In the midst of the confusion over Adelanto Elementary School District Superintendent Terry Walker’s continuing tenure with the district, the matter grew even more turbulent as Walker and her top-ranked assistant precipitously went out on leave last week. They have not returned.
Simultaneously, Walker’s executive secretary had departed the district, leaving the district essentially rudderless, as there was seemingly no one in place in the district’s executive suite over a period during which preparations for this week’s board meeting needed to be tended to, resulting in the meeting being canceled.
While Walker’s executive secretary, Xenia Lovett, has now returned to her post, the district appears to be running on autopilot, as both Walker and the assistant superintendent of academic services Walker hired in September, Saida Valdez, remain absent.
Among Adelanto residents, in particular parents of students in the district, there has been speculation at the reason for the interruption in normal district operations. The most recurrent and obvious theory to emerge from that speculation is the 3-to-2 divide on the school board that has manifested in recent months in which the majority has become disenchanted with Walker’s oversight of district operations created an atmosphere which has made her day-to-day function uncomfortable. Based on Walker’s contract, which was ratified by the school board in November 2024 and which runs through June 2028, she cannot be terminated on anything less than a 4-to-1 vote of the school board.
Though the board majority does not have sufficient votes to force the superintendent’s departure at this time, the two members of the board who are yet standing behind her, La Shawn Love-French and Christina Steward, are due to stand for reelection later this year. With the prospect that Love-French or Steward might opt out of seeking reelection or could be displaced in the voting if they do run, Walker is acutely aware that she may not be able to serve out the entirety of the time specified in her contract, which provides her with $282,782, in salary and another $92,635 in perquisites and benefits for a total annual compensation of $375,417. Accordingly, it appears, at least to some people involved with the district either as parents, employees or officials, that Walker has been engaging in strategizing to either keep her job long-term or maximize the amount of money she can arrange to receive if she comes to some early termination/separation agreement with the district.
In this way, it appears that what occurred last week and what is continuing into this week was an effort to illustrate that Walker, if not absolutely indispensable to the district’s operations, is of substantial value and key to keeping thing running smoothly. That Walker, Valdez and Lovett all went out on leave together and without any forewarning was either an extraordinary coincidence or deliberately calculated, several of those contemplating it have observed.
During the work week of January 19 through 23, Lovett, Valdez and Walker were gone, reportedly having taken simultaneously unspecified leave, unofficially described as sick leave or medical leave. When Board President Miguel Soto Jr. made a routine inquiry early in the week about progress on finalizing the agenda for the regularly scheduled board meeting that was to take place on January 27, he received no response. Through further inquiry, he learned that Walker, Valdez and Lovett were not present at the district headquarters and, further, could not be reached by phone, text or email.
Somewhat inexplicably, armed security guards employed by the Blue-Nite Protection Agency were in place at the district office beginning on January 20 and remained in place until January 23. Blue-Nite Protection Agency, which is owned and operated by Jerry Plascencia, had been previously contracted with by the district to provide security at the district’s board meetings, but was never employed by the district outside that context. There was no explanation given to district staff either by text message, email or verbally as to why they security guards were there or that they were going to be there ahead of time. No one at the district had any information as to who had hired them for the district office security detail. No vote to have them in place was made by the school board. It is not clear on whose authority they were hired. The scope of work specified in the district’s contract with the company extends only to board meetings held twice monthly.
Under the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open public meeting law, the items, issues for discussion, actions or votes to take place at a meeting must be given preview in an agenda for the meeting, which must be posted in a place or forum accessible to the public at least 72 hours in advance of the meeting. Given that the meeting was to commence in the evening of January 27 and the district’s offices close for the weekend, there was a deadline of 5:30 p.m. on Friday January 23 by which the agenda had to be completed and posted.
Under the district’s standard procedure, the agenda is formulated by the superintendent assisted by the superintendent’s executive secretary, incorporating items earmarked for discussion and votes by members of the school board ahead of time as well as routine business items such as payments to material vendors or service providers which are intrinsic to ongoing and continuing district functions. Without Walker available, the board sought to draft an agenda, but upon completing the title, date, time and location for the document, bogged down when seeking to lay out the topics for discussion, as this required the provision of back-up or accompanying materials pertaining to the schedule of actions/votes. Lovett, they learned, was the only district employee who had access to the programs on the district’s computers that would allow for the uploading of the documents that needed to be included with the agenda.
With the January 23 5:30 p.m. deadline approaching and Lovett nowhere to be found and unavailable for contact telephonically or online, a decision was made to cancel the January 27 meeting.
The implication of Walker, Valdez and Lovett checking out with seemingly no warning last week is still being felt. Though Lovett returned on Monday January 26, Walker and Valdez are out of the office, incommunicado with both the public and at least three and quite possibly all five of the board’s members.
Efforts by the Sentinel to reach both Walker and Valdez were routed to answering systems, which engendered no response, or to district personnel who had no information as to where either was or when they were to return.
Walker’s tenure as the superintendent grew problematic shortly after she was promoted into the acting/interim superintendents’ post in September 2024, a mere month after having been brought in as the interim assistant superintendent for personnel in August 2024. Walker was moved into the acting superintendent’s role because of the abrupt resignation of John Albert, the district’s one-time assistant superintendent for human resources, who had himself been moved into the interim superintendent’s position following a move by what was then the board majority, consisting of Christine Turner, La Shawn Love-French and Christina Steward, to place then-Superintendent Michael Krause on leave in March 2024. Krause and the district reached a separation agreement in June 2024, whereupon the following month he took out nomination papers to run in the November 2024 election for the Area 1 board position against Turner.
After temporarily promoting Walker to the interim superintendent’s post, the school board the following month voted to hire the executive headhunting firm of Leadership Associates to carry out a nationwide search for a superintendent to occupy the position on a permanent basis.
As the Fall 2024 campaign heated up, Walker acceded to requests by the then-board majority to hire, at the district’s expense, an attorney, Dominic Quiller, to author a letter that was sent to Krause, asserting that his candidacy and campaign for the school board constituted an abrogation of his separation agreement with the district, in particular its non-disparagement clause which required that the district and Krause mutually refrain from making any statements about the other that could be construed as critical. Dominic informed Krause that the district was immediately discontinuing the scheduled monthly payments and accompanying medical coverage he was receiving as in accordance with the six-month severance pay-out contained in the separation agreement and that if he did not immediately withdraw from the board race, the district would sue him.
Krause did not discontinue his candidacy. As a result of the poll voting at the three precincts in the Adelanto School District Area 1 on November 5, 2024 and the mail-in ballots received by the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Office prior to, the day of and after the election, Krause defeated Turner by a margin of more than 5.5 percent, as he claimed 1,720 or 52.78 percent of the total 3,259 votes cast to Turner’s 1,539 votes or 47.22 percent. With the election concluded, Turner’s remaining time on the board was reduced to just over a month, with four-year term to which she had been elected in 2020 due to expire in December 2024.
In that interregnum, one week after the election, on November 12, 2024, Turner, Steward and Love-French voted to dispense with the nationwide search for a superintendent and instead permanentize Walker as superintendent, approving a contract with her that runs until June 30, 2028. The contract was not, as required by law, made public on the November 12, 2024 agenda. The contract conferred upon Walker a compensation package that dwarfed that of any previous superintendent, consisting of a yearly salary of $282,782, perquisites and pay add-ons of $16,747 and benefits of $75,888 for a total annual compensation of $375,417. Moreover, it involved providing Walker with a level of job security never provided to earlier superintendents. Terminating her under the contract, either with cause or without cause, required under the contract’s terms, a supermajority vote of the board, that is, four of five votes.
The vote to hire Walker was made on a 3-to-2 vote of the board on November 12, 2024, with Turner, Steward and Love-French prevailing and board members Miguel Soto Jr. and Stephanie Kyer, who were not provided with a copy of Walker’s proposed contract, in opposition.
After the election results were certified, Krause was sworn in. Over the next several months, a new majority on the board evolved. Soto and Kyer previously had not been aligned with Turner, Love-French and Steward and had not joined in with them in March 2023 in voting to place then-Superintendent Krause on administrative leave. Nor had they supported hiring Quiller to write the letter to Krause in October 2024 in an effort to persuade him to drop out of the race and they were unsupportive of the decision to extend and approve a contract with Walker while the district was yet engaged in a nationwide superintendent recruitment effort. With Krause having joined Soto and Kyer on the board dais and with Turner gone, the 3-to-2 majority of Turner, Love-French and Steward prevailing over Soto and Kyer became a 2-to-3 minority, with Love-French and Steward dissenting to the predominating Soto, Kyer and Krause.
Initially, at least, Soto, Kyer and Krause sought to make the best of things, as the imperative to educate the district’s 7,742 students beckoned constantly, and keeping things moving at the 14 campuses – nine elementary schools, three middle schools, two kindergarten to 8th grade schools – and its three alternative programs took precedence over whatever matters of personality conflicts or differences that cropped up among the board members.
