By Carlos Avalos
As the establishment candidate in this year’s race for the position of San Bernardino County superintendent of schools, Cali Binks, currently the superintendent of the Yucaipa-Calimesa School District, is the odds-on favorite to succeed the outgoing county superintendent of schools, Ted Alejandre. Alejandre’s scandal-plagued tenure at last caught up with him over the previous two years, resulting in his decision to retire after as superintendent in December, at the end of what will be his third four-year term in office.
Reformists who for more than a half decade have been carrying out an informational and agitational campaign to expose the educational shortcomings and fiduciary failures in Alejandre’s stewardship of the San Bernardino County’s primary office of educational oversight, while heartened at his pending departure, are less than sanguine about the anticipated ascendancy of Binks, his designated successor. A widespread perception across the county is that Binks was chosen to replace Alejandre and then embraced by the army of campaign donors who previously backed Alejandre in order to perpetuate the abuses of the education system and violations of the public trust that flourished under Alejandre and previous county superintendents of schools whom Alejandre was anointed to succeed – Gary Thomas, Barry Pulliam and Herb Fischer.
San Bernardino County’s political institutions, from its county offices including those of the board of supervisors to sheriff to district attorney to assessor to county treasurer and its more local offices such as city and town councils, have been permeated for generations by an intensive pay-to-play ethos, which has compromised the integrity of governance. The office of county superintendent of schools has been no exception to that corruption of purpose.
Business owners, entrepreneurs, land speculators and developers seeking entitlements to build, applicants for government-granted franchises and competitors for government contracts to provide goods and services in San Bernardino County going back 50, 50 70 ,80 and more years ago learned that in exchange for hefty donations to elected officeholders who serve as the ultimate decision-makers overseeing those agencies and jurisdictions they could get project project approval, secure those franchises and land those contracts.
The county governmental structure and municipalities are not the only public entities in San Bernardino County. There are water districts, fire districts and school districts.
San Bernardino County is served by 36 distinct school districts, encompassing a total of 584 schools and educating approximately 420,220 students. Those districts and their schools receive roughly $8.18 billion in state and federal funding yearly. On top of that, the State of California passes through to the San Bernardino County Superinendent of Schools and the San Bernardino County Board of Education roughly $532 million as part of what is referred to as the San Bernardino County School Services Fund. The 36 school districts are separately and independently governed, though the county superintendent of schools and the five members of the San Bernardino County Board of Eductation have overarching authority with regard to many issues pertaining to education, educational services and other issues impacting schools in the county. A host of goods and services are provided to schools. The arbiters of what companies are to get the contracts to provide those services and good are an amalgam of the superintendents and administrators of the county’s 36 school districts, the members of the school boards of those 36 districts, the five members of the San Bernardino County Board of Education and the county superintendent of schools. Just like the owners or or principals in businesses doing business with county and city government or dependent upon decisions made with regard to project approvals or the granting of franchises grease the skids to ensure they are treated favorably by county or city government, businesses which supply goods and services to schools long ago learned to ingratiate themselves with school board members, members of the county board of education or the county schools superintendent. At the pinnacle of this this educational funding graftfest in San Bernardino County is the county superintendent of schools. Whereas Fischer, Pulliam and Thomas before him had raised this to an art form, under Alejandre it had been refined to a science. As county superintendent of schools, Alejandre was able to enrich himself. In addition to an annual salary of $389,479.59, he was provided with benefits of $85,014, for a total yearly compensation of $474,493.59. In addition, Alejandre’s wife, Barbara, was working as the assistant to the superintendent from 2014 until 2020. In that capacity she was paid $177,104 in annual salary along with $5,220.00 in other pay and perquisites on top of which she was provided with $i37,290 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $219,614.
This nepotism became something of a controversy. The county board of education had nonchalantly accepted that Alejandre could employ his wife as his assistant at a handsome salary. Simultaneously, Alejandre was transferring money from his campaign fund into the campaign funds of members of county board of education, as well as to selected members of school boards around the county. Simultaneously, those filling Alejandre’s campaign coffers were seeing the business operations they owned getting contracts with various school districts around the county, the office of the county superintendent of schools and the office of the county board of education.
