The focus of these articles was corruption, fraud and scandal in the Los Angeles Community College District, primarily at Los Angeles Valley College’s Media Arts Department.
A few of these articles summarized.
Erika Endrijonas faces new questions in LACCD fraud | May 2, 2023 |
Pasadena City College President-Superintendent Erika Endrijonas being fired from the institution and trying to get a job at Santa Barbara City College, Mt. SAC, and Los Angeles City College. Endrijonas had been subjected to a vote of no confidence by the Pasadena Academic Senate, Pasadena Full-Time Faculty Union, protests by Part-Time Faculty, and finally the vote to reduce her contract by the newly elected board of trustees.
The article dived into Endrijonas’s tenure at her previous institution – Los Angeles Valley College. Endrijonas was announced in her new role at PCC in December 2018, the same week that a jury in Van Nuys awarded a former LAVC employee $2.9 million jury award for illegal retaliation and abuse. A few months earlier, the Los Angeles Times published a major story about the Valley Academic and Cultural Center – a project meant to be Endrijonas’s crowning achievement – being an alleged massive racketeering scheme.
Further it documented the Media Arts Department the VACC would house had a lengthy history of lawsuits and accreditation complaints against the faculty for not providing the education and training advertised – negating the need for the new building. The building’s approval vote happened in August 2016, the lawsuit happened in 2009, and the Accreditation Complaints happened in June 2016.
Dozen LAVC Cinema Students Narratives challenge Erika Endrijonas’s LACCD Success Story | May 5, 2023 |
This article covered a release of an email thread from a dozen students in 2016 that was ultimately sent to the Accreditation Commission for Junior and Community Colleges in 2016, substantiating that there was widespread fraud in the department. Classes were not scheduled by Department Chair Eric Swelstad, training was not provided, labs were not held, etc . . .
Van Nuys/Los Angeles College Screenwriting Professor Faked Writer’s Guild Membership | May 17, 2023 |
Revealed that LAVC Media Arts Department Chair Eric Swelstad faked his membership in the Writer’s Guild of America – West, and then used it in multiple professional bios.
Los Angeles Valley College perpetuated wage theft against students on Julie Su’s watch | May 19, 2023 |
Documented how Grant Director Dan Watanabe engaged in wage theft against students for two years from 2013 – 2016.
Two Los Angeles Film Professors Bilked Taxpayers Over $3.5 Million Dollars | May 21, 2023 |
Described how LAVC Media Arts Department Founder Joseph Dacursso’s retirement first as Department Chair, then as a full-time faculty in 2012, left Department Chair Eric Swelstad and Arantxa Rodriguez to engage in petty infighting and squabbling that spilled over into scheduling decisions. In short, two faculty members collected six-figure-salaries while putting students in the middle of department in-fighting.
LAVC Omsbudsman Stalked Whistleblowers | August 8, 2023 |
Described how LAVC’s Dean of Students, Annie G. Reed (Goldman) retaliated and stalked students that went to Accreditation, going as far as running a smear campaign that one of them was a potential school shooter. Worse, she began stalking him after he left school – including on social media.
[Image: Annie G. Reed Goldman, Dean of Labor and HR at LACCD]
Further articles questioned where Academic Degrees were given out to students who had not completed Academic classes and criteria, the role of Jo Ann Rivas turned YouTube Personality ‘AuditLA’ who was on the Los Angeles Valley College Citizen’s Building Oversight Committee, whether a number of students with falsified resumes received payments from a Grant as ‘Professional Experts’ etc . . .
The scrubbing of these articles coincided with the formal appointment of Alberto J. Roman as the new Chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, following the retirement of disgraced administrator Francisco Rodriguez.
It also came with the publication of two final articles. One about Annie G. Reed’s being named as a Defendant in a lawsuit by former faculty at Los Angeles City College, who came to her about an administrator engaging in illegal behavior – including planting drugs on employees to get them fired.
The second article, probed Los Angeles Valley College Department Chair, Eric Swelstad’s professional bio again and provided evidence that he repeatedly lied and engaged in deceptive advertising and practices for two decades. It provided students who held loans with information about student borrower defenses.
The censorship also came months after Jo Ann Rivas aka AuditLA, herself probed by the articles, launched a barrage of attacks for about a week in January about a former student who had grievance’s against the school. Rivas had previously engaged in a similar barrage in July 2020.
This was not the first time that an attempt was made to censor this news stream.
In 2020, an attempt was made to hack the community news feed account on Twitter/X.com @LACCDW. Then a week before the LACCD Board of Trustees election in November 2020, Twitter suspended the community newsfeed altogether. It was only restored two years later after Twitter’s sale and the re-evaluation of previous suspended accounts.
