The Ventura County Office of Education spent nearly $700,000 in the last three years on tens of thousands of pens, pencils, tumblers, tote bags, picnic blankets, umbrellas, notebooks and other branded items, according to purchasing records recently released by the office.
Many of those items, though not all of them, were engraved or imprinted with the name of Ventura County Superintendent of Schools César Morales, along with the seal of the Office of Education. They were given to employees of the office and to teachers, students, parents and other people all over Ventura County who had some encounter with the Office of Education.
The spending on swag is detailed in 29 pages of purchase orders released by the Office of Education to the Ventura County Taxpayers Association on June 15, in response to a request made by the taxpayers association under the California Public Records Act. Purchase orders are considered public records under the act, and the taxpayers association asked for all spending on branded promotional items since 2022.
The orders total just under $729,000 over four and a half years, with about $684,000 coming in the most recent three years. The office’s spending on promotional items peaked in the 2023-24 fiscal year at about $265,000.
Spending on branded items shot up sixfold from the 2022-23 fiscal year to 2023-24, as the pandemic faded and the Office of Education started hosting more in-person events. Since then, the office has spent about 10 times as much annually on branded items as it did in the decade before Morales took over, according to Morales’ predecessor as superintendent.
“The amount of money is appalling, to be honest,” said Richard Lucas III, a member of the Ventura County Board of Education. “With our county facing substantial declining enrollment and the budgets the way they are, I don’t know why you would be spending taxpayer resources like that on things that aren’t specifically enriching students’ education.”
What is VCOE and what did it do with the items?
Lucas is one of five elected members of the Board of Education, each representing a different part of the county. The county superintendent of schools is elected separately, by all of the county’s voters. The board approves the office’s overall annual budget, but spending decisions like how much branded swag to buy are entirely within the superintendent’s purview.
Morales was not available for comment. He is on medical leave and is expected to return to the office on July 6, said Dave Schermer, the Office of Education’s director of communications.
Morales was admitted to a hospital on June 5 and treated there for five days for “chest pains and issues related to heart health,” Schermer said in an email.
Misty Key, the Office of Education’s deputy superintendent for fiscal and administrative services – a top position in the office roughly equivalent to chief financial officer – declined an interview request but answered questions from The Star via email about the office’s spending on branded merchandise.
Key said the items in the purchase orders were given to “various groups, including employees, teachers, students, parent organizations, and community members who participate in a variety of VCOE events and programs.”
The Office of Education operates schools for about 500 students, including continuation and special education schools and a school for children incarcerated in county juvenile facilities. It also oversees five independent public charter schools with a total of about 2,700 students.
Independent local school boards run all of the other public schools in Ventura County. VCOE has little role in their day-to-day operations but it does provide budget oversight and payroll processing, as well as teacher training, career education, student wellness programs and student competitions like science fairs and mock trials.
VCOE official: Spending was ‘immaterial’
The office’s spending on merchandise increased sharply in 2023, Key said, because “as in-person events returned after the pandemic, there was a greater need to inform educators and the community about VCOE’s programs and services, and branded items were one part of this effort.”
Key said the $729,000 spent on branded items from 2022 to 2026 “is an immaterial expense, representing only one-tenth of one percent of VCOE’s budget across the four years.”
The exact figure is just under 0.07% of the Office of Education’s overall expenditures, which were a combined $1.1 billion over four fiscal years, according to the last four budgets approved by the county board.
However, a little more than half of VCOE’s budget consists of “pass-through” funding for special education, which is sent from the state to VCOE and then from VCOE directly to local school districts. The office’s general operating fund, which includes most of the money that VCOE actually spends, averaged $145 million per year in expenditures between 2022 and 2026.
In 2023-24, spending on branded merchandise accounted for about 2 cents of every $10 the district spent from its general fund.
The promotional items were paid for out of an account for materials and supplies. That’s part of a larger VCOE fund for books and supplies, including textbooks, which are purchased through a different account than the one for promotional items.
Over the past three years, VCOE spent between 5% and 7% of its materials and supplies budget on the branded giveaway items. In each year, the office spent more on swag than it did on textbooks.
Most of the money in the materials and supplies account is restricted to certain purchases. The branded merchandise came from the unrestricted portion of the account; over the past three years, swag spending has made up between 23% and 36% of the unrestricted portion of the office’s materials and supplies budget.
The office has laid off employees in years in which it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on branded merchandise. In 2025, the Office of Education laid off four employees, all in the special education department, due to declining student enrollment, Key said. This year, the office will lay off another four employees, again due to declining enrollment and a decrease in the demand for special education services provided by VCOE to local school districts.
20,000 stadium bags; 6,000 tumblers, mugs and water bottles
Before Morales took over in 2021, the Office of Education spent much less on branded merchandise, said Stan Mantooth, who was Ventura County’s superintendent of schools from 2008 to 2021. He estimated that in those years, the office spent about $15,000 to $20,000 a year on such items, mostly to give to employees at an annual all-staff meeting. The office would also order commemorative pins or other gifts for employees celebrating a milestone such as 20 or 30 years of employment.
“We had an event for all the employees in January of each year, and every year we would pick an item for them,” Mantooth said. “I think one year it was a pair of sunglasses that said VCOE on the side. Maybe one year it was a water bottle. We had about 700 employees, and we might order 1,000 water bottles, because we might find a reason to give out a few more during the year.”
Some of the spending in recent years does appear to fit that model. In March 2023, the Office of Education ordered 750 small wireless speakers or about one for each employee. The purpose, according to the purchase order, was for an all-staff gathering on May 24, 2023. At $12 for each speaker, the order totaled $9,653, including sales tax.
