LITTLE ROCK — Three southwest Arkansas public bodies were on the agenda when state lawmakers reviewed audit reports at the Capitol last week, and each left with a referral to prosecutors, a pointed question from a legislator, or both.
The Legislative Joint Auditing Committee and its education subcommittee, meeting Thursday and Friday, took up an investigative report on the Prescott School District that has followed its former superintendent to his new job in Ashdown, an audit tying Mineral Springs’ former recorder/treasurer to $263,719 in questionable spending, and a management letter showing the Texarkana Arkansas School District sent $286,213 to scammers and got back only a fifth of it.
The cases share more than geography. In each, lawmakers asked what happens after an audit lands on a prosecutor’s desk. In two of them, they asked whether an employer knew, or should have known, about a hire’s past.
Prescott report follows Poole to Ashdown
The Prescott report, dated Aug. 20 and posted publicly Sept. 11, found $34,037 in purchases between July 2022 and June 2025 that auditors said did not appear to serve a school purpose and were “constitutionally suspect.” The report does not name the superintendent who made, initiated or approved them. On Friday, Prescott officials at the witness table did.
Asked by Rep. Matt Brown, R-Conway, to identify him, Prescott officials named Robert Poole and confirmed he is now employed by the Ashdown School District.
“Well, I guess we know where to go next,” Brown said.
Poole led Prescott from 2010 until 2025. He was placed on non-duty status there April 17, 2025, resigned effective June 30, 2025, and started as Ashdown’s superintendent the next day. Ashdown has since suspended him. Ronda Pounds, the district’s public relations director, confirmed the suspension but said the district would not comment further on a personnel matter. Federal programs coordinator Chris Scarborough is serving as interim superintendent.
The largest category of flagged spending was $10,348 for golf apparel, equipment and tournament fees. Auditors also cited $7,160 for clothing and shoes, $5,340 for Apple products and a cellphone, $3,143 for umpire gear and officiating fees, and $1,872 for custom baseball bats, gloves and apparel.
Among the specifics: a district-bought MacBook the superintendent later sold online, describing it in the listing as having been bought for and used by a relative; a cellphone that appeared to be for a relative and was assigned to his personal phone plan; golf clubs bought for a relative that turned up in a family member’s shed at Prescott Country Club; and a custom bat engraved with his initials and the name of a tournament team not tied to the district. Three of four out-of-state trips to PGA Tour Superstore locations fell on workdays with no leave recorded. The superintendent told auditors the umpire gear was for emergencies, though he acknowledged he had never umpired a Prescott game and was paid to officiate for other districts.
Auditors also found a $11,654 golf cart, upgraded with a lift, premium seat, tinted windshield and custom wheels, that had been billed as “Facility Transportation” inside the $12.3 million construction contract for Prescott’s new elementary school. The cart was never added to the district’s asset list. Poole returned it in June 2025 at the request of the district’s attorney.
Rep. Marcus Richmond asked who bought the cart. Audit staff said the construction manager was C.R. Crawford Construction of Fayetteville. The lawmaker asked for more information, saying he could not see how a contractor could justify an upgraded cart when the district already owned two.
The report also found $5,664 in purchases with no documented purpose that could not be located, including lawn equipment, nine Yeti and RTIC coolers and pickleball gear; gate money from five spring 2025 baseball and softball games that was never deposited; and a Game and Fish Commission grant spent on trail cameras and deer feeders that mostly could not be found. Because closeout paperwork was never filed, the district lost grant eligibility for the 2026 fiscal year. The superintendent repaid $1,229 between March 2025 and February 2026, the report says.
Prescott Superintendent Larry Smith told the committee he believes lapel pins the district bought with another school’s name and logo, on an invoice auditors said appeared to have been altered, were for Ashdown. “I believe it’s the district that he is currently working at, which would be Ashdown, but I’m not 100% sure,” Smith said.
