In an all-campus e-mail last Friday, Vice President and Secretary of the University Peter Patton announced that evidence suggested a former employee of the Green Street Arts Center (GSAC) had misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars of the GSAC’s operating money.
The misappropriation of approximately $30,000 was discovered during a routine review of receipts and expenditures from a Wesleyan-funded operating account, according to Director of University Communications Justin Harmon.
The University is withholding the identity of the individual, but Harmon did say that the individual is cooperating and working out a repayment schedule.
Interim Director of the GSAC Joan Astor del Valle informed the staff of the misappropriations in an e-mail last Friday. She reassured the staff that the Center’s operation would not suffer because of the missing money.
“Please be assured that this financial impropriety in no way affects our after-school program at Green Street,” she wrote in the e-mail.
Harmon echoed her sentiments.
“Wesleyan is going to ensure that there’s no loss to the Center in terms of its programming,” he said
No criminal charges have been filed so far, and University lawyers and administrators plan to meet next week to determine a course of action.
“We’re going through all the financial records and making sure that we understand what happened,” Harmon said. “We’re exploring legal recourse.”
“It’s sad that this happened,” said David Vitale-Wolff ’06, who teaches a music class at the center. “[Astor del Valle’s e-mail] gave me the sense that things are going to run as usual.”
The GSAC was formed in 2005 in a partnership between Wesleyan, the City of Middletown, and the North End Action Team. It provides classes in the arts and an after school program.
The GSAC is partially funded by Wesleyan and has an annual operating budget of $500,000, according to Pamela Tatge, director of the CFA, of which the GSAC is technically a part.
According to Director of the Office of Community Service and Volunteerism Catherine Crimmins Lechowicz, roughly sixty students have volunteered at the GSAC during this academic year.
Former Director Ricardo Morris, an experienced arts administrator, helped to plan and open the GSAC, but his resignation was announced on March 23. According to an announcement by Patton, Morris left the GSAC to start a non-profit consulting firm in his home state of Tennessee. Harmon, Patton, and Astor del Valle all emphasized in their statements that Morris had no knowledge of the misappropriated funds.
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