Rialto Unified School District Nutrition Services Director Rausat Rahman-Davies has entered into an agreement to resign from that post effective as of May of next year while the school breakfast and lunch program she headed is dogged by yet-to-be-fully-proven allegations of financial misfeasance and malfeasance.
On Wednesday, September 24, in the absence of two members of the school board, Edgar Montes and Evelyn Dominguez, who formerly appeared inclined to give Rahman-Davies the benefit of the doubt as indications mounted that the district had defrauded the state and federal government to obtain school lunch program subsidies it was not entitled to through the submission of inaccurate documentation, the three other members of the school board accepted Rahman-Davies resignation and voted to approve her departure contract.
That contract will allow her to continue to collect her current total yearly compensation of $293,589.41, consisting of her present annual $221,977.41 salary and $71,612. benefits until January 1, whereupon her annual salary rate will increase to $228,636.73. Upon retirement, she will be eligible for a $141,754.77 pension at age 60 in 2028 ,and the district will continue to provide her and her spouse with medical coverage until she reaches the age of 65 in 2033.
Questions about the financial integrity of the Rialto School District’s lunch program, which was augmented by state and federal funding, were raised two years ago. Those, however, were drowned out in the swirl of events and cacophony that attained in the aftermath of then Rialto District Superintendent Cuauhtemoc  Avila’s May 8, 2024 suspension by the school board, which had been orchestrated by Montes and effectuated with the support of Dominguez and then-Board Member Nancy O’Kelley.
What is now believed is that two district employees affiliated with the nutrition services division in 2023 grew suspicious about monetary pass-throughs and reimbursements the district had received for purchases, some of which had not been made. Initially, their separate reports wound up the chain of command on different paths, involving two school principals. By July 2023, Avila learned of the issue when several district employees were airing complaints about what they said was Rahman-Davies’ disproportional display of anger toward them when they made inquiries about missing food supplies. Avila did not have specific information upon which to act at that time, but he initiated an audit of the district’s nutrition department.
Avila did not fully appreciate the connection between Rahman-Davies, who had acceded to the position of nutrition services director in 2019 and Maria Montes Torres, School board Member Edgar Montes’ mother, who had been employed as a nutrition department worker with the district at least since January 2022. As the audit and parallel investigation of the nutrition services division progressed, it was learned that food, sometimes in bulk and sometimes in smaller quantities, was not being utilized in the school lunch program but was being diverted to other uses, including by charities that were in no way affiliated with the school district, churches and mosques as well as to district employees.
Sarah Dunbar-Riley, a nutrition services supervisor, was able to offer specific information about diversions, including data regarding food that had been ordered and delivered to some schools but which had not been served to students as part of the lunch program. Reports reached Avila that on multiple occasions going back at least to 2020, no fewer than seven individuals had participated in removing substantial quantities of food from the warehouse adjacent to the district’s central kitchen into their personal vehicles. Among those participating in this were Rahman-Davies; Kristina Kraushaar, a district employee who held the title of child nutrition program innovator; and Maria Rangel, who was employed by the district as assistant nutrition services director, as well as Maria Montes Torres, Avila learned.
According to Avila, when Edgar Montes, whom Avila described as a “close friend” of Rahman-Davies, learned of the audit and side-by-side investigation, the school board member grew irate. Directly and without informing the other members of the school board, scheduling a discussion of the matter either in pubic or in a closed session of the board or conducting a vote, Montes ordered Avila to discontinue the audit and investigation. When Avila did not comply, Montes again and again instead that the investigation be close out, according to Avila.
Thereafter, Avila was accused of sexual harassment by Patricia Chavez, who had been the principal at Wilmer Amina Carter High School and was also the district’s assistant superintendent for educational services and its so-called lead agent of innovation. It was Chavez’s accusations of sexual harassment that formed the basis of Montes’, Dominguez’ and O’Kelley’s May 8 2024 vote to suspend him. After leaving Avila hanging in limbo for more than nine months, the school board on February 19, 2025 voted to terminate him.
During Avila’s suspension, the district had promoted Edward D’Souza, who served up until May 2024 as the district’s so-called lead academic agent for math and early college programs, to serve as the district’s acting superintendent.
D’Souza, who was entertaining the notion of seeing his temporary position as interim superintendent being upgraded into a full-fledged and permanent post, was aware of how Avila’s direction in commissioning the audit and accompanying investigation had rattled Edgar Montes. Accordingly, D’Souza prudently sought to avoid antagonizing Montes, who could count on the support of Dominguez, who is Montes’ most steadfast ally on the school board. D’Souza suspended the probe of the disappearance of the food.
In the meantime, O’Kelley, who had been experiencing extensive health challenges including memory and cognitive degradation, did not seek reelection to the board in the November 2024 election, and Dakira Williams was voted into office and replaced her in December.
Edgar Montes’ effort to permanently bury the investigation into the food diversions failed when the school board, by a vote of 3-to-2 , with members Stephanie Lewis, Joseph Martinez and Williams prevailing, opted against permanentizing D’Souza as the superintendent, instead returning him to his former role as the district’s lead academic agent of math and early college programs in education services.
The board, again by a 3-to-2 vote with Lewis, Martinez and Williams coming out on top, voted to hire Judy White, the former Riverside County superintendent of schools and deputy superintendent of schools with the San Bernardino City Unified School District, to lead Rialto Unified.
In one of her first acts as superintendent, White reinitiated the investigation that had been suspended under D’Souza’s watch.
Almost immediately, on February 26, Kraushaar resigned to take a position as the food services director for the Chaffey Joint Union High School district.
With the resumption of the investigation and the audit, it was soon documented that at some the schools, discrepancies existed with regard to how much food was delivered and how many actual meals produced or provided. Data showed outright falsification of breakfast and lunch meal counts in single months exceeding two thousand at some elementary schools and more than 12,000 at a district high school. Other data showed the district being remunerated by the federal government for tens of thousands of meals that had not been served.
On April 16, 2025, Maria Montes Torres, Edgar Montes’ mother, submitted her resignation as a district employee. A public relations blitz around her departure suggested that she was leaving because her hiring by the district had been an “inadvertent” technical violation of the district’s ethical and nepotism restrictions when Board Member Montes had voted to ratify her promotion from being a substitute nutrition worker to a full-fledged district employee in the nutrition services division in September 2023.