In time, however, particularly during the two-and-a-half month summer break from regular academics, issues developed that created tension between Walker and the board majority.
In the summer of 2025, Julie St. John-Gonzales, the district’s assistant superintendent of business services, precipitously jumped ship, leaving the employ of the Adelanto Elementary School District with no forewarning and little more than a second-hand explanation that she had been offered a higher paying opportunity elsewhere. St. John-Gonzales’s departure caught the board, which had been satisfied with her performance, unawares and sent the Adelanto Elementary School District scrambling to replace her. In fielding a set of potential candidates to replace St. John-Gonzales, Walker offered the board a short list of applicants to interview and choose from. When it emerged that information about the background of at least some of those candidates had been withheld, members of the board majority became concerned about the level of openness and transparency that Walker was maintaining.
Inquiries with regard to some other issues highlighted what members of the board majority characterized as communication problems or the withholding of what some said was crucial information upon which they were basing their decisions. Soto, Kyer and Krause, observing what they interpreted as Walker’s reluctance to provide them with information and documentation they were seeking, grew concerned that there was a hidden agenda they were not privy to that was playing out in the district they were sworn to oversee. This resulted in the board members going to the extraordinary effort of filing requests and California’s Public Records Act for the district records and internal documents, material that under most circumstances is routinely available to board members. In some cases, records and documents were said to be missing or did not exist. The claim that records the district kept as a normal consequence of its operations were nonexistent was perceived as a deliberate effort by Walker to stymie the board’s exercise of oversight. In other cases, the board learned of some expenditures which seemed to have no or questionable value toward the education of the students in the district. While some were relatively minor expenditures, there were several which pertained to the district engaging in outsourcing of services traditionally provided inhouse, such as securing bus service from outside transportation companies when the district has buses and drivers of its own. Another involved the district’s receipt of $150,000 in Expanded Learning Opportunities Program funds from the California Department of Education. Those knowledgeable about how that money was spent described a substantial amount having gone toward purchases they say were unnecessary and in no way represented an effort toward expanded learning opportunities.
Over the course of more than five months, the board majority had compiled 75 pages of documentation obtained through the California Public Records Act request process which indicated district money was being expended on items or services of no or little conceivable application toward educating the district’s students.
For a time, the board majority’s focus, at least partially, turned toward hiring decisions Walker had engaged in. While school boards generally have the ultimate authority with regard to whom they hire as superintendent, beyond that hiring authority for the remainder of the school district’s personnel lies with the superintendent together with the district’s personnel director, commonly referred to in recent years as the human resources manager or director. While the board is empowered to have input with regard to the hiring decisions, it is the superintendent’s judgment in making such decisions that prevails.
Evolving out of the emerging board majority’s dissatisfaction with Walker was concern over the standards being applied in both hiring and the setting of salary levels.
Soto and Kyer began pressing for an audit of the superintendent’s office and a comprehensive fiscal audit of the district.
Reportedly, a topic that emerged in the board’s closed-door executive discussions relating to the superintendent’s performance was what options the district had in finding another superintendent, which would require that Walker be eased out of the post. The termination clause in her contract, however, required that no fewer than four of the board’s members vote to terminate her.
For months, the 3-to-2 board majority has been faced with the reality that despite their dissatisfaction with Walker’s performance, they do not have the political muscle to terminate the superintendent.
As the actuality of the situation has become more and more apparent, there has been a wellspring of support in the community – extending to the political backers of Love-French, Steward and the currently out-of-office Turner – for Walker. Walker’s supporters include parents of some of the district’s children, some teachers and at least a handful of other district employees. The show of support they have put on has been intended to make the board majority think twice about pressing forward with an effort to force her out.
While the three apparent votes against Walker are not at this time sufficient to hand her a pink slip, there is a possibility that by the end of 2026, a fourth vote to remove her as superintendent will materialize. Both Love-French and Steward must stand for reelection this year and succeed to remain in office. Love-French, whose children are no longer students in the district, has made public statement indicating she might not run for re-election. Reportedly, the union representing teachers in the Adelanto Elementary School District, the Adelanto District Teachers Association, which is affiliated with the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association, will oppose both Steward and Love-French if they run.
It is in this atmosphere that Walker has been contemplating her future. While she would prefer to remain in place as the Adelanto Elementary School District’s superintendent until the end of her contract in June 2028 or even beyond that, it may behoove her to cut herself an exit early, foreclosing the possibility that a newly-composed board at the end of this year or early next year forces her hand by terminating her with or without cause.
There were reports two weeks ago that Walker was engaged in some confidential discussions to see what arrangements could be made for her to step down prior to her contract running its course. Speculation went all over the place. One unconfirmed report was that Walker wanted, and the district was contemplating providing, a guarantee of her contract through to June 2027, a year before her contract is set to expire. In return, she would engage in a wholehearted recruitment drive to find her replacement, essentially reinitiating the search that Leadership Associated was engaged in when the troika of Turner, Love-French and Steward rendered that effort moot by hiring her as the full-fledged superintendent a week after Turner had been voted out of office.
It seems, based on Walker’s action in going out on leave with her second-in-command Valdez and her executive secretary Lovett, that the above-referenced speculation was not quite accurate. Her action has confounded her supporters and those who are in favor of her leaving alike. While the paralysis that gripped the district during the period Walker, Valdez and Lovett were gone did prevent the agenda for the January 27 meeting from being completed and posted, resulting in the cancellation/postponement of the meeting, that was, at best, a temporary interruption. It may have demonstrated the degree to which the district has become dependent on Walker and her team, but such dependence is not absolute. It further alerted the board majority that in the future it will need to have an alternate administration core in place if there is a repetition of what went on from January 19 to January 23.
Moreover, Walker’s lasting absence and that of Valdez has resulted in the loss of what was formerly imputed to her as her morale authority. Many of her supporters had lionized her as someone who put the interest of students first and who was standing up not for herself but for the principle of furthering educational opportunity. Leaving the district and its students in the lurch as she and Vldez have is undercutting her stature in the community.
Walker’s move is inexplicable because of the position it is putting her two crucial supporters on the board – Love-French and Steward – in. Both, for as long as they remain in office, formerly came across as ready to stand unquestionably by Walker. While Love-French remains inextricably tied to Walker, Steward bond to the superintendent is not unbreakable. Indications are that Steward is intent on seeking reelection in November. In the run-up to that contest, she may find it difficult to explain to the voters of Trustee Area 4 why she remains committed to continuing to employ a superintendent who without explanation headed out on an extended leave, departing in such a way that no arrangement for substitute management/administration/leadership put in place first and put the district’s academic mission at risk.
Not just those supporting Walker but others in favor of her departure as well as district observers who have no feelings one way or the other about her continuation as superintendent are baffled by her absence.
Equally mysterious was why Valdez, whose employment with the district began under Walker but whose continuing tenure with the district is by no means necessarily tied to that of the superintendent, seemingly acted in concert with her. The district’s academic services division is arguably that part of its operations most important to the core mission, and there appears to be no one fulfilling Valdez’s function. The district employees the Sentinel spoke with this week seemed genuinely unexpecting of what was ongoing, with one, who spoke guardedly, acknowledging that something was indeed going on, but that only those at the top of the district knew what that was. For the record, none of the board members are making any statements as to Walker’s status.

The City of Fontana will tear out its existing 27,000-square foot City Hall which has existed since 1964 and replace it with a structure of roughly 45,000 square feet.
Going with the old building is some history city officials and residents would like to remember, some history city officials and residents would like to forget and some lessons taxpayers might lose sight of at their own peril.
City officials intend to have the new edifice ready for occupancy two years from now – in January 2028 – a reasonable target but one that might not be met.
The city is spending $58 million to construct the new municipal accommodations, which is intended to house virtually all of the city’s departments other than its police department. It will provide quarters for the fire department, with offices for the fire chief, battalion chiefs and fire administration, within its expanse.
Though some are hailing the construction of a new City Hall as one that is welcome and past due, there are others who consider the undertaking to be self-indulgent and overblown. They consider the existing civic facility to be adequate if somewhat undersized and far from having eclipsed its useful life. They question why the city is going to knock it down and build a new one when it could instead keep it in place and augment it with an annex at cost of around have that of the $58 million the city is going to expend to recreate an edifice from scratch.
The project’s general contractor is PENTA Building Group.
The city is using Fontana Senior Engineer Christopher Smethurst and Lindsay Lomeli, who was recently hired by PENTA Building Group Construction Corporation after having left Uprite Construction Corporation in Los Angeles, as the  project managers.
City officials offered somewhat contradictory statements as to who is responsible for the project’s design. City officials acknowledge that the architectural firm Carrier Johnson + Culture did design work on the project. Nevertheless, Assistant Fontana City Manager Phil Burum in October told the Fontana Herald News, “Rather than having an architect design it, go through the plan, get bids approved, bid for contractors and then ultimately construct it, we lumped it all together with one team and a contractor involved in the design process to compress the development schedule and then also get the most efficient product we could get.”
