Former CPS assistant principal pleads guilty to stealing from West Loop elementary school

A former Chicago Public Schools assistant principal has been sentenced to probation for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Near West Side elementary school.

Tracey Canty-Robinson, 56, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a single count of continuing financial crimes enterprise before Judge Stanley Sacks, Cook County court records show.

Prosecutors dropped 16 other felony counts she faced in an indictment in exchange for her plea.

Sacks sentenced Canty-Robinson to two years of probation, as well as 50 hours of community service and the completion of treatment for drug and/or alcohol addiction, records show.

Prosecutors and the CPS inspector general’s office accused Canty-Robinson of stealing more than a quarter-million in funds that parents paid into an after-school program at Mark T. Skinner West Elementary School, a selective-enrollment school in the West Loop, by transferring money from the school’s PayPal account to a private account.

Canty-Robinson, who had a yearly salary of $128,687 for the position, started stealing the funds in 2015, prosecutors said. The Sun-Times previously reported that public records showed she had faced financial difficulties for years.

The inspector general’s office began investigating the missing funds in 2019 and later attributed Canty-Robinson’s ability to make off with the money without anyone initially noticing to “severe financial mismanagement and inattention by the school’s other administrators.”

“Not only did no one at the school notice that $200,000 was missing from the school, but the program was still somehow able to run,” then-Inspector General Will Fletcher told a reporter earlier this year. “So that signals concerns about whether or not the district is appropriately charging parents for these types of programs."

Canty-Robinson left the school amid the investigation in 2020 and was banned from working for CPS the following year after the inspector general's report was delivered to CPS officials.