Local school boards that have experienced increased costs or inefficiencies due to programs and policies enacted by the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) should submit formal reports detailing these impacts to the newly authorized audit of the OCBE by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee (JLAC).
Retired Judge Lynne Riddle and Andy Thorburn’s Contemporary Policy Institute (CPI) have shown how the OCBE wasted millions, justifying JLAC’s authorization, but ultimately local school districts have paid the true costs of the OCBE’s actions. The audit will benefit from comprehensive evidence mapping the flow of money and influence from the California Policy Center to OCBE board members, the current county superintendent, and locally elected school boards, especially those associated with the Capistrano, Orange, and Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School Districts.
On April 8, Sen. Tom Umberg announced that the JLAC had approved his request for a state audit of the OCBE and its public administration practices. Umberg said the audit is intended to strengthen transparency, accountability, and stewardship of taxpayer dollars amid longstanding concerns about OCBE governance, litigation practices, and policy decisions. The request cites a pattern of actions raising these concerns including disputes over implementing the California Healthy Youth Act, Title VI and Title IX violations, COVID-era reopening efforts and related litigation, controversial charter approvals, and multiple lawsuits involving state policy and internal governance. The audit will examine issues tied to transparency, fiscal stewardship, civil-rights compliance, and adherence to statutory responsibilities.
- Here is a fuller list of the scope and objectives of the audit.
- And here is a summary of some of the wasteful use of taxpayer dollars recently documented by Senator Umberg.
Any effort to trace the money flows and waste associated with the OCBE, however, should focus squarely on the downstream impacts on local school boards and the districts it oversees. While Lynne Riddle has performed an enormous public service by documenting various abuses occurring within the operation of the OCBE, local school boards and taxpayers need to further document those impacts in their districts.
Judge Riddle has set something of a template for such documentation, but one does NOT need to be a federal judge to perform the civic duty she once provided. The Public School Defenders Hub, associated with the CPI, trains people in conducting the types of documentation Riddle provided to warrant that JLAC. Please support the Public School Defenders Hub in whatever way you are able.
Local school boards, working with concerned taxpayers, can communicate their findings to the California State Auditor to help thoroughly evaluate the damages caused by the OCBE to neighborhood public schools. Obviously, the more formal the report, the better.
Such reports will both facilitate and enrich the CSA investigation. The JLAC has authorized about 4,200 hours of investigation at a cost of a little over $800,000. The more evidence local districts can provide, the fuller the picture the audit can have.
I recently encouraged the PYLUSD to undertake such a formal investigation in a letter I wrote to Board President Carrie Buck. I included Trustee Marilyn Anderson in this appeal because at the April board meeting, she expressed concerns about the cost to the district of the recently OCBE imposed Magnolia Science Academy. Its current enrollment is four students, but the costs imposed on the district by this imposition represent a potentially significant burden on the district’s budget. We need to quantify the current per‑pupil and total district costs associated with these four students and identify steps the district can take to ensure those costs do not further undermine the operations of our 23,000‑student district.
Open Letter to the PYLUSD
April 15, 2026
Carrie Buck, Board President
Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District
CC: Marilyn Anderson, Board Member, Area 2
Re: Request for Public Report Submission to the State Audit Committee
Dear President Buck:
I am writing to formally request that the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District (PYLUSD) prepare and submit a comprehensive public report, along with all relevant supporting records, to the recently authorized California State Joint Legislative Audit Committee as part of the Committee’s ongoing review of the governance and oversight exercised by the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE).
The requested report will assist the Audit Committee in evaluating the district’s experiences related to OCBE’s actions, with a focus on transparency and accountability. Providing these documents will help clarify the evident harms to the PYLUSD that have resulted from the operations of the OCBE and ensure a thorough and accurate review process by the state authorities.
Concerned citizens have convinced the state legislature that the OCBE may not be complying with state law regarding Brown Act requirements, charter authorization, appropriate litigation, misuse of public funds, grant requirements, and civil-rights obligations. With two county-imposed charter schools and past misconduct by county and district leadership, a report from PYLUSD would provide evidence to the Audit Committee and help the public understand the waste, fraud, and abuse experienced in the PYLUSD over the last five years.
Key items that the report should address include the district’s experience with county-imposed charter schools, legal compliance and governance issues, use of revenues, civil-rights implications, litigation trends and associated attorney fees, board actions that may conflict with voter intent or legal requirements, campaign and ethics disclosures, and the role of outside consultants.
