In June of 2020, South Bend voters approved an eight-year property tax referendum authorizing the South Bend Community School Corporation to collect $166.4 million in operating funds. The ballot resolution listed four approved purposes. Curriculum maintenance and expansion. Career pathways. Teacher compensation. Counselors and social workers.
Karen White
Karen White, an at-large member of the South Bend Common Council and a former school board president, served as co-chair of the campaign that asked voters to approve the referendum. White also co-authored a South Bend Tribune Viewpoint making the case for the ballot measure. She appeared in the campaign videos. Her photograph went up on the campaign website under the heading “Why We’re Voting Yes.”
The voters trusted her. The referendum passed. Five years later, the Indiana State Board of Accounts filed its 65-page Supplemental Compliance Report on the district’s 2022-2023 fiscal year. The auditors identified $767,585 in questioned costs across the district’s spending. They named a sitting member of the school board and a paid school district intern in two conflict-of-interest findings that, by the audit’s own description, fit the elements of an Indiana felony statute. They forwarded the file to the Indiana Attorney General and the St. Joseph County Prosecutor’s office.
On April 27, 2022, two years after the referendum passed, the school district paid Karen White $25,000. The check was made out to her personally, not to Reaching Higher Grounds, the Indiana nonprofit she serves as registered agent. The agreement that authorized the payment was a one-page general statement signed by Kareemah Fowler, the then assistant superintendent of business and finance. The State Board of Accounts, in its findings, noted that it “is not aware of any policy authorizing Fowler, as the Assistant Superintendent of Schools, to negotiate and enter into contracts or purchase services for the School Board.” The school board never approved the payment.
A year later, on April 6, 2023, the school district paid White another $25,000. Same one-page document. The date had been written in by hand. The school board approved the docket containing the claim only after the check had cleared the bank.
Reaching Higher Grounds is incorporated as an Indiana nonprofit. The state expects payment for services to a nonprofit to go to the nonprofit. Both checks went to White personally.
I reported in January, based on records we received from our SBCSC FOIA request, that the district paid White or Reaching Higher Grounds $99,020 between July 2018 and May 2024. The district has confirmed in writing, through a public records determination letter dated January 8, 2026, that no contracts can be located for any of the payments to White.
Lynn Coleman
Lynn Coleman is the founder of an organization called Let’s Turn It Around. He appeared on the 2020 Vote Yes campaign website alongside White, under the same heading. He also published a South Bend Tribune Viewpoint making his case for the referendum.
The school district paid Let’s Turn It Around $14,000 in federal pandemic relief funds across two installments. Eight thousand dollars in September 2022. Six thousand dollars on April 6, 2023, the same day one of White’s $25,000 checks cleared. The auditors found no documented evidence that the original Memorandum of Understanding had been reviewed or approved by the superintendent of schools, as the district’s contract policy required.
Gladys Muhammad
Gladys Muhammad has been a fixture of South Bend Democratic politics for decades. She was also the secretary of the St. Joseph County Democratic Party. The City of South Bend’s Department of Community Investment has retained her as an independent contractor in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 each contract authorizing payments of up to $60,000 a year for community engagement and outreach. Across those five years, the city authorized cumulative payments of up to $300,000.
The school district also paid Muhammad $12,000 on July 8, 2022. The accounting system recorded the payment as “Consult/Cares/GFP/Henry.” The auditors identified it as one of six questionable payments totaling $210,445 issued before the school board had approved the underlying claims. The district paid Muhammad earlier amounts as well. Thirteen thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars on February 2, 2021. Three thousand dollars on March 4, 2021. The district was unable to produce supporting invoices.
Brown Intermediate
The school district decided in 2023 to convert Brown Intermediate School, which had been closed in 2018, into the corporation’s new administrative offices. At the May 15, 2023 board meeting, the project budget was communicated as $2.8 million, with soft costs projected to take the total up to $3.5 million. According to a financial analysis the district’s finance team presented to the board in June of 2025, the renovation ultimately cost approximately $7.5 million, with general maintenance costs bringing the total to $8.4 million. The analysis identified the project as approximately $4.7 million over budget.