For the mnemonically-gifted or, depending on how you look at it, the mnemonically-afflicted, the city razing of the existing City Hall is somewhat galling.
In 1982, then-City Manager Jack Ratelle committed the city to a $769,800 renovation of the then-18-year-old City Hall. He gave members of the city council assurances that he would be able to get the job done on the cheap by getting discounts on several elements of the work that had to be done to complete the job, but was unclear as to the specifics. What Ratelle had in mind was that a handful of unofficial trades with contractors and developers by which he had given them assurances project proposals they had in the pipeline would get “expedited” treatment with the city’s planning division in exchange for work on the City Hall renovation to be done at cost or no cost with the city paying for materials.
The project was completed in 1983 and its cost defrayed through transfers and “borrowings” from multiple municipal funds and accounts, including one for $336,000 in one fell swoop from the city’s sewer bond debt reserve fund which Ratelle did not bother to inform the council about.
Eventually, a small group of civically-minded residents discovered that the amount of money in the city’s sewer fund had precipitously dropped from $668,000 to $332,000, without any indication of a disbursement for purposes related to wastewater treatment or the city’s sewer or effluent conveyance systems. Ongoing development at that time was placing a burden on the city’s existing sewage treatment system, necessitating, ultimately, increases in the sewer service rates charged to domestic, commercial and industrial users. After residents and businesses brought the vanishing of money from the city’s sewer fund to the attention of the city council, council members demanded an explanation from Ratelle. Without acknowledging explicitly that the money had been used for the City Hall expansion project, Ratelle assuaged the city council by suggesting that was the case, whereupon the city council acceded to a citizen committee’s recommendation that the city discontinue using money in sequestered municipal accounts intended or earmarked for specific purposes, such as the sewer fund, to pay for unrelated municipal projects and programs, such as the City Hall expansion.
In late 1983, at the city council’s direction, Ratelle and then Finance Director Ed Luekemeyer transferred $400,000 that had been appropriated for civic projects unrelated to maintaining or expanding the sewer system back into the sewer bond debt reserve fund. This was seen by many knowledgeable residents as an admission by city officials that the city was gouging its residents in charging them for the provision of basic services and diverting the inflated proceeds for unauthorized and illegitimate purposes and uses. In response, the city council, Ratelle and other top administrators offered an assurance that the money the city was taking in was being well spent. They said the City Hall expansion was intended to promote the civic center’s usefulness for another half century or beyond, perhaps extending City Hall’s life to the century mark in 2064.
It is clear from what the current city council is doing that its members do not believe they need to honor the commitments made by their predecessors in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Some have suggested that the mayor and current members of the council – Acquanetta Warren, John Roberts, Jesse Sandoval, Phil Cothran, Jr. and Pete Garcia – are throwing economic conservatism to the wind largely because they see an opportunity to provide themselves with a form of immortality of a sort – getting their names on the cornerstone of the new City Hall, a shrine that will outlive them and perpetuate their renown, at least in Fontana, until the 22nd Century.
While Warren, Roberts, Sandoval, Cothran and Garcia are intoxicated with the idea of their grandchildren’s grandchildren being able to proudly point out to their contemporaries who their great-great-grandmother or great-great-grandfather was, the cost the cost the city is taking on is sobering.
Revizto, Tech 24 Construction and MannLee Building Materials are in rough concurrence that constructing a 45,000-square-foot public building, such as a library, community center, or government office typically ranges from $13.5 million to over $26 million, based on average commercial costs of $300 to $600+ per square foot. Allowances for a deviation in cost is made for construction specialized public buildings, such as police stations, which can reach upward to $580/square foot, since complex community facilities can and often do fall on the higher end of the stated range. This is consistent with the cost Fontana city officials spoke about when they were discussing the City Hall project as recently as two years ago, when the figure[s] $27 million-to-$29 million were being thrown around.
At this point, the price tag has more than doubled, reaching $58 million. Approximately calculating that the currently existing City Hall’s 27,000 square feet represent 60 percent of the 45,000 square feet of the new City Hall, given that the yet-existing but now empty quarters remain fully functional, the value of the facility to be torn down is $34.8 million.
It has been observed that three of the members of the council are current or former government employees who are provided with generous and/or comfortable salaries and benefits or pensions paid for by the taxpayers.
Councilman Pete Garcia, who works for the State of California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, draws a $194,572.36 salary and $58,719.30 in benefits for an annual total compensation of $253,291.66.
Councilman John Roberts, who is retired as a firefighter with San Bernardino County, draws an annual pension of $137,240.91
Mayor Acquanetta Warren, who is a retired municipal employee primarily with the City of Upland, draws an annual pension of $98,421.24, based on her 24 years and 7.5 months as a city official.
Councilman Jesse Sandoval, who is a retired municipal employee with the City of San Bernardino, is pulling an annual pension of $69,862.07.
In this way, a majority of the city’s current decisionmakers, as government employees or former employees in the public sector who do not or did not feel the pinch of taxation in the same way that the majority of city residents, who are employed within the private sector and are subject to the vicissitudes of not just their own tax burden but taxation as levied upon their private sector employers. It is the mayor’s and city council’s easy come, easy go relationship with and perception of public money that might account, some believe, in the way in which the city is willing to knock down a building worth $34.8 million to replace it with one costing $58 million.
For Mayor Warren and councilmen Roberts, Cothran and Garcia, all of whom are Republicans, the razing of the existing City Hall harbors a highly personalized bonus. Doing so will allow for the removal of famed Italian sculptor Michele Paszyn’s 40-inch high by 32-inch by 16-inch cast bronze bust of John F. Kennedy, mounted on a 49-inch high by 33-inch by 25-inch granite-faced plinth on a stepped concrete base that was dedicated on November 22, 1964, one year to the day after Kennedy’s assassination and publicly unveiled on December 6, 1964. It has remained in front of City Hall ever since. Kennedy was a Democrat.

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors took several actions at its January 13 and January 27 regularly scheduled meetings.
The board approved at its January 13 meeting a $3.1 million revenue agreement with the California Department of Public Health for the continued provision of mandated newborn screening specimen collection and courier services through June 30, 2029.
The San Bernardino County Public Health Department will perform these screenings at local birthing hospitals and clinics, ensuring early detection of more than 80 congenital disorders. The agreement allows the county to receive reimbursement for coordination and collection services and supports efforts to improve early treatment and outcomes for infants born in San Bernardino County.
At the January 13 meeting, the board also signed off on accepting federal reimbursement for joint fugitive task force participation.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is receiving a reimbursement from the U.S. Marshals Service for participation in the Pacific Southwest Regional Fugitive Task Force through September 30, 2029. The reimbursement provides up to $31,900 annually for overtime and vehicle fuel costs associated with apprehending federal fugitives.
By participating in the task force, the Sheriff’s Department enhances collaboration between federal and local law enforcement, increases regional safety and supports the Sheriff’s priority of locating and arresting violent offenders, which aligns with the county’s declared goals.
At the same meeting, the board apprved providing mental health support for drug court participants.
The board approved an amendment to an agreement with MFI Recovery Center, Inc., adding approximately $418,000 in funding for a total not to exceed approximately $3.1 million through June 30. Utilizing these partnerships, the San Bernardino County Department of Behavioral Health provides outpatient, intensive outpatient and recovery services for adult participants in the San Bernardino County Superior Court’s Drug Court programs, which divert individuals from incarceration into treatment. The contract amendment ensures continued access to behavioral health services that support sobriety, accountability and reduced recidivism as part of the county’s collaborative justice approach.
The San Bernardino County Land Use Services is amending the county development code to consolidate and update regulations governing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and junior accessory dwelling units (JADUs), ensuring compliance with recent changes in state law. The amendments create a new stand-alone chapter—Chapter 84.36—by consolidating three existing chapters: accessory structures and uses, allowed projections, and parking and loading.
The revised ordinance establishes new development standards, including maximum building heights of 25 feet for attached ADUs, 18 feet for detached ADUs and 16 feet for ADUs permitted by right. Minimum unit sizes are now set at 200 square feet for ADUs and 150 square feet for JADUs. To streamline approvals, Land Use Services will adopt the state-mandated permitting timelines: 75 calendar days for standard plan applications and 45 calendar days for pre-approved plan applications.
At the board’s January 27 meeting, the panel approved discretionary funding allocations to support various community initiatives through what the county calls the district specific priorities program.
The county will appropriate:
– $433,500 from Second District Supervisor Jesse Armendarez’s district specific priorities program to the Fontana Unified School District to enhance school safety through a new crisis alert platform program for $418,500 and to support Summit High School Cheer Boosters for $15,000.
– $150,000 from Armendarez’s district specific priorities program to the City of Fontana to support its Downtown Economic Development Plan, including cultural programming, artist development and small business activation.
