A dozen years after a Rialto Unified School District accountant was caught embezzling at least $1.8 million in student lunch money from the district’s Nutrition Services Department, the audits and investigations division within the California Department of Education has determined that the district never fully redressed its accounting and internal auditing shortcomings, resulting in it misdirecting to itself over $3 million in state funding for the district’s student meal program.
Whereas the thefts Rialto Unified School District Accounting Manager Judith Oakes was proven to have perpetuated between 2005 and 2013 were crudely but effective carried out and entailed physically removing cash and coins, the activity that took place during the 2020-to-2022 COVID crisis that involved Nutrition Services Director Fausat Rahman-Davies, Assistant Nutrition Services Department Director Maria Rangel and Nutrition Services Program Innovator Kristina Kraushaar was more sophisticated, involving electronic entries across two data entry systems and the conveyance of some of the food purchased for the district by the state being handed off to charities or others connected to Rahman-Davies.
Similarly, the perpetrators of the 2005-to-2013 and 2020-to-2022 diversions were able to keep a lid on them through the compromising of those at a higher administrative or political level within the district. Oakes succeeded in keeping the thefts from coming to light, at least during the end stage of that chapter, by entering into a sexual relationship with Harold Cebrun, who was then Rialto Unified’s superintendent. Rahman-Davies insulated herself and the misuse of the state funding by arranging for the district to hire the mother of one of the school district’s board members as a nutrition services division employee.
The 2005-to-2013 diversions came to light as the result of Rancho Cucamonga-based Stewart Investigations Services having initiated an inquiry into allegations of financial irregularities in the district on behalf of a person or persons unknown. According to Stesart Investigations, the thefts has begun as early as 1998 and had involved the district’s loss of $3.16 million. When a public rather than private investigation into the matter, involving the Rialto Police Department, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and the California Department of Education was launched, the forensic audit of the lunch program was constrained to the eight years from 2005 to 2013, whereupon the missing $1.8 million was confirmed.
The revelations relating to the 2020-2022 diversions grew out of observations by Sarah Dunbar-Riley, a nutrition services supervisor, who maintained that during the latter two-thirds of her nine-year tenure as a district employee she sought to bring to the attention of district higher-ups that meal counts were being inflated and reimbursement claims overstated.
In 2020, with the advent of the COVID epidemic, social-distancing mandates and remote/internet classroom approaches for school districts throughout California, school-based nutrition programs were not discontinued but perpetuated, with parents whose financial circumstance qualified their children for free breakfasts and lunches being able to go the campuses of their children’s schools and pick those meals up to go. According to Dunbar-Riley, with the initiation of the COVID nutrition program, substantial discrepancies in the counts of meals served and the number of meals served reported to state and federal authorities for reimbursement purposes, resulting in the district receiving hundreds of thousands and then millions of dollars in funding it should not have been entitled to. When Dunbar-Riley attempted to bring the matter to the attention of Rangel and Kraushaar, she was rebuffed.
In January 2022, Rahman-Davies, acceded to hiring Maria Montes Torres, School Board Member Edgar Montes’ mother, as a nutrition department worker with the district at least since January 2022.
By 2023, Dunbar-Riley, yet unable to get Rangel or Kraushaar to take her concerns about the irregularities in the district’s nutrition department seriously, went over their heads to the district’s then-superintendent, Cuauhtemoc Avila. Avila, deeming Dunbar-Riley’s questions with regard to the financial integrity of the district’s lunch program, with its augmentation by state and federal funding, deemed her misgivings to be legitimate. Avila initiated an audit into the lunch program.
While auditors initially spun their wheels in seeking to determine how many meals were in fact being served and whether those figures had been padded, by the spring of 2024, the auditors were achieving traction. On May 8, 2024, Avila was abruptly put on paid suspension by the school board. That action had been orchestrated by Montes and effectuated with the support of Evelyn Dominguez and then-Board Member Nancy O’Kelley.
In short order, Montes was able to prevail upon Edward D’Souza, the district’s so-called lead academic agent for math and early college programs who had been promoted into the capacity of acting superintendent when Avila was put on leave, to scrap the audit.
With district officials disregarding her, Dunbar-Riley, believing the circumstance would not be remedied by her confining herself to in-house channels and through any internal corrections, went to the press and, ultimately, filed a whistleblower lawsuit.
There are indications to indicate that prior to press revelations relating to the 2020-202 diversions, the was a recognition among some of the district’s senior administrators and the school board of what had occurred and the possibility that it would result in scandal.
On February 26, 2025, Kraushaar left her position at Rialto Unified School District to take on the role of director of food services at the Chaffey Joint Union High School District.
Judy White, who was then serving as Rialto Unified’s interim Superintendent and had not been with the district in the 2020-2022 timeframe, in March 2025 commissioned a forensic audit of the meal program. While the audit was yet ongoing, Rahman-Davies and Rangel were placed on administrative leave during the audit.
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.
On April 16, 2025, Maria Montes Torres, Edgar Montes’ mother, submitted her resignation as a district employee.
In May 2025, news outlets reported on the allegations that originated with Dunbar-Riley that the district’s nutrition services managers had inflated student meal counts to collect millions of dollars in excess state and federal subsidies.
Rangel retired on June 30, 2025.
It was anticipated that the audit, having begun in March 2025, would conclude by that summer. A number of issues that were uncovered led to further areas of inquiry, and the audit remained open.
