Court case’s slow pace frustrates school parents
Incident regarding Discovery’s missing funds dates to 2017
Lisa Gonzalez took over as president of Discovery Charter School’s Parent Advisory Council in fall 2017.
The first thing the other officers told her is that they needed to talk because they believed Lisa Apato, the council’s former president, allegedly had been stealing money.
Gonzalez first thought it was a few hundred dollars but an internal audit for the council, which provides fundraising for the Porter school at 800 Canonie Drive and which has a separate budget, revealed almost $60,000 was missing from the council’s account, she said.
Council parents gathered together the audit and other documents and went to the Porter Police Department in November 2017. Apato, 49, of the 200 block of Spectacle Drive in Valparaiso, was charged almost two years later, in October 2019, with theft, a level 5 felony.
Apato, who has pleaded not guilty, was released from Porter County Jail in the days after her arrest on $2,000 bond.
The slow pace of the case angers Gonzalez.
“It’s crazy. It’s frustrating,” she
said.
Both Apato’s attorney, Robert Harper, and the Lake County Prosecutor’s Office, which was appointed as special prosecutor in the case because Porter County Prosecutor Gary Germann had prior contact with Apato about the case when he was in private practice, said the delays are related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which all but shut down the courts just months after Apato was charged.
“We asked for a trial date and as you know, they couldn’t start setting trial dates since the first of March,” Harper said. “Ninetenths of the time taken up by this case has been taken up by COVID.”
The case, he said, has been continued repeatedly because of the pandemic, adding all court cases slowed unless defendants submitted plea agreements, and that’s not the way Apato’s case has gone.
“It’s going to be set for trial. I don’t know of anything unusual that happened,” he said.
Lake County Deputy Prosecutor Daniel Burke was assigned to the case.
Bradley Carter, spokesman for that office, said the delays were mostly due to COVID19. Trials in Lake County are just starting up again, Carter added, and Burke is prosecuting a murder case.
Gonzalez said at one point, there was talk of a plea agreement but that never came to fruition. Neither has the setting of a trial date.
“That’s part of the frustration. We want a date even if she decides to plea,” Gonzalez said.
According to online court records, a status hearing to set a trial date is scheduled for 10 a.m. May 24 before Porter Superior Court Judge Michael Fish.
Apato, according to charging documents, used a council-issued debit card and took cash from school fundraisers and reimbursements totaling $57,947.77.
The thefts occurred between Dec. 1, 2015, and Aug. 31, 2017, when Apato was council president. The missing funds were discovered after Apato was no longer president and the council’s treasurer was able to gain full access to financial records, documents said.
When the treasurer took office in July 2016, “she began asking PAC President Lisa Apato about accessing PAC financial records; Apato, however, would always come up with an excuse as to why the records were unavailable,” documents state.
Once the treasurer had access to those records, “It soon became clear that Apato was not depositing cash received from the fundraisers into PAC’s bank account. Although the money paid by bank card went into the PAC bank account and the money paid by check was deposited into the PAC bank account, Apato would then remove this money from the PAC account by making a series of withdrawals.”
Apato removed funds in an assortment of ways, documents state, including writing checks on the council’s account payable to herself; making cash withdrawals with the council-issued debit card; and using the debit card for personal items and expenses.
Additionally, court records state, Apato kept reimbursement funds from the school board to the council on a number of occasions, as well as keeping cash raised at school fundraisers.