From the time Alejandre became a candidate for superintendent of schools in 2013, those companies with lucrative contracts with various districts, the county board of education or the office of county superintendent of schools endowed his political war chest with enough money to ensure that he would be elected in 2014, reelected in 2018 and again in 2022. Even while being consumed by unfavorable reports about his stewardship of the county educational system, Alejandre over the last two years had enough money pouring into his campaign coffers from those profiting by sales of chalk, blackboards, pens, pencils, paper, books, equipment, computers, software, supplies, food for cafeterias, desks and much more to the county’s schools to ensure that he would override any opposition in this year’s race for superintendent. Neverthless, he opted into retiring.
Almost immediately upon Alejandre indicating he was jumping out of the political game, Cali Binks jumped in. No sooner had she done so than the support network that had ensured Alejandre’s election and reelection and re-reelection line up to support Binks. Understood by the San Bernardino County establishment is that Binks will perpetuate the status quo.
Binks’ entré into the San Bernardino establishment had its roots, of note, before she arrived and as a consequence of her in-laws’ one-time estrangement from the establishment.
In the 1970s, Dean and Kathy Binks, originally from Utah, settled in Fontana where they ran the Ettie Lee Home for Youth, a county-contracted youth residential facility, and raised their four children, Randy, Kalene, Kelly and Mary Beth. In the 1980s, Binks was among a set of residents who disenchanted with the manner in which the Fontana Unifed School District was being led by the school board majority, which included board president William Tunney, and then-Superintendent Elton Etheredge. Binks and Linda Scialdone, the wife of then Fontana Police Sergeant Frank Scialdone, spent years protesting the manner in which the district was being run, and served as the primary support network for Dicksie Spolar, the school board’s sole dissident member.
After more than a half-decade on the outside looking in, in 1987 that shifted when Binks was herself elected to the school board. Simultaneously, Frank Scialdone, the husband of one of Bink’s closest friends was advancing in the police department, first to lieutenant, then to captain and ultimately to police chief. After Frank Scialdone retired from the force in 2004, he was elected to the city council, then acceded, briefly to mayor. Binks remained on the school board for a quarter of a century, serving four terms as school board president. She was also a co-founder and sitting board member of the Boys and Girls Club of Fontana, a nonprofit that received public money and public-school property as a subgrantee through the very district she governed. She thus transmogrified, over time, from having been a dissident and outcast to a consummate insider, member of the establishment and, in essence, a pillar of the Fontana community.
Just as Kathy Binks was settling into the role of Fontana establishment figure, her daughter-in-law, Cali Binks in 1990 was hired by the Fontana Unified School District as an educational support teacher. She remained in that role for six years. In In 1996, she transitioned into being a special education teacher. In 1999, she promoted to the position of assistant principal. Three years later, she became a principal and in 2005, rose to the position of deputy superintendent of instructional services. In 2008, at a school board meeting at which Kathy Binks recused herself and abstained from the vote, Cali Binks was appointed district superintendent on a 3-to-0 vote of the board, with board members Laura Mancha, Gus Hawthorne, and Julie Ramos, all three allies of Kathy Binks, in favor.
Cali Binks’ rapid progression out of the classroom to a series of administrative posts and on to superintendent was an anomaly in terms of trajectory in comparison to most, though certainly not all, educational professionals. Her rise was no doubt assisted by her familial connection to the school board president. The school board’s decision to put her into that position of responsibility was a questionable one on multiple levels. In 2008, Fontana Unified was struggling significantly with its scholastic standing, with multiple schools landing at the extreme bottom of California’s academic performance metrics. When the California Department of Education released its 2009 academic performance index statewide rankings, multiple schools within Fontana Unified received a ranking of 1, on a scale of 1 to 10, placing them in the lowest 10 percent of schools statewide based on standardized testing results.
Irrespective of who the superintendent was, the district faced daunting challenges. More than one fifth of the student population – 21.1 percent – were English learners, meaning neither parent spoke English or did so with what sufficed as fluency. What was more, 55.2% of the district’s students were from economically disadvantaged households.
