for nearly 15yrs I can tell you you are not far off from the truth. Think of how many news stories there have been about DOE employees stealing from or otherwise abusing the DOE system, and THOSE ARE THE ONES WHO GOT CAUGHT! That doesn’t include the ones smart enough, or CONNECTED enough, to not have gotten caught…yet. The system of NEPOTISM is alive and well at DOE and while some or many may know of abuses, they choose to look the other way, to protect, auntie, cousin, sistah, bro, or other ohana or hanai member. And supervisor Matayoshi gets an “A” rating?? For what???
15 years. You know all of these heinous acts are going on around you, daily. Your sole action in the face of all of this wrongdoing is an anonymous blog post.
So this person stole money before and you put them right back into a job where they can allegedly steal more, unbelievable!!
Friend of a friend. How many times she went to Vegas? Drug test her too.
On a far grander scale, the same Wall Street CEOs who crashed the economy in 2008 are still in charge. That’s what I call unbelievable.
Can we all just agree that the DOE should be dismantled immediately. They steal our money, and rob our kids of an education.
@peanutgallery: That would only happen if the entire DOE was corrupt. What you’re suggesting is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. With that said, this person never should have beeN placed into a position where they are handling money in the first place. It would be like putting a former crack addict into a crack production facility. Should have made them clean toilets instead.
The entire DOE is corrupt. That’s where most of the state fat is located because that’s where all the money goes. Just look at how many Asst. Superintendents they have. The first thing Brian Shatz did when he got elected Lt. Gov was to create a all new Asst. Superintendent (strategic reform) position for his twin brother who was previously a school teacher in the mainland. Must be nice to be politically connected. Another thing to consider is the thousands of teachers that don’t actually teach. They’re on the payroll but not in the classroom, at least not anymore. The Union says they’ve “paid their dues” and have earned their do nothing jobs at the district office level. HSTA runs the DOE nowadays, not Matayoshi.
I going try for Third Deputy Assistant Vice Superintendent Director of Copier Supplies. fo make sure xerox machine at one school no run outta peppah. Pays 70K. Sweet!
You’re right. Textbook example of nepotism by handpicking his brother for that position. No shame whatsoever.
Whoa!!!! I’m the 2nd Sr. Jr. Deputy Assistant of Nut Grass Control and I only make $65K. Better ask for a raise.
Best thing that could ever be done to improve DOE is to put it under immediate FEDERAl control for as many yrs as needed til firm rules and improvements are improvised.
You don’t work for the DOE.
Castle High School has a shortage of janitorial staff ….. they could surely use another person to happily scrub all the toilets 5 times a day at $1.00 per hour……this alleged thief deserves no less!
She would end up stealing the janitorial supplies.
I think they’d catch the theft of $37,000.00 worth of janitorial supplies a lot quicker.
just follow the toilet papah trail.
Oh “papio5”, you make me laugh!!! For real kine… that was a winner of a comment…
My comment about the thief has nothing to do with the DOE akkman.
Now that’s a great idea “Watcher”. Hmm… maybe you should run the DOE?
This story is endemic as to why the DOE is such an inefficient and ineffective behemoth of an entity. OK ’nuff big kine words… DOE really messed up hiring a known felon into a “Pre-Audit” position. How crazy is that?!?
Lenient judges are the problem. Had that Echiberi lady at that other school and that was like $10,000 and she was spared jail. And there was that guy at Waipahu High School for more than half a million dollars though I think he went to jail.
I knew something wasn’t right with this lady. When my child was at the school, the payment policy was “cash only”. No checks or even a money order. I would pay for exactly 10 meals at a time to the penny because no receipts were issued when payment is made. The cash was to be placed into a payment envelope then the envelope deposited into an unattended metal box in the office. A receipt would be sent home with my child on the next school day. What got me suspicious was how quickly my child would run out of lunch money. I’d get notices that the account was down to $5.00 when my calculations placed it at well over double that. When I questioned the shortages, I was told my child ate multiple lunches on a particular day, or purchased additional milk on a particular day. What got the lady tripped up was when she told me that my child ate two lunches on a day when my child had home lunch due to a field trip. :-O My child was in the 1st grade at the time. I asked her to double check the date. She confirmed the date in question. I scheduled an appointment with the VP, and presented my info. The VP promised to look into the situation then get back to me. Two days later, the VP got back to me and said that the lady made a mistake on the date, and my child ate multiple lunches on another day. I questioned my child about eating multiple lunches. My child stated that multiple lunches nor multiple milk was ever purchased. (My child would have snacks to eat after school, which would be eaten instead of purchasing additional lunches). After getting lied to by the lunch lady, I began paying in coins. Imagine having to count and process $22.00 in random coins! Other parents had the same concerns so began paying with coins as well. Funny thing is that those of us who payed in coins were never shorted again!
