PLAINFIELD, N.H. (AP) – The board of trustees for the former Runnemede School has sued a bank, saying it is partly to blame for the financial scandal that hit the school this year.

The River Valley Country Day School says its former headmistress and her husband stole at least $200,000 from bank accounts.

In a new lawsuit, the school says officials at Mascoma Savings Bank either knew that Joanne and Jeremiah Evarts were pilfering money and did nothing, or should have known something was amiss and were negligent. The suit was filed Wednesday in Sullivan County Superior Court in Newport.

“If the bank had exercised due diligence of our accounts … this problem would have been caught much sooner than it was,” said Bill Powers, a representative of the school.

The Evartses were fired by the arts-based, independent school in April. They deny the allegations.

Regarding the bank, “there was no collusion,” Joanne Evarts said Thursday. “The bank was extremely generous and supportive of the school at a time when the trustees were not providing adequate funds for the school,” she said.

Mascoma Savings Bank is working on a response, bank president Stephen Christy said Friday.

He noted that the school also is involved in lawsuits with a contractor that constructed a building financed by the bank; and with the Evartses, who filed for bankruptcy protection.

Christy suggested that the board of trustees “has been inattentive in its fiduciary and corporate responsibilities, and this point they’re trying to find someone to blame for that inattentiveness.”