CPS assistant principal stole $273K from after-school program, prosecutors say

The assistant principal first transferred money, thousands of dollars at a time, from her school’s PayPal account to a personal bank account.

Then, she faked checks to many of her own family members.

That’s all according to Cook County prosecutors who say she made off with more than a quarter of a million dollars in money parents paid for an after-school program at Mark T. Skinner West Elementary School.

A Cook County grand jury filed a 17-count criminal indictment against Tracey Canty-Robinson, who spent nearly 12 years as second in command at the selective-enrollment school on the Near West Side, before she resigned amid an investigation.

Details of the alleged embezzlement and criminal charges were laid out in an annual report CPS Inspector General Will Fletcher released this week. His office first began investigating the allegations in 2019.

The IG’s report did not name Canty-Robinson or the school — but the watchdog did say that what set the stage for the scandal was “severe financial mismanagement and inattention by the school’s other administrators.”

Public records show Canty-Robinson was charged in July, about three years after her March 2020 departure from Skinner West. Through her attorney, she has denied any wrongdoing.

CPS’ top watchdog first discovered the alleged scheme a few months before Canty-Robinson’s resignation when state officials flagged a PayPal account in the name of the school that had been sitting dormant.

Investigators found Canty-Robinson had created the account and several others to collect parent fees for the school’s after-school STAR program, the inspector general’s office said. Between 2011 and 2019, parents sent a total of $1 million into the accounts made and controlled by Canty-Robinson, the IG report said.

The STAR program is run by Skinner teachers and staff for several hours a day after dismissal, and this year it costs parents $2,200. The school’s website now requires payment through EPay, an online payment portal used by schools systemwide. CPS officials didn’t say whether the district has changed its payment requirements since this investigation.

The IG’s office found that since 2015 at least $175,000 was transferred from those PayPal accounts to a bank account listed as belonging to the “Board of Education City of Chicago” — but actually was a personal account registered to Canty-Robinson, the IG said. 

Investigators also found Canty-Robinson had allegedly written 12 forged or otherwise fraudulent checks to family members, including her daughters, totaling more than $21,000. The IG later found another $77,000 had been transferred to her accounts, the report said.

“Not only did no one at the school notice that $200,000 was missing from the school, but the program was still somehow able to run,” Fletcher said in an interview. “So that signals concerns about whether or not the district is appropriately charging parents for these types of programs.

“The school where the indictment came out of is a relatively affluent part of the city, and I think that the school thought that it could charge whatever it wanted,” Fletcher said.

In all, prosecutors accused the former assistant principal of stealing $273,364 in school funds. What allowed the scheme to go on for so many years, was “severe financial mismanagement and inattention by the school’s other administrators,” Fletcher’s office said.

“The investigation showed that the school did not follow basic internal controls procedures in that they gave the assistant principal near-total control over the school’s receipt and processing of electronic payments and failed to maintain adequate records of receipts and expenditures,” the report read. “One of the reasons that the assistant principal had so much autonomy was that the other administration members did not understand how the electronic accounts worked.”

Fletcher also recommended discipline for Skinner’s principal, but she retired before the Board of Education took any action. She has not been charged with any wrongdoing so she is not being named. Other administrators were to receive training, district officials said. 

The IG’s office referred the case to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, which presented it to a grand jury last summer. A 17-count indictment charged Canty-Robinson with theft of over $100,000 from a school, forgery and committing a continuing financial crimes enterprise.

Canty-Robinson, who pleaded not guilty, couldn’t be reached for comment. Her attorney, Andre Grant, said, “We look forward to addressing this matter in court.” Her case is still pending at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.

A CPS spokeswoman said the district accepted the assistant principal’s resignation in March 2020 from her $128,687-a-year position after the inspector general’s office asked to interview her. In July 2021, schools officials permanently banned her from ever working for CPS after receiving a copy of the IG’s report.

Public records show Canty-Robinson had faced financial difficulties for years.

By the time prosecutors say she started this alleged scheme in 2015, her house was facing foreclosure, records show. Since then, the city has sued her for other unpaid debts.