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GREENSBORO — All along, Northwest Guilford basketball coach Manny Bloom has maintained his innocence, claiming he was cleared of any wrongdoing at his old job in Boca Raton, Fla.

Palm Beach County Schools officials are just as adamant Bloom’s version is not quite accurate.

On Thursday, Guilford County Schools officials jumped into the he-said/they-said fray, announcing they would investigate the matter themselves.

Nora Carr, chief of staff for Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green, said Guilford officials are looking into Bloom’s final months as a basketball coach and teacher at Boca Raton High School in Florida.

At issue: Was Bloom up front with Northwest Guilford officials about the outcome of a Palm Beach County Schools investigation into a series of lucrative basketball camps and clinics he ran?

“It’s pretty clear this week the information from both sides is different,” Carr said. “We want to make sure anything that was represented to the school district was represented appropriately.”

Carla Alphin, program administrator for employee relations for Guilford County Schools, will talk with district officials this week in Palm Beach County, Carr said. Alphin could not be reached for comment Thursday night.

At the time of his resignation last year from Boca Raton High, Bloom and the school’s principal were being investigated by school system officials for depositing $421,983 in proceeds from for-profit basketball camps and clinics into three private accounts. Two of those accounts were personal accounts belonging to Bloom, according to documents from the Palm Beach investigation.

Palm Beach school officials said Bloom used Boca Raton’s gym without signing a lease.

Bloom maintained Thursday that the school’s principal did not require him to sign a lease because Bloom’s camp was giving some money back to the school and because the camp was serving local youth.

Since the camps were for-profit ventures, Palm Beach officials said Bloom should have signed a lease with the school system or deposited the proceeds into an internal school account.

Bloom did neither, according to the investigation’s findings.

Palm Beach County Schools board spokesman Nat Harrington said Thursday the investigation into Bloom ended when he resigned.

“Generally it's our policy to drop an investigation when someone no longer works for the school district,” Harrington said.

Bloom said school officials in Florida would have never let him off if they believed he had violated school policy.

“If they thought I was dead wrong they would have been all over me, even followed me up here,” he said. “They’re just twisting things around because they don’t have anything now and they didn’t have anything then.”

Haley Miller, a spokeswoman for Guilford County Schools, said Thursday the school system handles criminal background checks for most new employees. It is the responsibility of each school to check a potential employee’s references.

Northwest Athletics Director John Hughes said he called about 20 people in Florida looking into Bloom. He said Bloom told him up front about the investigation and that he had been cleared. Northwest principal Angelo Kidd said earlier Thursday he expected to meet with Bloom that evening. Kidd did not return telephone calls Thursday night.

Contact Robert Bell at 373-7055 or robert.bell@news-record.com