Before Alberto Carvalho publicly announced his resignation as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the school board sent him a confidential letter warning it had potential grounds to terminate him for cause, a move that would have stripped him of any severance from a contract paying $440,000 a year. The letter, first reported by the New York Post based on LA Times reporting, cited at least three instances in which Carvalho allegedly received financial benefits from a district contractor and failed to disclose them on required state forms.
Carvalho resigned effective June 21, 2026, four months after the FBI searched his home and LAUSD headquarters. He framed his departure as selfless. The confidential letter tells a different story, one of a superintendent cornered by ethics allegations and an active federal investigation, negotiating his exit while the board held a loaded contractual weapon.
The contractor at the center of the investigation is AllHere, a now-defunct ed-tech startup that secured a deal worth up to $6.2 million with LAUSD to build an AI chatbot. AllHere completed roughly $3 million in work before collapsing in 2024. Its founder, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was later charged with securities and wire fraud, according to AP News.
The confidential letter laid out specific allegations. It cited an August 2023 trip to the White House that sources say AllHere paid for. It cited tickets and possible perks for at least two events at Dodger Stadium. And it cited travel to an education conference in Denver. The board also raised concerns about Carvalho's reported personal use of a district car and driver that were designated for work only.
Each of these alleged benefits, the board argued, should have appeared on Carvalho's state financial disclosure forms. They did not.
The financial stakes were significant. Carvalho's four-year contract, which took effect just 11 days before the FBI raid, included a $50,000 annual retirement annuity contribution on top of his $440,000 salary. Termination without cause would have entitled him to at least one year's pay. Termination for cause would have eliminated severance entirely, though he would still receive compensation for unused vacation time.
Before the letter arrived, Carvalho had been pushing for an exit package worth more than $1 million, along with legal indemnification. The board countered with an offer of several months' pay, but only if Carvalho dropped the indemnification demand. Then came the letter, making clear the board believed it had the contractual leverage to walk away from any payout at all.
A representative for Carvalho disputed that the allegations warranted termination, saying each issue had mitigating factors and that none of the cited actions, individually or collectively, justified firing him. A spokesperson added that district officials had long known about AllHere's contribution toward Carvalho's work-related travel and had reviewed the expenses after the company collapsed in 2024, concluding no action was necessary.
Regarding the White House trip specifically, Carvalho claims he paid for his own airfare and hotel. The board's letter, however, pointed to sources indicating AllHere covered the cost.
In his public resignation statement, Carvalho struck a different tone entirely. Fox News reported his full statement:
"Placing students first has always guided my work. Because I believe our schools must remain focused on students and learning without distraction, I am resigning as Superintendent of LAUSD effective today, June 21, 2026."
The word "distraction" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. An FBI raid on your home tends to be more than a distraction.
On February 25, FBI agents searched Carvalho's home and LAUSD's district office. Breitbart reported that the investigation was linked at least in part to Carvalho's interaction with the contractor behind the failed AI chatbot venture. Fox News noted that a third location was also searched, the Miami home of longtime Carvalho associate Debra Kerr.
Two days after the raid, the LAUSD Board of Education unanimously placed Carvalho on paid leave.
The AllHere contract had been a signature initiative for Carvalho. On August 4, 2023, he unveiled the company's AI chatbot, called "Ed," during his annual superintendent's address at Disney Hall. Four days later, he traveled to a White House cybersecurity summit. The proximity of those events, and the question of who paid for the Washington trip, sits at the heart of the board's concerns.
AllHere collapsed less than a year after completing its $3 million portion of the contract. The pattern is familiar to anyone who follows public-sector contracting scandals: a flashy technology promise, a large contract, a politically connected rollout, and then a company that simply ceases to exist, leaving taxpayers holding the bill. It fits a broader pattern of Democratic-aligned figures facing serious legal consequences over the handling of public funds.
Carvalho's legal team at Holland & Knight has emphasized that no criminal charges have been filed against him. The firm stated that Carvalho "respects the rule of law and the investigative process and has always acted in the best interests of students and within the bounds of the law." In a separate statement, the firm said no evidence had been presented by prosecutors supporting any allegation that Carvalho violated federal law.
That may be true as far as it goes. But the absence of charges four months into an FBI investigation is not the same as clearance. The investigation remains ongoing. And the board's confidential letter dealt not with federal criminal liability but with contractual ethics obligations, a lower bar that Carvalho's own representatives struggled to dismiss entirely, resorting instead to the argument that each violation had "mitigating factors."
LAUSD is the second-largest school district in the country, serving over 430,000 students across 780 schools, as Just the News noted. The families in that system deserve leadership that is not under federal investigation and not negotiating million-dollar exit packages while the FBI sorts through seized documents.
What remains unclear is whether Carvalho ultimately received any severance or exit payment. The confidential letter gave the board leverage to deny him one. Whether the board used that leverage, or quietly settled to make the problem go away, is an open question that LAUSD parents and Los Angeles taxpayers deserve to have answered.
It also remains unclear what specific state financial disclosure forms Carvalho allegedly failed to complete, what agency oversees those filings, and whether any separate state-level investigation might follow.
The broader pattern is hard to miss. Public officials entrusted with enormous budgets develop cozy relationships with contractors. Benefits flow. Disclosure requirements go unmet. When the arrangement collapses, the official claims ignorance or cites mitigating factors, and the public is left to wonder how much of its money went where it was supposed to go. It is the same dynamic at work when convicted officials still demand taxpayer-funded pensions, the system protects the insiders while the public absorbs the cost.
Carvalho's contract took effect just 11 days before federal agents showed up at his door. The timing alone raises questions about what the board knew, when it knew it, and why a new four-year deal was finalized so close to a federal raid. Those questions, too, remain unanswered.
The superintendent who said he was stepping aside so students could learn "without distraction" had spent months trying to negotiate a seven-figure exit while a confidential letter cataloged his alleged ethics failures. That is not putting students first. That is putting yourself first and hoping no one reads the letter.
