Evelyn Dominguez ran unopposed for the Rialto Unified school board in November 2022.
“I want to be a voice for not only the Hispanic community, but all the community,” Dominguez said at the , her first as an elected official. “I’m here for the journey, I’m here for the ride and let’s get it done.”
District staff and community members now complain the first-term board member runs roughshod over staff and other parents. And an outside vendor she brought in for a school event has accused her of failing to pay thousands of dollars owed for their work.
“Mrs. Dominguez’s presence has instilled a climate of fear and intimidation amongst school staff,” Marcus Johnson, a parent at Boyd Elementary School, where Dominguez’s children attend, told the school board in May of this year.
Dominguez did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. Other Rialto Unified board members also declined to comment, citing privacy concerns.
Festival Latino expenses
How — and whether — a vendor at the district’s first got paid was the subject of a . The report, and other documents quoted in this story, were obtained through the California Public Records Act.
Under normal procedures, vendors are vetted by district staff, then brought to the school board for approval before an event. Invoices are issued and the paperwork necessary to pay the vendor is typically in place before services are rendered.
That’s not what happened at the Festival Latino — now renamed the Hispanic Heritage Festival — on Sept. 24, 2022.
On Sept. 7, 2022, the school board approved a list of vendors and a budget of $18,000 for tacos, a photo booth, games and frozen treats. According to district records, days before the event, the organizing the event came back to the district, wanting to add two more vendors, a pupusa vendor and one serving cotton candy. Dominguez, not yet a school board member, was the festival coordinator. She told the district she would pay the cotton candy vendor herself, and get repaid by the district later.
According to the owners of the cotton candy company, Lu-va, Lu-va Sweets for All, they knew Dominguez personally. One of the owners, Aurora Sotelo, had children at Boyd Elementary at the time. (Her children are now homeschooled.) She had been picking up and taking care of Dominguez’s kids as a favor for about a year before the festival, she said in an interview alongside her business partner, Herlinda Aldana.
“One day, we were putting together an order of a dozen cotton candy cups, and Dominguez came in to pick up her kids,” Sotelo said in Spanish. “She told me it would be a good idea to sell those at the Latin festival. I agreed and she asked if we could make a lot of them.”
Dominguez wanted 1,200 cups for the festival. Sotelo agreed.
“Mrs. Dominguez shared with (a district administrator) that she had already made a verbal agreement with the cotton candy vendor and we needed to add them to the list” of vendors, Avila’s report reads in part.
According to his report, Rialto Unified administrator Manuel Burciaga said “it was too late for the vendor to be added to the board item for approval at the Sept. 21 (2022) meeting. At that point, Mrs. Dominguez shared that she would pay and get reimbursed later. However, she did not disclose the cost of the cotton candy.”
But there was another problem.
“A little while later I told her this is a very small business; we don’t have permissions or anything, so who will the check be made out to?” Sotelo remembered. “Dominguez said, ‘We’re going to say I paid you in cash, so that (the district) can reimburse me the money.’”
On Sept. 26, 2022, Dominguez submitted an invoice for the cotton candy vendor to the district, writing that she had paid Sotelo and Aldana $3,600 in cash, according to Avila’s report.
At its meeting Oct. 5, 2022, the board approved repaying the $3,600. Two days later, the district began the process of getting a requisition to repay Dominguez.
Weeks went by.
“The festival passed. And in October, she told us the payment had not yet been approved by the district,” Sotelo said. “We said, ‘Fine, we’ll wait.’ ”
Aldana said a parent who regularly attends district board meetings told her the reimbursement to Dominguez had already been approved. So on Oct. 28, 2022, the district’s education department got a call from a woman — unnamed in Avila’s report — who said she was the co-owner of Lu-va, Lu-va Sweets for All, the cotton candy vendor.
“The caller was seeking payment for services rendered at the Festival Latino event,” Avila’s report reads in part. “The caller indicated that they dealt with Mrs. Dominguez directly and had not received payment.”
The secretary who took the call then called Dominguez.
“Mrs. Dominguez was taken aback by the allegations,” the report continues. “Mrs. Dominguez stated that she dealt directly with the (owners) and that there may have been a misunderstanding between business partners.”
On Oct. 30, 2022, Dominguez called the district. According to the report, she said the caller seeking payment from the district was “a fraud.”
“Mrs. Dominguez alleged that the lady (the secretary) had spoken with was not a co-owner but in fact a gossiping neighbor,” the report reads in part.
Although Dominguez told the district that she paid Lu-va, Lu-va Sweets for All $3,600 in cash, she has not been repaid, according to district spokesperson Syeda Jafri. An item on the Nov. 16, 2022 school board agenda approving reimbursement to Dominguez was pulled from the agenda.
According to Sotelo, Superintendent Avila reached out to the partners in summer 2023, asking to meet to discuss the payment.
“Evelyn (Dominguez) called me and told me, ‘No, Aurora, don’t tell him because you are going to get me into problems,’ ” Sotelo said.
According to Sotelo, Dominguez told them to tell Avila they had, in fact, been paid. But lying weighed heavy on Sotelo’s conscience, she said. So at a later meeting, Sotelo and Aldana told Avila the truth: Dominguez had not paid them, told them to lie for her and created a “paid” invoice that she had Sotelo sign.