It was only a matter of time before this lady was gonna get caught. I’m glad she eventually got caught. My child’s current school accepts cash payments and receipts are given upon request at the time of payment and another one is provided the next school day with the current account balance. Checks are accepted up until the last 3 weeks of school. Money orders are accepted up until last week of school. Dunno why there’s so little accountability at some schools. I’m glad (yet amazed) it doesn’t happen at other schools.
Hard to believe how she was able to steal $37,000.00 in school lunch money. Being that school lunches are now running $2.40, that would be like 15,000+ school lunches! :-O
Administration must be incompetent to allow a “cash only” payment plan at the school. What school would even want a cash only plan unless you were okay with this kind of shady practices to occur. The principal should be put out to pasture for this mess. Star-Advertiser please follow through by investigating who this incompetent administrator is. Unbelievable.
The principal at the time has since retired. Not sure who the current principal is, but s/he inherited a BIG mess.
My kids went to school in California. They had a system that allowed parents to pay for meals online (with a service charge, unfortunately). All of their purchases were tracked and we could check and see what they ordered any time. Maybe Hawaii should look into this type of system. (I think the online company is called MySchoolBucks.com.)
Make your kids lunch, stop depending on the system to feed your children people.
The truth comes out finally!!!!
Thanks for the story. Is the VP still at the DOE ? They get paid big bucks, i think. And not to get bamboozled by the lady in question. The VP is supposed to be sharper or more akamai than the one you dealt with. As we said before, internal controls should have been better including when the lady went out sick. (Was she using some of her money when she was out sick ?) Like having someone taking over the program when requiring the lady to take one whole or two weeks of vacation, so irregularities would be found. Also, someone else should have been engaged with accounting for the money received. And having a better overall system of collecting and accounting for the money as others have pointed out. It doesn’t have to be only aconvicted felon who will steal. Anyone could be tempted to steal, so the controls in the system have to be better.
Steal once, shame on you. Steal twice, shame on me (for hiring you). And Obama wanted to make it harder to not hire criminals? Obama banned hiring bias against ex-cons. Hey, if you are an ex-con them you brought the stigma upon yourself for screwing up in the first place. If you stole or hurt someone then you made a conscious choice to take a risk that –if caught–you would screw up your employment record for the rest of your life.
The issue is oversight. Who was in charge of this thief? Who hired her? Where’s the investigative reporting? Let’s have some names.
Good luck with that. The wagons will be circled and there will be zero accountability. The alleged thief will probably go to jail but it will stop there. It would be interesting to learn how she was caught. Somebody was obviously doing their job.
I guess Superintendent “exceeds expectations” Matayoshi is not so great after all. The DOE, like UH is out of control. There’s more fraud, waste, fat and cronyism going on in those 2 department than the rest of state government. Why? Because that’s where all the state budget goes. It’s easier to justify huge budgets and expenditures when all you have to say is “it’s for the kids”.
If you don’t expect too much, isn’t it easy to exceed expectations? It’s the State’s general thought process.
That’s not Aliamanu ELementary School in the photo. That’s the middle school. Lazy buggas at SA, just googling and guessing.
Yep. I guess it was easier to just take a pic from Salt Lake Blvd rather than pull in by the Salt Lake Public Library and take a photo of the actual Aliamanu Elementary. Very careless news reporting.
They are some of the laziest people on earth!!
This is the “fault” of her supervisors, including the principal and the accounting system they didn’t have. There are supposed to be checks and balances, internal controls to help prevent this type of thing from happening.S he shouldn’t have been the only one keeping or not keeping track of the payments, etc.
You telling me. The lady was out sick one day and it seemed like the whole system came to a screeching halt. Payments weren’t processed and many students ended up needing lunch loans despite having made payments the previous day. Imagine if something tragic happened to her like long term illness or sudden death. I was surprised that there wasn’t someone trained to pick up the slack the day she was out sick.
Looks like when she gets out in 10 years, she’ll have a job waiting for her.
LOL! She will get a slap on the wrist fine and probation; typical Hawaii justice for this type of theft. Mark my words, you read it here first. Lucky you live Hawaii!!
Naw…she had to at least re-pay the money the first time, and they gave her a job in a couple of years. That’s called forgiveness, something the Bible teaches. But! this second time…no, no, no, no!
What was the reason she stole?
Did any child go hungry?
