Teacher's aide gets 6 months for lunch-money thefts

Kristen Rene Santoyo, 37, was also given four years probation during a hearing Tuesday before Ventura County Superior Court Judge James Cloninger. In addition, Santoyo was ordered to pay $285 restitution to the student and to attend at least one year of weekly child abuse counseling sessions.

The victim, a 14-year-old high school freshman who suffers from severe autism and cannot speak, was sent to school with a lunch box that had snacks and $5 to purchase a cafeteria meal, prosecutors said. After she came home from school hungry and went straight to the refrigerator multiple times, her parents grew suspicious and contacted the school principal and teacher.

School officials then alerted police, who conducted a three-day investigation using a hidden camera that showed Santoyo on two occasions stealing the student's lunch money from her backpack. Santoyo was charged with stealing the victim's lunch money on 57 separate occasions between September and November, when she was caught and the complaint was filed, authorities said.

"The whole thing is pretty hard to put into words," said Shawn Spitzer, the victim's mother. "We trusted this caregiver, the assistant teacher, with our child, the most precious thing we have, and she violated that trust day after day by victimizing her. And this was a victim that couldn't speak, that couldn't tell anybody she was hungry or that her teacher was stealing from her."

Defense attorney James Harmon argued that Santoyo suffered from a drug abuse problem that resulted in bad judgment.

But Spitzer criticized the Oxnard Union High School District's hiring practices.

"We don't know that this defendant is the only person out there doing these crimes, because the policies that are in place right now are not working," Spitzer said. She said she wanted the district to make changes in its hiring practices and drug-testing policies.

School officials said Santoyo, who worked for the district for about 12 years, was fingerprinted and underwent a background check before she was hired in 1996.

One year later, a new electronic database called "Live Scan" went online to keep track of employee fingerprints and alert school officials to any new criminal charges. So although Santoyo was convicted in 2001 of theft at a Mervyn's department store and sentenced to 15 days in jail, the district never learned of the criminal record because she was not in the system, said Roger Rice, a district official.

"Our foremost priority is to protect students, so we're very disappointed," he said.

The district is currently reviewing the hiring records of all of its 1,400 employees to ensure they are included in the electronic database, Rice said. About 500 employees will have to be added to the system at a cost of about $30,000 to the district, he said.

tami.abdollah@latimes.com