How A Secretive Two-County Legal Consortium Seized Control of Personnel Decisions Affecting 64 School Districts Without Public Knowledge or Board Approval
By Carlos Avalos
For more than a decade, school districts across San Bernardino and Riverside counties have been unknowingly funneling their most sensitive personnel decisions, employee misconduct investigations, labor negotiations, discipline proceedings, and legal settlements through a secretive consortium controlled not by their elected boards, but by two county superintendents and a private law firm.
The organization is called the Inland Personnel Council, or IPC. On paper, it is described as a resource-sharing cooperative for local educational agencies. In practice, documents obtained by the Sentinel and the public reveal it has evolved into something far more powerful: a shadow governance structure that has quietly absorbed authority that California law reserves for independently elected school boards, operating entirely outside the transparency requirements of the state’s open meetings laws.
Now, a cascade of legal challenges, public records disclosures, and a landmark court settlement involving one of IPC’s most prominent member districts, Redlands Unified School District, is bringing this hidden architecture into the open. And the picture that emerges raises serious questions about violations of California and federal law at every level of government.
WHAT IS IPC AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
The Inland Personnel Council was established decades ago as a cooperative framework allowing school districts to share legal expertise and resources related to employer-employee relations. On its face, this is not unusual. Joint powers agreements are a routine tool in California government, used by cities, counties, and school districts to pool resources and achieve economies of scale.
But IPC is not a typical joint powers agreement. According to documents obtained through the California Public Records Act, IPC operates through a web of interlocking agreements that obscures its true governance structure from both the public and, in many cases, the school board members who approved it. According to its own website and agreement language, IPC serves approximately 64 school districts, community colleges, and county offices of education across San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
For reference, a Joint Powers Agreement (which is just a contract sharing services) vs. a Joint Powers Authority, which is a new public entity. IPC is listed on the website as a “Joint Powers Agreement”, but it has the hallmarks of a Joint Powers Authority, with bylaws, a governing board, and says it “employs” the IPC Director. The bylaws are referenced in the contracts and are critical in defining IPC and how it is governed, but school districts deny having them, and so they have not been obtained via public records requests.
Legal services are delivered through the private law firm Atkinson, Andelson, Loya, Ruud & Romo, universally known by its abbreviation, AALRR. Heading the consortium as its Executive Officers are San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools Ted Alejandre and Riverside County Superintendent of Schools Edwin Gomez. Together, they control a structure that influences personnel decisions for hundreds of thousands of students, thousands of employees, and billions of dollars in public school spending, with almost no public accountability.