Avila told them he would get in touch with them again about payment, according to Sotelo and Aldana.
“Evelyn (Dominguez) would tell us that she was being investigated, and that her lawyer said she could no longer talk about it. She said that same lawyer would be reaching out to us and that she was going to go to jail,” Sotelo said.
“We honestly didn’t know if we could believe her anymore, or if she was saying all these things so we would not bother her about this any more,” she continued. “I felt even more hurt with her because I was doing her the favor of taking care of her kids without ever charging her. … We helped her with her campaign, and all for her to be insincere with us.”
Sotelo began to distance herself from Dominguez and decline when the board member would ask for her kids to be picked up at school.
“One day she comes to my house looking upset. I say, ‘Hello, Evelyn, how are you?’ And she says, ‘Not very good.’ I ask her what’s wrong, and she says, ‘Well, because of whatever you guys told Avila, I’m going to go to jail. What did you guys say?’ And I tell her we just told the truth, nothing more, nothing less,” Sotelo said. “I said it was your idea to say you paid us out of your own pocket, that you will get reimbursed and that we haven’t received any money from you.”
Dominguez told Sotelo not to trust the superintendent.
Avila had assured Sotelo and Aldana that Dominguez wouldn’t be in any trouble unless she stuck with the same story, Sotelo said.
By this point, it had been more than a year since the women made the festival treats.
“I called the district and said I think it’s embarrassing to let a year pass and not pay us. I said I would present myself at the next board meeting and request an investigation, get a lawyer, whatever was necessary, because it had been a long time of them continuing to lie,” Aldana said. “I got the email addresses of the board and I said I was going to tell everyone the truth. The next day, we got a call to pick up our check.”
The check, dated Sept. 5, 2023, was not an official Rialto Unified one. Instead, it was a personal one from Avila’s checkbook, they said.
Avila was placed on administrative leave on May 14. The Rialto Unified school board voted 3-2 to place him on leave, with Dominguez voting to do so. Avila did not respond to a request for comment.
Clashes on campus
During the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, meanwhile, Dominguez reportedly had a contentious relationship with staff at Boyd Elementary, where her children still attend school.
According to an , she harassed the teacher, whose name was redacted from the complaint, starting in August 2022.
Before the 2023-24 school year started, the teacher tried to resolve the ongoing issues with Dominguez. According to the complaint, on Aug. 3 and Aug. 4, 2023, the teacher spoke with Dominguez.
The result: “Mrs. Dominguez would be able to differentiate between being a board member and parent.”
That doesn’t seem to have happened, though.
Days later, on Aug. 7, 2023, the , Boyd parents were told they could walk their students to class, but not come in. It was an attempt to help young students transition to being in a teacher’s classroom.
According to the complaint, Dominguez felt she had a special right to go into a classroom.
“When told she was not to come in, she placed her finger in my face, stated ‘board member’ three times, walked in and spoke to the kids,” the complaint reads in part.
The teacher had enough, asking on the complaint form for the “removal of her student from my class, as I am no longer willing to take her disrespect.”
Boyd employees who would not speak on the record, citing a fear of retaliation by Dominguez, said she has clashed with multiple employees at the school and has successfully had some demoted and moved to other sites for the 2024-25 school year.
Dominguez’s behavior hasn’t gone unnoticed by the larger Boyd community.
“Mrs. Dominguez’s presence at school functions has (shown) a clear pattern of abuse of power,” Johnson, the Boyd parent, . “She frequently asserts control over meetings, conducted as though they were her own personal agenda.”
He said he was speaking on behalf of a group of Boyd parents, many of whom had lined up around him at the board meeting. Dominguez insists on being treated as a board member, not a Boyd parent, at school events, he alleged.
Dominguez, he said, had claimed she was behind staffing changes at the school. Johnson said Dominguez was reportedly targeting Assistant Principal Karensa Hutchens next. Dominguez did not respond to Johnson’s comments at the board meeting.
When the 2024-25 school year started Monday, Aug. 5, Hutchens was no longer at Boyd.
Instead, the 19-year district employee has been reassigned as an English teacher, according to the district, and has taken a $21,565 pay cut. Hutchens declined to comment for this story.
School board training
Historically, new school board members in California receive . They’re taught the law, how California public school districts operate and best practices for school board members and ethics. According to Rialto Unified records, Dominguez has not participated in CSBA training for new board members, which is optional.
Other board members contacted about Dominguez’s behavior declined to comment. Instead, they quoted a statement prepared by the district’s lawyers.
“RUSD has internal processes for addressing complaints and concerns, which protects the privacy rights of employees, students and parents,” school board president Joseph Martinez said in a written statement. “For that reason I won’t be commenting publicly at this time.”
Elected boards are limited in what they may do regarding what educators sometimes refer to as a “rogue school board member.” A board may vote to censure a member — effectively, a public scolding — but that’s about it. Earlier this year, the San Bernardino City Council and voted to censure members.
Dominguez’s school board term runs through December 2026.
Related stories
- San Bernardino council initiates censure of Kimberly Calvin for ‘policy, law, fiduciary’ violations
- Rialto Superintendent Cuauhtémoc Avila put on leave, replaced with interim leader
