Lunch lady in Virginia stole more than $250K from school system, police find

Matthew Diebel | USA TODAY

A lunch lady in a small Virginia city stole more than a quarter-million dollars from the local school system, an investigation by state police has found.

Investigators concluded that Lenora Williams, the longtime director of food services for the Radford school system, had used taxpayer money to make hundreds of unauthorized purchases from an account that she controlled, according to local media reports.

TV station WSLS said the probe found that over about 10 years Williams ran up $173,366.74 in unapproved charges on a debit card from the account, $11,804.84 in unapproved checks, and $76,123.66 missing from cafeteria money deposits. Police said a total of $261,295.24 had been embezzled.

State attorney Chris Rehak said the fraud became apparent after Williams died at age 61 in late 2017. He said debit card receipts revealed purchases Williams made at Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, restaurants, gas stations, resorts and even for her utilities and taxes.

Williams embezzled the money by falsifying audit reports, taking cash from student meal plans and inflating numbers for the free and reduced lunch program, he said.

Rehak, who released the report on Monday, also claimed that the decade-long thievery was preventable.

"On top of negligent record management, lackadaisical security measures, and careless accounting efforts, the more troubling part of the saga may rest in disregarded warnings," Rehak wrote in a statement. "The working environment in 2010 was such that cafeteria staff members felt uncomfortable reporting unusual gifts and expenditures by Williams for fear of losing their jobs. Nevertheless, one brave employee stepped up to blow the whistle.”

After the tip, school administrators met with cafeteria staff and learned that Williams might be mismanaging money, Rehak said. However, officials “dismissed the concern and failed to contact law enforcement.” He said most of the embezzlement appears to have happened after that meeting.

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According to The Roanoke Times, the school system insisted they had no warning of the ongoing embezzlement until after Williams’ death. In a statement, the school administration was “unaware of any reliable and verifiable facts” that pointed to the fraud before late 2017.

The Times also reported that Williams was an institution in the community of about 15,000 people, which is the southwestern part of the state. A school board member praised her cooking in a television news report and she was lauded on the school system’s website as someone who “found great joy in providing food for the school community.”

According to the paper, Williams’ husband was a major in the Radford Police Department.

Schools superintendent Rob Graham told the Times that the discovery of Williams’ fraud was the most awful moment he has faced during his three-year tenure in the position.

“She was a beloved member of the school community … It didn’t seem real. But we had the facts in front of us to show it was real,” Graham said.