Former Atlantic High athletic director fired over paying herself $5K in coaching stipends
A former teacher and athletic director at Atlantic High School was fired by the Palm Beach County School Board last month after a school district investigation found she paid herself more than $4,600 for coaching sports she wasn't involved in — a practice many considered to be common that 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 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.
More: Former Atlantic High School athletic director arrested following investigation
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.
Smith-Thomas' attorney, like Lucia's, highlighted the longstanding problems with that the school district has allowed coaching stipends to be used to reward employees for extra work they do not related to the teams.
"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.
Smith-Thomas was fired by the school board on Sept. 13, although she's appealed the decision. Wilensky said he could not comment on the appeal.
From 2022: Former Atlantic High School athletic director arrested following investigation
Andrea Smith-Thomas was highly rated in her evaluations for 30 years
Smith-Thomas started working for the school .district in 1989 when she was hired as a math teacher at Loggers Run Middle School. She moved to Crestwood Middle in Royal Palm Beach in 1990 and then became a math teacher at Atlantic High in 1996.
She became the athletic director at the school and stopped teaching in 2018.
Smith-Thomas was highly rated for more than 30 years while she was teaching. In 2021, though, Atlantic High was fined $20,000 by the Florida High School Athletic Association for allowing ineligible students to play football during a May scrimmage. Smith-Thomas did not stop the eight players from taking the field on her watch, and the school was placed on a monthlong administrative probation.
Smith-Thomas was issued a written warning by then-principal Sandra Edwards for the incident.
At the time of the eligibility scandal, Smith-Thomas was also under investigation over the misuse of athletic stipends, failing to record ticket sales and several other allegations of financial misconduct at Atlantic. Those allegations included:
Paying her son, a school employee at the time, when he wasn't working.
Allowing a volunteer to coach a sport without performing the proper background security check.
Requiring an employee to use their own money to pay a bus driver to take kids to a sporting event.
Using a stipend designated for women's sports to pay herself to coach a men's sports team.
An investigation by the school district's office of professional standards and the inspector general substantiated only the allegations involving athletic stipends and ticket and parking sales, the records show.
During the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years, Smith-Thomas paid herself $2,904 total for working as an assistant coach for Atlantic's boys weightlifting team and $1,705 total for being an assistant coach for girls lacrosse. Those stipends were in addition to $7,050 she received for being head coach of the girls track team.
But the weightlifting and lacrosse teams already had coaches: one for boys weightlifting and two for girls lacrosse.
All three coaches said Smith-Thomas never worked as an assistant coach for their teams and, in fact, their teams didn't have assistant coaches.
But using stipends at an athletic director's discretion is a practice that was asserted as commonplace even by a school police investigator who interviewed Tara Dellegrotti, Atlantic's principal during part of Smith-Thomas' tenure.
The unnamed investigator "explained to Dellegrotti that it is not uncommon for a staff member to receive a coaching supplement for performing a duty for a team, outside their normal responsibilities, even if it is not coaching. The example given was someone marking a field for a game or washing towels for a team."
Dellegrotti said that did not happen at Atlantic High while she was there, the police report says. Dellegrotti, who was removed from being Atlantic's principal in 2021, after students accused her of creating a "culture of systemic and blatant racism on campus," said she wasn't aware of extra athletic stipends going to Smith-Thomas.
But Smith-Thomas' attorney Wilensky said the buck should have stopped with Dellegrotti. To say she was not aware of the stipends or issues with football ticket sales "excuses and ignores" the responsibility of school administrators to approve the payments, he said.
Atlantic AD made untimely deposits of parking and football game ticket money, investigators found
Investigators also found that Smith-Thomas didn't complete paperwork required of schools when they collect more than $1,000 in ticket sales for an on-campus event.
Atlantic treasurer Mary Stacey said that Smith-Thomas' deposits during the 2019-20 and the 2020-21 school years were "always missing the documentation" and that she repeatedly reminded the athletic director to submit the paperwork. Deposits to the school's ticket and parking bank accounts that should have been made within a few days of home football games also were late or oddly timed, investigators found.
Smith-Thomas made 10 deposits totaling $22,717 soon after the home football game dates in 2018, but another nine were not. She made one deposit before the first football game and at least four during a month without any home football games. Those five deposits totaled $20,167.
In 2019, Smith-Thomas made 12 deposits totaling $28,152 near the dates of home football games and another five deposits, totaling $13,557, that were not.
In addition, Smith-Thomas submitted the required documentation on just four of the 25 payments. Not all of the deposits she made required documentation.
The school moved to an online ticketing platform in 2020, according to the investigative records. That system no longer requires the athletic director to handle cash.
Smith-Thomas ultimately worked as Atlantic's athletic director for just three years. In August 2021, she moved to Village Academy to work as a teacher again.
Katherine Kokal is a journalist covering education at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at kkokal@pbpost.com. Help support our work, subscribe today!
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Ex-Atlantic High athletic director fired over taking $5K in stipends