– $125,000 from Armendarez’s district specific priorities program to The Rivers Edge Ranch to launch a women’s residential recovery program in Apple Valley.
– $50,000 from Armendarez’s district specific priorities program to Thundar Lightning and Peace to expand outreach and wellness services for veterans and first responders.
– Up to $50,000 from Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman’s district specific priorities program to Chino Post No. 299 American Legion Department of California to support the event hall renovation project at the Chino post.
These investments will enhance recovery services, economic opportunity and public safety through strategic partnerships that will help the county to achieve its declared goals.
The board on January 27 approved the creation of a Child Welfare Ad Hoc Committee to review and recommend policy changes that strengthen child protection and family services. The committee will consist of Vice Chair and Fifth District Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr. and Second District Supervisor Jesse Armendarez.
This newly formed committee will work alongside county departments to evaluate the structure, practices and policies of the county’s child welfare system. In 2025, the San Bernardino County Children and Family Services Department received more than 24,800 referrals and served over 7,100 children, including more than 5,400 in active foster care placements. The committee’s goal is to identify and address barriers to child safety, improve case timelines and enhance long-term outcomes for children and families.
The San Bernardino County Division of Animal Care is partnering with The PAW Mission to expand mobile veterinary services to support animal shelters and community cat programs throughout the county. The $500,000 annual agreement will provide spay/neuter, vaccination and general veterinary care both in the field and at the county’s Devore and Big Bear shelters from February 1 through January. 31, 2028.
The PAW Mission will help reduce overcrowding by preparing more shelter animals for adoption and expanding the Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return program to humanely reduce free-roaming cat populations in unincorporated areas.

The board approved a $1.2 million contract with E-1 Holdings, Inc. to purchase and upfit eight new vehicles to support San Bernardino County Behavioral Health’s Community Crisis Response Teams in their mobile crisis response to strengthen mental heath health care in the field.
The new vehicles will enhance the county’s ability to deliver mental health crisis intervention services directly in the community, often in coordination with law enforcement or emergency medical responders. The units will be equipped with emergency lighting, communications technology, storage and interior modifications to support a safe and effective field response.
By increasing timely access to behavioral health services, the county is making continued progress toward achieving its declared goals.
The San Bernardino County Public Defender received a $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to support holistic defense services in the county. The funding will help to establish an interdisciplinary, client-centered legal representation model, including wraparound services such as social work, mental health support and reentry services.
The board on January 27 accepted more than $45 million in grant funding to support local efforts to prevent infectious disease and improve behavioral health services, including:
Approximately $4.7 million from the California Department of Public Health to San Bernardino County Public Health for the Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention and Collaboration Program for the period of July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2031.
Funds will support sexually transmitted infection prevention, testing, treatment and care activities focused on high-risk and at-need populations.
At least 50 percent of the funds must be allocated to community-based organizations or nonprofit health care providers selected through a competitive process.
The county is also going to receive approximately $1.7 million from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which is to be provided to the County Department of Public Health for strengthening public health infrastructure through November 30.
Funding will allow the County Public Health Department to enhance the department’s performance management and accreditation effort, the development of policies and standard practices, updates to the electronic health record system, and financial management and procurement processes.
This is the county’s second award installment under this grant program.
Approximately $39 million from the California Department of Health Care Services for the Bond Behavioral Continuum Infrastructure Program (Round 1: Launch ready grant) to San Bernardino County Behavioral Health through June 30, 2026.
Behavioral Health will utilize approximately $3.9 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, land contributed to the Pacific Village Platinum Campus and any needed 2011 Support Services funds to meet the 10% local match requirement for the grant award.
The departments will utilize the grant funds toward the construction and rehabilitation of the campus, including facilities for crisis stabilization, crisis residential, community and outpatient behavioral health services and clinically enriched long-term treatment.
By receiving these grant funds, Public Health and Behavioral Health are working toward achieving the health care goals in the Countywide Vision.

Affordable housing and community development investment strategy

San Bernardino County Community Development and Housing presented the proposed 2026–27 U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Consolidated Annual Action Plan, which serves as the county’s formal grant spending strategy for approximately $9.1 million in anticipated federal entitlement funding from federal programs, including Community Development Block Grant, HOME Investment Partnerships and Emergency Solutions Grant.

The department developed the plan in collaboration with local jurisdictions, service providers, developers and the San Bernardino County Office of Homeless Services.

The final annual action plan will be presented to the board in April for approval and submitted to HUD in April.

Angela Valles, who cut her political teeth in the Victor Valley two decades ago, shocking and rearranging the political establishment while doing so, is seeking to represent a Congressional District in the northern part of the state.
As before, Valles is approaching her candidacy in ways that are not in keeping with the powers that be on either side of the political spectrum.
Valles was elected to the Victor Valley College Board of Trustees in 2007, which was essentially a baby-step that made few, if any waves. In 2010, she vied for a position on the Victorville City Council, which again rang no major alarm bells until she won. At that point, she stepped into a whirlpool of controversy. Victorville, the third of San Bernardino County’s desert city’s to incorporate in 1962, had grown into the county’s fifth largest city population-wise and its largest geographically. Once host to an Air Force Base that was being transitioned into an international airport for which city officials had hopes of becoming the largest air cargo transport facility in the world, Victorville in addition to its municipal government had multiple adjuncts, including aviation and rail authorities. The community was attracting investment dollars from elsewhere in Southern California, in particular Orange and Los Angeles Counties as well as from elsewhere in the state, across the country and internationally. Infrastructure was being constructed and a race was on among companies competing to get lucrative contracts to build it. Money was changing hands as corporate interests were attempting to get in on the ground floor and secure advantages going into the future. Alliances had been set up years previously and individuals placed onto the city council who were long committed to seeing the interests of those who had bankrolled their campaigns advanced.
The High Desert and the Victor Valley in particular were already a hotbed of conservative, right wing politics. Valles fit into the mold of the area’s politicians but at the same time, she did not. She was a Republican and a social, fiscal and Constitutional conservative. As a Latina, her alliance with the GOP was at a variance from what many might have expected. And her rock-ribbed Republicanism and fiscal conservatism was something else again compared to what the Republicans running Victorville expected.
City fathers were on a mission to make the money of those who had invested in Victorville grow. That meant cutting corners, ethically and legally. Political grease was being spread around to make sure projects and programs, which might otherwise bog down or get denied in the planning process, were approved. Bonds were being issued to pay for infrastructure and public improvements which were secured by assets and collateral which were woefully overvalued.
Initially coming into office, Valles was aware of none of that. She had expected to become a member of the team, indeed was looking forward to it, but that did not happen. What she sensed, virtually from the moment she was sworn in as a councilwoman, was that she was an outsider whom those already on the inside were not sure about. They were not certain that she could be trusted if she were told about everything that was happening. She was kept in the dark on a lot of things. Still, there were things she couldn’t miss.
“On the Victorville city council I saw the corruption and kickbacks,” she said. Having not been welcomed into the inner sanctum, she made no bones about distinguishing herself from her council colleagues, referring to action the council took as things “they” rather than “we” carried out.
In April 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that fraud was committed by the city of Victorville, the Southern California Logistics Airport Authority and Keith Metzler, who held the dual roles of assistant city manager and executive director of the airport authority, when misrepresentations were allegedly made to the purchasers of bonds, the proceeds from which were intended to assist in the development of Southern California Logistics Airport.
The airport authority was formed by the city of Victorville to facilitate the conversion of the former George Air Force Base, which was shuttered by the Department of Defense in 1992, into a civilian airport. The Southern California Logistics Airport Authority, which has as its board of directors all five members of the Victorville City Council, issued bonds which were sold to investors to generate revenue to be used in converting the base to civilian use.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s action pertained to bonds that were issued in April 2008, before Valles was elected to the council. There was suspicion among those in the Victorville establishment that it was Valles who had dimed the city out to the SEC. Valles has never confirmed that, exactly, saying simply, “I fought them. I saw them giving everyone raises even while we were failing to make bond payments.”
Relatively early on, Valles recognized that her ability, on her own, to reform Victorville was limited. In 2012, she sought, but ultimately failed, to move into a more powerful and higher ranking position from which she could effectuate change. In 2012, when long-time Congressman Jerry Lewis did not seek reelection in what was then California’s 8th Congessional District, she ran, as a Republican, to succeed him. Ultimately, Paul Cook, then a California Assemblyman, prevailed in that bid.
In 2014, she opted against seeking reelection to the Victorville City Council. In 2016, she and her husband, Apple Valley Councilman Rick Roelle, in a highly unconventional move, both challenged incumbent San Bernardino County First District Supervisor Robert Lovingood for reelection. They were joined in the race by two city councilmen from Hesperia. Valles captured second place in that year’s June Primary Election and went on to the run-off against Lovingood that November. She lost in a surprisingly narrow 51.76 percent to 48.24 percent contest to the incumbent.