In a final update – The Valley Academic and Cultural Center, despite having a 2018 completion date, remains unfinished. According to minutes of the LAVC Work Environment Committee Minutes from 2025-05-08;
“The Valley Academic and Cultural Center (VACC) is as of Friday, May 8th, about 80% complete. They are still patching the roof. There are still some critical items like stage protection net.”
LOS ANGELES — After the Palisades Fire destroyed her son’s high school, Shoshanha Essakhar found herself among the thousands of Los Angeles County parents wondering what to do.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be doing Zoom for the next God knows how long,’” said Essakhar. “It was a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty.”
The fire devastated Palisades Charter High School, where Essakhar’s son was a ninth grader, as well as two elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The Eaton Fire, which broke out around the same time in early January, severely damaged or destroyed six school facilities in Pasadena Unified School District. Together, the fires disrupted learning for more than 725,000 kids and displaced thousands of students from their schools, their homes or both.
For Essakhar, a potential solution came by way of an executive order California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Jan. 14. For students in Los Angeles County schools affected by the fires, the order paused, through the remainder of the school year, the requirement that a student live within their school district’s boundaries. That meant she could enroll her son at nearby Beverly Hills High School, where another parent she shared carpool duties with was also enrolling her child. She quickly completed the necessary paperwork.
But roughly a week later, Beverly Hills Unified School District abruptly stopped accepting students displaced by the fires, closing the door on Essakhar’s son and dozens of other students who expected to spend the semester at Beverly Hills High.
“As a mom, you try to do your best for your child, but it got so unpleasant,” Essakhar said. Beverly Hills school leadership said it could not afford to accept additional students, nor did it need to: Students who lost their school but whose homes were still intact did not need their help.
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The dispute between Beverly Hills Unified School District and some Palisades parents raises questions that school districts across the U.S. increasingly must grapple with as wildfires and other extreme weather events become more common because of climate change: What does a school district owe its neighbors after a major disaster?
For Beverly Hills Unified, the answer was admitting 47 students before pausing enrollment over concerns that a surge of newcomers midyear would siphon resources from the district’s 3,000-plus existing students.
“You’ve got a community where a lot of those folks lost their homes, and half lost their school but their homes weren’t impacted,” said Los Angeles Unified School District board member Nick Melvoin, whose district includes Palisades Charter High School. Like Beverly Hills, its students are predominantly from affluent backgrounds.
Newsom’s order was an attempt at a fix: It urged districts to “extend every effort to support and facilitate the enrollment of students displaced by the fires.” Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which focuses on the societal effects of disasters, said it “provided the necessary flexibility that disaster survivors really need, because their circumstances are so diverse.”
In Beverly Hills, school board members resisted the order. Beverly Hills is one of the few “basic aid” districts in the state, meaning it collects more in local property tax revenue than an annual funding target set by the state, which is based on average daily attendance and other factors. Most districts fall short of the target, and the state makes up the difference.
The January fires in Southern California disrupted learning for more than 725,000 students. Credit: Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
At a series of meetings in January and February, Beverly Hills school board members argued that the district couldn’t absorb additional students without harming those already enrolled. While other school districts see increased funding from increased attendance, that’s not true for basic aid districts like Beverly Hills.
Board members also questioned whether students who lost their schools, but not their homes, such as Essakhar’s son, should be considered affected by the fire and able to enroll. Board members told district administration that they believed only students whose homes were destroyed should qualify.
Not so, said Melissa Schoonmaker with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which provided guidance to the county’s school districts on implementing the order. “It’s not that they had to lose their home or be evacuated, it could be a broad range of impacts,” she said.
Board members supported making this pause permanent.
“Going forward we are closed to any enrollment that comes right now as a result of a student going to Pali who has not been displaced from their home but would like to come to Beverly Hills because they don’t want to go on Zoom,” board President Rachelle Marcus said at the meeting, referring to Palisades Charter.
Essakhar, who lives in Brentwood, a Los Angeles neighborhood roughly halfway between Beverly Hills and the Pacific Palisades, called the entire process traumatic.
She gave up on finding an in-person school option for her son, settling instead for Zoom through Palisades Charter. “Honestly, I didn’t want to go through the experience again,” she said. Plus, most of his friends who left Palisades Charter had enrolled at Beverly High. “Being with your group of friends is different than sending my kid alone to some other school to transition in the middle of the year after the fires on his own,” said Essakhar.
Another Palisades Charter parent, Negeen Ben-Cohen, was initially optimistic that the school would quickly secure a temporary campus. But as the weeks went by, she started considering other options for her ninth grader.
“It was mostly about keeping my son in a healthy social environment, and not isolated at home,” said Ben-Cohen. “Covid already showed that with the amount of learning loss and how much kids fell behind during Zoom.”
Like Essakhar, Ben-Cohen filled out all the necessary paperwork to enroll her son and was told she would hear soon about his class placements. Then enrollment was paused.