Chekesha Donaldson/Alignment Ventures
Painting at Brown Intermediate began on January 10, 2023. There was no contract for the work. There was no bid. The school district could not produce a record of who was on the job. Forty-five days later, on February 24, 2023, a limited liability company called Alignment Ventures filed Articles of Organization with the Indiana Secretary of State. The Articles list one person, Chekesha Donaldson, as the sole governing person. The principal office is a P.O. Box. The contact email is a Gmail address. Donaldson, at the time, was three weeks into a paid office internship at the school district. Her LinkedIn profile lists a two-decade career in administrative and clerical work. Permit secretary for the City of South Bend’s Building Department for nearly nine years. Medical receptionist. Customer service representative at Liberty Mutual Insurance. Administrative assistant at the South Bend Community School Corporation from 2018 to 2020. Her listed work history does not include painting, construction, or facilities work.
The school district paid Alignment Ventures $271,568 across twenty checks while Donaldson was an employee. By September 2024, the cumulative total had reached $506,534. The district could produce no contract for any of the payments, no bid form, no financial statements, no bid bond, no performance bond, no non-collusion affidavit, and no vendor evaluation. The auditors found invoices dated before the corresponding purchase orders had been entered into the district’s accounting system. For Alignment Ventures specifically, six checks were processed by the bank before the dates printed on the checks. Three of the company’s invoices carried service completion dates from before the LLC legally existed.
Donaldson did not file a conflict-of-interest disclosure with the State Board of Accounts or the Clerk of the St. Joseph County Circuit Court, as Indiana law requires from a public servant who has a financial interest in a contract with the entity that employs her. Indiana law makes that conduct a Level 6 felony.
Two other contractors were paid for work on the Brown renovation without contracts, bids, or vendor evaluations. Coach Ready Mix received $74,778 to remove lockers, whiteboards, shelving, and other debris. M. Haywood received $40,260 for mobilization services moving items from the existing administration building to Brown.
Leslie Wesley
The audit’s second conflict-of-interest finding involves Leslie Wesley. Wesley served on the school board from 2017 through 2024. She is also the incorporator and chief executive officer of a nonprofit called the Indiana Parenting Institute of St. Joseph County. The school district paid the institute $1,177,903 over the school years that overlapped with her tenure on the board, in payments tied to two grant-funded programs called Pathways 2 Success and Gear Up South Bend. Wesley filed conflict-of-interest disclosures with the school board itself in 2021, 2022, and 2023. She did not file the annual disclosures Indiana law requires with the State Board of Accounts or with the Clerk of the Circuit Court for St. Joseph County for any of the four years between 2021 and 2024.
Credit Cards & Miscellaneous Spending
The school district spent $635,171 on credit card transactions during the audit period. The auditors tested $248,979 of that. Seventy-two percent of the transactions reviewed lacked sufficient supporting documentation. The district could not produce a credit card log because it had not kept one. Cards were retained continuously by select administrators in violation of the district’s own P-Card agreement, which required cards to be signed out per transaction. The school board approved monthly payments to the credit card issuer without reviewing the underlying charges.
The charges included $55,206 in unsupported lodging, $10,887 in airfare with seat upgrades and excess baggage, a $1,200 luxury ride that included a $200 tip, catered meals with no record of who ate them, a $2,635 catering bill at a DoubleTree charged to the Operation fund, and a $220 floral order charged to the Education fund.
Milton Lee
On July 27, 2022, Milton Lee, the district’s director of communications and athletics, who is also married to SBCSC board member Kate Lee, used a school credit card to buy a $100 cash bar charge, three mixed drinks, and eleven import or craft beers. He charged it to ESSER III, the federal pandemic relief program. Federal regulations governing ESSER funds prohibit alcohol purchases. District Policy 6550 prohibits the purchase of alcohol with public funds.
Conference Spending
Conferences accounted for the rest. Twenty-two employees attended the Building Expertise Educators Conference at Walt Disney Resort in June 2023. The district spent $27,896.85. There were no travel requisitions on file. One employee’s airfare was paid before her registration was confirmed. Fifteen of twenty-two staff stays had no room receipts. Twelve employees attended the Innovative School Summit at Caesars Palace in July 2022. The auditors found $615.33 in unjustified room upgrades and early check-in. Four employees attended an Art School Network Conference at the Golden Nugget in October 2022. The district paid $3,143.45. There were no travel requisitions, one attendee booked a different airline at extra cost, and the only conference materials the auditors could find was a Golden Nugget promotional flyer.
