Dr Edward D’Souza’s tenure as the Rialto Unified School District’s acting superintendent turned out to be a simple parallel consequence of Superintendent Cuauhtémoc Avila’s suspension from the post overseeing the district, as the school board this week voted 3-to-2 to remove D’Souza as the district’s interim leader and replace him with former Riverside County Superintendent of Schools Judy White.
D’Souza’s time as acting superintendent – nine months and thirteen days – lasted two days longer than Avila’s nine months’ and 11 days’ suspension. Avila was put on administrative leave on May 8, 2024 and fired on February 19, 2025. D’Souza was selected to serve as acting superintendent of the district on May 14, 2024 and was relieved of that post yesterday, February 27, 2025.
Intrigue and mystery yet attend the circumstances around Avila’s departure, and the pertinent facts that precipitated it are known only to a handful of people. What has leaked out is that there were a succession of sexual scandals that plagued the district – entailing members of the faculty being concupiscent with one another; members of the faculty being concupiscent with students, resulting in at least one known pregnancy brought to term and which was consummated in a marriage; teachers attempting to engage in “tag team” sexual encounters with students; and one principal seeking to use a safety center on a middle school campus as a “grooming grounds” to lure female students into heterosexual assignations.
Those discreditions, apparently, did not directly involve Avila nor D’Souza, but proliferated under their watch. To move beyond them and prevent the unseemly details they involve from becoming public, the district determined the best course of action was to end its employment of Avila and return D’Souza to a lesser assignment than that of superintendent to limit or eliminate inquiries about activity that had taken place under his watch or his knowledge about it.
It yet remains publicly unknown, precisely, what led to Avila’s suspension. It appears that some personal animosity may have developed between Avila and School Board Member Edgar Montes. According to Avila, Montes was pressuring him to hire his cronies and family members into district positions or extend to them lucrative district contracts. When Avila refused, the former superintendent maintains, Montes joined with his ally on the board, Evelyn Dominguez, to intensify the pressure on him. Ultimately, beginning in March 2024, Montes and Dominguez began networking with caretakers for Nancy O’Kelley, an absentee board member whose physical condition and mental capacity had diminished to the point that she was committed to an institution, convincing them to allow Kelley to be brought to board meetings. Such arrangements were made, and through Montes’s continuing importuning of her for her vote to do so, Kelley in May 2024 came through with a crucial third vote to place Avila on leave.
It appears that the board had no awareness or in-depth understanding of sexual escapades among the district’s employees, something that was only hinted at when Montes was joined by Patricia Chavez, the district’s lead agent of innovation who had been hired by Avila in 2016 to serve as Carter High principal and was subsequently promoted to the district’s director of education by Avila, in deprecating the superintendent’s comportment. Chavez, who was promoted from the Carter High principal position to the lead academic agent slot in 2019 and to the lead innovative agent position in 2022, claimed that Avila discontinued promoting her after she refused his sexual advances. It was this accusation made by Chavez, it is believed, that tipped the scale against Avila and convinced O’Kelly, whose mental focus was fading in and out, to suspend him.
Thereafter, the board hired Bonafacio Garcia of the law firm of Garcia Hernández Sawhney to conduct an investigation into Avila, with both Montes and Dominguez half-expecting and half-hoping that enough derogatory information about Avila would be churned up to justify firing him. Garcia, starting with the accusation that Avila had been extremely forward in making sexual overtures toward Chavez, worked along that tangent, digging for indications, evidence, proof and narratives of sexual indiscretions and improprieties, foremost involving Avila. While Garcia was less than successful in nailing down hard specifics about Avila, the trail he was on led him to some sordid descriptions of the carryings-on of several district employees. What Garcia was left with was a compendium of improprieties that, it turned out both Avila and D’Souza should have known about or maybe knew about but had done nothing in response.
Montes and Dominguez, having gotten from O’Kelley what they wanted when she voted to suspend Avila, allowed her to return to the facility she had been placed into, and after July 10, 2024, she never attended a board meeting again. She did not vie for reelection, and in November 2024, Dakira Williams was voted into office and replaced her in December.
Much to Montes’s and Dominguez’s chagrin, Garcia’s report did not provide them with the smoking gun they needed to fire Avila with cause. It did, however, document some incidents of district personnel engaging in sexual activity with students which represent tremendous liability to the district if the details were to be discovered by the parents or guardians of the students in question. Montes and Dominguez were confronted with the worst of both worlds, being unable to justify terminating Avila while having documented events that could bankrupt the district they represent if the document they had paid Garcia to create ever got out. The remaining members of the district were faced with the dilemma of having to take ownership and responsibility for a catalog of indiscretions that would potentially cost the district in excess of a hundred million dollars if it were to be revealed.