The report should quantify the total costs to date and projected long-term financial exposure associated with county charter schools imposed on PYLUSD, including the Magnolia Science Academy and the California Republic Leadership Academy, with particular attention to facilities renovation and maintenance obligations, insurance, and Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) impacts.
It should also address misrepresentations and any preferential treatment given to the Orange County School of Computer Science (OCSCS), including a review of legal advice from Orbach, Huff, and Henderson and the role that advice played in misrepresentations about the proposed charter revision disclosed at the January 14, 2025 board meeting. As part of that review, the report should analyze the OCSCS lease proposals included in the revision (estimated at approximately $800,000 lost per year) and explain whether any per-square-foot lease arrangement offered to OCSCS would have had to be extended to other county-authorized charters operating in PYLUSD (e.g., Magnolia and CRLA).
In addition, the report should explain the district’s use of developer fees in connection with the Universal Sports Institute (USI), including the factual basis and legal rationale for using fees intended to mitigate construction impacts on school sites to fund a program designed primarily for homeschooled youth, and whether this use was unlawful or, at minimum, indicates that legislation should be strengthened to prohibit similar expenditures in the future.
Relatedly, the report should address civil-rights compliance concerns, including whether access to USI created unequal benefits for families who could afford to homeschool and thereby violated elements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The report should further summarize district litigation costs, including how repeated violations of the Education Code, Labor Code, and district by-laws under the previous superintendent contributed to staff claims and costly lawsuits. It should also describe the fiscal and operational impacts of district leadership’s support for pandemic-related litigation and challenges to state policies affecting gender-nonconforming students, and it should provide a longitudinal analysis of attorney-fee trends from 2015 to the present.
Additionally, the report should document the cost and impact of the supermajority requirement adopted by Trustees Blades, Frazier, and Youngblood to dismiss seven specific managers, including whether the action was unlawful and/or whether similar measures should be prohibited because they undermined the will of voters as expressed in the 2024 school board elections.
Finally, the report should address campaign and ethics disclosures by verifying trustee-candidate FPPC filings for completeness, and it should describe any use of district resources by former Superintendent Cherniss to interfere in the 2024 school board campaigns. An examination of the legality of certain fundraising practices associated with the Yorba Linda Taxpayers Association might be included as well.
The report should also include an assessment of the performance of Hazard, Young, & Attea & Associates, particularly regarding any failure to notify the board of well-documented violations attributed to Superintendent Cherniss in his previous positions. This includes reviewing the claims from Keith Butler v. Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District (Case No. 21TRCV00016) and the findings from the investigation contracted between PVPUSD and Douglas P. Dickerson. Although the Dickerson report cannot be obtained through a public records request, our district may be able to conduct a confidential review to identify behavioral patterns within both PVPUSD and PYLUSD.
We respectfully request that the Board ensure the Audit Committee is provided with all relevant documentation necessary to assess both the practices of OCBE and their impact on our local school districts. Additionally, the Board may wish to consider engaging Douglas P. Dickerson to conduct an investigation comparable to the one previously commissioned by Palos Verdes following their experience with Dr. Cherniss. According to available reports, Palos Verdes was extremely satisfied with Mr. Dickerson’s work.
I understand that this letter includes many requests, some of which may fall outside the Board’s responsibilities. My intention is not to add to your workload. However, the JLAC could offer a chance to resolve issues unique to our county. Any efforts we make to support it may prove valuable for the future success of all public schools in Orange County.
Samuel T. Myovich
Barke and Williams Trial Updates
In closing, here is an update regarding ongoing lawsuits involving Mari Barke and Ken L. Williams.
Lynne Riddle, acting as a Private Attorney General, has sued Mari Barke for failing to report around $14 million on her FPPC Form 700 over a period of five years. Failing to report this one year might be excusable. Failing to report repeatedly over five years involves either gross negligence or intentional disregard for the law. The submission of final arguments is scheduled for this week in the ongoing bench trial. Judge Colover is expected to deliver her verdict in May.
The statute of limitations for criminal prosecution has elapsed following the violent incident on Crystal Canyon Road in Silverado, which took place on March 11, 2023. This allows Caden O’Malley’s civil suit against Ken L. Williams to move forward. The Case Management Conference for this trial is set for July 27.
Retired Federal Judge Lynne Riddle has spent years scrutinizing the fiscal stewardship and other practices of the Orange County Board of Education. This commentary, recently published in the Foothills Sentry, reflects nearly a decade of persistent investigation that helped encourage the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to authorize a state audit. What follows summarizes a small portion of her findings related to only one of the six areas under legislative review—legal spending. It raises fundamental questions about transparency, judgment, and the use of public education funds by the current OCBE.