In 2018 Valles was among a field of 12 candidates in the race for three positions on the Apple Valley Town Council. She finished seventh.
She has not been directly involved in politics since, other than as a consequence of Roelle’s service as a member of the Apple Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees and through her commentary on her personal blog, which expounds, sometimes extensively, on politics. As a consequence of her blog, there was speculation that she was going to run for the Apple Valley Town Council this year. That is not accurate, however. She says she had no such plans and, in actuality, is a resident of Apple Valley’s District 2, where an election will next be held in 2028.
Valles and Roelle also have a home in Northern California, which falls within California’s First Congressional District. Last year, in reaction to a redistricting effort in Texas pushed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott intended to transform congressional districts in the Lone Star State held by Democrats into Republican leaning jurisdictions that will therefore fall into Republican hands and help preserve a Republican majority House of Representatives following the mid-term November 2026 election, California Governor Gavin Newsom and his Democratic cohorts placed Proposition 50 on a special November 2025 ballot. Proposition 50 called for gerrymandering the existing California Congressional map such that five of the 12 congressional seats in California now held by Republicans will be likely to flip to Democrats in the November 2026 election. Among those seats where the borders were rearranged to move Republicans out of the district and Democrats in was the First Congressional District to which Republican Doug LaMalfa was elected in 2024. Proposition 5 was passed by the state’s voters in November 2025.
In a quick response, Democrats Mike McGuire, James Salegui, Casey Stewart and Kyle Wilson jumped into the First Congressional District race. The Republicans were yet backing up and trying to regroup, contemplating, perhaps, getting another Republican to run in the primary, hoping that with so many Democrats competing and two Republicans in the race, the Democratic vote might be diluted to the point that the two Republicans would finish first and second in the June Primary, qualifying themselves for November run-off, thus thwarting Newsom and company’s plan to flip the Republican First Congressional District Democratic. Things went topsy-turvy on January 6 when LaMalfa died.
According to Valles, “Following the unfortunate passing of Congressman Doug LaMalfa, I believed there was both an opportunity and a responsibility to ensure Northern California does not lose this Republican seat under the realities created by Proposition 50 and redistricting. Quite candidly, repeating the same candidate profile without regard to changing voter demographics places the seat at risk.
“In that context, I was contacted by Mike Greer, who identified himself as representing the Northern California Republican Central Committee,” Valles continued. “During that conversation, he encouraged me not to run, explaining that party leadership preferred career politician Dan Gallagher of the California Assembly and did not want additional candidates ‘crowding the field.’ I respectfully declined. I made clear that I am running because I believe I offer a stronger, more competitive alternative—particularly among independent voters, Hispanic voters, and women, all of whom are increasingly decisive in District 1. If Republicans fail to broaden the coalition, this seat is far more likely to flip.”
Valles said, “While I have never received formal party support, my decision is grounded in electoral reality, not internal politics. California Republicans will not secure or expand representation without candidates who reflect and appeal to the voters necessary to win general elections.”
In spelling out her campaign platform, Valles said, “Northern California’s economy is driven by small businesses, agriculture, trades, tourism, and resource-based industries” and she said the region needs, “economic opportunity, small business and workforce development.”
With regard to the nation’s overall need for fiscal responsibility, she said Congress in general must reduce federal spending and the national debt. “The national debt is a serious threat to economic stability, national security, and future generations. Endless deficit spending reflects political convenience, not leadership.”
She indicated that she is behind President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, stating this was a matter of “public safety, border consequences and the rule of law. P ublic safety begins with the rule of law. When laws are selectively enforced, rural communities suffer.”
With Valles, maintaining the Second Amendment right to bear arms as a fundamental American principle is “non-negotiable. The Second Amendment is absolute. It is not a suggestion, not a privilege, and not subject to political fashion. It exists for one reason: to ensure that free people are never dependent on criminals or corrupt systems for their survival.”
She opined that the federal government has been remiss in its managing of forest lands, leading to catastrophic massive wildland fires.
“Wildfires are not an unavoidable reality at today’s scale,” she said. “They are the result of federal mismanagement, bureaucratic delay, and ideological land policies.”
She said the state and federal government should remain in their lanes.
“One-size-fits-all federal mandates frequently fail rural communities,” she said.
While she supports President Trump over the Democratic alternatives, she indicated that the executive branch at the federal level has overstepped itself and that she favors restoring constitutional governance and congressional oversight.
“The Constitution places Congress closest to the people and gives it oversight authority for a reason,” she said.
Valles said she is in favor of ending federal income tax and abolishing property taxes, and funding the U.S. Government through tariffs rather than taxes on citizens’ wages.
“The federal income tax is a weapon of control that punishes work, tracks earnings, and feeds a bloated federal bureaucracy,” she said. “It allows Washington to confiscate wages before families ever see their paychecks — all while wasting trillions with no accountability. Property taxes are one of the most abusive and unconstitutional forms of taxation in America. If the government can seize your home because you stopped paying a recurring tax on property you already purchased, then you do not own your property — the government does.”
Northern California deserves serious representation focused on results, responsibility, and respect for the people who live and work here. For too long, rural communities have carried the consequences of federal decisions made far away, without local understanding, transparency, or accountability.
This campaign is about restoring trust in government, defending liberty, and ensuring California’s First District is no longer an afterthought in Washington.

Federal law does not require a congressional candidate to reside full-time in the district he or she represents but within the state of the Congressional delegation he or she is a part of. Despite Valles’s long association with the Victor Valley, she is actually a resident with an established domicile in Shasta County.
“I purchased a Lakehouse in Lakehead, California, approximately three years ago, and have been splitting my time between Southern and Northern California since then,” Valles told the Sentinel. “I am registered to vote in District 1. I live in the district part-time, and it is where Rick and I intend to retire one day.”

The Redlands Unified School District Board of Trustees on Tuesday night signaled the readiness of its ruling majority to provide 6.8 percent of its employees with pink slips in March that will become effective in June if the district’s financial picture does not improve.
The vote by three of the board’s members was preliminary and precautionary rather than de facto. California law requires that teachers and support personnel, referred to as classified employees be provided with warning by March 15 if their employment is to be terminated in the following school year.
According to those three board members and Redlands Schools Superintendent Juan Cabral, budgetary constraints brought on by generous pay increases over the last five years and declining enrollment have forced the district into having to make cutbacks.
Contradicting that, the two board members who dissented in the vote and their supporters have asserted that the district’s preparations toward layoffs is a byproduct of the illiberal attitudes of the three board members who now constitute the ruling coalition on the school board.
Discerning facts from rhetoric in the Redlands School District has become increasingly difficult over the past several years as two ideologically-driven factions – those espousing what they call traditional values and those claiming to be progressives – have been struggling for control of the 19,428 student, 25 school for four years.
For more than two decades, Redlands Unified, much like the vast majority of the 1,023 other school districts in California, was dominated by liberal politics, based upon multiple factors, mostly on account of the Democratic Party’s solid majority hold on the state, the advanced-education status of those in the teaching profession and the power of the California Teachers Association and its hundreds of affiliates and offshoots representing the state’s educators.
Within the last decade and more intensely since 2020, growing numbers of social conservatives, including parents and social activists, have made concerted efforts in a limited number of venues throughout the state to not merely challenge the schools’ liberal heterodoxy but to strive and even lunge for political control in specific jurisdictions where the demographics and concentration of Republican or conservative voters have made takeover of local school boards possible. While many such bids at this conservative ideological assertion failed either narrowly, concingly or spectacularly, there were breakthroughs in some places, most notably the Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County, the Temecula Valley Unified School District and the Murrieta Valley Unified School District in Riverside County, the Orange Unified School District in Orange County, the Sunol Glen Unified School District in Alameda County, as well as in other districts in Placer, Sacramento, and San Diego counties and in the Central Valley. In 2022, conservative forces coalesced behind Erin Stepien in her challenge of longtime board member Patty Holohan in the district’s Area 1 race.
Redlands’ social conservatives, instead of desisting after that setback, intensified their efforts in 2024, functioning under the umbrella of a local political action committee dubbed “Awaken Redlands,” which heavily backed candidates Lawrence Paul Hebron, Candy Olson, and Jeanette Wilson in an effort to establish a traditional values coalition on the school board. While Melissa Ayala-Quintero prevailed over Hebron in the district’s Area 3, Wilson and Olson carried the day in areas 4 and 5.
This created a liberal/conservative split on the board with Holohan and Ayala-Quintero matching Olson and Wilson, making Michelle Rendler, who had faced no opposition in her 2022 race, in the position of the swing vote on the panel. In the initial months after the new members of the school board were installed in December 2024, Rendler earnestly sought to bridge the middle ground without taking sides and giving either faction a clear edge. The presence of Olson and Wilson on the board, nonetheless, created a situation in which actions championed by conservatives that were anathema to the liberals, which had not previously been contemplated or considered, were being brought forth for discussion.
