Part 2: Missing School Equipment

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Story Published: May 21, 2009 at 5:53 PM PDT

By Audrey Asistio

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YAKIMA COUNTY -- During weeks of research, Action News uncovered thousands of dollars worth of school equipment that vanished from our local schools, and no one knows where it went. This is equipment bought with your taxpayer dollars. Even though we asked for inventory from seven school districts, only three provided the numbers. So we continued calling and visited the districts who did not provide reports. One of those districts is Grandview. Assistant Superintendent Brad Shreeve said they do keep inventory reports, but do not keep a list of missing or stolen items. He said, "We have the hard copies but it just isn't in the database any longer. It wasn't something that we thought was important enough to maintain within the database, the items lost or missing, because there were so few of them."

Shreeve is in the process on compiling those missing items.

East Valley school district handed over their inventory reports. In the past two years, three laptops went missing. They say they were able to get them all back. They owe their success to security cameras and small amount of equipment to keep track of. "It's used so frequently by teachers, it's pretty hard to know when some thing's missing. You kind of look around and say 'wait a minute, some thing's going on here,' and so we know almost immediately," East Valley school district assistant superintendent Mike Messenger said.

As for Wapato school district, the only person allowed to speak on camera was out sick, Thursday. When the school districts were asked why it took so long for them to respond to our request, they couldn't give a clear answer. We are still trying to get answers on why Wapato and Ellensburg school districts don't keep track of items worth less than $5,000.

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