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How thousands of dollars went missing, who took it, and why parents were kept in the dark has been revealed through documents obtained by the Citizen and through interviews with members of the school’s parent council.

In September 2014, Dave Wright went to the bank to determine how much money was in the Leslie Park Public School parent council’s bank account, which was used to keep the proceeds of fundraisers such as pizza days, cake walks and movie nights.

Wright, the school’s newly elected parent council treasurer, was checking to see how much money was left in the account from the year before. It was one of his first acts as treasurer — a role he’d taken over from Corinne Reynolds who had left the school at the end of the previous academic year.

The numbers didn’t make sense to Wright. He said hefelt butterflies in his stomach.

The account — which had a balance of $10,616.81 in January 2011,the last time a financial report had been prepared by the council — was overdrawn by $121.94. More than $6,500 from school council fundraisers since that time also wasn’t accounted for.

The money had vanished.

“I thought ‘I’m just going to report this and the police are going to come in, the cop cars are going to pull up on the lawn, and this is what is going to happen,'” Wright told the Citizen. “I went immediately to the principal and I went into his office and closed the door and said ‘It’s bad.'”

After Wright toldthe principal, the principal contacted the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. The board’s advice was for thecouncil to make an official complaint to police, which they did.