Volunteering at your kid’s school is a great way to get involved and help out where you can.

What would you do if you joined the PTA and noticed that something was off about the finances, and you suspected that the president was stealing?

That is what happened to the mom in this story, so she went through every transaction for years and uncovered massive fraud.

The PTA incident

Texas PTAs in the 90s played for keeps. The Frito Pies flowed thick and cheesy, the colors were bright enough to blind you, and everything was done bigger in Texas.

People like to keep busy and participate in community.

There were events to plan, bake sales, fundraisers, and decorations to paint. All back when everyone was still carefree.<

My mom thrived in that environment. She used to say she had “Attention Surplus Disorder” because she loved to throw herself wholeheartedly into everything she did, and the PTA always needed more, so it was a match made in heaven.

Some people take PTAs very seriously.

This particular school PTA was run with an iron fist by a woman we’ll call Rosa. Nothing went through the PTA without her say-so, and her default answer was always no.

She was even known to turn down free donations if she didn’t like where they were coming from.

It’s crazy that they had ‘tryouts’ to get on the PTA.

There was a board of people in this PTA who were the elite. To get on the board, you’d volunteer and explain why you thought you’d be a good fit.

There would be a vote to allow you in, and the board would vote on what position you’d receive from there. Rosa made it clear she didn’t care for my Mom very early on. She’d gone so far as discouraging her from even applying, saying they didn’t need the help and not to bother.

Hey, at least she made it onto the PTA.

The board decided, at Rosa’s suggestion, that my mom should be the treasurer. The position had been open for years; everyone who had tried to take it on had quit shortly after.

Rosa would joke that they just weren’t as dedicated as the rest of them, and they’d move on.

I have a feeling this is going to backfire on Rosa.

In choosing this position, Rosa had tried to bury my Mom out of the way. Rosa didn’t realize that my Mom was a seed and had now been planted.

Mom shows up for her first board meeting, excited about getting into the numbers.

How can she do the job if she can’t see the numbers?

She was promptly told that she couldn’t see the books; only Rosa was allowed to see the books.

Turned out people had been quitting this position because they were never allowed to do anything and didn’t want to deal with the fight. Rosa would buy all of the things; she was responsible for putting in all the numbers into the books, and she would dictate what money was left or how much was owed.

I’m not surprised she didn’t want to cause problems.

Rosa said she felt it would be inconvenient for anyone else to look at it. Mom didn’t want to rock the boat on the very first day, so she just kept her mouth shut while she learned the lay of the land.

The first order of business is to have a small bake sale, so they asked what she thought. Since my mom was always so extra, she suggested, instead of just a bake sale, why not have a whole carnival day event to bring the families together?

Wow, Rosa is already getting outvoted? I bet she didn’t like that.

Rosa was against it; she felt like it would be impossible on their budget. Which, of course it would be impossible, but that never stopped my mom. After some back and forth, Rosa was outvoted.

The impossible carnival day not only happened, but I think it was way bigger than even my mom was expecting. It was a whole spectacle and just sort of took on a life of its own.

I bet the community loved it too.

This was by far the largest event the school had ever seen. They were making money hand over fist. The principal got dunked in a legit dunk tank. She contacted the carnival, and they agreed to help out.

It took up the whole front and sides of the school and filled the gym, and lasted for hours. They even suspended classes for the day, so all the students got to go. Just a truly fantastic day.

She is excited now!

By the time the next PTA meeting rolled around, Mom was ready to begin working on the next thing because now she had tasted blood and liked it. She had come up with a bunch of ways to use the money as a jumping-off point to help the kids at the school.

Rosa immediately put her foot down. “We don’t have the money for any of that.”

They should be rolling in money at this point.

Mom was pretty taken aback. Money being the issue seemed weird after such a large fundraising event, especially compared to what they originally planned to do. “Oh, how much money do we have?”