JUDGE RIDDLE’S COMMENTARY
Recently, many of us learned there will be official state audit into the policies, practices and expenditures of our Orange County Board of Education (OCBE). Broadly, the report may help us determine whether – and what extent — our taxpayer dollars spent by the Board benefits the classroom learning experiences of O.C. kids.
Our state’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee sought the audit, asking the State Auditor look into and report on six particular areas. My comment focuses on the one regarding OCBE legal fees expenditures, the Board’s tax dollar spending; its transparency, fiscal practices and legal compliance. Those questions are most comfortable based on my 60+ background in university teaching, law practice and judicial tenure, along with my attentively sitting (gavel to gavel) through nearly every OCBE meeting from 2018 through 2024.
As the published OCBE/Orange County Department of Education (“OC Ed Department”) annual budgets show, between 2013 to 2018 the amount of combined legal expense (including both litigation attorney and the Board “special” counsel advice fees) incurred by both OCBE and the OC Superintendent was $51,626. That averaged spending of just over $10,000 per year. But note; between 2018 and 2024 those total legal costs came $8.1 million. That’s an average legal expenditure of $1,351,000 per year — a stunning 25,000% increase.
A reasonable question is Why? For What was that $8.1 million spent? More importantly, How did that $8 million spending improve our children’s school experience?
Our OCBE . . . (I use “Our OCBE” to underscore the fact that WE elect each OCBE member, and upon our election approval they become trustees, bound by oath, to hold our tax dollar in trust: To use of those trust funds for the purpose of maximizing the learning of the children of the county). In any case, our OCBE – as plaintiff – initiated six lawsuits in the O.C. Superior Court between 2018 and 2024; two against our County Superintendent of Schools (with one including our State Superintendent of Public Instruction), a suit against Governor Newsom and the State Department of Public Health, two against the Orange County Committee on School District Organization (a state-funded education agency) and then in 2024 against the Orange County Department of Education. One of the six (filed in 2019) is still open. In none of the other five did the OCBE receive a favorable judgment. However, in its first suit against the Superintendent, and after some 20 days of trial, the parties “settled.” That said, the estimated legal expense of over $3,000,000 came from public funds.
We O.C. residents should be especially concerned when the OCBE sues the County Superintendent, the County Committee and the OC Department of Education (OCDE) because all the attorney’s fees and costs, for both sides, come from the same pocket; the money budgeted by the state to the OC Ed Department. Every dime spent was our money.
To me that seems a remarkable difference in litigation and other legal spending considering the OCBE’s litigation success record appears to be – shall we say – meager. Always, I wonder why.
Because the public has virtually no right or opportunity to look at any of the OCBE’s litigation expense invoices, we can’t tell exactly how much and for what that money was spent. The auditor will have a transparency the public simply doesn’t.
Not only did the OCBE file its first lawsuit in 2018, in September that year it entered into a contract with to hire its own “special” general counsel to advise only with the Board. Its “special” attorney was not hired to provide advice to our OC Ed Department or any OC local school district.
Throughout his engagement the Board’s “special” attorney resided in the Bay Area; his office was in San Franciso. The contract agreed to pay his travel time and expenses. As he traveled, hotel-stayed, sometimes eat, attended Board meeting, etc. and we paid for his time and costs, from September 2018 through about July 2024.
The public was never informed of how much he was paid between 2018-2021. But beginning in 2022, the OCBE began to agendize for discussion and approval his monthly invoices. It publicly posted meeting agendas with copies of his invoices but having descriptions of his billed attorney services totally redacted from public view. But as to his reimbursable expenses the public could see his service dates, and well as, generally, but not always, vendor names (hotels, taxis, meals, etc.) and amounts for travel and his other claimed out-of-pocket costs.
His invoices in 2022 totaled over $330,000; in 2023, nearly $590,000, and in his six months in 2024, nearly $395,000 (his firm was not retained after June 2024). Rounded, that’s $1,315,000 in 2-1/2 years (for advice, not litigation). If we surmise that he received an average of $100,000 for 2019, 2020 and 2021, then it’s fair to estimate he’s received not less than $ 1,600,000. Simply put, I find paying more than $1.3 million in our tax dollars in 2-1/2 years for school board legal advice hits the “gasp and pearl clutching” column.
