Camp Adams, a facility for troubled youth in Penn Forest Township, closed permanently in June.

But Jim Thorpe Area School District still has not received more than $1 million in reimbursement it is due for paying to educate students who were sent to the facility from other school districts.

Under new Superintendent John Rushefski, the district is making a renewed effort to collect those bills. In less than a month, they have collected $107,344.

“We had a moment where we said: ‘This is important to the superintendent, this is important to the board, and this is important to the Jim Thorpe community,” Rushefski said.

Residents at Camp Adams were sent there by juvenile courts around the state. Under state law, the responsibility for educating students at a juvenile facility like Camp Adams falls to the local school district. But the local district can also collect payments from the student’s home district.

In 2014, Youth Services Agency, the organization which operated the camp, threatened to send its students — about 45 at the time — to the Jim Thorpe Area Schools. That prompted backlash from local parents.

In order to prevent YSA residents from entering Jim Thorpe Schools, the school board approved an agreement where Jim Thorpe would pay YSA the cost of educating the students, and provide special education teachers when needed. When the facility closed, that rate was $76.25 per student, per day.

The district could then collect that money from the school districts where the students were from.

But over the last five years they did not collect the bills, which Rushefski estimated are between $1.5 million and $2 million.

Residents have criticized the district in the past for failing to collect the reimbursements.

On Wednesday, Rushefski thanked the staff in the district office for their recent efforts to collect that money. He singled out Tammy Lombardo-Schatz, Cindy Kmetz and Michelle Searfoss for their work.

“I’m very impressed with the amount of work they did and the returns,” Rushefski said.

So far, they have sent out all the bills for the 2018-19 school year — approximately $483,000.

Then they sent out nearly $500,000 worth of uncollected bills from the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years.

They have received $107,344 in payments.

Rushefski is now hanging the checks on the wall in the board’s meeting room.

“Every month you’ll see checks up there that we receive, and I hope to take over that board with YSA checks,” he said.