“They shut the door in our faces. And that was after the kids got their hopes up, they think that they’re going to be able to go in-person, they think they’re going to be able to start with their friends,” said Ben-Cohen.
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At board meetings, parents and students expressed similar outrage.
“Beverly had the opportunity to extend a hand when we needed it the most but instead they turned around and slammed the door in our faces,” said Kylie Abdi, a senior at Palisades Charter, at a Feb. 11 meeting.
“We do not even want to get an education in a school that kicks others while they are down, you have lost the opportunity to teach your students how to be there for each other,” said another Palisades student, junior Rosha Sinai, calling the board “selfish.”
Jason Hasty, the interim superintendent of Beverly Hills Unified School District, said in an interview that enrolling any more than 47 students would have strained the district’s resources and required hiring more teachers — although he acknowledged that his district is better funded than most.
“We get more money than the state formula because of the way we’re funded. That is a fact. Also what is a fact is on July 1 of every year, we set a budget … based on the students we are projecting to have,” Hasty said.
State Sen. Ben Allen, who represents both the Pacific Palisades and Beverly Hills areas, said that Beverly Hills would be compensated for taking in displaced students, although the details are still being worked out.
“We’re going to have their backs and that they’re going to be fully compensated for any students that they take in,” he said.
Hasty said the district has been “in direct discussion” with Allen’s office, but “until we are sure that those funds are materializing and will be provided,” the pause on enrollment under the executive order (which expires at the end of the school year) remains in place. The district continues to enroll students who move to Beverly Hills or who are eligible under the McKinney-Vento Act, said Hasty. That legislation provides protections for students who are homeless, which is defined as “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate, nighttime residence.”
Nearby Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District is also a basic aid district, but it interpreted the order “to mean that any student who wants to come here can come here right now,” said Gail Pinsker, the district’s chief communications officer. So far, the district has enrolled more than 140 students, with about 200 enrollment requests still being processed. The influx of students prompted the district to combine some elementary classes and hire a new high school teacher, Pinsker said.
Three months after Palisades Charter High School burned, students remain on Zoom. The school just finalized plans to use an old department store building in downtown Santa Monica about 20 minutes southeast of the high school as its temporary campus. In-person instruction should resume sometime after the school’s spring break in mid-April, according to Palisades Charter High School.
Palisades Elementary Charter School, which was devastated by the wildfires in January. Credit: Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Allen, the state senator, said the episode shows the need for a policy for compensating basic aid districts that take in displaced students to make the process smoother after future disasters.
Also helpful would be a website listing districts accepting affected students, said Peek, the University of Colorado researcher.
Lessons from the Los Angeles fires could inform policymaking elsewhere, she added. “They’re going to need it sooner rather than later, as other disasters continue to unfold across the country.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
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The past week has been a blur for Fred Farina, the California Institute of Technology’s chief innovation officer, who lost his home in the fires still tearing through Los Angeles.
“Things turned on a dime. One evening we were sitting in our living room and within 10 minutes we had to evacuate,” said Farina, who lived in Altadena, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the Eaton fire. “The loss of everything you have is hard to deal with.”
While most institutions were spared burn damage to their physical plants, many spent the last week entrenched in immediate recovery efforts. Numerous colleges are raising money to help students and staff secure housing and other basic needs.
Others are opening shelters and food pantries. Pepperdine University’s law school is hosting free remote legal clinics to educate homeowners and lawyers about federal emergency assistance and related issues such as insurance, leases and mortgages. And the University of California, Los Angeles, opened space at its research park for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use as a disaster recovery center for fire victims living on the city’s Westside.
Flexibility and Compassion
But beyond efforts to meet their communities’ most pressing needs, colleges in Los Angeles are also figuring out how to move forward and get through a semester already scarred by more than one of the most destructive fires in California history. The priority emerging for most college leaders is moving forward with flexibility and compassion.
“Words seem inadequate to capture the scale of the devastation,” said Thomas F. Rosenbaum, president of Caltech in Pasadena, near where the Eaton fire destroyed 1,400 homes. “The Caltech community has responded with compassion and generosity, seeking to help each other and working heroically to permit Caltech and [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] to resume their fundamental missions of learning and discovery. We are in this for the long term, and the closeness of our community gives us hope for the future.”
The blaze didn’t reach the Caltech campus itself, but the institute estimates that more than 1,000 students and employees live in an evacuation zone. Of those, more than 90 employees have lost their homes, along with at least 200 employees—many of whom live in the decimated nearby enclave of Altadena—of the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Lab.
Caltech was one of the many colleges in Southern California that closed down last week—in addition to Santa Monica College, Pasadena City College and Glendale Community College—as strong winds accelerated the Palisades and Eaton fires and displaced scores of people affiliated with those campuses.
Caltech resumed in-person classes Monday, and most other local colleges have done the same or are planning to in the coming days as the air quality continues to improve. But hundreds of students, staff and faculty are far from resuming life as it was before the fire.
