District's Ex-Charter Schools Chief Admits Fraud

Belton was placed on administrative leave in June 2006, two days after investigators searched her home and office. The searches came after an employee tipped authorities off to a possible misuse of funds. News that Belton was under investigation rocked the school system, and she was later fired.

Her duties had included monitoring charter schools' student achievement and legal compliance under the No Child Left Behind law. A federal program provided the city with $1.9 million in the 2003-04 school year and $850,000 in 2004-05 to help with that effort, and Belton soon began tapping into the money for her benefit, prosecutors said.

She bypassed the city's competitive bidding process to select contractors to monitor the charter schools, according to D.C. and federal education investigators. First, she created a bid-evaluation panel, court papers say, made up of Pearl Sandifer, who was Belton's maid of honor; Lynn Long, who later opened the Washington Academy Public Charter School; and Linda Butler, then director of reading at D.C. Head Start. The panel never met, prosecutors said. Butler has said she does not recall such a panel.

Yet Belton submitted papers showing that the panel favored Equal Access Inc., a company created a few months earlier by one of Belton's longtime friends, Brenda Williams, and a former tenant at Belton's home, Nadine Evans.

The school system paid the company $65,000 for the 2002-03 school year -- the firm's first contract and the first time it made any money. At the end of that school year, board member Peggy Cooper Cafritz raised a red flag, according to sources and records, complaining about the quality of the company's reports.

Cooper Cafritz then urged Belton to seek additional "assistance" for the next year's reports from Sheila Handy, a veteran schools monitor.

Belton arranged for Handy and another veteran, Sandra Fitzgerald, to act as subcontractors to do some of the work for the 2003-04 school year; at the same time, she told Evans and Williams that their firm was no longer the monitor. The next school year, in 2004-05, Belton began the scam, fraudulently using the employer number for Equal Access Inc. to create a dummy company with a similar name, Equal Access in Education.

Even though Fitzgerald was doing the actual monitoring, Belton sent $203,000 in further monitoring payments to the dummy company -- which was based at her daughter's home.

School officials missed a chance to discover a problem, prosecutors' court filings show. The Board of Education was supposed to approve the use of Equal Access Inc. every year; tougher oversight could have revealed the dummy company.

Belton also authorized no-bid city school contracts to longtime friends Sandifer; Linda Scope; Wanda Gordon; Chonya Davis-Johnson, a former D.C. schools employee; and Verna Robinson, a cousin. Prosecutors said that the contracting was improper but added that it is unclear whether any work was done.

Prosecutors said Belton received about $180,000 in illegal payments -- from some of the same friends, including Williams, Evans, Sandifer and Scope. Some of the checks were directed to Belton companies BHX Consulting and the TAO Group as well as to Belton's daughter, Lindsey Holmes.