The inability to create a culture of academic priority continued to dog the district, as did an anemic preschool program, which resulted in the vast majority of the district’s students functioning below grade level from the first grade on. Efforts to design into the classrooms a sufficient number of translators proved uneven over the years.
Nevertheless, despite the unabating challenges, Cali Binks would remain as the district’s superintendent for 15 years, while the district continued to subsist academically. Under Binks’s leadership, the district in some areas made modest progress. By the time she left the district in 2013, while Fontana Unified continued to compare unfavorably and even lost ground to the state’s wealthier districts in terms of the economic disadvantage, the district did manage, occasionally on a multi-year basis, of improving its internal academic performance index scores, narrowing its internal achievement gaps, an indication Binks was able to make a better distribution of the teaching talent available to her throughout the district.
When she left the district, students at the district’s 43 schools had climbed out of the bottom ten percent of academic achievers throughout California into the bottom 30 percent. In Fontana Unified School District, 29 percent of both elementary and middle school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading. In math, and 22 percent of elementary school students and 20 percent of middle school students tested at or above arithmetic proficiency levels. Among high school students, 60 percent tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 26 percent tested at or above that level for math.
Binks had proven far more savvy in cultivating both social and political connections in Fontana. Her husband, Kathy Binks’ son Kelly, had, through the link between Kathy and Linda Scialdone and thus to Frank Scialdone, landed a job with the Fontana Police Department. This placed Cali Binks more firmly in mainstream of Fontana, its establishment. Frank Scialdone, after leaving as police chief, followed in the footsteps of a previous Fontana police chief, Ben Abernathy, who had run, successfully based on name recognition and positive resident identification with his law enforcement role, for city council. Scialdone, as a member of the city council from 2004 until 2010, was turned to when then-Fontana Mayor Mark Nuami, resigned that post to become Yucca Valley town manager. Scialdone most likely could have perpetuated his hold on the mayor’s gavel, had he chosen to run for that office that year. He did not, however, in favor of endorsing Councilwoman Acquanetta Warren for the mayoral post.
The dynamic of camaraderie and political alliance attending Warren is an intensive one in Fontana that cannot be ignored and which is nearly impossible to overestimate. Currently 56,057 or 45.5 percent of Fontana’s 123,069 registered voters are Democrats and slightly more than half that number, 28,659 or 23.3 percent are Republicans. In Fontana, there are more residents, 28,960 or 23.5 percent, who have no party preference than there are Republicans. Moreover, 7.6 percent of the city’s voters are members of the American Independent, Green, Libertarian, Peace and Freedom or other more obscure political parties. Despite the city’s Republicans being a minority of the voting-eligible population, indeed less than one quarter of voters citywide, four of the city council’s members are Republicans, led by by Warren, are die-hard, hardcore, rock-ribbed Republicans.
In 2012, Fontana Unified School District board members Leticia Garcia and Sophia Green attempted to remove Superintendent Cali Binks from her position. What followed was a coordinated recall campaign targeting Garcia and Green. Community activist Gil Navarro appeared before the Fontana Unified board that year and publicly stated on the record that the recall effort was connected to ‘the mayor of Fontana,’ meaning Acquanetta Warren.
A past member of the Warren Team was Jesse Armendarez, a major campaign donor to Warren’s political campaigns whom she designated as a successful candidate for the school board in 2014 and then assisted in his successful 2016 election to the Fontana City Council Armendarez has since been elected to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors. One of the current Fontana City Council members is Phil Cothran, Jr. Young Cothran’s father, Phil Cothran, Sr., is the chairman of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee. During her 24 year career as an elected official in Fontana – eight years as a city council member and the last nearly 16 years as mayor – Acquanetta Warren has proven, among municipal elected officials, to be the third most prolific fundraiser in San Bernardino County history. A political machine has grown up around her which has, in essence, dictated, who is to hold office in Fontana at virtually every level, and who will not. Those upon whom elected status is conferred are either dyed-in-the-wool Republicans or DINOs – Democrats in name only – who are amenable to carrying out Warren’s commands. On the Fontana City Council, councilmen John Robers, Phil Cothran, Jr. and Pete Garcia remain in place because she can absolutely rely upon them to support whatever initiative or goal she is intent on at the moment. Councilman Jesse Sandoval, the lone Democrat on the council, is the single vote she does not control. Taking care of the donors who have financed the campaigns that have put her in office is, for her, imperative. Likewise, Warren has control over three-fifths of the school board.
