(The Center Square) – Nearly $300,000 in school technology has gone missing, according to a recent state audit that revealed a local district cannot account for nearly 1,000 laptops.
The Washington State Auditor’s Office released a report Thursday detailing significant “internal control deficiencies” within Centralia School District No. 401.
According to the audit, which covered the period from September 2024 through August 2025, the district failed to properly track and safeguard theft-sensitive assets, specifically student Chromebooks.
The most jarring figure: a July 2025 physical inventory found that 986 out of 6,714 Chromebooks were missing. The total value of the unlocated devices is estimated at $295,000.
State Auditor Pat McCarthy’s team further tested the district’s systems by selecting a small sample of 20 Chromebooks to locate. The district was unable to find 11 of them.
“Without adequate tracking and monitoring of theft-sensitive assets, the District is at an increased risk that a misappropriation or misuse of public resources could occur and the District would not detect it promptly,” the report stated.
The audit attributed the losses to a decentralized system where staff prioritized getting devices into student hands over the clerical work of scanning and tracking. District officials admitted that time and budget constraints often led staff to skip check-in and check-out procedures, leading to “undocumented swaps” between students.
Taxpayers who fund the district’s $60.3 million budget are now seeing the results of what auditors described as a repeat issue; the report noted that similar recommendations to improve asset tracking were made in a prior audit, but were not fully implemented.
In a formal response, the district agreed with the findings. To fix the issues, the district’s technology department will now take full control of all hardware assignments, removing that authority from other staff to ensure a tighter chain of custody.
The district did not return a request from The Center Square for additional comment before publication.
Centralia School District serves about 3,300 students across eight schools. The State Auditor’s Office said it will review the district’s progress on these corrective actions during its next audit.