Those included banning all flags beside the American or California flag and creating a system by which parents or others could challenge books in the schools’ libraries or classrooms’ bookshelves as obscene or inappropriate and have them removed upon a concurring conclusion by a review panel and restricting those competing in girls’ sports to biological females.
Holohan, Ayala-Quintero and their supporters were outraged that even a conceptual discussion of those proposals was broached let alone that the board would take action with regard to them. An amorphous group of progressives, known as Together For Redlands, coalesced in a reaction against what Olson and Wilson and their band of traditionalists were up to. For starters, they said, such a flag ban was not only closed-minded and xenophobic on its face but in actuality a disguised effort to ban the homosexual pride flag, an insult to not only homosexuals but queers of all stripe, including gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals. Banning the pride flag was tantamount to shaming those of alternate sexuality and risked inflicting on the more sensitive among them such deep psychological trauma that they would be driven to suicide. Preventing students from having access to books was indistinguishable from the book banning/book burning of Girolamo Savonarola in the 1490s or the German National Socialists in the 1930s. And anyone seeking to prevent those who consider themselves to be women from presenting themselves as such and being accorded the basic human respect of having their chosen identities recognized and honored were bigots of the lowest order who were falsely claiming they were protecting women to further their own sexist agenda, those on the liberal side of the political divide asserted. Olson and Wilson were, quite simply and clearly, seeking to impose their white Christian mindset on everyone else, they said.
Meanwhile, the bewildered Rendler was caught in a no-win situation between Redlands Awake and Together For Redlands. Those on both sides of the divide believed with the same degree of passion that the decision for Rendler was a simple and straightforward one: she should come down on their side.
When Rendler hesitated, seeking deliberate and potentially compromise, the community’s conservatives such as those with Redlands Awake became impatient with her dawdling. The buttonholed her, poked her in the ribs and told her, quietly and out of the earshot of the public, that she should do what is moral and right by just saying, “No,” to the queers.
There was nothing so subtle about Together For Redlands, which did its lobbying of her not in private but in public. Its members and others of like mind made their feelings known about the rightwing Christian bigots who were seeking to commandeer the city’s once-vaunted public education system. They told her straight out that she could either stand with those who were on the right side of history and shut down Olson and Wilson’s fascistic takeover or disgrace herself by siding with them. When Rendler continued to hang fire, the liberals turned mean.
Having been elevated to the position of board president, Rendler officiated over the meetings. She prided herself on being able to conduct open, spirited and exploratory discussions of issues of impost to the district in an orderly and dignified manner in which those participating were respectful, civil and courteous. As it grew obvious that Rendler was not decisively falling onto the liberal side of the divide, a tactic the progressives used against her was to deny her the ability to conduct civilized hearings. Instead of redoubling their efforts to win Rendler over, they openly sought to offend and insult her by engaging in ad hominem attacks on the community’s conservatives or those present at the meeting with pointed verbal abuse, personal attacks, profanity and departures from propriety that plunged the board meetings into chaos. Members of Together For Redlands reserved some of the most vitriolic attacks for Rendler.
The tone deaf political approach that the progressives in the community were taking in the effort to win Rendler over was obvious to many on hand at the meetings or viewing them on television or by steaming them over the internet. Rendler wanted nothing so much as to be respected and given her due as board president. The strategy, to the extent that there was one, was to deny her that dignity unless and until she came across to vote with Holohan and Ayala-Quintero. Meanwhile, the traditionalists, who were themselves a bit miffed with Rendler’s unwillingness to make up her mind, prudently waited the situation out, doing nothing over to offend the board president.
Rendler, stuck in a no-win situation where both choices seemed equally problematic or nonsensical, and facing a choice between two unpleasant options, found herself at last swayed more by the attacks the liberals were making on her than the persuasiveness of the traditionalists. Ultimately, she gravitated to Wilson and Olson’s side of the divide.
At this point, those at the forefront of the Redlands progressive movement maintain they were right all along in engaging in the blistering attacks on Rendler.
Rendler was never on a trajectory to see eye-to-eye with Redlands liberals and left-leaning residents in the city, a spokeswoman for Together For Redlands told the Sentinel in October 2025.
“It is implied that Ms. Rendler is solely reacting to the tactics used by Together For Redlands,” a group statement read. “In fact, Ms. Rendler had previously voiced support for banning books and banning flags during previous school boards, but lacked support for such positions until Ms. Olson and Ms. Rendler were elected.”
On April 22, 2025, the Redlands Unified School District Board of Education passed a 3–2 resolution, with Rendler, Olson and Wilson prevailing, aimed at banning transgender girls, i.e., those assigned male identification at birth, from competing as part of girls’ sports teams.
On July 8, 2025, following a lengthy and emotional meeting the Redlands Unified School passed, by a 3-to-2 margin with Rendler, Olson and Wilson prevailing, a policy restricting flags on school campuses and in classrooms. That policy prohibits the display of the gay pride flag at school facilities.
On August 19, 2025, on a 3-to-2 vote, with Rendler, Olson and Wilson prevailing, the Redlands School Board passed a policy establishing a formal, 45-day review process for challenging books in school libraries and classrooms alleged to be obscene, sexually explicit, or inappropriate for students. That policy allows the books to be banned if a panel consisting of the district superintendent, the assistant superintendent of educational services and either the director of primary education or the director of secondary education deem the book to be more sexually explicit/inappropriate than of educational value.
Not all, but some, district teachers protested vigorously over the district’s policy changes. In some cases, those teachers lodged protests that were respectful of the board majority. In other cases, those protests were less than respectful.
Those on that list included: nine assistant principal at the elementary and middle school level; two special services coordinators, including one who specializes in athletics and student support; eight so-called academic case carrier counselors; eight elementary school counselors; six secondary school counselors; four librarians; four program specialists; ten teachers and counselors with the Redlands Adult School; three school nurses; twenty teachers on assignment at various schools; sixteen physical education teachers; one English language teacher; one coordination at the district’s Academics, Arts & Athletics (AAA) Academy; two family and community engagement liaisons; nine health care technicians; three general instructional paraprofessionals; five special education instructional paraprofessionals; twelve library paraprofessionals working four hours per day; one library paraprofessional working five hours per day; one library paraprofessional working six hours per day; one library paraprofessional working eight hours per day; six full time library paraprofessionals; two licensed vocational nurses; and three special education behavior assistants.
Cabral said that the proposal was “horrible” but the district’s top administrators were making the recommendation based on the way that would best balance the district’s budget.
“It is horrible,” he said. “There is no choice. We need to reduce that,” but acknowledging, “It is not good for our kids.”
Nevertheless, Cabral said, financial reality is pushing the district into “making the decision now.” .
This week, Superintendent Juan Cabral brought before the board a proposal to inform 138 district employees that they potentially will be laid off at the end of the current school year in June.
Some of the members of the public present at the meeting, including parents, some teachers, a few of the district’s non-teaching employees and some students were critical of the preparations for the layoffs.
Some suggested publicly and some privately that the move was made in part because of the manner in which Rendler is alienated from those activated liberals in the community, extending to many teachers and members of the teachers’ union. Others have said proposal had something to do with the board majority’s hostility toward the community’s progressives.
Holohan harkened back to 2008 and 2009, when the downturn in the economy had resulted in a loss of revenue to the district. She said the district had administrators go to all of the district’s schools to interview the principals to hear their recommendations on how to achieve operational savings and determine what teachers or employees should or could be let go. She indicated she could not get behind wholesale layoffs.
Critics of the board majority have suggested that Rendler, Oson and Wilson are looking to punish district employees for having opposed the policy changes they pushed through last year and the way some of that opposition was personalized to them.
Redlands Teachers Association President Stephen Caperton said the lion’s share of the cuts the board is pursuing pertain to teaching, classrooms and services to students while only three positions are being taken out of administration at the district office. The board was not being judicious or even-handed in making the cuts, which he said were necessitated by the board’s previous decisions.
“When cuts are necessary,” Caperton said, “they must be laser-focused and focused on maintaining our mission.”
Holohan wanted the district administration to lay out other options for cutting costs.
According to Olson, the district is just coming to grips with fiscal reality. Part of that reality was created by the district intensifying spending in 2021 after receiving money from the state and federal government to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. In 2021, flush with that money, which discontinued after one-time infusions, the district provided 13 percent to 14 percent raises to teachers.
“When the one-time money runs out, it catches up, and it has caught up to us,” Olson said.
Ayala-Quintero said the teachers deserved the raises that were made after the district’s receipt of the COVID-19 funding because they had worked hard to keep the district’s educational mission running during the crisis.
Ayala-Quintero’s pro-employee and pro-union advocacy, coupled with her criticism of the board majority, encapsulates the deep philosophical divide within the district. Some, such as Ayala-Quintero and Holohan see keeping teachers employed and generously compensated as a primary goal of the district, and argue that doing so ensures a top-flight education for the students in the district. Others assert that pay, benefits and job security for teachers and district staff should be secondary to the quality of education provided to students and that if money is needed to enhance educational opportunities, then laying off non-critical teachers and staff to obtain that funding should be pursued.
