Chualar parents want a say in how the school is run, but the district is shutting them out.

Anita Rodriguez, a Chualar Union School District parent who agreed to speak to the Weeklyusing an alias out of fear of retaliation, wants answers to a few simple questions. Mainly, where is the district’s money going?

But she, like other parents, allege they only found out where the district’s money was going four hours before the LCAP – or Local Control Accountability Plan, a school district’s budget – was approved by board members.

Rodriguez teaches in Salinas so she knows a little more than the average parent on how the school budget process works. She knew that there is usually a parent committee to oversee the LCAP. She says when she inquired, the board confirmed there would be, but then it never materialized.

“Their inconsistencies are hurting parents,” she says. “They don’t know how to communicate.”

The Monterey County Office of Education did circulate a notice for the district’s LCAP that ran in the Monterey Herald on June 9, nearly three weeks before it was approved.

But the LCAP is just one of the public processes CUSD is obscuring. Since October 2018, the board has canceled five of 10 regularly scheduled board meetings. Information as basic as the names of board members is absent from the district’s webpage.

The district, which operates one elementary school serving about 340 students, is currently under two investigations by the state Fair Political Practice Commission and the California Department of Education. The FPPC is investigating filing officer duties, while the CDE is investigating the district’s failure to respond to a complaint.

Multiple phone calls by the Weekly to the district office during business hours have gone unanswered. Phone calls to board president Yvette Contreras were not returned. A hand-delivered letter and visit to Chualar Elementary School, where the district office is located, also yielded no response.