Rosa laughed condescendingly, “Just because one event did well doesn’t make the money work for the whole year. Some of us have to think on longer timelines.”

How much money do they even need for a PTA?

This is a PTA. There’s not really a way to go into debt. Mom dug in a little further, “I’d be happy to look at the books. Maybe I can help,”

Rosa put up her hand to stop her talking. With the most insincere smile she could manage, Rosa said, “Bless your heart, Melissa, you don’t need to worry about that. I already said no.”

She is basically telling her to shut up.

For those of you not from the South, “Bless your heart” is basically fighting words. You only really pull it out when you want to bring someone down a peg in the nicest way possible.

Rosa changed the subject, but the switch had flipped. There was a skunk in the woodshed, and Mom could smell it now. It wasn’t about being insulted or pride in her achievements; she had thicker skin than that. There was just no way the money was already gone, unless someone was taking it.

Rosa is very suspicious.

My mom starts asking around to people who had been on the board for longer about whether or not anyone had seen the books… Never once.

Rosa’s kids were pretty far apart in age, and she had been doing this for a very long time. By the time her oldest graduated from the school, her youngest would be starting pre-k, so she wasn’t going anywhere for a while either.

I have a feeling I know where the money is going.

Other members told her there would regularly be meetings where things would be suggested, but Rosa would say that they didn’t have the money. Regardless of recent fundraising. Most of these parents assumed everyone was acting in good faith and dropped it.

Mom scheduled a vote to force Rosa to release the books to her, which passed.

Oh, I bet she fought very hard, she knew her scam was going to be exposed.

Rosa fought hard, way too hard. It took weeks for her to obtain them. Rosa kept complaining that having the treasurer look at the books was too inconvenient for her and that she had always handled it this way.

She tried multiple times to call a vote to keep the books that were shot down. Several times she “forgot them at home.” It took a long time, but she eventually gave up the ghost.

So, some of the other parents suspected something wasn’t right.

At this point, a few parents were eagerly awaiting these records because the whole thing seemed off. They figured now that they had the books, they must have her dead to rights.

They took them from her, and I remember they rushed home, sat down at our kitchen table, and started flipping through pages.

Rosa was better at covering her tracks than they expected.

Then reality sets in. My mom expected to find a smoking gun or money missing in mass quantities, but it was mostly just itemized amounts for things she remembered seeing used. Everything looked… normal. The other parents looked at it for a long time, then they started to just shrug their shoulders and leave.

Rosa even acted weird about it for a few weeks after my mom got them, but when nothing happened, things settled back to normal.

Yeah, it didn’t make sense for her to keep everything hidden.

My mom kept saying, if it was all above board, why go to these lengths to stop anyone seeing it? She couldn’t let it go. It took a while but the closer mom looked, the worse it seemed.

Everything was accounted for, but the price of things just didn’t add up. The PTA used the same vendors a lot. I think the major one was Sam’s Club, where they got wholesale prices tax-free because it was a PTA.

Ahh, now things are starting to come together.

In some instances, they were paying more than we paid at home without any of those benefits. Rosa would write down the numbers, but she never kept receipts. They just had the line items to match it up with from the accounts.

There were enough of these pretty suspect numbers and instances of odd behavior that she approached the police about it. She couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong, but it wasn’t right either.

What do you mean they don’t have time? That is their whole job.

She was directed to the financial crimes unit, which at the time was like 3-4 people in a room at the police station. They just didn’t have the resources for this level of scrutiny. They agreed it seemed weird, but they didn’t have the time to go through so many transactions spanning years of time to establish a pattern.

My mom, however, definitely had the time.

She is not letting this go.

She starts calling every store in the book and asking about their prices. If she couldn’t get a receipt, she’d document the steps she took to get to that conclusion.

She’d get them to fax over the current prices as well as any information they had on sales or price fluctuations around that time period.

It is good that she is getting some help.

