ELIZABETH —She stole more than $2,600 from a federal lunch program for underprivileged children while her family earned more than enough money to pay for the lunches of her own kids.

Now, Marie Munn, the former president of the Elizabeth school board, will have to serve children in a school lunch program as part of the probationary sentence a Superior Court judge imposed this morning.

Judge Robert Mega spared Munn a term of up to a year in the Union County jail in Elizabeth because, he said, he didn’t see how what would turn out to be a short stint behind bars would serve to punish her. Instead, he sentenced her to three years’ probation and ordered her to perform 300 hours of community service, with the recommendation that it be in a program that would remind her of whom she had cheated over the five years that she lied on applications to get free or subsidized lunches for her two children.

“It’s for those who…are impoverished and need the support of that program. It’s not an entitlement for the defendant to go in and take food essentially from the mouths of these other children that seek that program,” Mega said. “Those children are then deprived of these government benefits and those are the needy ones.”

Munn, 49, was convicted on March 27 of theft by deception and tampering with public records for information for under-reporting the income of her and her husband so that her two children could receive free or subsidized lunches from the National School Lunch Program during that time.

After an investigation by The Star-Ledger exposed abuses in the school lunch program, the state Attorney General’s Office launched its own investigation and charged Munn as well as other members of the city’s board of education and two attorneys associated with the board.

At the time she filled out the applications, from 2006 through 2011, Munn was a human resources administrator for a non-profit organization. Munn claimed she mistakenly omitted the income of her husband, who worked for the New York Times and was the owner and head coach of a semi-pro football team.

Deputy Attorney General Veronica Allende, who argued that Munn should have gotten jail time, said Munn and her husband actually earned quadruple the income eligibility limit to qualify for the free or subsidized lunches.

A tearful Munn, dressed in a dark sweat suit and a purple shirt, apologized.

“I’ve always been the kind of person that tells someone to do what’s right. I was always brought up that way,” she said in a low voice. “I made a bad choice. I did something that was easy for me at the time because of what I was going through.”

Munn’s attorney, Michael Baldassare, said her behavior was an aberration from the lifetime of good works she did for others, including caring for her blind ailing mother and her special-needs daughter. He read from letters of members of her church who described her as “deeply compassionate,” “a very generous person” and “highly respected in her church.”

After Munn was arrested in 2011, she was fired from her job and had been unemployed until shortly before her trial this year. She was fired from that job after her conviction, Baldassare said. Her husband of 17 years also lost his job with the New York Times, he said.

“Miss Munn is financially ruined,” Baldassare said, noting she has no health insurance and her home is in foreclosure.

“There is no reason to find that Miss Munn needs to go to the Union County jail to be deterred from committing another crime,” he argued.

Munn has said she repaid the $2,682.50 in stolen lunch money but Mega required her to verify the program received the money.

Allende said Munn never took responsibility for her actions and instead blamed the error on a misunderstanding of how to fill out the application.

“Ms. Munn, as the payroll manager for her company for how many years, can’t understand how to fill out a simple form?” Allende said, calling Munn a “liar” and a “thief.”

“She has never taken responsibility for stealing from her own school district and she has never taken responsibility for lying on those applications in order to do so,” Allende said.

Mega noted he didn’t impose a more severe sentence because he found she stole the money “as a parent,” and not as a school board official. She was not the school board president when she received the assistance and for the first three of the seven falsified applications she was a member of the school board.

“What she did was wrong,” Mega said. “What she did she did as a parent…to benefit her children to the detriment of others.”

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