How, while under a duty to protect money intended to school our children, did spending some $1.6 million benefit those kids education? How did it benefit them to hire a guy from San Francisco and pay for his travel and lodging just to get to work? Why, rather than flight and hotel expenses (and the time billed while traveling), couldn’t he have attended the Board meetings via Zoom? I still wonder Why the OCBE paid thousands to have their advice-giving attorney merely sit in the audience at 4 or 5 of their “forums” that featured, entirely, Board- curated “expert” panelists to present the chosen topic. The meeting videos show counsel sat mute; he gave no legal advice. If he and the OCBE felt it necessary he hear the program content, couldn’t he have watched via Zoom from his Bay Area home?
After many hours reviewing the OCBE’s legal fees and costs paid by the Board it is counsel, I was concerned not only by the large numbers, but simply stunned by some of the individual out-of-pocket cost reimbursement items the OCBE paid. Some simply boggle the mind. Reasonable persons could fairly wonder and ask whether either the Board or its counsel “gave a fig” about reviewing the legitimacy of his reimbursement claims before saying, “That’s OK, just pay it.” In my view, a more responsible (ethically and legally required) approach to every reimbursement cost claim is to for each Board member to ask themselves before voting “Is this expense really something our kids should pay for?”
After reviewing tens of counsel’s invoices, I had had many questions. Here are a few.
I’d ask about the time when headed by air to O.C. he apparently had forgotten or lost his cellphone charger. He asked, the OCBE approved, and we paid some $41 for a new one purchased at the Oakland airport. One he apparently kept. Trivial? Perhaps. But it seems a thoughtless, unconcerned failure by the board and its counsel to carefully review expense claims before simply paying with school kids’ tax funds.
Here’s a head-scratcher. How many of us have stayed, at taxpayer expense or even at our own expense, in a D.C. hotel room at $827 per night? (Counsel’s total hotel bill, paid by the Board without question, for his four-night that stay was $3,300.00)? Not only that, the OCBE paid him some $19,000 (48.5 attorney hours at $400/hr.) during an asserted OCBE lobbying effort.
Another OCBE reimbursement claim approved and paid by the Board in June 2023, without a single question, was invoiced by counsel as “Meals, 5/26/23, $720.” There was no information as to who eat and drank what and why. Following a Public Records request, there’s evidence the restaurant charge was from the Water Grill, Costa Mesa. The obtained restaurant receipt had a notation (appearing to be in counsel’s hand) “OCBE” dinner. Months after the invoice was OCBE-approved and paid, the matter was noted in public comment, after witch counsel said something like “Gosh, it was just a mistake. When we learned of it, our firm refunded the $720.”
Certainly, good news. But wait! Shouldn’t a diligent, responsible counsel review his own invoices for errors before he ever submitted them? He’d never before sought $720 for a “meal.” Seems like that would stick out to any attentive reviewer. Then too, the board members (some or all) appear to have counsel’s guests at that very Water Grill gathering. There were five board members who had a duty to review every bill before paying them. Shouldn’t that date — May 26, 2023, along with their attorney’s name, and along with a rather big $720 meal bill, seem worthy of raising a question? None of the Board members did. They simply just voted to pay. Whether refunded after public exposure or not, we taxpayers and residents simply have to ask why didn’t they – each and every one of them –review the invoice before paying.
Now, however, that’s a question the auditor can ask. Maybe that investigation report will tell us exactly who’s guarding the OCBE vault?
Yes, yes, I take the attorney’s assurance that the sum was refunded. I understand too he and the OCBE may to claim “No harm. No foul.” Yet too, in these times of political chaos, I also have the notion that after this public airing of their laundry they may bemoan these observations as simply a “political” attack. It is not. It’s about properly spending school funds
Finally, I take the OCBE at its website-word, that “The Orange County Board of Education respects the public’s right to accountability and will cooperate fully with the audit process,” and assuring too that it will “participate fully in the audit process and provide complete and accurate information” and ending with “We are confident that a fair and objective review will reflect our commitment to students, families and the responsible stewardship of public resources.”
Let’s all share the OCBE’s constructive stance. Let all the facts be presented, analyzed. Let the auditor review for all to see the applicable facts, policies and legal requirements. If errors were made, let’s fix the process. Let’s praise the OCBE and its members for all it and they have done to serve the children in our schools. And finally, and perhaps most important, let’s all learn together, and come together, to actively do all we can to better achieve the educational goals we share and, with hope and good earnest, gladly fund.
Lynne Riddle
Resident of Orange County