WFAA-TV

Board of Control minutes from 10 schools appeared to have exact duplicate signatures from week to week.

DALLAS - While federal agents continue to investigate abuses of the Dallas Independent School District credit card, new questions have surfaced about the district's finances.

The recent inquiries question how millions of student activity funds were accounted for and spent.

Over the past two months, News 8 poured over thousands of records trying to determine if $15 million in student activity funds were being appropriately spent, which was made difficult by a lack of cooperation by top district officials.

Some of the uncovered evidence revealed that some records may have been falsified, which is a potential violation of state law.

A Friday night football game is not only fun for the students who play and attend, but it also helps raise money for the school's activity fund. Money raised for the fund helps pay for field trips, and at times, books and materials.

Three years ago, two DISD office workers were indicted for misusing the funds and three principals were removed from their campuses for not keeping watch.

To make sure it didn't happen again, tough new accounting procedures were put in place that included a panel of teachers at each school that are led by their principal called a Board of Control. Their charge is to account for every dollar of student activity fees at meetings that are supposed to be held at the schools every week.

But just two years after the new procedures were put into place, a PTA mom at Rosemont Elementary, Peggy Victor, found that the student activity fund records at her school were in disarray.

"They were really a mess, and they didn't make much sense," Victor said.

Victor said she asked to see the minutes of the weekly Board of Control meetings, but school officials took weeks to find them.

"And we found out after we got the records that the teachers had not attended these meetings, and that right before I collected these records, they had gone around to the staff and told them they had to sign these attendance sheets as if they had been at these meetings all year long," she said.

Victor took her complaint to DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, whom she said has yet to take action.

"I went to Superintendent Hinojosa and gave it to him on a silver platter," she said.

Hinojosa declined requests for an interview, which led to the News 8 investigation.

Of the 168 schools that sent copies of their records, News 8 classified 83 as satisfactory. But 85 schools, more than half of the schools that turned in records, were found to be inadequate or substantially out of compliance with district policies.

Also, Board of Control minutes from 10 schools appeared to have exact duplicate signatures from week to week.

News 8 invited handwriting expert Don Leyhew to conduct an analysis.

"The signatures are identical on both," he said he found in school after school.

While News 8 tried to talk to the principals at the 10 schools, top DISD officials told them not to talk.

However, a former South Oak Cliff High School counselor, Frank Hammond, whose signatures were among those examined, discussed the findings.

"They are the same signatures, but it seems like they've just been recopied over and over and over and over again," he said.

Hammond said the meetings never took place.

"We never met at all," he said. "We never met at all, except for that meeting at the beginning of the year in August. But all these other dates, ahh no."

David Rastellini, DISD's associate superintendent of finance, also responded to the findings.

"I find it hard to believe, but it's unacceptable to us," he said. "It's unacceptable to this administration quite frankly."

Aside from the possible forged documents, he said he's disturbed at the lax compliance with district policy.

"Well, I guess the easy answer is yes," he said when asked if the News 8 findings should have been something caught by internal audit and by the accounting devices that were employed by the district.

"Well, it's just that no one is watching what's going on," Victor said. "We have this Board of Control, like checks and balances, to keep things clean in the office and nobody's watching what's going on."

Tampering with government records is a criminal offense.

E-mail bshipp@wfaa.com