A public elementary school in Kizugawa, Kyoto Prefecture, has run a shortfall of about ¥54 million in school fees including lunch money since 2012, after a clerical worker stopped chasing parents who had not paid. About ¥37 million of the gap was quietly covered out of pocket by the clerical worker and the principal, according to the city board of education.
The board, which disclosed the case at a news conference on November 2, is now asking the principal to pay the remaining amount himself. It says no campaign to refuse payment ever took place: the clerical worker simply skipped the dunning, and the principal, once he found out, tried to hide it.
The school, identified only as X Elementary, sits in a new housing district built alongside the Kansai Science City, a research and cultural development spanning Kyoto, Osaka and Nara prefectures. It has about 600 pupils.
Parents were briefed at a meeting before the board went public, and some asked that the school not be named, a city official said.
A monthly bill of up to ¥9,000
The clerical worker, identified as A, arrived at the school in spring 2012 as a Kyoto Prefecture-appointed staff member, and the shortfall is believed to have begun that fiscal year. From fiscal 2024 the worker was employed on part-time terms and left at the end of March this year.
A told the board that accounting had been handled properly at a previous school and that the timing of the lapse at X Elementary was not remembered. No ledgers survive, so the start cannot be pinned down, though records exist from fiscal 2019, when the accounting system changed, a board official said.
Until last fiscal year, families paid lunch fees of ¥3,900 plus textbook costs, PTA dues and savings for the school trip by direct debit, with some year groups billed around ¥9,000 a month. The money is not public funds but a school-internal account, handled inside the school.
A's job was to track incoming payments by item and chase parents whose debits had failed. None of that was done, the official said.
“Like a bicycle operation, money coming in was put toward payments, and rather than dunning and collecting what was missing, the shortfall was made up out of pocket. This was repeated.”a board official, Kizugawa board of education
The shortfall surfaces in June
The payments came to light in June, after A had left, when the school lunch center told the board that X Elementary was not paying its lunch bills. The board questioned the principal, identified as B, and the out-of-pocket payments emerged.
The board's account leaves the scale of the arrangement unexplained: a single worker and a principal covering tens of millions of yen in fees that parents had been billed but never chased.