A former teacher and athletic director at Atlantic High School in Port Orange, Fla., has been fired by the Palm Beach County School Board after a school district investigation found she paid herself more than $4,600 for coaching sports she wasn't involved in.
As reported by The Palm Beach Post, the practice has now led to the termination of two employees in the past year.
Andrea Smith-Thomas, 57, paid herself four times over two years for coaching boys' weightlifting and girls' lacrosse in addition to her duties as head track coach, but she never helped coach the other two teams, the investigation found. Investigators also found she failed to submit proper records of more than $84,000 in football game ticket sales from 2018 to 2020.
Smith-Thomas was arrested in October 2022 and charged with grand theft, official misconduct and running an organized scheme to defraud the school district over the stipends. She has pleaded not guilty to all three charges and declined a pretrial intervention program that might have resulted in the charges being dropped if completed.
Smith-Thomas is just the latest school district employee to be fired and face criminal charges regarding misallocation of athletic stipends meant for employees who take on the extra work of coaching a sport. Cindy Lucia, formerly an athletic director at Olympic Heights High School, was fired by the school board in September 2022 after a school investigation found she pocketed $24,836 in athletic stipends even after a jury cleared her of any wrongdoing.
Related: HS Athletic Director Fired Over $24K Stipends
"This practice is well known to the district, and despite the periodic complaints of the inspector general, the district has not changed those policies and procedures," attorney Mark Wilensky wrote in papers filed in the school investigation. "There are no clear district guidelines which govern how those supplements are to be paid."
Wilensky added that Lucia's criminal case revealed it is "commonplace for employees to receive supplements listed for sports that they did not actually coach in compensation for providing services that assist athletic teams," such as lining fields for games or doing laundry for a team.
Related: No Jail Time for Another Former Palm Beach AD Who Siphoned Coaching Stipends
Smith-Thomas was fired by the school board on Sept. 13, although she's appealed the decision.
