The Ventura County Board of Education will investigate and audit its own agency after Superintendent of Schools César Morales admitted twice to granting himself and his top deputies pay and benefits that weren’t authorized by the board.
The board voted 5-0 on May 26 to appoint two of its members to a committee to oversee an investigation that will include a full forensic audit and interviews with current and former staff of the Ventura County Office of Education.
The two board members who volunteered for the committee, Michael Teasdale and Richard Lucas III, are tasked with appointing experts to investigate the office’s finances, management and compliance with state law.
“I think it’s necessary we do a full investigation,” Teasdale said. “This has been a really dramatic break in trust, a violation of laws now admitted in public. We need to address this fully and completely because trust has been lost in this institution.”
The board’s vote to undertake a forensic audit was met with applause from the audience. More than 100 people packed the board room for the meeting, filling every seat and lining the back wall, to watch a board that usually has a handful of people attend its meetings.
Some came to praise Morales’ leadership while others blasted him for the unauthorized pay and benefits and accused him of dragging his feet when people request documents from his office that should be publicly available.
The meeting was the first since Morales admitted that in 2024 he paid himself a bonus of $15,750 that was not approved by the board. State law requires any changes in the superintendent’s salary be approved by a public vote of the board.
Morales said in a statement posted May 15 on the Office of Education website that he has paid back the bonus.
A week after Morales disclosed the unapproved bonus, his office released documents that showed that in 2023, his five top deputies signed new contracts that granted them lifetime health benefits. The Ventura County Office of Education stopped offering lifetime health benefits to employees in 1997, due to concerns about the potential cost.
The latest contracts did not go before the Board of Education, despite a state law that requires board approval for any increase to any employee’s retirement benefits.
During the May 26 board meeting, Morales read a statement that said he only found out the lifetime health benefits should have had board approval during preparation for that meeting, when board President Rachel Ulrich showed him the relevant portion of the California Education Code.
“I did not bring this provision for review. Therefore, I have informed cabinet-level team members that the provision is void and not valid,” Morales said.
He said both his own bonus and the benefits for his cabinet were “an oversight.” They had “no fiscal impact,” he said, because he paid his bonus back and none of the cabinet members retired or otherwise attempted to use the lifetime benefit.
In the future, any new contracts with top executives “will be posted along with the publicly posted salary schedules for those positions.”
In 2024, Morales’ total pay was $307,000, after subtracting the $15,750 bonus he returned, according to salary data provided last year to the The Star by the Ventura County Office of Education. The five executives whose contracts included lifetime health benefits were the office’s highest paid employees after Morales, with pay ranging from $227,000 to $307,000 in 2024.
Pay and benefits information for government employees is considered a public record under state law, available on request from any state or local government agency. The Star asked the Office of Education for its payroll and benefits data for 2025 on May 12, and the office had not provided it. Morales said during the May 26 that his office is responding to all public records requests.
‘The trust has been broken’
Morales is not a member of the Board of Education. As county superintendent of schools, he is elected by all Ventura County voters, and is up for re-election in the June 2 primary. The Board of Education has five elected members, each representing a different part of the county and elected by the voters of that district.
This arrangement is unlike the structure of local school districts, which have an elected board that can hire and fire the superintendent.
Instead, the Ventura County Office of Education’s governance is shared between the superintendent and the board.
The superintendent runs the office and its schools and educational programs, and all of its employees report to him. The board approves the office’s overall budget and has other specific responsibilities, such as deciding appeals of local school district decisions on charter schools petitions, student transfers and expulsions.
The Office of Education as a whole is also unlike a local school district. The local districts run the vast majority of the county’s public schools independently, while the county office runs schools and programs in areas like special education, alternative education, career education and schools for children in the juvenile justice system and other at-risk youth. The Office of Education also provides budget oversight and payroll processing for all 20 of Ventura County’s public school districts.
At the outset of Morales’ statement regarding the rescinded health benefits, he said he looks forward “to continued and improved communication on the well-being of the Ventura County Office of Education.” But the the relationship between him and the board appeared strained.
“We did have a good working relationship, but that’s past tense,” Teasdale said. “The trust has been broken. There’s been mismanagement of funds, and I cannot trust some of the information I’ve received over the last two or three years. That’s broken what was a good relationship.”
Lucas III said he was “deeply disturbed by the gross mismanagement and lack of transparency.”
Has county education office delayed response to public records?
One point of contention between Morales and the board was the response by Morales’ office when people request documents under the California Public Records Act. Morales disclosed his unauthorized bonus only after a local political blogger made a public records request for the details of his pay.
The lifetime health care benefits were also revealed when the same blogger, a Newbury Park resident named Jess Weihe, requested copies of employment contracts for the office’s top executives.
“These things came out when the administration was pressured not of its own will,” Teasdale said.
Weihe made her public records requests on April 21. She attended the May 26 meeting and said the Office of Education still has not released some of the documents she asked for.
And she believes the contracts were only released on May 22 after Lucas III learned of her request and went to the Office of Education to get the documents himself. Lucas III said he sat in a conference room all day before Morales’ staff gave him paper copies of the contracts.
“I’m really frustrated that I had to do what I did,” Lucas III said.
Another person who attended the May 26 meeting, Roni Miranda, said she submitted a public records 42 days ago, and it still has not been filled.
Chris Valenzano, who was a member of the Board of Education from 2004 to 2008, said the delays in releasing records are “a slap in the face” to the public.
“These documents are not the property of Dr. Morales,” he said. “They are not the property of the Office of Education, and they are not the property of the superintendent’s office. They are the property of the public, and you need to release them.”
All five board members said they wanted to see documents released promptly, but no one seconded Teasdale’s motion demanding they be released.
The agenda for the meeting did not include a potential vote on the public records issue, so the board couldn’t take any action, Ulrich said. And board member Ramon Flores said the board doesn’t have the authority to demand their immediate release.
Flores also said he thinks some of the records requests are so broad they amount to a “denial of service” attack, a term for when a hacker floods a computer or network with repeated requests in order to overload the system with traffic. He described Weihe’s requests for all payroll data and purchase orders as “someone trying to slow down the operation of this office.”
Lucas III countered that if some requests are too broad, it shouldn’t stop the office from supplying whatever records are readily available, such as the employment contracts. And if a request is too broad, he said, the office can help the requester to narrow it down to something that can be provided.
“Why the delay in releasing information that is public record?” Lucas III said. “This isn’t a private organization. This isn’t a corporation. We don’t have trade secrets here. Everything going on in this office is subject to public scrutiny.”
When Lucas asked him to address the public records issue, Morales said: “Presently all public records requests are being responded to in accordance with law and in consultation with legal counsel.”
County education board could webcast future meetings
As part of its efforts toward greater transparency, the board also asked Morales to look into recording or live streaming board meetings online. Unlike most city councils, school districts and other elected bodies in Ventura County, the Board of Education does not have any video of its meetings. Audio recordings are posted a few days after each meeting on the office’s website.
Morales said he would return at next month’s board meeting with cost estimates for different video options, including streaming video live during the meetings or recording them and posting the video the next day. His report will also include options for excluding certain sensitive matters from video coverage, such as hearings on student discipline or transfers between school districts.
“It’s 2026, and we should be able to have video access to this board,” Ulrich said. “These are open meetings and the public should be able to see them.”
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: County Board of Education demands answers on bonuses, benefits
Reporting by Tony Biasotti, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
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