“So given this gentleman’s propensity to spend money on the district’s money, what district is he now spending the money of?” asked House Co-Chair Robin Lundstrum, R-Elm Springs.
Prescott School Board President Michael Williams said Poole had worked in the district for “18 plus years” and the audit covered only the last three. The district has never done its own review, he said. “The scope needs to be broadened,” Williams said, speaking for himself and not the board. Lundstrum urged Prescott to hire a forensic accountant and consider suing.
Brown then moved to have the report sent to the Ashdown School Board, saying he did not want Ashdown “left holding the bag” the way Mineral Springs had been. Sen. Mark Johnson, R-Little Rock, asked that the letter go out over the co-chairs’ signatures “to emphasize that this is not just the administration, this is the General Assembly.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, spoke against it, saying the committee refers reports to prosecutors regularly and it is not the Legislature’s job to notify every employer of a person named in a public report. “That’s on them,” Sullivan said. The motion passed on a voice vote with at least one no.
Sullivan then moved to refer the report to the Professional Licensure Standards Board, which can investigate educators and suspend or revoke licenses. That passed without opposition.
The report has been forwarded to the Eighth North Judicial District prosecuting attorney and the Arkansas attorney general. A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office confirmed the office has received the report and is reviewing it. Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeanna Sherrill has been appointed special prosecutor, according to the prosecuting attorney’s office.
Mineral Springs: gambling on a city card, and a record no one checked
The Mineral Springs case was the one Brown had in mind. Auditors linked former Recorder/Treasurer Denise Juniel to $263,719 in questionable transactions between Jan. 1, 2023, and Dec. 31, 2025, including $92,040 in online gambling charged to a city credit card.
Juniel, 59, resigned Nov. 5, 2025, and was charged 12 days later with theft of property over $25,000, a Class B felony, and five counts of tampering with a public record, a Class D felony, in Howard County Circuit Court. She has pleaded not guilty. A pretrial hearing is set for Oct. 7 and a jury trial for the week of Oct. 20. Charges are accusations, and she is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court.
According to an arrest affidavit, Juniel told auditors in a recorded interview the day she resigned that she knowingly used the card for gambling and used whiteout to erase line items on bank statements to hide it. Five statements had been altered, auditors said.
Of $190,855 in card charges auditors reviewed, they found $174,309 were improper. Beyond the gambling, that included $36,946 in personal purchases such as groceries, clothing, streaming services and “buy now, pay later” charges, $25,888 with no documentation and $6,832 in undocumented travel. Auditors also found $55,931 in improper payments outside payroll, including $19,189 in undocumented travel reimbursements and $10,208 in duplicate reimbursements, and $33,479 in improper payroll payments, among them $9,300 in loans repaid through payroll deductions, which the Arkansas Constitution prohibits.
What drew the sharpest reaction was her history. Legislative Auditor Kevin White told the committee a 2012 audit of the Mineral Springs School District included a finding over Juniel’s timesheets, and she later pleaded guilty in Howard County District Court to misdemeanor theft of property. That conviction put her on the Arkansas Fidelity Bond Program’s exclusion list, meaning the city’s bond coverage for her had been canceled. The bond board typically waits for a criminal case to end before ruling on reimbursement, and the city may be unable to recover its losses through the program.
“So the summation is the zebra didn’t change their stripes,” Lundstrum said.
Mayor Vera Marks said she hired Juniel in 2021 or 2022, at the end of an earlier term, after the previous recorder/treasurer stepped down and no one else applied. She said she had “very little knowledge” of Juniel’s history.
Marks, who was appointed mayor pro tem in April 2025 and is finishing the term of Bobby Tullis, who resigned in March, said no one at the city reviewed bank statements because there were no paper statements and Juniel alone saw the accounts. “He had this baby all by himself until then. I only followed his lead,” she said of Tullis. “My name was not on any signed checks. I didn’t approve anything.” Marks is unopposed for mayor in November.
