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My daughter's principal was embezzling money from the school lunch program while kids went hungry.

I only found out because my 7-year-old Emma started bringing home uneaten lunches every single day for three weeks straight.

"Why aren't you eating at school, sweetheart?" I asked her one afternoon.

"They don't have the good food anymore, Mommy," she said sadly. "Just crackers and cheese most days. Sometimes the milk tastes funny."

I thought she was just being a picky eater until other parents started complaining loudly at pickup time.

"Did you see what they served the kids today?" Mrs. Garcia whispered to me by the playground. "Stale bread and a single slice of processed cheese. That's literally it. My son came home starving."

"Same here," added Mrs. Chen, shaking her head. "And they're charging us the same lunch fees for this garbage."

Meanwhile, I couldn't help but notice that Principal Johnson was driving a brand new black Mercedes-Benz and had just returned from his third expensive vacation this year to Hawaii.

Something felt very wrong about this whole situation.

I decided to volunteer for lunch duty the following week to see the situation for myself firsthand.

What I witnessed in that cafeteria made me absolutely sick to my stomach.

Kids were getting half-portions of the cheapest possible food imaginable. Expired milk cartons that were clearly past their date. Moldy bread that the lunch ladies were being told to "just cut around the bad parts and serve anyway."

Some children were so hungry they were eating the moldy parts anyway.

But when I accidentally glimpsed the invoices sitting on the lunch coordinator's desk, I saw something that made my blood boil.

The school district was paying $8.50 per student per day for "fresh, nutritious, well-balanced meals."

These kids were getting maybe $1.50 worth of expired garbage food at best.

I started asking pointed questions immediately.

"Where exactly is the rest of the lunch budget money going?" I asked the lunch coordinator directly.

"You'd have to ask Principal Johnson about that," she said nervously, looking around like she was afraid someone might overhear us. "He personally handles all the food service contracts and vendor relationships."

That night, I did something I'd never done before in my life. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all lunch program financial records from the past two years.

What came back in my mailbox three weeks later was absolutely devastating and infuriating.

Principal Johnson had been systematically approving invoices for expensive catering companies that didn't actually exist anywhere.

$127,000 in completely fake invoices over just the past two years alone.

Every single dollar was going straight into bank accounts controlled by his wife's mysterious "consulting company" that had no employees and no office.

I immediately took all this evidence to the school board meeting the following Tuesday night.

"These are extremely serious allegations you're making," the superintendent said, reviewing my documents carefully. "We'll launch a full investigation immediately."

The official audit took six long weeks to complete.

They discovered that Principal Johnson had stolen $180,000 total from various programs specifically meant to feed low-income children in our district.

Some of these kids were getting their only real meal of the entire day at school, and he was literally stealing that money to fund his luxury lifestyle.

Principal Johnson was arrested on a Thursday morning right in front of the whole school.

He got three years in state prison and was ordered to pay back every penny in full restitution.

The new principal, Mrs. Martinez, completely overhauled the entire lunch program from scratch.