Former Lincoln-Way Central secretary pleads guilty to stealing from booster club

Judge orders Manhattan woman to pay over $44,800 in restitution

A former athletic secretary for Lincoln-Way Central High School has pleaded guilty to stealing more than $44,800 from the school’s athletic booster club.

On Wednesday, Judge Carmen Goodman sentenced Melissa McGrath, 54, of Manhattan to two years of second chance probation after McGrath pleaded guilty to felony theft.

Ten other counts of theft, two counts of identity theft and two counts of forgery were dropped in the case, according to Will County State’s Attorney spokeswoman Carole Cheney.

Goodman ordered McGrath to pay about $44,854 in restitution.

The restitution will be paid by the $20,000 McGrath posted for her release from jail, as well as a $24,854 cashier’s check that McGrath made out to the Will County Circuit Clerk’s office, court records show.

McGrath was investigated by the Will County Sheriff’s Office.

The Lincoln-Way District 210 offices are seen Thursday at Lincoln-Way Central High School in New Lenox.

On Aug. 6, 2019, detectives were called to Lincoln-Way Central High School in New Lenox and spoke with administrators regarding “suspicious financial transgressions” discovered on the Lincoln-Way Athletic Booster Club accounting books, according to the Will County Sheriff’s Office.

Administrators told the sheriff’s office they believed that McGrath ran two sets of books to siphon money from the boosters club, police said.

Detectives found more than $30,000 vanished between August 2017 and April 2019, police said, and “McGrath created her own booster account spreadsheet that she would present to the athletic boosters and a second official accounting report that she would submit to the school district.”

Detectives also determined that several submitted reports contained forged signatures of athletic club board members, police said.

McGrath had resigned as Lincoln-Way Central’s athletic secretary on June 24, 2019.

In 2019, Lincoln-Way Superintendent Scott Tingley said there were discrepancies discovered in the high school’s athletic booster account as district officials were undergoing a budget-building process.

“As we were going line by line and analyzing, we found discrepancies. We found certain accounts were low,” Tingley said.

Tingley said the accounting firm Sikich, which is the district’s independent inspector general, conducted an internal investigation of the accounts earlier in the summer that then led to the resignation of an employee in the high school’s athletic department.

In 2017, the Lincoln-Way school board approved employing an inspector general to investigate complaints of waste and fraud after auditors found the district lacked the ability to detect and prevent it.