For months, the board was gripped by paralysis. Avila remained on paid leave. D’Souza remained as acting superintendent. Parents, the public and the media were asking penetrating questions the district could answer but would not. When the press began to file public records requests for documents relating to what was going on internally at the district, D’Souza, hamhandedly, instructed the district’s public information officer, Syeda Jafri, to stonewall and simply ignore the inquiries. Suspicions escalated. The district, in a holding pattern, was paying for two superintendents it could not get rid of, while the board had no conception of what to do next.
Drawing a paycheck of $14,630.75 every two weeks while still drawing benefits pegged at $95,444.93 annually, Avila nevertheless grew impatient at hanging in limbo. In November, he filed a claim against the district, laying out his contention that Montes and Chavez had conspired against him to trigger his suspension and his eventual termination. In January, the district suspended Chavez, whereupon she filed a claim against the district, asserting she was being retaliated against.
Ultimately, a decision to fire Avila was made by the entirety of the board, despite board members Stephanie Lewis and Joseph Martinez having been opposed to his suspension in 2024. At that point, Montes, Dominguez, Lewis, Martinez and the board’s newest member, Williams, had come to believe that separating the district from Avila was necessary, but recognized that doing so with cause would inevitably lead to Garcia’s report becoming public. Therefore, Avila’s firing was done without citing cause. They took that action, recognizing the likelihood that Avila will move ahead with his threatened legal action and that, at the least, the district will need to pay him the remainder of the money due him under his contract as superintendent, which runs to the end of June 2027 – the $126,799.83 he is due to be paid from March through July in the current 2024-25 school year, the full $391,811.47 salary he is due to be paid in scholastic year 2025-26 and the full $403,565.82 he is due to be paid in 2026-27.
In doing this, the board believes it can ensure that the Garcia report will never see the light of day. So far, only eight people other than Garcia and members of his firm – Montes, Dominguez, Lewis, Martinez, Williams, D’Souza, the district’s legal counsel and Derek Harris, the district’s risk manager – have seen the document, which is kept under lock and key. When the report was provided to the board members, they were not permitted to remove the copy they had been provided with from the room in which they read it, to make a copy or to take notes.
Having dealt with Avila last week insofar as securing his separation from the district if not yet expending on him the $922,177 remaining on his contract and covering the attorney’s fees paid to his attorney, Robert Stanford Brown, for representing him throughout his suspension and any follow-up litigation, the board this week turned to dealing with D’Souza, scheduling a special meeting for yesterday at which a closed-door discussion of “public employee appointment” relating to the “interim superintendent” was to take place.
This was an indication that the status of D’Souza in the superintendent’s role was on the line and a contemplated replacement of him with someone else was to, or could, take place.
Several members of the community and some faculty weighed in on the wisdom of removing D’Souza as acting superintendent.
Celia Sarabia, speaking in Spanish, said “We are three months from the end of the school year.” She said changing out the position of superintendent was justifiable “when someone is not performing the job well or exhibiting inadequate behavior, but that is not the case with Dr. Dsouza. He’s a great professional His conduct is unquestionable. He is of great support and contributes to our our district and community.”
Sarabia said, “Let’s finish out the school year and open up the hiring process for a superintendent who will be permanent. This is out of place, and it is negligence to remove a temporary superintendent just to replace him with another one. That’s not fair to anyone, especially to our students.”
Ana Gonzalez said that while she appreciated the work Dr D’Souza had done “over the years, I do agree it is time that we get someone who is going to be coming in here with a neutral set of eyes to start cleaning up this district and start the healing process and start the restorative justice that this district really desperately needs for our children to get the… high quality education they deserve. Looking at the reports we saw last week and what we see in the California dashboard over and over every single year, we have failed our children.”
Mona Ruiz said, “Our children must be the priority, no exceptions, no excuses. Our district needs stability and accountability. Enough with the friendship that protects instead of leading. Enough with the cover-ups and slap-on-the-wrist consequences. I have been asking for accountability and I will keep asking until action is taken. I know it is time to start looking for a new superintendent. And it must be done right away with every stakeholder involved: parents, teachers, staff. Community members must have a voice in this process. We need a leader who is here to make a real change, not just collect a paycheck.”
Frank Montes said he would not dispute what those who had praised Dr. D’Souza had to say about him, but noted “A lot of times the bad outweighs the good, especially when it comes to the safety of our children.”
He referenced a pinball machine at Frisbee Middle School with inappropriate sexualized imagery that he personally knew had come to the attention of two female students “under the age of 13,” he said.
Montes, who is no blood relation to Edgar Montes, said the district was beset with a “lack of transparency [and] corruption. We need new leadership today.”
Steve Figueroa denounced “the steering of special education contracts to special education advocates,” saying, “We need a superintendent with integrity and honor and a superintendent to keep closed door meetings with the board.”