Olson said the cuts might prove necessary.
District employees with a window on the district’s finances said the preparation to make the personnel cuts was a logical reaction to the district’s current financial picture and trends.
According to Deputy Superintendent Jason Hill, COVID-19 funding was utilized to hire employees as school resumed following the 2020-2021 shutdown. The discontinuation of the funding with the district still employing those added teachers and staff is draining district resources at present. Layoff would return district staffing levels to those before the COVID-19 crisis, Hill said. He indicated the district has for two years understood that those hirings in 2021 and 2022 were supposed to be temporary.
During the June 24 school board meeting, RUSD Director of Fiscal Services Kirtan Shah previously told the board that at the end of the district’s 2025–26 budget cycle in June, there will be a year-end fund balance of $70.7 million in the district’s reserves, down from $91 million the previous year. By 2028, the reserves will have diminished to $48 million as a result of declining enrollment and reductions in state funding.
At this point, more than half way through 2025-26, the district’s reserved are down to  $74 and $55 million of that is restricted funding, earmarked for spending on specifics into the future. The difference represents the district’s true reserves, Hill intimated. Much of that $19 million will be eaten up by anticipated but uncertain costs and maintenance, he said. Thus, the district has $8 million that is not already scheduled to be spent out on known costs.

The Yucca Valley Animal Shelter, at least temporarily, will not be welcoming dogs being given up their owners.
The facility’s kennels are beyond their maximum capacity. Designed to hold 57 dogs, as of 2 p.m. today, they are packed with 97.
“Yucca Valley Animal Shelter is currently operating at 170.1 percent capacity,” the shelter’s website states.
The shelter has animals that are cataloged in three categories, those being ones on its urgent need list, its adoptable pets list, its rescue release only list and its stray & found list.
Currently, there are 71 dogs on the shelter’s adoptable pets list, all of which can be adopted by qualified owners willing to give the dogs a good home. There are now two dogs on the rescue only list, which is not a euthanasia list. Those animals are not currently available for public adoption but are eligible for placement with approved rescue partners who can give the dogs specialized treatment. Animals are continuously evaluated for health and behavior, and may be moved to the adoptable list as appropriate. Pets under eight weeks of age or under two pounds will remain rescue release only until they meet adoptable criteria.
There is a single dog on the stray and found list. There are also 14 stray and lost cats at the shelter.
There is currently a single dog on the in-urgent need of assistance from a 501(c)(3) rescue partner list, as the dog is at risk of humane euthanasia due to medical, behavioral, and/or capacity limits. This dog and others who in the future are placed on the in-urgent need of assistance list may also be available for adoption by the general public.
According to the Town of Yucca Valley, dogs brought in by their owners accounted for over 17 percent of all dogs and 19 percent of all cats housed at the shelter in 2025. Over the year, 133 dogs and 36 cats were left off by their owners.
Strays brought to the shelter by residents comprised 28 percent of the 772 dogs brought into the shelter in 2025. In the same period. Of the 184 cats at the shelter 25 percent, or 41 were strays.
Roughly one fourth of both the dogs and cats at the shelter last year were county and town animal control officers impounds.
For the time being, those pet owners who can no longer care for their pets should see if they can have others who will be kind to them, such as friends, family or individuals who are known to be animal lovers take them off their hands.
The shelter intends to continue to accept stray animals and deal with animals caught in emergency circumstances.
Those thinking of adopting can go to yucca-valley.org, and go to the animal shelter feature or phone 760-365-3111.
Shianne May is Yucca Valley animal care and control manager. Cassandra Blackstone is the city’s senior shelter specialist. Amanda Saliba, Ryan Gordon and Nathan Lopez are the animal caretakers at the shelter.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” —from Franklin Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address, 1933

By Phill Courtney
Eighty-five years ago this month, on January 6, 1941, in Washinton D.C., President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered the eighth of his constitutionally mandated reports on the nation’s condition. Given first as speeches by Presidents Washington and Adams, then followed by many years of written reports, it’s almost always given now as an annual State of the Union address after President Wilson restored the tradition in 1913, and Roosevelt gave this one at the beginning of his unprecedent third presidential term while warfare in Europe and Asian blackened the background.
World War II was now raging, and Roosevelt was acutely aware of the conflicting forces then abroad in the land, with some voices calling for our participation, while others countered that call by urging a continuation of what some called “neutrality,” and others American “isolationism.”
In Roosevelt’s speech, he focused much of his attention on an effort to persuade many Americans that we could not continue to ignore our role in stopping the dictators then goosestepping across the globe, with some reminders of just what we should be fighting for; describing them as “The Four Freedoms,” which has led to this State of the Union address being referred to by that title.
So, with that introduction in mind, let’s take a look at each of these four freedoms; the goals they laid out; how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve yet to go, since, in so many ways, we’ve fallen far short of FDR’s lofty visions for the future; visions both for us as a nation, but also for the entire world as well.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND EXPRESSION: Roosevelt envisioned a world where all are permitted to express their opinions and beliefs free from the fear that they might suffer dreadful consequences if they dared to do so. Of course, before FDR’s speech, countless people died for doing just that, often tortured to death for their beliefs. However, that’s not just ancient history, conjuring up visions of thumbscrews and the burning of heretics, but continues today with far too many examples since FDR’s speech.
Some of us remember the wholesale slaughter that occurred in 1989 when those wishing to express their opposition to the communist regime in China were mowed down in droves by the terrible tanks of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, to the massive bloodbath now going on in Iran. Yes, our current president is decrying that bloodshed, but, at the same time, he has also disgustingly embraced, encouraged, and enabled other despots such as those murderous misogynists in Saudi Arabia, and rolled out the red carpet (not just literally, but also figuratively since it was soaked in blood!) for another murderer who’s currently ruthlessly ruling the country of Russia, whose opponents seem to keep falling “accidentally” out of the windows in high rise apartments.
So, we have no room to be smug Americans, looking down from our lofty perch of moral superiority as paragons of free speech and expression. Many have also lost jobs; been ostracized; and even shot down (literally) because someone didn’t like what someone had to say. We’ve even seen a broadscale banning of books—banned because of what someone expressed through their written work; writers cancelled (yours truly included, although not here at the Sentinel); and educators told they don’t have the freedom to tell the unvarnished truth about our history because it might make some students feel “bad” about our country.
FDR would also be heartbroken to see the current crop of autocrats still running countries; from Azerbaijan (where human rights activists and journalists are routinely imprisoned), to Zambia (where our ambassador there was expelled from the country in 2019 when he dared to speak out against their oppression of same-sex couples) and continue to crush their critics, while the man who currently holds the position FDR once held, uses masked thugs from ICE as, essentially, his own private police force to harass and even kill dissenters. This was not what FDR envisioned after World War II when blood was shed once again to make the world “safe for democracy.”
FREEDOM OF WORSHIP: Since 1941 religious repression has continued throughout the world, following civilization’s long, disgraceful history by those in power oppressing those whose beliefs they did not approve of. Yes, the United States has, by law, no religious requirement for elective office. But, even now, there are those who think that there should be, along with an unspoken agreement that non-believers running for congress will not be elected, and it wasn’t until 2006 that a congressman who was openly a “non-theist,” was elected.
Also distressing has been the naked antagonism towards groups seen as outside the mainstream, with many today unaware that even some sects claiming the title of Christians, like the Mormons, were massacred in the 1900’s, and, since FDR’s speech, Muslims have been targeted and entire populations smeared as “garbage” by the man now occupying FDR’s office.
Also profoundly alarming has been Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson’s openly advocated position that political candidates be subjected to a sort of religious “litmus test’ to determine if their values are in line with Biblically based Christianity—in his world view the only sound basis for government. Although he’s soft-pedaled that twisted logic lately, there’s been no indication that he’s renounced it—only taken it under the radar.
As for the oppression of minority religious groups in the world at-large since the FDR’s speech, it’s also been on-going, with one of the most egregious examples being what the Chinese did to the Tibetans when they swept in and took over that nation in the 1950’s with mass executions and even widespread castrations of Tibetan monks. It’s an outrage that continues today because the Chinese cannot be forced to relinquish the country (as we did for Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War after Iraq’s forceful take-over)) since the Chinese (unlike the Iraqis) possess nuclear weapons in yet another example of the continuing principle that “might makes right.”
Few talk of Tibet now because of China’s status as a faithful trading partner since they buy so many American products and vice versa—with the typical American home being a virtual “made in China” emporium of communist merchandise made for those “low, low prices”—which includes, of course, those unspoken low-low standards for the rights of workers.
