Grand Haven Area Public School (GHAPS) district leadership lost the trust of the community with the Wheeler embezzlement. The community is not happy with the district’s transparency regarding the disappearance of over $1 million. This was made extremely clear by residents who responded to the post-election bond survey conducted by King Media.
According to GHAPS Superintendent Scott Grimes at the July 17, 2023, Board of Education (BOE) meeting, “We are still trying to recover from the embezzlement, which was nearing, two years ago. It’s about a year and a half; trying to do everything we can to work our way through that.”
What neither Grimes, nor the school board has disclosed is that the district seems to be working with poorly kept financial records.
Grand Haven Area Public Schools (GHAPS) is currently considering updating their accounting software to help them track funds. GHAPS currently is not using professional accounting software to track spending for grants, special education, operations, and music accounts. Rather, they are relying heavily on spreadsheets and doing manual accounting which involves hand entering the numbers into a report to provide to the State Department of Education.
For example, according to GHAPS Director of Finance Michael MacDonald, the Special Education accounting code is 2020. Every entry in the general ledger having to do with special education should get the code 2020. That way, to see entries for special education, a report is run for the code 2020. However, despite having a dedicated accounting code, GHAPS has not been coding the special education entries. Each year when GHAPS completes required State of Michigan reports, they first have to print out all of the general ledger status reports, and then manually sift through over 1000 pages in search of special education items. Once identified, the special education items are manually entered into another spreadsheet. That spreadsheet data is then used to complete the report.
As you can imagine, the manual process makes it difficult to determine if everything balances. The procedures and systems currently being used to track funding and ensure money is being spent correctly seem to be greatly lacking. This is likely why Wheeler was able to steal money for so long.
Due to these lax procedures, it is not unreasonable to wonder if there is additional unaccounted money.
It appears as if the school district management may have been neglectful and may now be attempting to cover up decades of poor financial tracking in their accounting procedures by refinancing existing bonds with new bonds proposed to the taxpayers in November 2023, so the reporting can be delayed.
One final resident comment from the King Media survey.