A longtime cafeteria manager at an Atlanta area high school is accused of stealing hundreds of dollars every day from the lunch room she ran for more than two decades.
Police say Brenda Watts, who had worked at North Springs High School since 1987, may have pocketed more than a million dollars over the last 15 years. The scheme wasn’t exactly sophisticated: She simply operated the cafeteria’s cash-only a la carte line and stuffed money into her pockets before the transactions could be recorded.
So, how much did she steal in total? Here comes the math:
The police charge that Watts stole $500 a day. That’s $2,500 a week, which is a staggering $90,000 in a school year.
Over 15 years, that would be $1,350,000.
You can buy a sh*tload of hoagies and grinders for that kind of money. Or you could just live like the finest cafeteria worker in all of Lunch Lady Land:
According to the arrest warrants, Watts lives in a five-bedroom, 5,400 square-foot home in south DeKalb County.
No one answered the door when [a reporter] stopped at the home for comment on this story. Moments later, a late model Mercedes pulled out of the garage and drove away from the home.
Watts retired last June, immediately after Atlanta’s WSB-TV Channel 2 Action News broke the story that Fulton County school officials were investigating the cash-only cafeteria line.
WSB-TV & Mail Online; Image via Fulton Campus PD/REX