Mark 11:25
When you pay $12 or less an hour, it is hard to find good workers
Agreed!…you pay peanuts, you get monkies.
That word I think you’re looking for is “monkeys”. And no, $12 an hour is not peanuts in Hawaii. Many workers make less than that and the amazing thing is that they pay a large portion of their peanuts to pay for these unionized workers.
When it’s monkey work, you get monkey pay. Want more than monkey pay? Learn to do more than monkeys can do.
The computerized meal payment system was put in place to prevent abuses like this. Less handling of cash on the lunch line. At least that’s what they told us when I worked in the DOE. Like a lot of DOE ideas – just doesn’t work in the real world. YMMV
Ha ha ha! Hawaii is so dumb! Probably the dumbest state in the nation!! Rail, school, politics – so fricken dumb-
DOE – No respect for them. BUNCH of losers. Drug test anyone?
Lack of basic internal controls is inexcusable.
True. Unfortunately the “lack of basic internal controls” is systemic, for the deregulation of Wall Street costs taxpayers $16.8 trillion via the big bank bailout, not to mention it being a root cause for the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Stealing money in general from anyone sucks. But there are two places in my opinion that if you steal money from you should get an automatic go to Hell card. A church and a public elementary school. Its like you stealing from the kids. Sad thing is that she’ll get off easy.
I was always under the impression that the DOE HR dept did a background check for ALL employees. Apparently not!….That over staffed office must be staffed with incompetents. Wonder who was the Principal of that time that accepted the felon to be on campus as an employee.
You’ll find a bunch of schools with incompetent office staff unfortunately.
Yes. All employees are fingerprinted and subject to a background check. In the background check, convictions will be noted. If the suspect in this case successfully completed the Court mandated requirements of a DAG plea for the previous case, it would not be indicated in the background check. I tried to find that information but it wasn’t available.
Not condoning stealing, but to put things in perspective, a few months ago the SA ran a story about a local CEO who pleaded no contest to stealing nearly $1,000,000 from his clients. http://www.staradvertiser.com/hawaii-news/fittest-ceo-given-time-to-pay-victims/ It appears that if this CEO can come up with the amount he stole, and pay back those to whom he defrauded, the judge will reduce his prison sentence.
So my question is why is there a disproportionate amount of outrage directed at someone who stole $37K as opposed to someone who stole almost a whopping $1 million? Are underpaid government workers held to much higher standards than outrageously overcompensated CEOs who work in the private sector? Double standard?
Soooo, nobody compares the deliveries of the previous week against sales for current week? Interesting.
(The Food Service Manager is responsible for completing and submitting a a pile of 19th century pen and paper reconciling of every aspect of the cafeteria each week. An administrator is responsible for counter-signing. Unfortunately, administrators have so many different and often unrelated areas of responsibility and so little time that most must take the word of the SFSM, quickly check that there aren’t any terribly obvious errors, and sign. The other problem is that accounting is a terrible mixture of horribly substandard software and paper forms. You find this to be true in almost every almost every State department. The third problem is that school food service administration is subject to divided control. Some aspects such as personnel are under control of the school, other areas are controlled by the School Food Services offices. It’s really a mess.)
“You find this to be true in almost every almost every State department.”>>> You’re right there.
aww jeeze aunty………i guess no mo xmas envelope dis year
DOE boss was slated for a raise and performance rated outstanding. A reflection of how the DOE operate, rudderless.
DOE rudderless, yet performance rated excellent and boss person slated to be rewarded with a substantial bonus?
This woman was not stealing from the school but from the parents of the kids who were paying for the school lunches. This may explain why
the school was not keeping track of what was going on and why this was allowed to go on for so long.
Very bad system rife for this kind of thing to go on. This stuff could be going on in other schools.
For many years I tried to tell the various functionaries that the Department needed to follow the lead of many mainland districts and adopt an online payment model with one-stop parent login access so that parents could make payments, check accounts, track student progress and academic information, communicate with schools and teachers, and access school and department news and information. Unfortunately, the Office of Information Technology Services was incapable of wrapping a 20th century mindset around 21st century ideas and realities.
I recall with an irritated chuckle the day a previous Ass’t Superintendent told me with a straight face that one student information database was only accessible on the least secure and buggiest browser in the world at the time for “Security reasons.” I said “I can’t believe you just said that.” He blushed.
The person counting the money also justifies the books? No check or balance.
Everyone knows she should have never been hired (except for the ones responsible for her being hired). And we also know we’ll never find out who these people are or what kind of disiplinary actions if any were administered. And also where the buck stops. Instead they’ll all continue to get their high performance reviews and bonuses.