A former bookkeeper at Stephenson High School in Stone Mountain agreed to a 10-year sentence after being convicted of using a school credit card to buy more than $12,000 in products for her personal use.
Shirlene Benton pleaded guilty Thursday to theft by taking and will have to serve six months of the sentence in jail with the remainder spent on probation.
“This money is meant for activities that go to our children that enrich their lives,” DeKalb County District Attorney Robert James said. “Every time somebody uses money that’s meant for our children to enrich themselves with a plasma television, it makes me angry.”
In addition to jail time and probation, Benton, 46, also must pay the school back, and is prohibited from working with money ever again.
“She violated a trust,” James said. “When they have you acting as a bookkeeper, your job is to manage the money and mange the finances and she violated that. And she should not be able to do that again.”
The Loganville woman was accused of buying a Blu-Ray DVD player, a 50-inch plasma TV, an iPod and more with school funds, according to court officials.
Benton has also been accused of taking in checks meant for sponsored school events, organizations or activities to offset cash that she had fraudulently spent.
“You have a lot of cash moving through schools,” James pointed out. “If you have one person that is receiving that cash, it is difficult to determine what was given and was done with it.”
She was indicted in April on financial transaction card fraud, forgery and theft-by-taking charges and arrested in May. According to the indictment, Benton took $12,446.76 worth of high school property.
The thefts occurred sometime between Sept. 8, 2009 and Feb. 17, 2010. She was fired on Feb. 22, 2010, after an audit uncovered the purchases.
Benton was accused of forging Principal Brian Bolden’s name three times in connection with purchases made in January 2010: a plasma TV, a TV stand, an Apple iPod dock and a DVD player.
Benton, who was released from the DeKalb County jail on $12,000 bond, must return to on Dec. 4.
Benton is the second bookkeeper from a DeKalb school to get busted on theft charges in less than a month. In October, Chyrokessia Rucks was sentenced to 15 years probation for stealing $23,000 from Stone Mountain High School.
Staff writer Ernie Suggs contributed to this report
About the Author
