Stephanie Ball’s campaign for county clerk promises “attention to detail.”
The Indiana State Board of Accounts filed its latest federal audit of the South Bend Community School Corporation on Sept. 30. It covers July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2025. Ball sat on the school board for the first 18 months of that stretch.
Special education grants work on reimbursement. The district spends the money first, then asks the state to pay it back. Each request is supposed to be backed by records showing exactly what the money paid for.
The district filed 23 of those requests during the audit period and collected $12,668,761. Auditors could tie 10 of those requests to the district’s spending records. The other 13 requests could not be traced to anything the district provided. Some of those requests did not even say what dates they covered. Instead of a date range, the requests read “Entire Grant Period.” That made it hard for auditors to tell what the district had already billed for.
With 13 requests that could not be reconciled, auditors could not pin down which expenses the money covered. Without that, they could not say whether the district followed federal rules. So they questioned all of it, every one of the $12,668,761. A questioned cost is not proof of misspending. Auditors question a cost when it may break grant rules or is not backed by adequate records, and it is not an improper payment until it is reviewed and confirmed. The report warns that the district could be required to pay the federal money back.
A second federal grant had the same kind of trouble. The district received $3,530,669 from a federal program that funds incentives for teachers and principals. It could not show auditors the award letters that set the rules for spending that money. Every director who had run the grant had left, and auditors found no current employee who understood its requirements.
Auditors then checked 60 expenses paid with that grant. Seven expenses were not allowable, including advertising costs and reimbursements for alcohol. Twelve were stipends the district could not show the School Board ever approved.
Most of these problems were not new. The last federal audit flagged 10 expenses. In its own summary included with the new audit, the district says eight of them still had not been fixed. Six of those eight date to the 2021-22 school year. Ball was on the board then. She was still on it for the first 18 months of the two years in which the district says they remained unfixed.
In the fall of 2024, Ball described a trustee’s job in answers to a WSBT candidate questionnaire.
“A Trustee must be thoughtful and evaluative of how we deploy our resources and challenge the administration to demonstrate whether we are hitting or missing the mark,” she wrote.
She lost her seat that November to Carlos Leyva.
Now she is the Democratic candidate for St. Joseph County Clerk of the Circuit Court. Her campaign site calls her “a fixture in South Bend Democratic Party politics.” It lists campaigns she has worked on. One is Common Council member Karen White’s.
White has already appeared in a state audit. A State Board of Accounts report on the district, filed in April, describes two $25,000 payments of federal pandemic relief money meant for Reaching Higher Grounds, a nonprofit for which White is the registered agent. The first, in April 2022, rested on a “general statement” signed by then-Assistant Superintendent of Business and Finance Kareemah Fowler. The second, in April 2023, relied on the same statement with a new date written in by hand. No invoice supported it. Both checks were made out to White, not the nonprofit.
For the April 2023 payment, auditors found the docket listing the claim “was approved by the School Board after payment was made to White.” They saw no evidence the board ever approved the agreement. Ball was on the board for both payments.
In July, I reported on a default judgment against Ball in a collection case and on errors in her campaign finance report.
The district agreed with every finding in the new audit.
The clerk’s office, Ball’s campaign site says, is responsible “for managing court filings and finances.”
Logan Foster
Logan Foster is the founder and editor of Redress South Bend, an independent news outlet covering local government, courts, and public institutions in South Bend and St. Joseph County, Indiana. He reports from primary documents: public records requests, court filings, state audit reports, and campaign finance disclosures. His reporting has examined city and school district payments made without competitive bidding, school board spending, and the records of candidates in county races. Redress South Bend obtained the South Bend Police Department's ShotSpotter coverage map after the department initially denied public access. The outlet is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Online News Association. Reach him at info@redresssouthbend.com
