ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL ARRESTED

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement says a Pensacola mother and daughter have been arrested for unauthorized access into hundreds of student accounts and using that access to cast fraudulent homecoming court votes. 50-year-old Laura Carroll was an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School, while her 17-year-old daughter was a student at Tate High School. The FDLE says Carroll had access to the FOCUS program, which is the school district’s student information system. In October 2020, hundreds of votes for Tate High School’s Homecoming Court voting were flagged as fraudulent, as many of the votes originated from the same IP address within a short period of time. Other students reported that the daughter talked of using her mother’s FOCUS account to cast votes. Carroll was booked into Escambia County Jail and her daughter was taken into custody and transferred to the Juvenile Detention Center.