The district could not produce contracts for six of nine administrators reviewed. None of fourteen hourly employees tested had a time sheet on file. One was paid for seventy-five hours that did not appear on the supervisor’s attendance report. The federal grant schedule understated the school breakfast program by $2,979,484 and the school lunch program by $7,948,337. A $2,390,000 bond series was not reported. A $3,155,000 bond series was reported twice. The payroll account was not reconciled in June of 2023 and remained unreconciled for over two years until July 2025. A separate bank account for electronic vendor payments had never been reconciled in the district’s history.
The ballot resolution voters approved in June 2020 listed four purposes for the operating referendum. Curriculum. Career pathways. Teacher compensation. Counselors and social workers. The South Bend Tribune Viewpoint White co-authored urged voters to support reading specialists, college counselors, social workers in every school, increased teacher pay, and subject-certified teachers. That was the pitch.
The audit shows what the district spent some of the money on. County ditch fees, including a delinquent tax and a delinquent penalty. A Chevrolet Equinox substituted for a service plow truck after backorder delays. Custodial services. Vehicle repairs. Utilities. Staff parking fees. Bottled water for teacher lounges. Payroll for a building and grounds employee. None of those items appear on the ballot resolution voters approved.
SBCSC’s Response
The district’s chief financial officer, Ahnaf Tahmid, defends the practice in his official response to the audit. He notes that 86 percent of the district’s roughly 1,000 teachers are paid from the Education Fund, that the referendum fund is capped at $30 million annually, and that the operating referendum fund therefore “provided the strategic flexibility to cover operational costs beyond our General Operations Fund.” He cites Indiana Code 20-40-3-5, which permits the fund to be used for “any lawful school expenses.”
He may be right that the law allows it, but the voters who passed the referendum were not told the money was for any lawful school expense. They were told it was for teachers and counselors.
Tahmid took the chief financial officer job after most of this happened. He inherited bank reconciliations years behind, an Empowerment Zone fund $9.7 million in deficit, a credit card program with more than fifteen cards, and a Brown renovation that ran approximately $4.7 million over its $2.8 million budget. By his own account, he has been cleaning the mess up. Cards reduced from fifteen to two. Reconciliations brought current. Capital assets inventoried. The audit does not contradict him. That is what an administration is supposed to do when it inherits a mess.
But cleaning up the mess doesn’t excuse the mess. A school district that promised voters teacher raises and student counselors paid for ditch fees and parking out of the same bucket. A school district that wrote policies requiring board approval of every contract paid a sitting city councilwoman $99,020 over six years and couldn’t produce a contract for any of it. A school district that adopted Indiana’s public works bidding statutes paid half a million dollars in painting work to a company that did not legally exist when the brushes hit the wall. A school district that wrote a credit card policy ran the program with no log, no documentation, no review, and allowed alcohol to be purchased with federal pandemic relief money.
2020’s Vote Yes Campaign
The 2020 Vote Yes campaign was carried by South Bend’s Democratic establishment. Former mayor Pete Buttigieg appeared in the campaign videos. Sitting mayor James Mueller appeared in the campaign videos. Common Council members Karen White at-large, Rachel Tomas Morgan at-large, Sheila Niezgodski of the 6th District, Troy Warner of the 4th District, Sharon McBride of the 3rd District, and Canneth Lee of the 1st District appeared in the campaign videos urging support. Then-superintendent Todd Cummings and then-assistant superintendent of business and finance Kareemah Fowler appeared in the campaign videos reading from the same script that promised reading specialists, college counselors, and increased teacher pay. Milton Lee, who purchased alcohol with federal relief funds, also appeared in the campaign videos.
Stephanie Ball appeared in the campaign videos as the fourth-district representative on the South Bend school board, walking voters through how to request and complete their absentee ballots. Her campaign biography lists that she worked for Karen White. Ball is currently running for St. Joseph County Clerk of the Circuit Court on the Democratic ticket. The Clerk of the Circuit Court is the office where, under Indiana Code, the conflict-of-interest disclosures the audit found Wesley and Donaldson never filed should have been filed.
Voters get to decide whether someone who advocated for this institution, and who campaigned for the figure the audit traces $99,020 to, is the right person to keep its records going forward.
South Bend voters are five years into an eight-year property tax increase. They have three years left.
Logan Foster
Logan Foster founded Redress South Bend and reports on local government and public records in South Bend and St. Joseph County. He is 31 years old and is majoring in finance. He is a Cleveland sports fan and a longtime season ticket holder of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