Without being explicit, he referenced a “board member who leaks everything,” stating “outsiders know more than board members.” At the same time, Figueroa said, again without being specific, “One board member bullies everybody else.”
Leticia Garcia told the board, that “Kids are in danger when they come to your schools.” She said it was in the “best interest and fiscal interest to go another route” from having D’Souza continue to lead the district.
She said that hiring a retired superintendent or a retired school administrator to direct the district would reduce costs because the California Teachers Retirement System caps the amount of money a retiree can make when going back into teaching or administering at a public school, and that a retired superintendent would have the skill required to guide the district.
She said that in the case of Rialto Unified, the district needed stability and someone with experience in a leadership role. She suggested the board consider hiring retired Riverside County Superintendent of Schools Judy White, whom she had worked under when she was a school teacher in the San Bernardino City School District and White was the assistant superintendent. She said that White at that time carried the assistant superintendent title but was actually running the district. White, Garcia said, “Really ran things smoothly. I implore all of you to do the right thing and hire a superintendent that is not involved in cliques, who has a 40-some-year track record scandal-free and who will be fair to you, to staff and fair to students.”
Ophelia Fitzpatrick, an instructor, gave a statement that seemed to support keeping D’Souza in place, though she never said that explicitly. “We are student-centered,” she asserted. She deprecated “outsiders” who were critical of the district about whom she said, “It is it is very easy to speak out and throw stones into glass windows and not hear the hear the heart or the words or the passion for the students within those rooms.”
Fitzpatrick said that despite “the difficult time we have faced” when things were “contentious,” that “some of those children” the community and teachers had advocated for in the past had now become “the teachers, the educators and the activists. I am proud to stand among them as my colleagues now. We cannot go into emotional instability. When we say we want change, the change I am hearing in the room is to eliminate our community. That is impossible to do.”
Tobin Brinker, the president of the district’s teachers’ union, advocated for retaining D’Souza as the interim superintendent. Brinker decried what he characterized as “another hastily-called special meeting [pertaining to] one agenda item, little transparency and no real engagement with the people this decision will affect the most. Leadership should not be decided in a rush. It should be decided with wisdom, unity and integrity.”
Brinker said, “The Bible warns us about division in leadership. In Mark 3:25, it says if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. A split decision tonight, a 3-2 vote, weakens not just the next superintendent but the entire district. It tells us that the board itself is not unified and that instability will follow. If Dr D’Souza is to continue, he deserves the chance to truly lead without the shadow of politics. Dr. D’Souza was appointed last year in a time of crisis because he was seen as fair, intelligent and neutral, someone who could steady the ship. He has not had the opportunity to show what he can fully do because of the circumstances of his appointment. Why remove him now without a full fair search process?”
Continuing, Brinker said, “We have 59 school days left until the end of the year. This time should be used to decide how the process will work, to engage with community groups and determine what qualities the next leader should have to create a timetable for recruitment and interviews so the new superintendent can be in place hopefully to start the next school year. Rushing this decision and excluding the voices of teachers, staff and families sets a dangerous precedent. It tells us the board does not value transparency or stakeholder input. The next superintendent, whoever they [sic] are, should not begin under a cloud of division. If you are to choose new leadership tonight, it will look like this is more about the internal politics of the school board than it is about what is best for our district, because you will have made the decision in a hastily called special meeting without getting input from any community groups.”
Jasmine Valenzuela, a former educator in the district, supported Dr. D’Souza, saying he was “appointed at a dire time. He has not been given the opportunity to fully exercise his leadership as the superintendent.”
Valenzuela said D’Souza’s appointment “was a clear and well-considered choice and I am here to say it would be just as wise for the board to keep him in the role of interim superintendent or superintendent. Dr. Souza is a leader with integrity and strong connections at the county level and state levels. These relationships provide invaluable opportunities for the district, ensuring the district remains at the forefront of educational advancements, funding opportunities and policy decisions that benefit Rialto students. He has a proven dedication to our schools. His leadership has never been about personal gain.”
Ludlow Creary, counsel for Dr. D’Souza, was going to speak but did not after the board would not allow him to confer with D’Souza before he made his comments.
The board went into closed session and returned 38 minutes and 15 seconds later to announce that it had on a vote of 3-to-2 appointed Judy White, the former Riverside County superintendent of schools, as interim superintendent. White served with Riverside County schools from 2017 until November 2020. Prior to that she was employed with the Moreno Valley Unified School District for six years and worked as a teacher, principal and deputy superintendent at the San Bernardino City Unified School District for 32 years.
D’Souza has been returned to the position he held before he was elevated to the acting superintendent’s post, that of the district’s lead academic agent of math and early college programs in education services.