One of the few celebrities who has spoken out loud and clear about China’s crimes has been the honored film actor, Richard Gere, who’s been unrelenting in his campaign of criticism. But he’s had to pay a high price in ostracism and outright bans, asserting that he is no longer cast in American blockbuster films due to his criticism of China, which constitutes a huge market for such films. Then, after speaking out against Chinese human rights violations at the 1993 Academy Awards, he was banned from ever appearing again. So much for freedom of speech in America.
Besides Tibet, religious repression continues within the traditional boundaries of China itself with their systemic near genocide of various religious minority groups, with perhaps the most well-known being the Muslim-majority Uyghurs; many of whom are now being held in the largest secretive internment camps since the Nazi Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands have been subjected to rape; torture; executions; as well as forced labor; abortions, sterilizations, and the coerced insertion of contraceptive devices. That a single American home contains a single product from such a country, is an on-going disgrace.
Meanwhile, in Myanmar, the genocide against the Rohingya Muslim majority regions by government death squads is also on-going, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties since 2017, with perhaps a million refugees fleeing to other countries, including Bangladesh, which is now the site of the largest refugee camp in the world.
Again, although we’d like to think: well, that’s Myanmar—we don’t commit such atrocities ourselves (although our nation certainly did in the past against the Native Americans)—take another look because Israel’s on-going genocide of Muslims in Palestine, now on a steady pace to reach some 100,000 lives—If you count those bodies rotting unrecovered in the apocalyptic rubble—has been paid for in large part by American military dollars, aided and abetted by both major political parties. I’d like to think that FDR would be appalled.
FREEDOM FROM WANT: World-wide, during the next 24 hours, some 15,000 children five years of age and under will die from causes like starvation and curable diseases; dead not because there weren’t ways to prevent those deaths, but because the adults around them either did not have the willingness, or, for millions, far more likely the money to pay for the food and medical care necessary to prevent them—a damning indictment of the economic systems now in place throughout the world.
Let’s face it: we live in a completely topsy-turvy, upside-down world of egregious economic disparities where, shamefully, some corporate CEOs earn more money in a single day than many Americans earn in a year, and just a few people have, literary, billions of dollars, while billions of people have just a few or, more often than not—none at all—hence that terrible toll on the most vulnerable among us: our children.
Although many Americans often view this world of want as one that exists beyond our borders—that world of bloated bellies; stick-thin limbs, and eyes ringed with flies—we live in denial that much of these conditions prevail in our nation as well. No, we don’t see dead, emaciated bodies lying in the streets (although sometimes we do), we also don’t see (or want to see) that some one out of five of our children lives in poverty; food insecurity; and lack of adequate medical care.
Fortunately, studies now show that we have seen a steady decline recently in the death rates of the youngest among us, but still much want remains both in the world and in the U.S.—a want of nutritional food; a want of even just adequate health care; and a widely-known want of housing. It’s now estimated that some 70 percent of Americans cannot afford to buy a $400,00 average-priced house.
No, we don’t see the bodies in the streets, but we do see the tents on the sidewalks—a vivid daily reminder of how far we’ve fallen from FDR’s call for a freedom from want, and today it’s more obvious than ever that the entire world needs not just a minimum wage, but a “livable” wage for everyone. In other words, economic systems that ensure that anyone who’s willing to work full-time makes enough income from their efforts, whatever they may be, to afford at least adequate housing; nutritional, healthy food; and the ability to live in simple decency.
FREEDOM FROM FEAR: FDR viewed this freedom through the lens of World War II, where murderous despots threatened the world’s citizens with death if they didn’t bow to their will, and our need to join in on the effort to end that threat. Since FDR was a thoughtful man, with a long-range view of history, he could see that our involvement was inevitable, but he also saw a need following the war for an end to any nation’s capacity to mount those threats in the future.
That goal was obtainable, he argued, through diplomacy; world law; and eventually effective disarmament, where wars are ended first because we’ve decided to do so, but then demonstrating that commitment to a world without war by ending the production of the weapons to wage them.
Although the formation of the United Nations in the summer of 1945, shortly after FDR’s passing in April seemed to indicate a budding commitment to his goals, with one of the UN’s stated purposes being an end to “the scourge of war,” war after war since then has steadily chipped away at his vision and the UN’s since then.
Signatories to the UN charter have not only failed to achieve a world without war, and a world without weapons, but many have also failed to obey some of its most basic resolutions, treaties, and laws; one of the most blatant examples of which was committed by the U.S. government in 2003 when it attacked Iraq with a “preemptive” invasion prohibited by the charter, which clearly states that one country can’t attack another unless it’s first been attacked or is about to be.
The world is still not free of those fears and continues to be (although these days, more often than not, it’s simply “background noise”) as long as the nuclear “Sword of Damocles” hovers over our heads with all those warheads, which still number well-over ten thousand in the hands of the nuclear powers. So, not only is the goal of nuclear disarmament still unachieved, far too many continue to think that it never can be—and so trillions of dollars since World War II have been and continue to be squandered to build weapons that, ironically, can never be used unless humanity wants to commit suicide.
But, beyond the need for a freedom of fear from those “weapons of mass destruction” that FDR cited, it also needs to be mentioned that the fear of weapons in the form of the millions of firearms in our homes and neighborhoods, which not only end lives individually, but end many lives during our now routine and almost daily mass murders, is a fear many experience on a daily basis.
Because the U.S., and far too many other countries as well, have yet to decide that an armed population is not a safe population (despite all the propaganda to the contrary, the statistics show otherwise: i.e. Japan) many Americans these days are afraid to leave their homes because of the fear that they cannot do so without risking their lives.
We cannot go out to a restaurant; a music concert; a church; a mosque; a synagogue; a bar; a store; or, most tragically of all, an elementary school, without thinking of the realistic possibility that our brains will be blown out by a bullet from what seems to be an endless supply of madman bent on punishing the world—madmen wielding one or more of our many easily obtained weapons to do so—along with the almost always unspoken prospect of an even more gruesome future ahead of us as more and more sophisticated hand-held weapons are developed with the capability to kill more and more people.
SO, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Although FDR wasn’t a perfect president (who could be?), and certainly had his own “feet of clay,” the most egregious example of which was his order to intern the Japanese Americans during World War II (where not only were his feet of clay, but perhaps his entire legs), unlike others I could name, he was a positive, and inspirational president, who, eighty-five years ago, looked to the future with confidence—confidence that the human race would make the choices necessary for a world enjoying the freedoms he envisioned.
Although there has certainly been some overall progress in the world in a number of ways, the picture I’ve just described is bleak, with international criminals on the march and in control of countries throughout the world—criminals who should not be in power, but in prison, along with the people who protect them. So, what then to do?
For me the most obvious first step now is to make sure that criminals are not running our own country, with leadership that not just gives lip service to obeying international laws; the UN charter; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the writing of which was helped immensely by FDR’s amazing wife, Eleanor), but actually does so.
Since the founding of our country, our government has defied and derailed many international laws and human rights on the basis of “American exceptionalism,” where we essentially say: do as we say, not as we do. By first ending that mindset, in so many ways we could set an example for the world by moving forward with law-abiding leadership, instead of kicking them to the curb as we’ve done so often in the past.
To name a few other moves we could make: we could sign on to the International Criminal Court, created to hold lawbreaking leaders accountable for their crimes (so far only done with third-world countries), but the U.S. has failed to do so. We could ratify the UN’s law banning landmines, but again, we have failed to do so. We could ratify their international treaty for the rights of children—but, shamefully, we remain the only UN country failing to do so. We could also obey the international law that says countries cannot preemptively attack other countries—but again, we have failed to do so. Finally, we could lead the charge in a total reform of the UN so that its laws are actually enforceable rather than talking points.
Sadly, the most recent examples of our country ignoring the UN charter; violating international law; and our own Constitution (just in case anyone still cares about that) was the attack on Venezuela earlier this month—an attack that killed some 50 to 100 people (including a mother of three, Johana Rodriquez Sierra, who was actually a citizen of Colombia) in order to arrest only two. We could stop acting like these sorts of terrible “trade-offs” are totally acceptable.
Of course, we need to remember that this is a country which once incinerated tens of thousands of elderly men; pregnant women; children and infants beneath two mushroom clouds over Japan without blinking an eye in order to end World War II. That option could stop, but the no first strike policy, which only India, and, surprisingly, China, currently adhere to, remains in place here.
We could also stop electing leaders who support torture; extrajudicial executions (by both major parties); and would never suggest that we could win the War on Terror by killing the children of terrorists to demoralize their parents, as the current leader of the “free world” has said—a leader who has turned stoking fear into one of his trademarks.
In 1941 this is not the sort of world Franklin Delano Roosevelt would envision by now, but it still could be if we decided to sincerely pursue those principles he proposed and began electing more people like him to make them a reality. These days FDR would weep, but—if you’ll allow me a small bit of poetry—we can stop those tears by ending the fears and replace them with the freedoms he spoke of.
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Phill Courtney was a high school English teacher and twice ran for Congress with the Green party. His email: pjcoutney1311@gmail.com