Auditors also found none of 25 tested city payments had been approved, Tullis was paid $2,170 above his salary for around-the-clock well monitoring, and the city loaned employees $11,350 in 2025. Council member Vanessa Hendrix testified the council was never given complete financial information.
City officials said the recorder/treasurer’s duties have been split, two people now sign every check and the city receives printed statements. The city has not sued Juniel. Brown urged it to do so, warning the statute of limitations is running and criminal restitution may fall short. Marks said the city has not checked its other employees against the bond program’s exclusion list.
Texarkana Arkansas School District: seven payments, $286,000, one recovered
The Texarkana Arkansas School District’s audit came before the education subcommittee Thursday with no one from the district present.
A management letter included with the district’s annual audit says that between April and June 2025, the district made seven ACH payments to fraudulent accounts after receiving emails asking it to change a vendor’s bank information. Employees made the changes “without properly verifying the authenticity of the change request,” the letter states.
No one noticed until the real vendor called to ask why it had not been paid. The district contacted its bank, and one payment, for $58,339, was recovered. The other $227,874 was not.
The letter, dated Feb. 26 and signed by Deputy Legislative Auditor Matt Fink, was posted on the agency’s website April 15 but had not been presented publicly until Thursday. It does not identify the vendor, say how many employees were involved or say whether the loss was reported to law enforcement.
The scheme, known as business email compromise, is a common one. The Pine Bluff School District lost $3.2 million to a similar scam in December after criminals hijacked an email thread with its construction contractor.
The audit’s one formal finding, a material weakness, involved the district’s federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program grant. The district drew down $804,310 on March 21, 2025, including a $741,516 advance, then spent $321,608 over the next three months while drawing another $186,371. At the June 30, 2025, close of the fiscal year, it still held $606,279 in unspent federal money. Federal rules require recipients to keep the time between receiving and spending grant funds to a minimum. The district said it has put in place a multi-step review of drawdown requests.
The subcommittee voted to hold the report and invite district officials to its Oct. 8 meeting in Little Rock. Audit staff said the findings were referred to the prosecuting attorney and the attorney general.
What happens after a referral
Running underneath all three hearings was a complaint lawmakers have made before: reports go to prosecutors, and the committee rarely hears what became of them.
The education subcommittee’s chairman said Thursday that referrals often produce no response. The panel voted to invite the state Prosecutor Coordinator’s office to its October meeting to explain how referred audits are handled.
In Mineral Springs, White told lawmakers that whether anyone helped Juniel conceal the spending is a question for prosecutors, not auditors. In Prescott, Smith said the attorney general’s office told him it could not discuss the investigation and that he has not seen the underlying records.
The Fouke School District offers a recent example of how the two tracks can diverge. In August 2025, the committee authorized a report on $3,655 in travel reimbursements paid to then-Superintendent Jim Buie, including mileage for about 16 trips to Arkansas Children’s Hospital to visit an injured student and airfare for a trip with four students to the University of Tennessee. A deputy legislative auditor said the report would be referred to the prosecuting attorney and the attorney general.
The licensure track produced a result. The State Board of Education suspended Buie’s educator license for three years in July, in a separate Professional Licensure Standards Board case, after finding he kissed two male students, let a student live in his home and spent more than $1,000 of his own money on gifts for students, including vehicles. Buie finished his contract with Fouke through the end of the 2025-26 school year.
The criminal referral has produced nothing public. More than a year after the audit went to prosecutors, no charges have been announced.
“Upon referral from the Arkansas Legislative Audit Committee, our office conducted an investigation and shared our findings with the Office of the Prosecuting Attorney for the Eighth Judicial District South,” said Jeff LeMaster, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office.
Eighth Judicial District South Prosecuting Attorney Connie Mitchell, whose office would also receive the Texarkana Arkansas School District referral, declined to comment when asked what became of those findings.
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