SEATTLE — A former Seattle school employee and two associates were charged Tuesday with stealing more than $250,000 from Seattle public schools in a scandal that precipitated the firing of the district superintendent.
Silas Potter Jr. is accused of helping himself to cash filtered through tw
o dummy companies doing business with the school district — Emerald City Cleaning and Grace of Mercy — that did little or no work, said King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg.
Potter and David Anthony Johnson were each charged with nine counts of theft. Lorrie Kay Sorensen was charged with four counts of theft. Johnson and Sorensen worked for the companies.
If convicted, Potter and Johnson both face up to 43 months in prison and Sorensen could serve up to a year in jail. All three are scheduled for arraignment on Nov. 8.
The prosecutor said the 10-month investigation into the district’s small-business development program found no evidence of involvement by other district employees, although some like Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson were held partially responsible by the school board and lost their jobs.
Satterberg said there was no evidence that Potter’s intent to steal school district money was directed or shared by his supervisor.
“He was a trusted employee who abused that trust,” the prosecutor said.
Before the prosecutor’s office got involved, the development program had been investigated by the state auditor and by an independent auditor hired by the school district. They both found that much of the more than $1.8 million that flowed through the program was misused or just wasted. The school district is independently working to recover some of the money.
The investigation by the prosecutor and Seattle police focused just on the criminal statutes and not on whether the program was a good use of public dollars, Satterberg said.
Most of the companies that did business with the school district program cooperated with the investigation and all three people being charged were interviewed by investigators. During an interview in Tampa, Fla., Potter confessed to conspiring with Johnson to get money from the school district by creating invoices for classes that were never taught, according to the court documents.
The prosecutor obtained bank records and computer files showing how the dummy companies were set up, and tax records showed Emerald City Cleaning did not pay any business or employee taxes, court documents show.
When interviewed in Henderson, Nev., Lorrie Sorensen said Emerald City Cleaning “was not a real company but a front for getting easy money from the school district.”
Michael DeBell of the Seattle School Board thanked Satterberg and Seattle police for their investigation.
“It should help ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” DeBell said.
DeBell said the board and the district have new policies to improve financial and administrative controls — including a new internal auditor — and to work with the city’s ethics board to develop more policies that will prevent theft or fraud.
The three did not appear to have listed phone numbers and the prosecutor’s office said no attorneys have contacted them. Potter has told The Seattle Times he was not to blame for the scandal and had been wrongly accused.
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