A primary school in Kizugawa, Kyoto Prefecture, left about ¥54m in lunch and textbook fees uncollected over 13 years, and a principal and other staff covered roughly ¥37m of it from their own money without reporting it, the city's board of education has found.
The board's investigation, made public in November, found that a former clerical worker and a series of principals filled the shortfall themselves rather than let it surface. The case exposes how much of the money schools collect from parents depends on staff paying it back out of their salaries.
A principal's explanation
The city runs its primary schools on monthly direct debits of about ¥4,000 per child for school lunch and a little over ¥1,000 for textbooks. Payments stopped coming in, and the shortfall reached an estimated ¥54m by spring 2025.
A principal in his 50s told the board he did not want the matter to become a scandal at a time when many staff were absent and running the school properly was hard. He said he wanted to cover the arrears himself and settle them inside the school, the Asahi Shimbun reported.
A former clerical worker in his 60s who handled the collection paid in about ¥20m from his own and his family's accounts between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2024. Five principals in succession said they had not noticed what was happening.
How the arrears surfaced
The current principal, who took up the post in spring 2023, learned of the problem in spring 2024. The school lunch center told the school that the previous year's lunch fees had not been paid.
The principal covered the unpaid ¥4.77m himself. The clerical worker told him the paperwork had not been sorted out, and he believed the money would be returned.
No refund came, and the clerical worker retired in spring 2025. In May 2025 two suppliers billed the school for unpaid textbook fees, and the principal paid a further ¥2.47m from his own funds.