“It’s pretty overwhelming, the things that have to be done to get back to a good situation,” said Farina, who is in the throes of dealing with insurance and disaster relief logistics after losing his home. “There’s so many decisions that have to be made so quickly.”
Although Farina is uncertain about when he’ll find permanent new housing for his family—apartments are scarce and rents have skyrocketed in the past week—Caltech helped him and many other employees secure a temporary place to live. So far, the Caltech and JPL Disaster Relief Fund has raised about $2 million, and the fund is giving that money to help displaced people meet their basic needs in the aftermath of the fires.
Numerous other L.A.-area colleges are also helping their students and employees get access to cash and safe housing, which have emerged as two of the most needed resources more than a week after the fires started.
At California State University at Los Angeles, at least 60 faculty, staff and students lost their homes, and college officials expects that number to grow. The university is raising money and offering basic needs support for those most affected, which includes grants for housing and food as well as adjustments to teaching and learning, as needed. Cal State LA President Berenecea Johnson Eanes said in a memo Wednesday that the institution “will continue to harness the healing power of our university for the long road to recovery.” (This paragraph was updated with information provided after publication.)
The L.A. Foundation for Los Angeles Community Colleges launched the L.A. Strong: Disaster Response Fund, which is raising money to give people financial assistance for housing, transportation, clothing, food and other basic needs.
“What’s most important right now is financial support,” said Alberto J. Román, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, who expected the first round of assistance to be distributed by the end of the week. “We consider these really unprecedented times with an impact, and that’s why we are compassionate and empathetic of individual situations.”
None of LACCD’s nine campuses sustained fire damage, and Román said he doesn’t believe any of the district’s more than 200,000 students and 9,000 employees were injured as a result of the disaster, either.
“The impact that we’ve had has been on folks who’ve been evacuated or lost their homes, road closures preventing people from coming to work or power outages and being without internet,” he said, noting that the colleges transitioned to remote work last week.
Although LACCD resumed in-person operations this week, Román said the district wants to be flexible with students and staff whose lives have been upended by the fires.
“It is important for us to continue instruction,” he said. “It’s a balance between health and safety and ensuring that students can finish their courses.”
Glendale Community College reopened for in-person classes Wednesday, though at least a dozen employees and 20 students lost their homes and dozens more had to evacuate. While officials continue to try and make contact with the 600 students who live in evacuation ZIP codes, the college is also offering extra paid leave for some employees, raising money, supplying students with laptops and helping people connect with other resources.
Smoke and fire could be seen from the Glendale Community College’s Verdugo campus last week.
Glendale Community College
Tzoler Oukayan, dean of student affairs at Glendale CC, said the college is allowing students to withdraw from their classes without facing a penalty.
“The challenge is that a lot of our students in these areas didn’t—and some still don’t—have power. Access to the internet and their classes has been very challenging,” she said. “It was important for us to open up campus and give people a place to just be.”
Empathy and compassion will also be a priority for Mount St. Mary’s University president Ann McElaney-Johnson when her campus reopens. As of Thursday, the university’s Chalon campus—which is about three miles from the burn path of the Palisades fire—was still under evacuation orders and four faculty members so far have lost their homes.
“The impact of the fire—once we’ve ascertained what it is—is going to be tremendous. So, we really want to make sure we’re caring for our community as we move forward,” McElaney-Johnson said, adding that the university is using money from its operations budget to provide staff and students with financial assistance. “We’ll pick up where we need to, but there will be special attention. Some of the plans for different projects can get put on hold. Right now, the only thing that really matters is the safety and well-being of this community.”
‘Healing More Than Academics’
That’s the approach California State University, Chico, took in 2018, when it reopened two weeks after the Camp fire destroyed the homes of more than 300 faculty, staff and students.
“We made sure that we had all of the exceptions and support systems in place to prioritize the people who were part of our community, to make sure our eye was on their long-term success,” said Ashley Gebb, executive director of communications at Chico State. “We were focused on healing more than academics. It was about how we could get students to the end of semester with their well-being as a priority.”
While Gebb said Chico State was “one of the first to have a community leveled by a fire like this,” the fires in Southern California this month have proven that catastrophes of this scale are becoming more common.
Meredith Leigh, climate programs manager for Second Nature, a nonprofit focused on higher education’s role in climate action, said it’s a signal that higher education institutions across the country should be prepared to navigate increasingly drastic events.
“While campuses across our network have taken steps to increase climate resilience and adaptation, the scale and impact of the current fires (as well as recent floods in the East) is novel in its intensity,” she said. “In this way, the biggest lesson for campuses across the nation is to shift the mental model for resiliency and emergency management—away from planning and implementation based on what has happened in the past, toward what are certain to be more frequent and intense events that previously seemed ‘unimaginable.’”