Meanwhile, Rahman-Davies, who had been widely touted as an American success story based on her emigration as a child from Lagos, Nigeria, remained on paid administrative leave, even as leaks of information were indicating 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. 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 with regard to the rumors that were swirling about her, the three other members of the school board accepted Rahman-Davies resignation. In doing so, they voted to approve her departure contract.
The terms of that departure arrangement, at least in certain circles, provoked outrage. The agreement/severance contract will allowed her to continue to collect her then-current total yearly compensation of $293,589.41, consisting of her annual $221,977.41 salary and $71,612. benefits until January 1, 2026 whereupon her annual salary rate increased to $228,636.73. Upon retirement, which was to take place as of June 2, 2026, she was to be eligible for a $141,754.77 pension at age 60 in 2028, and the district agreed to continue to provide her and her spouse with medical coverage until she reaches the age of 65 in 2033.
In November 2025, the audit, compiled by the accounting and auditing firm CliftonLarsenAllen was released. It determined that the nutrition services department received $3,015,000 in excess federal funding over a three-year period as a consequence of inflated student meal reimbursement claims.
A primary finding of that audit was that in the months of June and July, 2021, June and July 2022 and June and July 2023 the district received more than $2.9 million in overpayments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, based on misreported data in the district’s eTrition system, which tracks student meal accounts and meal program data. The district also tapped into reimbursements of over $88,000 in December 2021 and more than $27,000 in December 2022 to which it was not legally entitled.
Subsequently, the California Department of Education took up an examination of what occurred, independent from the CliftonLarsenAllen, covering much of the same ground but delving into other areas, as well. The California Department of Education assigned its audits and investigations division, aided by personnel from the California Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team to carry out its own audit, investigation and analysis as to what occurred in the Rialto Unified School District.
It appears that one of the vulnerabilities was that the California Department of Education manages its state and federal nutrition programs using the Child Nutrition Information & Payment System. The Rialto Unified School District like hundreds of individual school districts across California, uses the eTrition system, consisting of web-based school nutrition and meal-tracking software by Harris School Solutions, to manage its local lunch programs and point-of-sale systems. The California Child Nutrition Information & Payment System, nown by its acronym CNIPS, is designed for school districts and charter schools to submit applications, claims, site changes, and other administrative actions. e-Trition is a separate, state-developed point of sale system used by many California school food service providers to track meal counts, process payments, and generate reports for compliance and reimbursement purposes. A direct data exchange system between CNIPS and eTrition cannot take place. CNIPS does not natively accept eTrition data as a direct import. CNIPS requires school districts and charter schools to manually enter or upload meal counts, claims, and other required information in its own format, often using what is called the SNP POS file layout specifications provided by the California Department of Education. eTrition can generate the required POS files, but these must be converted or formatted to match CNIPS’ specifications before upload. This means eTrition can be a source of data for CNIPS, but the integration is manual or file-based, not a live API or automatic feed. Therefore, the state cannot trace back to the school lunch rooms or cafeterias how many meals were actually made or consumed there during a given day.
The California Department of Education investigation found that Rialto Unified School District claimed more than $3.015 million in improper school meal reimbursements during the COVID-19 pandemic through inflated meal counts and failing to provide adequate oversight of the program. The district, in addition to abusing the trust put into it during the COVID-era program, also inflated meal counts for multiple years under its summer food service program.
The the audits and investigations division within the California Department of Education also found nonexistent, insufficient or weak internal controls within the district’s nutrition services department and evidence that what was misrepresented as “surplus food” was distributed to people ineligible for the district’s meal program.
The programs under which the district received reimbursements were the Summer Food Service Program, the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program. Those reimbursements were subject to the audit. Audits intended to verify the accuracy of the reimbursement claims were limited to the district’s Ethel Kucera Middle School, Kolb Middle School and Rialto Middle School campuses.
Meal counts at the three schools for June 2023 could be reconciled with supporting documentation. Substantial discrepancies emerged with counts done at Rialto Middle School in June 2022, when the district was reimbursed for 1,654 breakfasts and 9,860 lunches, but only 787 breakfasts and 2,606 lunches were logged as having been served. The claim that the Rialto Middle School cafeteria provided 8,445 breakfasts to students in December 2022 was verified by investigators, who nonetheless determined that the claim of 7,128 lunches served the same month did not match the actuality, which was 6,533 lunches were provided to students.
Rialto Unified subsequently corrected reimbursement claims covering the federal and state nutrition programs from July 2021 to June 2023 and repaid the state $3.04 million in February.
Dunbar-Riley filed a civil lawsuit in San Bernardino County Superior Court against the district, Rahman-Davies, Rangel and Kraushaar in May of this year, but altered some of the pleadings and refiled it in an amended version on July 7, 2026. It alleges she was retaliated against for having spoken out with regard to the overbillings.
In the suit, Dunbar-Riley, who is represented by the Law Firm of Wagner Zemming Christensen claims the district and its employees did not investigate the misappropriations of state money she had brought forth, and that she was reassigned out of the Nutrition Services department to the risk management office, cut off from others in the district, and subjected to retaliation, which included investigations of specious charges against her and hostile work environment.
The district’s returning of the money improperly received from the the state and federal government, along with the findings of the CliftonLarsenAllen and California Department of Education would appear to lend credence and strength to Dunbar-Riley’s lawsuit.
Moreover, details provided by the lawsuit, taken together with the audits and their findings, raise questions as to what the district and other agencies, such as the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and the California Attorney General’s Office, will do with regard to Kraushaar, Rangel and Rahman-Davies.
-Mark Gutglueck