Several students had been approved for aid they never received.
Some had been told their applications were incomplete even though they had confirmation emails showing every document had been submitted.
Others had awards reduced without a clear explanation.
The missing amounts were not always large enough to attract attention on their own.
A few hundred dollars disappeared from one account.
A fee waiver vanished from another.
An emergency grant was marked as issued even though the student never saw it.
But when the records were placed side by side, the irregularities stopped looking accidental.
Approval codes repeated in files that had no connection to one another.
Signatures appeared in places where the listed administrator said she had never signed.
Donor money designated for struggling students had been redirected through accounts connected to favored recipients.
One of those recipients was Gemma.
Another trail led to changes made through Spencer’s office access.
I did not want to believe either of them was involved.
Gemma had always treated me cruelly, but cruelty and fraud were not the same thing.
Spencer was smug and careless with confidential information, but that did not automatically prove he had stolen anything.
So I kept working.
I checked each figure twice.
I compared timestamps.
I matched transfer references with approval forms.
I preserved the original files and documented every change I made to my research notes.
The deeper I looked, the clearer the pattern became.
Spencer had altered records after business hours, often within minutes of messages exchanged with Gemma.
Gemma’s scholarship total had increased while other students’ awards were reduced.
An administrator had repeatedly approved the changes despite obvious inconsistencies.
The project was no longer only about barriers in financial aid.
It had become a record of how people with access could quietly take from students who were unlikely to challenge them.
I submitted the project through the university’s official system and kept a separate copy with the legal aid clinic.
Two days later, I was accused of cheating.