Cali Binks’ ability to remain in place as Fontana superintendent for five years was a function of her readiness to play ball with the Warren Political Machine, ensuring that lucrative district contracts for goods and services went to those who were bankrolling that political machine.
In 2013, Binks was hired away from Fontana Unified by the Yucaipa-Calimesa School District. Instrumental in her hiring by Yucaipa-Calimesa was Jane Smith, one of the board members with that district. Smith had been the superintendent of Fontana Unified and after retiring from that post, was elected to the Yucaipa-Calimesa School Board.
According to Binks, one of her proudest accomplishments was the work she did in creating the Family Learning Center, a space that began as a room filled with stored transcripts, which was transformed into a place for parent classes, community learning and support for English learner families.
With Alejandre’s tenure as county superintendent of schools winding down, a full-blown effort by the network that put him in place and has kept him there for nearly twelve years is seeking to perpetuate the status quo by which the companies that have prospered during that time can defy the reforms that those who have succeeded in hounding Alejandre to retire can maintain those contracts. To that network, Cali Binks is the logical heir apparent to Alejandre.
Campaign finance filings with the California Fair Political Practices Commission confirm who is funding Binks. There is substantial commonality between her current donor list and that of Alejandre, together with Warren network donors, building industry and developmental interests, Fontana Police Officers Association-connected funding sources, and various names connected to San Bernardino County’s political establishment in general, along with individuals and entities involved in the educational profession or providing services to schools and school districts.
Among those donors are the California Teachers Association, which has provided her with $10,500; the Association of Colton Educators, which gave her $3,714.00; the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation Indian Tribe, which gave her $2,500; State Senator Rosalicie Ochaoa Bogh, who gave her $5,000; San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus, who gave her $5,000; Teamsters Local 1932 gave her $2,500; the Charter Schools Political Action Committee gave her $2,500; David Thurston, who is Alejandre’s assistant superintendent of county schools, gave her $1,249; former Superintendent of San Bernardino County Schools Herb Fischer gave her $1,500; the Fontana Police Officers Association gave her $1,200; and former San Bernardino County Chief Executive Officer Greg Devereaux gave her $1,000.
Other establishment figures supporting her include former Yucaipa Mayor/Coiuncilman David Avila, former Assemblyman Bill Emmerson, Apple Valley Town Councilman Larry Cusack and former Upland Police Chief Steve Adams
Alejandre and his wife provided Binks with $700, including $500 transferred from Alejandre’s political war shest.
A slew of individuals and companies which have already secured or which are attempting to obtain contracts with the superintendent of county schools office or the county board of education or are otherwise involved in the educational profession are handing money over to Binks in an effort to ingratiate themselves with her prior to her assumption of the post now held by Alejandre. Those include Marsden Group LLC of San Bernardino; Donna Horn, the executive director/owner of DMH Learning Center Inc; Lawrence King the top administrator of Sage Oak Charter Schools; Krista Woodgrift, the superintendent of Sage Oak Charter Schools; Ryan Rainboldt, the owner of Enchanted Education; Casey Woodgrift, a principal with Inland Leaders Charter Schools Ryan Holman, the superintendent of the Snowline Joint Unified School District; Andrea Bartlett , a principal with the Snowline Joint Unified School District; Paul Sevillano, the superintendent of the Rim of The World Unified School District; Christina Behringer, a school board member with the Snowline Joint Unified School District; Jesse Najera, the superintendent of the Silver Valley Unified School District; Tim Ryan , a safety specialist with the Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District; Susan Courts, a library technician with the Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District; Kevin Burgess, the manager of child nutrition at the Yucaipa-Calimeas Joint Unified School District; Adele Thomas, the senior director of human resources with the Fontana Unifed School District; Laura Rowland, the superintendent of the Etiwanda School District; and Cecilia Holguin, an employee with the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools office .
Efforts to obtain Cali Binks’ input for this article were unsuccessful.