Other orders were for thousands or even tens of thousands of items. In February 2024, the office placed an order that included 2,500 Thermos-type vacuum flasks, 2,000 journals bound in synthetic leather, 2,500 first aid kids and 20,000 clear tote bags, known as “stadium bags” because they can be carried through security in stadiums that don’t allow non-transparent bags.
The total for that order was $144,305. The stadium bags, at $3.54 each, added up to $70,800.
Between 2022 and 2026 the office bought almost 6,000 water bottles, flasks, mugs and other types of drinkware. In May 2024, it spent $27,500 on 1,000 Yeti tumblers. Ten months later, the office spent $24,370 on 1,000 Denali stainless steel mugs.
Lucas said he’s run into people with no connection to public education who recognized his VCOE branded notebook and said they have one of their own. When he was first elected, he said other elected officials in the county would joke with him about whether he had started a swag collection yet.
“I’ve been on the board about a year and a half, and I’ve got a duffel bag full of stuff,” he said. “I’ve got an umbrella I got at the grand opening for the welding center, a power bank with the VCOE Welding Center logo on it. They’re kind of nice in certain aspects, but it seems like an awful waste of taxpayer money.”
All of the VCOE merchandise orders were placed with Amicolor, an Oxnard-based company. Amicolor representatives did not respond to requests for an interview. The company’s website says it provides branded items to schools, government agencies and nonprofits.
“Amicolor continues to be selected for its lower prices after receiving quotes from multiple vendors,” Key said via email. “Amicolor is based in Ventura County, allowing tax dollars spent with the company to support the local economy. We routinely compare prices from other vendors before placing orders with Amicolor.”
‘It’s marketing’
Tiffany Israel is a partner in the law firm Aleshire & Wynder, where she represents government agencies, including the city of Fillmore. She said she’s never heard of a local government agency that spends on giveaway merchandise the way the Ventura County Office of Education does.
“Most public agencies don’t spend a lot of money on swag because they don’t have a lot of extra money,” she said. “It might be a holiday gift or a program that rewards employees, but a district and superintendent-branded flask or a cup or a mug seems very unusual to give to other people outside the district.”
Cities and other public agencies often give their employees things like coffee mugs, Israel said, “small expenses that make people happy and feel like they are part of a team.” But she said she’s never seen anything like the VCOE’s order of 20,000 stadium bags, when the office employs 700 people.
“It’s marketing,” Israel said. “100%.”
With Morales’ name featured prominently on many of the items, there’s some question as to what exactly is being marketed.
Mantooth said that when he was superintendent, items intended as gifts for employees never had his name on them.
“We felt that it was all about VCOE and its people, and that’s why we didn’t have things with my name on them,” he said.
Key said some items purchased before Morales’ tenure did have the name of the superintendent on them. She gave The Star a photo of a folder customized with Mantooth’s name.
“As the elected leader of VCOE, it is appropriate for the superintendent’s name to be included on items that represent the organization,” she said in an email.
Key also provided photos of promotional items purchased during Morales’ tenure that did not have his name on them.
It’s clear that the office bought many more items with Morales’ name than it did for his predecessor.
“I don’t understand why the name had to be on all that merchandise,” Lucas said. “It definitely seems like self-promotion.”
Rachel Ulrich, another member of the Board of Education, said she was struck by the fact that on many promotional items, Morales’ name is larger than “Ventura County Office of Education.”
“Why is it a larger size font?” she said. “Does it scream narcissist? Probably.”
Israel said there’s no law that strictly prohibits spending taxpayer money on items with an elected official’s name on them, but it’s still something she would advise against.
State prohibits using public resources for campaign purposes, and she said buying a lot of items with an elected official’s name and the office’s seal could raise suspicion that the purchases might benefit the official’s re-election campaign.
Proving that would require showing that the elected official intended to use the items to benefit a political campaign, Israel said. There is no evidence that Morales did that. VCOE spending on promotional items declined slightly as his 2026 re-election campaign heated up, and his campaign does not appear to have used any of the taxpayer-funded VCOE merchandise.
A string of spending questions
Morales lost his bid for re-election in the June primary, coming in third in a three-person race.
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Morales twice admitted to awarding pay or benefits that were not authorized by the board, in violation of state law.
First, on May 15, he said he paid himself a $15,575 bonus in 2024 without board approval. He said he paid the money back the day before the disclosure.
A week later, Morales’ office released documents showing that he gave his top deputies lifetime health benefits, again without the board’s knowledge. At the next board meeting, he said the benefits had been rescinded.
Since those revelations, the relationship between Morales and the board has been strained. The board formed a subcommittee to oversee a full investigation of the office’s finances, including a forensic audit to look for any additional irregularities.
Mike Teasdale, who is on the subcommittee along with Lucas, said the spending on branded merchandise is going to be examined in that audit.
The Ventura County Taxpayers Association, which made the public records request for the purchase orders, will also be looking into the purchases.
Ryan Grau, the executive director of the Taxpayers Association, said the organization decided to request the purchasing records after it was approached by a “whistleblower” with an armload of VCOE-branded merchandise. The Taxpayers Association shared the results of its public records request with The Star and allowed The Star to photograph the items for this article.
Grau said he was shocked at the dollar amounts when he saw the purchase orders.
“I just hope this stuff went to the kids,” he said.
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Swag cost county’s Office of Education $700K-plus in recent years
Reporting by Tony Biasotti, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
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By Tony Biasotti, Ventura County Star | USA TODAY Network
