For Rialto Schools To Be Great, They First Must Be Good

When adjectives like “embattled” and “scandal-mired” preface the name of your school district, you know you've got a mighty job ahead. So it is for Cuauhtémoc Avila, the newly appointed superintendent of the embattled and scandal-mired Rialto Unified School District.

RUSD's board last week voted unanimously to appoint Avila, whose first name is pronounced Kwahu-tem-oc, to oversee the 26,000-student district. Avila, 47, is a newbie. He's been a teacher, a school principal and an assistant superintendent for educational services at the Los Angeles County Office of Education. But Rialto will be his first superintendent's gig.

And what a gig it is! Corruption and incompetence cast a long shadow over Rialto Unified. Avila's predecessor, Harold Cebrun, “retired” last April after the school board placed him on administrative leave following an embezzlement scandal. Former bookkeeper Judith Oakes, convicted last year of skimming some $1.8 million from RUSD's school lunch account, may or may not have had an extracurricular relationship with Cebrun.

He steadfastly denied those allegations, but he couldn't deny his mismanagement. Separate independent audits found evidence of fraud, misappropriation of funds, possible conflicts of interest in district contracting and purchasing, including $1 million in questionable spending in district's special education programs.

A report by the state's Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team also found “a systematic lack of focus on instruction and lack of guidance from the highest level of leadership,” which nicely sums up the state of Rialto Unified over the past decade or so.

Mere weeks after Cebrun's retirement, RUSD made international news when a local newspaper reported that 2,000 eighth graders were asked to write an essay arguing whether or not the Holocaust really happened. The district wound up “withdrawing” the assignment several months after students had received their grades.

The board over the past 12 months has steadily replaced much of the old Cebrun regime, but the slate isn't entirely clean. Mohammad Z. Islam, the district's interim superintendent, will return to being associate superintendent of business services when Avila arrives in July.

Islam was clearly over his head in the interim position, and given the questions surrounding RUSD's procurement practices, he may be over his head as associate superintendent of business services. Islam was at the helm when the Holocaust-denial fiasco broke. He first defended the essay topic, then dissembled, then finally took “full responsibility” for the misbegotten assignment. Yet he somehow remains employed.

Avila sounds keen to get on with his job – he starts officially July 1 – so it would be unfair to bash him before he's even got the key to the men's room at district headquarters. But he would do well to avoid the sort of mealy-mouthed bureaucratese that typified Islam's interim management and speak plainly and honestly about the challenges ahead.

Initial signs aren't promising. “There are some great things that are happening [in the district] that are not always being communicated,” he told a reporter last week.

Avila offered no specifics in his passively worded pronouncement. And “great” is a word much overused. We use “great” to describe hot dogs and the works and deeds of Winston Churchill. Tony the Tiger says Frosted Flakes are “Gr-r-eat!” We sing “How Great Thou Art” in church on Sunday morning and promise a “great time” at the barbeque later that afternoon.

If everything is great, nothing is. And Rialto's schools aren't even in the neighborhood of great.

GreatSchools.com gives Rialto Unified a ranking of four out of 10. Rialto schools do a middling-to-poor job of teaching the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic. Last year, more than half the schools in the district were classified as “program improvement” – the state's euphemism for “failing.”

For Rialto's public schools to be truly great, they first need to be good. That's a long-term goal in itself.

Rialto Unified needed fresh leadership, and Avila just may be the man to deliver it. At the very least, his appointment brings to a close a long, grim chapter in the district's recent history. How the next chapter reads will be largely up to him. I wish him luck.

This piece originally appeared in Riverside Press Enterprise

This piece originally appeared in Riverside Press Enterprise