She and another member of the PTA would do the regular meetings at the school with everyone, then go to our kitchen table and work in secret. Working in the shadows and building a case against Rosa every night. It was months and months worth of effort.

Turns out the scam that Rosa was running was to basically buy 3-4 items; her kids would get 2, and the school would receive 1-2 for whatever the money was going towards.

This is a smart scam, and doing it for years I am sure she got a lot of stuff.

She’d mix them in with normal transactions so that it didn’t look outwardly obvious. Rosa would buy 10 items and then double or triple up on a handful of them. That way, the whole receipt wasn’t inflated by the same amount every time someone found it.

She would do one clean transaction out of every 2-3, so she could point to normal ones she knew would add up if asked. Then she’d just pass on the total for everything without an itemized receipt for the books, thinking no one would do the legwork to find out. She was quite literally stealing candy from children and had been getting away with it for years.

His mom must have went through every transaction for years.

Mom finishes up her report, and the evidence took up a whole 3-ring binder full. Hundreds of documents with everything in writing from independent sources.

They drop this irrefutable evidence on the table, itemized and color-coded in the financial crimes unit. It had graphs and charts, receipts, and monthly and yearly breakdowns for everything that was missing.

Wow, stealing that much from her own kid’s schools.

It didn’t seem like much per transaction, but Rosa had stolen 10’s of thousands of dollars’ worth of goods over several years of being PTA president. It was all there in black and white in the books that only Rosa had previously had access to. She just didn’t think anyone would be able to figure it out.

Jaws dropped, and the room went silent. The other officers around the room also came over to look.

She basically did their entire job for them.

They opened up the binder and started going through it. My mom said they didn’t say anything for over an hour. One of the cops pulled out a calculator, and they would check on it and nod.

Finally, the cop looks up and says, “This is, hands down, the most thorough list of evidence of a crime like this I have ever seen. I get convictions every day using far less. This amount of legwork would have taken us years to go through… You did this all by yourselves?” “Of course.”

A very dedicated and focused mom that is.

Another cop asked if she was an accountant. “No, I’m a mom.”

The cop closed the binder. “I don’t think there is anything left to say; we will take it from here.”

Rosa was put into handcuffs later that day.

I can’t believe Rosa was still doing the scam when she knew other people were looking at the books.

The PTA had just finished an end-of-year charity raffle in which an orange Huffy bike was the big-ticket item. Rosa said it was ~600, it was actually 200, and both her kids had already gotten their prizes.

The other two identical bikes were still in her house when she was arrested. It was open and shut. When faced with such overwhelming evidence, Rosa took the first deal they offered her.

How on Earth did she avoid a felony charge? She stole WAY more than the limit.

She narrowly avoided a felony charge, but she did spend a week or two in jail. The whole thing was kept quiet, and it never hit the news or went to court.

Rosa was told she had to pay back every penny, and she couldn’t be in charge of a financial position or work with children for the next decade. She also lost her job because she worked for a financial institution, which is probably where she figured out how to cover her tracks like that.

She really got off easy compared to what she was doing.

She took her kids out of the school and left in disgrace, never to return again. She honestly deserved far worse than what she got.

My mom was made the president of the PTA shortly after that. When the money was being used correctly, she was able to do some really amazing things.

I bet the school absolutely loved her.

The events were legendary, just like her. She always said she lived her life so that there are those who would thank God that she existed, and she earned it in everything she did.

I still remember how excited the other kids got every time she walked into the room because the PTA was always doing something great.

She really went above and beyond for the school.

After all of us graduated on to other schools, she even stayed on to help the school for another year so they could transition to someone else.

She stepped down as president and took her old spot as treasurer that last year to help pass the baton so it all came full circle.

What an amazing woman, I can’t imagine how much work it took to do all of that.

Read on to see what the people in the comments thought about it.

Yeah, this was a huge red flag.

Mom is absolutely a queen!

She went above and beyond.

Yeah, she sounds like a legend.

She put in some incredible work to protect the PTA.

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.